The astonishing part about the 2004 “encounter” that consumed 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan and three others is not that it has now been declared to be “fake” but that the police officials in “India’s best governed State” were so clumsy in their attempt to cook up evidence to curry favour with “The Other Great Debator“.
With temples, mosques, churches, even a fire temple, all happily jostling each other, Shivajinagar in Bangalore is India, as our founding fathers would have liked it, in a microcosm. On Tuesday, the car festival of St Mary at at St Mary’s Basilica near Russell Market attracted thousands.
After the initial hoopla, former Karnataka chief minister S.M. Krishna‘s surprise induction into the Manmohan Singh cabinet, with charge of the vital external affairs portfolio, has lost all steam. For starters, Krishna has had to constantly battle the impression that the prime minister chose a weak minister because he wanted to have his way.
Krishna’s slow, measured way of talking has not gone down too well with 24×7 media which requires razor-sharp bytes. Then the MEA babus, who are queasy about Krishna’s right-hand man Raghavendra Shastry, are said to be reluctant to allow him to speak extempore given the fear that he may say something out of place.
After the “shame” at Sharm el-Sheikh, he was teased and taunted on the floor of Parliament of being a half-right not a Fulbright scholar. And, given his dispensation towards designer clothes, there were all those barbs about his being the next Shivaraj Patil, even before the first 100 days were over.
Krishna’s request for a certain officer to be posted in the MEA has apparently been stonewalled while many officers have expressed reluctance to join his team because they aren’t sure how long he will stay. On the other hand, ambitious ministers like P. Chidambaram are seeking to undercut his role by dealing directly with the Americans. And on top of all that, stories of his profligacy, like staying in a five-star hotel at his own expense, are doing the rounds.
Question: Will S.M. Krishna last his full term as a Union minister? Or has the countdown begun for his exit?
Two headlines from today’s newspapers highlighting the excesses of Union ministers S.M. Krishna and Shashi Tharoor. The one above from the Indian Express, Delhi. The one below from DNA, Bombay.
The operative paragraph for former Karnataka chief minister and current Union external affairs minister with declared assets of Rs 18 crore:
“It’s learnt Krishna is checked in at the Maurya‘s presidential suite on the 16th floor. The sutie’s tariff, hotel staff said, is “on request”. In other words, there’s no declared tariff for the four presidential suites in the hotel which have had guests like US President George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Industry insiders say the room tariff is in the range of Rs 1 lakh plus per night although ‘it can be negotiated’.”
Always in an off-white safari suit, Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa slips into a dapper, pin-striped suit to intereact with delegates during an “investors’ meet” at Shanghai in China on Monday.
As if the circus so far hasn’t been hilarious enough, the BJP president Rajnath Singh has issued a gag order threatening action against anybody in his party who “favours” Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
In an interview telecast on CNBC TV18 on Sunday, Vir Sanghvi spoke to Jinnah’s grandson Nusli Wadia, who has for decades been a close associate of the creme de la creme of BJP and RSS, on the self-flagellation within the sangh parivar over Jaswant Singh‘s book leading to his expulsion from the party and a ban on the book in Narednra Damodardas Modi‘s Gujarat.
Sanghvi: Given that you knew them so well, are you surprised by the way the BJP behaved?
Wadia: I am surprised, yes. I am very surprised, saddened and appalled.
In Kanchipuram, directed by Priyadarshan, Prakash Raj depicts the lives of silk weavers in the eponymous town in Tamil Nadu in pre-independence India and exposes communists “who preach a lot and practice little“. He had earlier won a national award for his supporting role in Mani Ratnam‘s Iruvar in 1998, and a special jury award in 2003.
Question: Are actors like Prakash Raj lost to Kannada cinema?
After exercising the limited IQ of his partymen with his mixed metaphors (kati patang, Alice in Blunderland, Humpty Dumpty, great pygmisation, Tarzan) for a few days, Arun Shourie‘s interview with Shekhar Gupta on NDTV’s Walk the Talk programme, has slipped off the media radar.
Yet, the most significant part of that powwow was not the name-calling but Shourie’s call that the RSS take control of the crisis-ridden BJP. In the latest issue of Tehelka, Shoma Chaudhury tracks Shourie’s “adumbral position between liberal knight, self-righteous crusader and unselfconscious fascist”.
