The world is an infinitely darker place when gems of the lustre of T.S. Satyan and his great friend H.Y. Sharada Prasad start shining no more. Sixty-one years ago, Satyan, then still fresh in the profession, met an acknowledged jewel, Sir C.V. Raman, for a feature in Deccan Herald, which he recounted later for Outlook magazine*.
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By T.S. SATYAN
My first meeting with Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, the eminent physicist, is still green in my memory.
One day, in l948, I telephoned the Nobel laureate to ask if I could meet him at his convenience and photograph him for an illustrated feature.
I was apprehensive about getting an appointment from so busy a person, but was pleasantly surprised when he asked me, “How much time would you need?”
An hour, I said.
Raman went on to say those thirty minutes would do. I could see him the next morning at nine sharp. “Come on time,” he warned.
I dutifully reported my success to Pothan Joseph, Editor of Deccan Herald, which had been started barely a month ago. “Be punctual and conduct yourself with grace,” Pothan counselled me. He told me that Raman was a man of quick temper and so I should not throw my weight about in his presence, just because I was a newspaperman.
“He may get angry if you direct him to act before your camera. He is particular about the rules he sets for himself,” he warned.
After listening to all these do’s and don’ts I felt somewhat nervous because, I was going to photograph a celebrity for the first time.
I decided to take another person with me for moral support. My choice fell naturally on my alter ego of those days, M.S. Sathyu, now a noted film director, but barely out of his teens then.
Sathyu and I were great friends from our school days and he used to keep company with me on my assignments.
Contrary to our fears, we found Raman extremely affable and gentle. He seemed very cooperative as I photographed him in his study, laboratory, library and the garden he loved. All this took twenty minutes and I still had ten minutes left to complete my job.
Then, a bright idea struck me and I told Raman that I would love to photograph him with Lady Raman.
“Forget about her. She is not here,” he said.
And then a brighter idea came to my mind.
Summoning the required courage, I asked the scientist: “Sir, may I take one last, important picture? Will you please pose for me displaying your Nobel Prize citation?”
Pursing up his lips, Raman gazed at me, while my heart began to pound rapidly. He relaxed in a minute and, to my utter surprise, said, “Why not?”
He went into a room to fetch the precious document.
“I’m lucky,” I hissed in Sathyu’s ear. I entrusted my brand-new Speed-Graphic camera to his care and set about adjusting the furniture and books in the room, for the all-important picture.
Raman had meanwhile returned, holding the scroll, and stood beside a blackboard on which was scribbled in chalk, the diagram of a galaxy and other mathematical calculations. He looked at me and said, “It’s getting late. Shoot!”
When I was about to pick up my camera from Sathyu who was standing in a corner, the silence in the room was shattered by the sound of metal hitting the ground. We looked around and found to our dismay that Sathyu had dropped the camera.
Raman’s face was livid with anger.
He walked up to Sathyu, gripped him by the collar and thundered: “Do you know what you have done? You have damaged a beautiful instrument of science. Why weren’t you careful?” We were shaken and mumbled our apologies. Our minds were a malange of shame, confusion and embarrassment.
Raman’s anger subsided within a minute.
Holding the camera in hand, he carefully examined it as an experienced doctor would a patient.
He wrote on a piece of paper: “Prisms out of alignment. Replace one broken piece and realign. Set right the metallic dents.” He pressed his prescription in my palm and gave us the marching orders saying, “You may leave now.” My first photo session with the Nobel Laureate and Bangalore’s most famous citizen, had ended in a fiasco.
churumuri.com records with deep and profound regret the passing away of the legendary photo-journalist Tamabarahalli Subramanya Satyanarayana Iyerbetter known as T.S. Satyan in Mysore this afternoon.
Mr Satyan was five days away from his 86th birthday. He is survived by his wife Nagarathna, children, grandchildren and a City (and a profession) he dearly loved till his last breath.
Mr Satyan belonged to a golden generation of the Maharaja’s College in Mysore in the 1940s, from which almost everybody ascended to reach great heights in life. He took to photojournalism at a time when neither photography nor journalism was the first-choice profession and communicated with images the way another famous co-townsman of his (R.K. Narayan) did with words: simply and honestly, without any frills.
Fittingly, for someone who was full of life, Mr Satyan titled his memoirs In love with life. In the last few years, the octagenarian developed a love for the wired world, and wrote several pieces for churumuri, whose friend, wellwisher and guide he remained from the day of its inception.
B.S. NAGARAJ writes from New Delhi: Cricket’s ultra-pyjama version, Champions League T20 tournament, got off to a glitzy start on Thursday. Chaka Khan, Shaggy and Jameila, and not to forget our own A.R. Rahman, crooned and danced.
“I Feel for You,” they sang, their voices reverberating across the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium through 5,000 MW speakers.