Prabhash Joshi, the former editor of Jansatta, the Hindi newspaper of the Indian Express group, offer this crisp analysis of his Magsaysay Award winning peer’s use of a butcher’s terminology—jhatka versus halal—to haul it out of the coals:
“His suggestion to the RSS betrays the quintessential Shourie. He wants a democratic political party like the BJP to be chained lock, stock and barrel by an organisation that calls itself “cultural” and does not believe in parliamentary democracy or the Indian Constitution. And he wants this democratic party to be taken over by jhatka (sudden death).
“Who would want such a thing? Only an autocratic, dictatorial mind.
“Arun Shourie is a time-server and climber who wants to dictate whatever he considers intellectually superior into the democratic polity of this country. Any man who does not believe in democracy and is in politics is a very dangerous animal. Be very afraid of him.”
Chetan Bhagat, the author of the best-selling ‘One night @ the call center‘, is touting his latest book ‘2 States: the story of my marriage‘. The Delhi-born Bhagat, who is Punjabi but married to a Tamil-Brahmin from Thanjavur, is asked in an interview in The Sunday Times of India what one can do for one’s country.
“Punjabis will have their meals sitting on the bed with plates piled on sheets of the previous day’s newspapers. But at my in-laws’ house, meal times were confined to the dining table and food was had in complete silence. It was a real culture shock.”
Really?
Is marrying outside your State going to make India a better country? Would you like to (if you haven’t already, that is)? Will marrying outside your State it help us understand each other better, sink differences, bring us closer? Can marriage become a national mission?
You can change the walls of Bangalore, but can you change, well, the balls of Bangaloreans? The Brihan Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) is using innovative techniques to inspire civic sense among citizens. At Mysore Bank circle on Saturday, a churumuri vendor waits for customers in front of a new painting hailing the beauty of Pattadakallu while warning of a Rs 500-fine if assets disproportionate to known sources of income are revealed in front of it.
The Karnataka Premier League makes no attempt to hide the fact that it is a pathetic “Modi Xerox” copy of the Indian Premier League, which within two years is already tolling the bell for 50-over cricket, if not five-day Test crickret itself, while reducing a classy, civilised sport into a loud, rowdy circus.
IPL was the personal project, the cricketing arangetram of Lalit Modi, so KPL is the personal project, the cricketing arangetram of Srikantadatta Narasimharaja Wodeyar, masterfully puppeteered by the dance-master, Brijesh Patel. And so on.
So, because IPL had a theme song, KPL also has to have a theme song or what it thinks is a “theme song”. This, then, is the mind-numbingly vacuous effort of composer Ricky Kej and lyricist Kaviraj, with Avinash Chebbi and M.D. Pallavi at the mike. The video director is Aloke Shetty.
What is remarkable in this “Phase I” video is: a) how the lyrics and visuals are completely devoid of anything called the gandha of Karnataka or the regions from where the players hail from. And b) how the tournament has little to do with cricket but twisting the teats of the clubhouse cash-cow till it hurts.
What you also wonder, looking at Erapalli Prasanna and B.S. Chandrashekhar and Syed Kirmani, is: is there anything our legends won’t do, say or endorse for a few extra bucks after a few extra pegs?
PALINI R. SWAMY writes from Bangalore: A very powerful chief minister of a very large State goes missing over a very dense forest reputedly infested with very vengeful Maoist elements. His very large party goes into a very large tizzy and pulls out all stops to trace his whereabouts.
The Indian Air Force is drafted. The Indian Satellite Research Oorganisation jumps in. Even the US defence department plunges in. Helicopters, fighter aircraft, low-flying reconnaisance aircraft, refuellers, river boats all join the hunt. Army men, CRPF personnel, anti-Naxal Greyhound cops and other security chaps come in.
Chenchu tribals on the ground work with spies in the sky. Night-vision goggles, thermal imaging devices are all used. Less than 24 hours later, Yeduguri Sandinti Rajasekhara Reddy is revealed to have unwittingly fulfilled his promise of political retirement at the age of 60.