The report in Deccan Herald was suitably gushing:
“The fusion of art forms from East and West was symbolic of the message the 16-day tournament conveys, a global cricketing village and the desire to uphold the spirit of the game.”
We talk of the world being a global village, but what about the worst-ever flood in a century in our own backyard? How have our cricketers responded to this monstrous calamity in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh? What about the “feel” for your people?
One hasn’t come across announcements of any big donation, either from the stars or from the cash-rich cricket associations so far. This is what Lalit Modi, who deserves a good deal of the credit for vulgarising the game, had to say when asked whether there would be a donation for flood relief from the tournament earnings:
“This is a calamity that has hit our nation and we will seriously examine it … this is something that is on the cards for discussion in the next few days.”
Mr Modi, do you need a discussion to write out a cheque for a few crores out of the thousands that the Champions League and Indian Premier League which you head rake in?
The other day, when chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa went round the by-lanes of Chickpet and Balepet in Bangalore, the response was spontaneous. The Karnataka garment association presented a cheque for Rs 4.5 lakh, the electrical merchants association Rs 10 lakh, and the Bangalore switchgear manufacturers association Rs 1.71 lakh.
A coconut vendor is said to have dropped Rs 150 into the donation box, while an old woman took a wad of notes from her seragu as her contribution. And here you have Lalit Modi saying he would have a “discussion” with his Australian and South African counterparts over the next few days on the issue!
And what about the stars?
Anil Kumble, Rahul Dravid and Robin Uthappa are the three biggies from Karnataka playing the tournament. We haven’t heard from them either. If they had only spared a few minutes before the match began to go round the stands with a donation box, a good deal of money could have mobilised.
Or they could have put up their autographs for sale, just as they put themselves up for auction in the IPL bidding rounds.
Nobody grudges the cricketers their millions by way of match fees, endorsements, and players’ auctions. But there is something called CSR or cricketers’ social responsibility too.
Photograph: The opening ceremony of the Championship League Twenty20 at Chinnaswamy stadium in Bangalore on Thursday (Karnataka Photo News)
churumuri records with deep regret the passing away of the veteran cricket writer Rajan Bala in Bangalore this morning. He was 63 years old, and is survived by his wife and two sons.
Mr Bala, a former cricket correspondent of Deccan Herald, The Hindu, Indian Express and The Asian Age, had suffered a cardiac arrest two weeks ago while doing a television show for News9 in Bangalore and slipped into a coma.
It speaks for the current state (and priorities) of journalism in Bangalore and elsewhere, that the news of one of India’s most knowledgeable cricket correspondents Rajan Bala—formerly of Deccan Herald, Indian Express, The Hindu, The Asian Age—struggling for life in one of the City’s speciality hospitals, should barely make it to the pages of any one of the publications he represented.
Mr Bala went into a coma after suffering a cardiac arrest while in the studios of News9, the Bangalore-centric news channel of the TV9 group two Saturdays ago. Maybe the health of journalists is of no interest to readers, but Rajan Bala, like K.N. Prabhu before him, was no mere hack. As a writer, he was, he is, an iconic figure before cricket writing became a joke at the hands of lesser folk. As a wordsmith, he was an inspiration.
A tribute and a prayer.
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By SUNAAD RAGHURAM
As the sad news came filtering in that the great cricket writer and journalist Rajan Bala has been lying comatose after a cardiac arrest, at the Fortis Hospital in Seshadripuram, for over a week now, I achingly remembered sitting in class at Mysore’s Sharada Vilasa college in the early 1980s, on one of the wooden benches, perhaps as aged as a cask at a Scottish distillery, my twitchy mind invariably tuning itself off the lecturer’s frequency and sailing gently into the tremendously inviting and comforting world of cricket.
And cricket writing.
Rajan Bala was our hero. The final word on the game.
A guru who sent home through his writings, news and views on cricket and cricketers, which we received with reverential servitude. A man whose words on cricket were read with the same awe and fascination a child in the Himalayas would have for the formation of the sun-kissed mountains.
Rajan Bala’s cricketing sentences, to us, were formed with the same grandiose exuberance and well roundedness, the same authenticity and confidence.
To me, especially, his use of the English language, handled with phenomenal mastery, the strange novelty of certain archaic, out-of-use phrases he employed, like ‘methinks’, to denote a sense of personal opinion about someone or something; his ability to create extraordinarily catchy headlines; ‘By Lord’s, it’s India’, bringing home the news of an Indian victory on English soil in 1986 or the most memorable, ‘Marshall Law declared at Kanpur’, when speedster Malcolm Marshall rocked the ill fated Indian batting lineup during the 1983 India-West Indies test, with even Sunil Gavaskar’s bat being embarrassingly knocked out of his hands as he tried to fend towards square, were something to be feverishly discussed with friends over spicy churumuri near Ballal circle, dished out by the even-now-in-business, Dharmalingam, the Sanath Jayasuriya look-alike!
One day in 1985, I crazily travelled to Bangalore and went looking for Rajan Bala at the KSCA stadium while a Duleep Trophy game was on between South and West Zone. I knew he would be there somewhere, because I had read his report of the first day’s play in the Indian Express!
A few nervous enquiries later; I had never seen him in flesh and blood until then after all; one of the groundsmen wearing a khaki uniform pointed in the direction of a portly man with a receding hair line smoking a pipe, and engrossed in clanking the day’s report on a clearly derelict type writer placed on an old table in the administration office of the stadium.
A nervous ‘excuse me’, a few uncertain steps in his direction and he looked up.
“Hello,” his voice rose above the clatter of the Remington and a wave of his hand bid me to sit down.
“Pull up a chair,” he said. I was so excited and happy to be in his midst, the cricketing equivalent of a bowler bagging a wicket off his first ball on debut!
The day’s report was over soon and so was my introduction. He seemed amused when I shakily told him that I aspired to be a sports reporter and that my first love was cricket.
“Come tomorrow. Let’s chat,” he said before walking away from the room, presumably to beat the deadline at the office.
Krishnamachari Srikkanth got a big score the next day and after he got out, I remember him smoking, sitting on the parapet wall of the dressing room, wearing a lungi! As I took in this funny sight and hung around the pavilion area—back then, the KSCA was not really the fortress it is now and I could quite easily gain access—I was greeted by Rajan Bala who said, “So you are from Mysore, you said.”
“My uncle was the director of CFTRI,” he began. “Dr Swaminathan. I remember spending a few of my summer holidays in his house on, what road is that…ah, Geetha road,” he smiled, reminiscing. I for one found it so terribly improbable, in my rather infantile imagination, that a globe trotter like Rajan Bala could have even visited Mysore or played around on Geetha road, of all the roads in the world!
As we talked and I got a bit bolder to keep a conversation going with him, in walked into our midst, the venerable M. Chinnaswamy after whom the KSCA stadium is now named.
“So how are you, you irascible old man,” joked Bala, with one of the doyens of Karnataka cricket. I could easily make out that Rajan Bala had a certain presence born of tremendous confidence in himself and his role as a cricket writer, a certain way with words, a certain form of appeal, a certain ease with people, even with terribly important men like Chinnaswamy; not to mention cricketers, one of whom, I distinctly remember, was the promising opener Carlton Saldanha, who sat in close proximity to us that day, with a sense of well proportioned acquaintance with the imposing journalist.
Cricket journalist Joseph Hoover, who was one of the youngsters in the 1980s groomed by Rajan Bala, tells me simply, emphatically, that there has never been an Indian journalist with the cricketing knowledge of Rajan Bala.
“His strength as a writer of cricketing matters was way ahead of the others in his tribe, the knowledge stemming from his innate, instinctive talent as an observer of the game; as a formidable opener himself for Calcutta University in the good old days when he was very hard to get out; his voraciousness as a reader of books, not just on cricket but on most subjects ordinary men couldn’t even think of; English literature, science, philosophy and even business journals. He had some 3000 books in his personal library.”
Rajan Bala in his heyday could sit with a man like Sunil Gavaskar and discuss the importance of footwork at a cricket crease, and more than once had he pointed out a tiny chink or two in the otherwise impregnable armour of the legendary opening batsmen, which ordinary journalists, either couldn’t even detect or were afraid to tell.
When a pompous cricketer once took offence when a flaw was pointed out in his batting and said that journalists did not have the right to talk about technique because they hadn’t played the game at the highest level, Rajan Bala quoted Neville Cardus who had once said, “I may not have laid an egg but I can tell when I see a bad one!”
That’s how much cricket literature Bala knew.
Rajan Bala belonged to another era of cricket reporting, an era when journalists did not fall over each other to please cricketers “because we were not expected to write about a cricketer’s underwear! Most of today’s cricket journalists have unfortunately become chamchas of cricketers, who feel happy in their status as non-playing members of the team,” he once remarked with cold sarcasm.
It’s the Great Umpire above who will decide whether Mr Rajan Bala will come out of his coma and open his eyes ever again to the world. If that happens, the news would be that a man, who batted so fantastically, capably, all his life with a pen in hand, and carved out masterly strokes all around the wicket of life, to think of a turn of phrase, is ready to play ball again.
Otherwise, it would be that he played out his last over before draw of stumps, in silent anticipation of another game. Somewhere else. On some other ground that He wills.
If you ever went by what the Vedantic sage Shankaracharya propounded: ‘Punarapi maranam, punarapi jananam…’
I’m sure Rajan Bala would have read this philosophy too.