Seeing such electric inter-governmental efficiency and action directed to save one man (and his four co-passengers) from the thick of the jungles of Nallamalla, my mind raced back to the days of Koose Muniswamy Veerappan Gounder whose tragicomic show went on unhindered for all of 17 years.
Approximately 148,920 hours.
What if YSR-style force and might (and intent) had been used when Veerappan, to give the man his media moniker, was running riot in the forests of B.R. Hills and M.M. Hills, in Kollegal and Gundial, and challenging the might of three State governments—Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala—and of successive governments at the Centre?
What if the various governments and their home ministries, our netas and babus, had showed the same seriousness or purpose with a rampaging brigand as they did with a popular chief minister instead of allowing the “pursuit” and “hunt” look like a joke it had become till his death?
Would the lives of 184 people have been saved?
Would the policemen—Shakeel Ahmed, Harikrishna and countless others—and forest officers like P. Srinivas who walked into ambushes have been around? Would MLA H. Nagappa be alive today? Would the kidnapping of Dr Raj Kumar have been avoided? Would R.R. Gopal have become such a landmark figure in journalism?
Would the police forces of at least two States have been not reduced to caricatures?
Comparing 9/11 with the tsunami gets a world, which knew neither, all charged up.
Maybe we should get closer home and start comparing Veerappan and YSR, about both of whom we have seen, read and heard, to understand the difference.
The difference between action and inaction, between life and death, between comedy and tragedy, between VVIP and common citizenry. The difference, really, between 148,920 hours and 24, which, for the academically inclined, is 148,896 hours.
Gift a man a loaf of fish and he will be happy for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will be happy for a lifetime, is an old jungle saying. Such poetry has no place in the dog-eat-dog world. An authorised fishing contractor’s men chase away a man fishing illegally at the Ulsoor Lake in Bangalore on Friday. Public fishing is banned here.
K. JAVEED NAYEEM writes: September 5 happens to be the birth anniversary of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, one of India’s most learned former Presidents. Since he was a very great and able teacher too in addition to being a very learned statesman, we observe the day as Teachers’ Day.
It is the sad truth in our lives that while acknowledging the role of persons who help us in our race to reach the top, we seldom realise that our teachers, who are the persons who deserve our gratitude the most, are the ones who seldom get it in right measure.
Our parents who nurture us, the firm that gives the first job that becomes the stepping stone, the boss who ensures that we get our promotions and positions in time and the colleagues who help us achieve our targets and goals and almost every other agency responsible for our success gets thanked at the end of the race.
But very sadly, most often our teachers never get the share of our tributes that is their rightful due.
However, it is good that one day in our calendar is marked as Teachers’ Day as it helps us all to remember from time to time that we should recall the role of our teachers in moulding and shaping our personalities, our careers and our lives. But as we all prepare to pay our debt of well earned and well deserved gratitude to all the members of the teaching fraternity tomorrow by observing Teachers’ day, somewhere in the heart of rural Tamil Nadu a group of students is all set to say ‘thank you, sir’ to one of their school teachers in a very unique way.
Last fortnight, my attention was drawn by my friend Lt. Col. Dr. Y.N.I. Anand to a report in one of the newspapers which said that in Guruswamypalayam in Tamil Nadu, a group of 500 students had got together to pool their money, purchase a site, build a two- storey house worth Rs 10 lakh and gift it as a token of their gratitude on the occasion of Teachers’ Day tomorrow to S. V. Venkataraman, their former Tamil pundit who retired nearly 25 years ago in 1985.
It appears the effort was led by M. A. Arthanari, a retired municipal commissioner and an old student. Realising that their teacher had no savings left to have his own house after spending on the marriages of his two daughters, the group of students decided that this was the best way of paying their ‘Guru Dakshina.’
After reading the report I felt that to deserve this magnanimous gift of gratitude from so many of his past students well after his retirement, he must have been a really great teacher. And, to remember their debt of gratitude to their humble school teacher so long after their own lives had been made and after many of them had themselves retired from their own jobs, they must have been a really great bunch of students.
Ekalavya by giving away his thumb to his unseen and distant Guru Dronacharya, may have set the best example of gratitude to a teacher in distant mythology but by their unique act in a present day world, this group of students have not done anything less.