RAJEEV A. RAO writes from Bangalore: After watching Gaalipata, I had mentioned that Yogaraj Bhat had a challenge upfront for his next venture—”to take the road not taken, to tread on uncharted territory and to significantly exceed expectations”.
22 months later, it gives me great pleasure to report that Bhat scores a neat hat-trick with Manasaare. It has all the elements from his earlier celluloid successes while at the same time being a refreshingly fresh movie —a “statement movie” in the garb of a love story.
The whole storyline has been woven to make one statement: don’t worry about this world, this world is a huchchara santhe (mad world). Starting with that surmise, Bhat builds up his pieces to make a bold/ unconventional film that might, however, leave many viewers (and reviewers) wondering.
Comparisons may be odious, even inevitable, if a director is following up on Mungaaru Male and Gaalipata. But Bhat makes sure that such comparisons are also redundant.
One could say that the film has an even thinner storyline compared to his earlier two films. He has let go of his favorite actors (Ganesh, Anant Nag), his favourite animals (the rabbit and the pig), and his favourite element (the rain.) Instead, he relies on a stronger script (newcomer Pawan Kumar) and witty dialogues bordering on the ironical as main spine of the movie.
Lilting music by Mano Murthy that grows upon you, impeccable photography by Sathya Hegde and the word wizardry of Jayant Kaikini and Bhat himself complement this unusual fare.
Faith in a fairly new cast (at least for a commercial film) has paid off. While Digant and AindritaRay prove to be a candy-floss on-screen couple (with fairly creditable performance to boot by each), Raju Thaalikoti steals the show with his Dhaarawaadi dialect and dialogue delivery: gems like “temporary huchcharu oLage and permanent huchcharu Horage” (temporary mad men inside, permanent mad men outside) abound.
The technical crew has delivered a top-notch performance—the picturisation of the song “Naa naguva modalene” sums up the crew’s performance, elevating the song to a visual treat. Bhat and team drive home the point that concept and script are the pillars of their movies, with a simple but brilliantly executed climax.
The reviewers are a flummoxed lot. The New Indian Express and DNA largely hail the movie. Deccan Herald hints cruelly at “inspirations” when there are none, and The Times of India childishly labels the movie “a romance”. Vijaya Karnataka has an honestly positive review at the same time wondering how reviewers can assign “stars” to such an unusual movie.
And like the reviewers, one would expect that the movie, given its concept and execution, would garner mixed feelings from its viewers. But, coming at a time when there is such a lack of fresh ideas and execution in Kannada filmdom, this is a movie to be watched by all and judged by each.
Bhattare, we are eagerly waiting for your next one.
KRISHNA VATTAM writes from Mysore: My daughter-in-law Shantala was sobbing as she woke me up this morning.
“Mama, Gangavva is no more,” she said, and broke down.
The rest of the morning was not the same for me, too, a journalist long used to being woken up at odd hours by people anxious to have the news of the demise of their near and dear ones published in the early editions of newspapers; long used to hearing news of accidents and deaths.
“Gangavva is no more,” had had a telling effect, and it was far from impersonal.
Was it the magical spell of the music of Gangubai Hanagal that had made me to adulate her? No. She was Gangavva to an even unlettered vegetable vendor, who has no ear to any classical music, be it Hindustani or Carnatic, except to the cheap beats of Kannada songs.
When I was in Hubli three years ago, where my son was the correspondent of Deccan Herald and where Shantala was learning music from Gangubai , I was taken by them to the weekly shandy.
I was pleasantly surprised to see Gangubai, then all of 94, shopping there, with a vegetable vendor who clearly identified her beckoning her by name:
Or, was it her down-to-earth qualities, clad in simple Ilkal cotton sarees, that endeared her to one and all?
When my son had called on her in connection with a feature he was doing, it appears she casually asked about his parents. It was in 1999 when she was visiting Mysore to inaugurate the Dasara music festival she took my address from my son and honoured us with her visit to our small home. Shantala was also there on the occasion.
Gangubai Hanagal took my grandson, Shashank, in her arms. We were quite embarrassed and apologetic as the 10-month-old child urinated on her saree.
She was least disturbed.
“Bidi, nanu makalanna hadide doddoulu agilla (It’s all right. I have not grown up without giving birth to children).”
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Veteran journalist Krishna Vattam is the former Mysore correspondent of Deccan Herald
ASHVINI A. writes from Bangalore: Scanning the headlines on the Deccan Herald website on Friday afternoon, I came across a Press Trust of India (PTI) report about Indian parliamentarians attending classes at Yale University on global issues and leadership challenges.
My first reaction was “Wow, good idea, will open their minds.”
But it took just a few seconds for my initial enthusiasm to come crashing down. As I scrolled down the report, the choice of MPs selected for the programme intrigued me, and then began plainly irritating me.
Leader of the pack: Abhishek Manu Singhvi, son of L.M. Singhvi.
The other members of the squad:
# H.D. Kumaraswamy: son of former prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda.
# Naresh Goyal: son of former prime minister I.K. Gujral.
# Jayant Chaudhary: son of Rashtriya Lok Dal leader, Ajit Singh.
# Shruti Choudhary: daughter of Haryana tourism minister Kiran Choudhary, and grand-daughter of Bansi Lal.
# Priya Dutt, daughter of late Sunil Dutt.
# Mohammad Hamdullah Sayeed, son of the former Union minister P.M. Sayeed.
# Anurag Singh, son of the Himachal Pradesh chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal.
# Mausam Noor: granddaughter of Congress leader A.B.A. Ghani Khan Choudhary.
In other words, eight of the ten members of the team (there is also Prakash Javadekar, who is just the son of his parents) are from political families. Sons, daughters, relatives of political leaders.
First, their family standing and surname helped most of them get tickets to contest the elections and enter Parliament. Now, they are getting preferential treatment for leadership courses!
Democracy zindabad!
In a house of 543 MPs, were there no other “young MPs” who were found worthy of being chosen for this high honour?
(For the record, the India-Yale Parliamentary Leadership program is aimed at “providing insight and perspective to young leaders by giving them the exposure of different fields and ideas.”)
Who selected the MPs?
The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) or the Indo-US forum of parliamentarians? Does Yale know of the scam? Or is it a party to it?
How did H.D. Kumaraswamy get on the list? Did he serve as chief minister without these leadership skills? Or did his friend Rajeev Chandrasekhar, who headed FICCI till recently, swing it for him?
Off hand, I can think of at least three other MPs from Karnataka who have been elected on the strength of their own steam without any member of their family being in politics, who could have been on this trip: Dhruvanarayana (Chamrajanagar), Navin Kumar Kateel (Dakshina Kannada) and Janardhana Swamy (Chitradurga).
Looking at the number of “children” who were elected to the Lok Sabha, it seemed to me as if “We, the People” had internalised dynastic politics to the extent of becoming a Dynastic Democracy.
Looking at the Yale list, I am convinced.
Questions like whether leadership can be taught if not learnt in a classroom, and whether leadership for an Indian milieu can be taught by an Ivy League University, are evergreen.
But there are other questions bugging me:
# How is it that these “children” did not pick up leadership skills from their father, mother, uncles?
# Should a former chief minister like Kumaraswamy have been included in the list with first time MPs?
# Can an American university, howsoever great, really teach leadership for an Indian context?
# Are these first-time MPs in danger of being brainwashed and indoctrinated in the American way of thinking and learning?
# Should we not send delegations like these to places in India that are poor, disease-stricken so that they know the reality?
# Should not these MPs spend time with farmers, weavers, fishermen etc who face extreme hardships to make a simple livelihood and have little of no support from Goverment?
Going to Yale is good idea, but visiting different towns and villages at home in Bharat that is India will teach them more lasting lessons about leadership and challanges that an Yale can never teach.
Pretty soon, Parliament is going to take up the question of whether “foreign universities” should be allowed to set up shop in India. Is it reasonable to expect at least eight of the ten to have made up their minds?
Journalism, it is said in jest, is basically about letting readers who did not know that a certain somebody was alive that a certain somebody is dead. Even by that morbid yardstick, it can be said that our celebrity-obsessed, hit-and-run media does a pretty bad job of saluting the good and the great who pass into the ages.
The ashtanga yoga legend K. Pattabhi Jois passed away in Mysore on 18 May 2009 at the age of 94.
Yet all he got from the Star of Mysore was a couple of paragraphs and six from the newspaper of record, The Hindu. None of the others fared any better: The Times of India with an “edition” in Mysore and Bangalore ran an AFP screed; Deccan Herald had all of 247 words. Rediff.com had a slideshow.
Possibly because of his long association with the West, possibly because of the Hollywood actors and singers who were disciples, Pattabhi Jois got a fair deal from the foreign papers. The New York Times ran a full obituary as indeed did The Daily Telegraph, London, and there were six paragraphs in The Guardian.
Now, The Economist, whose obituary page is a must-read, has run a obit on Jois, which we publish here in full sans permission, to underline the point that if you do not where you come from, you will never know where to go. Then again, The Economist, despite being a mouthpiece of capitalism, did not run the obituary of P.V. Narasimha Rao.
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One sure sign that yoga has entered the mainstream of Western society, or at least the urbane bits of it, is that its practitioners have splintered into separate and sometimes competitive tribes. In spas, resorts and studios from Byron Bay, Australia to Big Sur, California, and wherever else one might expect Priuses on the roads and organic kale on the tables, the question is less likely to be “Do you do yoga?” than simply “Ashtanga or Iyengar?”