People say a doctor’s profession is the noblest one but as a doctor I have always felt the most sacred profession in this world is that of a teacher. Wisdom is undoubtedly the most essential and important asset human beings need to lead a fruitful and civilised life on this earth and to be in the position of a teacher who imparts this to us generation after generation, certainly makes it the noblest profession.
As we go through the process of acquiring our education we come across many very good and efficient teachers. But not all good and efficient teachers become great in the eyes of their pupils. Only a few extraordinary ones leave a lasting impact or even an imprint of their own personalities on our minds as S. V. Venkataraman, the school teacher of Tamil Nadu perhaps did.
The quality that makes them stand apart is their ability to go beyond just teaching into the more difficult realm of being able to mould the character of their students by propagating values essential to a good life.
They are very rare gems indeed and thus very hard to find but I have had the good fortune of having many glittering brightly among the many fond memories of my student days.
(K. Javeed Nayeem is a practising physician who writes a weekly column in Star of Mysore where this piece originally appeared.)
The difference between 230,000 and 2,752 is the difference between West and East, between Asia and America, between brown and white, between natural and manmade.
This “unauthorised” World Wildlife Fund (WWF) commercial which compares the toll in the September 11 attacks on New York City with the December 26 Asian tsunami, and shows an array of aircraft pounding Manhattan to put the number in perspective, has been termed “tasteless“.
Twenty-five years after they passed out of Marimallappa‘s High School in Mysore, the “10th B” batch of 1984—including one very, very famous Mysorean—walked down memory lane last Saturday, 29 August. They sat on the same benches they warmed a quarter-century ago, compared notes and (hopefully) compared paunches.
In the picture below, the group pose for posterity.
Standing (L to R): M.S. Suresh, Rampi, Gopalakrishna, Yadugireesh, R. Satish, B.R. Rajesh, Ananda H., H.R. Prasanna, R.K. Ramesha.
Sitting(top L to R): P.G. Srinivas, Vinay Kumar, Hemantha S.R.
Sitting(2nd row from top, L to R): M.P. Manjunath (Keeki), J. Srinath (Babu), S Manjunath (Akasha), H.S. Shailesh
Sitting (2nd row from bottom, L to R): Nagesha, Sharath K.S., Ananthaprasad, G. Ramesha, Ashley, B.A. Suresha, Kishan
Sitting (bottom row, L to R): VB Arun, Mohandas K.S., Veeraraje Urs, Raghavendra (Rags), (Missing in action: K.N. Srikanta)
A screenshot of Google Trends around 3.30 pm on Thursday, 3 September 2009, on how the wired world tried to search for news of Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, whose death following the crash of a helicopter carrying him and his staff was finally confirmed.
There are ways and ways to send off the good Lord. Devotees in Karwar prepare to immerse an idol of Ganesha the traditional way in the Arabian Sea on Wednesday.
Screenshots of four English news channels (NDTV, CNN-IBN, Times Now, News X) and four Telugu news channels (Saakshi, TV9, TV5, Gemini News), around 2.40 pm on the day the Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy‘s helicopter went missing.
Saakshi owned by Reddy’s son, Jagan Mohan Reddy, now a member of Parliament, and Gemini were the only ones proclaiming YSR safe, while among the English channels, NewsX claimed the chopper carrying the CM had been found.
The top-23 Google searches at 6.10 pm were all related to the news of the missing mukhya mantri.
When the whole world is pouncing on Lalchand Kishinchand Advani in the late evening of his political career, one politician sprang to his defence on Barkha Dutt‘s The Buck Stops Here on NDTV last night.
The politician slammed the media for targetting and tarnishing Advani and reminded the world the place that Advani deserves in our contemporary history.
“Why are we digging old wounds? It’s over and done with. Why do you want to hang Advani? Why the hell are you people playing it up so much? An icon will fall.. You want it to fall… Advani is an icon India can never forget. He has done everything possibile for India. He has thought for India. He has lived for India. He will live for India till his last breath.”
After selling newspapers almost for free to kill competition, build up circulation, increase advertising rates and making a killing, Indian publishing houses are in the middle of a major crisis.