If the answer is Ashtanga, that has everything to do with Pattabhi Jois—“Guruji”, as his disciples called him. The word Ashtanga, “eight limbs”, originally meant the eight stages yogis must traverse to reach enlightenment, only one of which, asana or “postures”, is the sort of thing Westerners associate with yoga. But used in Mr Jois’s way, which is how most Westerners understand it now, Ashtanga meant stretching, balancing and swinging to the relentless rhythm set by a little, smiling, potbellied man in an undershirt and Calvin Klein shorts, crying “Ekam, inhale! dve, exhale! trini, inhale! catavari, exhale!”, until every member of the class was breathing like Darth Vader and running with rivers of sweat.
This was just how Mr Jois liked it. The intense internal heat generated by his sort of yoga was meant to purify and cleanse the body. For him, yoga was “99% practice and 1% theory”, as he liked to say in his squeaky, mischievous voice. Though he was the son of a Brahmin priest, and knew the teachings, anyone asking him for deeper philosophy would get a smirk in reply, or a scrap of his famously broken English. Why, for instance, did he insist that one must enter the Lotus position right leg first? “Practice and all is coming,” Mr Jois would say, and leave it at that.
He disdained the fastidious and perfectionist alignment of postures that some of his rivals practised in chilly yoga studios. He scorned Iyengar, the careful and medicinal branch of the art which, like his, arrived in the West in the 1960s, in which middle-aged ladies spent an eternity studying how to spread their toes properly while standing, before building complex poses with straps, blocks and chairs. His Ashtangis were younger and fitter, more likely to have Om tattoos and rippling shoulder muscles, and to start their exercises with a chant of “Guruji!” to a portrait of him pinned up on the wall.
His yoga poses came in sets and sequences that never varied. Do the same sets again and again, Mr Jois believed, and the body would, over time, supply its own grace. The poses did not change when he taught his daughter’s son, whom he was grooming to carry on the tradition after losing one son to death and growing distant from another. Nor did they vary for new, pale, stiff arrivals from the West at his school in Mysore, in India; nor for the Hollywood celebrities, from Madonna to Sting and Gwyneth Paltrow, who made the pilgrimage to catch Guruji on one of his world tours.
What changed was only how many of the six sequences—in theory, one for each day of the yoga week—the student was able and allowed to do. Each set had a theme, and they got harder and harder. The first, with many forward bends, was cleansing and calming; the second, with lots of back bends, was stimulating, and so on. The later ones were otherworldly in their contortions. It was said that only a handful of people could do all six.
Mr Jois first saw these yoga postures performed in one connected sequence in the 1920s, when he was 12. He was watching a demonstration by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, a charismatic guru who would teach all the principal yogis who later brought yoga to the West. Electrified, he became Krishnamacharya’s student the next day. His teacher made him start at daybreak, with sun salutations towards the east until he was sweaty and hot. Then followed postures, shoulderstands, headstands, deep breathing in the Lotus position and meditative rest. Strong, flexible and easily bored, the boy had found a discipline that challenged him.
After running away from his village with two rupees in his pocket, Mr Jois eventually managed to study at Mysore and then began to pass on what he had learnt. At first he taught in obscurity, in one small room with a grubby carpet, and only other Brahmin men. But from the late 1960s onwards, as the perfume of joss sticks drifted over Western civilisation, yoga caught on there too. A hippie fan brought him to California for a visit in 1975, and his fame spread.
Among his followers, Mr Jois inspired a cultish devotion. But his students were not unaware of their teacher’s contradictions. What had happened, for example, to the yogic principle of ahimsa, non-violence? A good number of Mr Jois’s students seemed constantly to be limping around with injured knees or backs because they had received his “adjustments”, yanking them into Lotus, the splits or a backbend. And what about the yogic principle of brahmacharya, sexual continence? Women followers, it was said, received altogether different adjustments from the men. Most mysteriously, why had Mr Jois himself apparently stopped practising his sort of yoga decades ago? Was that another instance of the wisdom of the East?
Mahatma Gandhi called him a “Raja Rishi” (saintly king). Historians have compared him to emperor Ashoka. He is seen to have ushered in the golden age of carnatic music.
Yoga and Sanskrit learning took flight under him. Sir M. Visveswaraya was diwan under him. Under them, Mysore became the first State in the country to generate hydro-electric power; Bangalore the first City to have streetlights.
Nalvadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar, or Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV to give his real name, was born 125 years ago on 4 June 1884.
Shyam Sundar Vattam reports in today’s Deccan Herald that a political party which has Lord Rama on its electoral lips hasn’t even bothered to remember the man whose kingdom has been described as Rama Rajya on his 125th anniversary. And this, while the BJP government of B.S. Yediyurappa is splurging untold millions in taking out advertisements on the completion of one year in office.
Shame.
S.M. Krishna’s gutless regime acquiesced to communalists and parochialists who blockaded Tipu Sultan’s 200th death anniversary because he was alleged to be anti-Hindu if not anti-Kannada. What is the excuse of the great Hindu nationalists wearing their religion on their foreheads and fighting their elections with it?
“The Congress party’s claim to be secular does not wash because it has not implemented even one recommendation of the government-appointed Rajinder Sachar committee report which pointed out last year that the plight of Muslims was worse than that of Dalits.
“Indeed, the party brings secularism to the fore only during the polls and forgets it after coming to power. Backwardness of Muslims is a sad commentary on the Congress which has been in power at the Centre and in most states for more than 50 years since independence.”
The latest desktop calculations of the editors of DNA with the two main alliances and the “others” running neck-and-neck.
An opinion poll reportedly conducted for a weekly newsmagazine by a polling agency, but not published due to the Election Commission’s diktat, gives the BJP 144, Congress 143, Left 32, BSP 30, Samajawadi Party 27, AIADMK 24, Telugu Desam 18, NCP 12, Trinamool Congress 13, DMK 13, Rashtriya Janata Dal-Lok Janshakti Party 15, Praja Rajyam Party 2, Biju Janata Dal 9, and Janata Dal Secular 2.
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Swapan Dasgupta, the journalist cum BJP strategist, writes on his blog that the second phase of polling “has been very good for the BJP and its allies, good for BSP, not so good for the Congress, and somewhat diastrous for the so-called Fourth Front.
“In Karnataka the BJP appears to have done as well as in 2004. “But there are non-quantitative reports of the BJP not doing so well in Bangalore.”
“If the BJP becomes the single largest party, you would be surprised by the number of small parties which suddenly discover the virtues of stability at a moment of economic crisis.”
In divorcing itself from any moral compulsions in l’affaireVarun Gandhi, the BJP has taken the same stand that it took in l’affaire Narendra Modi. Namely, in a democracy, the people will decide if they were right or wrong. The Congress, and countless other parties which put up killers, kidnappers, rapists, with gay abandon, has taken the same line in the past. But merely because “the majority” endorses the bestial, does it make it right?
“The BSP’s list of Lok Sabha candidates from Uttar Pradesh includes five persons facing murder charges and two nominees allegedly involved in other crimes. Five wives have been given tickets…. Other parties have also dredged dirt to pick up candidates. At least two Hindu right extremists who have been in the news of late for all the wrong reasons, are seeking court permission to contest the elections.
“Whatever the law, it is morally wrong to release such undertrials on bail to contest elections and, if they perchance win, to claim thereafter that they have been exonerated by the ‘people’s court’ and now stand above the law in their new avatar.”
History, it is said, repeats itself, first as a tragedy, then as a farce.
In coastal Karnataka, though—in the homeland of the honourable home minister of the State—the self-appointed protectors of “Hindu culture” seem to have obtained a licence to take it into the farcical stage straightaway.
As if attacks on pub-going girls, bans on burkhas on campus, and preventing couples of different communities from holding hands or living together, wasn’t bad enough, some Hindu activists have reportedly objected to a statue of Charlie Chaplin being installed on a beach near a temple in Kundapur taluk for the shooting of a Kannada film.
Not even the fact that the Udupi district administration has given permission for the film shoot seems to have come in the way of the spoilsports, whose game is revealed by the blanket threat to prevent shooting anywhere in the district, not just near the Someshwara Temple.
The fact that it is a film-maker making the claim and that the intent is to put up a 67-foot statue of a five-foot-nothing comedian should set off some cautionary alarm bells as to whether this might not be a neat publicity stunt.
Then again, looking at the frequency with which these incidents are being reported under the cavernous noses and nostrils of the BJP government, you wonder if the Christian comedian who twirled the globe on his fingertip is The Great Dictator—or the Hindu jokers working overtime to kick the name of their great religion into the mud.
“If women have been at the receiving end of moral policing by Hindutva elements till now, it is now the turn of the Karnataka police to join the party by busting birthday celebrations…. The action has scant defence in law and is an intrusion into the private lives of people.
“Rave parties have been targets of self-proclaimed custodians of morality for long. A few months ago, Rakshana Vedike activists attacked a party and manhandled the participants and even stole some of their belongings. But Sunday’s busted party had nothing rave about it….
“Police should respect people’s rights, but what the police love to do is to use a sledgehammer to persecute people. The revellers of Sunday are said to have been “scantily dressed.” Is it the business of the police or anybody to pass judgment on how people dress at a private party and punish them for it?
“Karnataka’s social life is already under threat from the senseless acts of a cultural mafia which bash up women in pubs, punish girls for talking to boys and do not believe in equal rights for all people. The police have been soft on these retrograde elements, probably because the political environment is conducive to these backward ideas and encourages such elements.