First rising oil prices took newsprint prices to new highs. Then the rupeer-dollar exchange rate played havoc with suplies. Later, the slowdown hit advertising (which accounts for 85 per cent of the income) with signs of a turnaround still not visible.
Result: the cover prices of newspapers today barely cover for the cost of the newsprint on which the paper is printed, and in the words of N. Murali, the managing director of The Hindu, “the bubble is about to burst“.
Publishers are now talking of incrementally increasing the cover price of newspapers every few months to take it all the way to Rs 6 or Rs 7 per copy per day. The question is, will consumers used to having a paper delivered for dirt-cheap prices, oblige?
ARVIND SWAMINATHAN writes from Madras: The larger-than-life, conversation-stopping image oftheformer Presidentof India A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is the fruit of assiduous self-promotion, audacious political opportunism and pumped-up nationalism, combined with the gee-whiz ignorance of an uncritical media.
# A missile technologist who is routinely confused for a “nuclear physicist”.
# A scientist without a formal PhD—who was turned away from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) because he didn’t have the “requisite scientific credentials”—who happily uses the appendage “Dr”.
# A reverse-engineer who has presided over several failures as the in-charge of the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme who is unquestioningly called “Missile Man”.
# And, although the masterstroke to make him President came initially from the Samajwadi Party, it is the BJP which has appropriated the Thirukkural-quoting, veena-playing, vegetarian “Kalam Iyer” as its favourite Muslim, thanks in part, as the Princeton scholar M.V. Ramana wrote, because of his ability to “dress up even mediocre work with the tricolour to pass them off as great achievements.”
However, in a nation thirsting for heroes, the question marks were airbrushed out of the frame by “inspiring” speeches bordering on the infantile and “motivational” books bordering on the banal.
Thankfully, some of the super-reverential mythology around Kalam is being dismantled.
Twice in the last few days, two prominent nuclear scientists have stood up to question Kalam’s clean chit to the “Pokhran II” tests conducted by the BJP-led NDA government of Atal Behari Vajpayee during its 13-month reign in 1998.
To rewind, Kalam’s former Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) colleague K. Santhanam described the “thermonuclear device” that was tested as a”fizzle”. Meaning: the yield was lower than what was claimed, and was certainly not what was desired. Santhanam said more tests were required to perfect what the device was supposed to produce: a hydrogen bomb.
But “Major General Prithviraj“, as Kalam was codenamed during Pokhran II, jumped in and declared the tests a success. And Prime Minister Manmohan Singh too butted in, saying Kalam’s certificate was the last word.
Result: The gloves are off in the very secretive nuclear fraternity.
“What is so sacrosanct about Abdul Kalam? Even Albert Einstein made mistakes. Before the scientists on the site called New Delhi to confirm the tests, they should have checked the yield of the thermo-nuclear bomb with the seismic centre in London, with which India has a co-operation agreement. Dr Kalam did not check and doubts about the yield were there after the tests.”
“What did he (Kalam) know about extracting, making explosive-grade uranium? He didn’t know a thing. By being the President he appeared to wear the stature. He relied on atomic energy to gain additional stature.”
By no yardstick do M/s Iyengar, Sethna & Co represent the last word on the subject of Kalam, but by being unafraid to question an icon, they have done the nation (and Kalam) a service by bringing some balance to the myth-building.
“Jaswant Singh’s book is a brilliant landmark encompassing accepted and contrarian views. According to him, Partition (he uses the emotion-laden word “vivisection”) is the central event of 20th-century Indian history. Singh is wrong. The central event of the times was the ending of the British Raj. He argues that Nehru and Patel were as responsible for Partition as Jinnah. He is right. It is his position that Partition was a great mistake that is questionable.
“Let’s look at the counter-factual “where would we be if Partition had not happened?”
“It’s impossible to say whether we would have been better or worse. We might have become a fractious violence-ridden Lebanon. We might have splintered into dozens of warring states, something that has happened before in our history. If things went well, we might have been a prosperous, happy utopia! This question does not have many takers among Pakistanis or Bangladeshis. Most of them, with a few exceptions, think that Partition was good. We must perforce take them at face value.”