“Now the cops have gone a step forward, and are themselves trying to act as protectors of the false tradition these elements lay claim to. Law and order and culture should not be mixed up wrongly. The police in Bangalore have a lot of other things to worry about. Rather than misspend their energy on youngsters’ parties, they should try to make life safe for the City’s citizens.”
Photographs: “Scantily dressed” girls arrested by the police during a “rave party” at a farm house near Dodda Aladamara in Bangalore on Sunday (Karnataka Photo News)
In the understandable hoo-ha over Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, it is easy to forget that there were others before the kids of Dharavi who set hearts aflame in Hollywood.
Krishna Vattam, the longetime Deccan Herald correspondent in Mysore, remembers one of them from our very soil, who sailed from the foothills of Chamundi to Beverly Hills.
As I was reading about the street children in Bombay, who were cast in leading roles in Slumdog Millionaire, I went down memory lane, recalling a rags-to-riches true story way back in the 1930s, of a Mysore mahout boy set in reel life from real life.
Britain’s reputed documentary maker Robert Flaherty with his wife Frances, were in Mysore with a film team, wanting to do a feature film based on Toomai of the Elephants—a story by Rudyard Kipling.
They were keen on choosing a ‘native’ boy for the lead role of Elephant Boy.
While walking around what was then a small town, the Flaherty couple, saw some children playing football, and others quarrelling among themselves in a friendly manner.
One afternoon they stepped into the Palace elephants’ stable, where elephants were being maintained by the Palace. It was lunch time and the senior mahouts were away, leaving the young boy in charge of the stable.
The little boy was wearing only a lungi and around his head a white turban was wrapped.
On seeing the white skinned visitors, he excitedly performed acrobatic stunts while handling and fondling the gentle giants with much ease. His manner charmed and captivated the Fleherty couple, and they felt that their search was over.
They were convinced that this was the boy they were looking for.
Writing about the couple’s encounter with this lad, Robert’s biographer Paul Roather, recalled:
“My most treasured memory of this day is of Sabu. He made his appearance slowly astride on an elephant, and there they stood in the middle of the very large compound for the world to see. The manner in which he handled the ponderous, lumbering elephant was enough to stir one’s confidence and trust in him.“
“I have found a gold mine,” wired Flaherty to Alexander Korda, the producer of the Elephant Boy, who was in London.
A large part of the film was shot in 1935 and 1936 in the jungles around Mysore, with which Sabu was familiar.
Since there was a delay in the completion of the production of the film, the team was asked to go over to Britain and the rest of the film was shot in the Denham studio in London. The Elephant Boy was a box office hit and the performance of Sabu was universally praised and Sabu became an instant star.
“Sabu, the Indian boy is a sunny faced, manly little youngster. His naturalness beneath the camera’s scrutiny should bring blushes to the faces of precocious wonder children of Hollywood.“
Born in Karapura, the famous site of the khedda of yesteryear in Heggadadevanakote taluk of Mysore district, on 24 January 1924, Sabu was an illiterate boy, who lost his mother when he was in the cradle and his mahout father when he was just seven years old.
He was the youngest stable boy in the Maharaja’s ward.
The Elephant Boy was a big box office hit and Korda signed him up with a long-term contract. Here was an Indian juvenile star, who had earlier not travelled beyond Mysore.From then on, Sabu became the ward of the British government and was given an excellent schooling. With this grooming, Sabu learnt perfect English, which gave him the added confidence to interact with other celebrities in both Britain and America.
His third film The Thief of Baghdad was a smash hit.
When the Kordas moved to America, Sabu also joined them and became an American citizen in 1944 and embraced the Episcopalian faith.
When Hollywood super stars like Gary Cooper and Ronald Reagan stepped out of the studio to fight against the Nazis in World War II, Sabu also joined them as a gunner and was honoured for his courage and valour. He married an actress named Marilyn Cooper and had two children—Paul Sabu, who established a Rock band unit while Paul’s sister, Jasmine, owned a horse farm in California.
Sabu died young, at only 39, after a heart attack and his body was interred in the famous Forest Lawn Cemetery among other film personalities. He had achieved name and fame and was a celebrity in his own right.
Sabu returned to his home town, Mysore, in 1952 to shoot a film and this former mahout boy from the Palace elephant stable was the guest of the Maharaja Sri Jayachamarajendra Wodeyar.
His memory is kept alive, thanks to the occasional screening of the 28 films, in which he acted in, especially The Elephant Boy, and other hits like The Thief of Baghdad (1940), Jungle Book (1942), Arabian Nights (1942).
This article originally appeared in Deccan Herald, and is reproduced here with the kind courtesy of the author
Can you count the number of dosas about to be served at one glance?
Those who have migrated out of Bangalore will eternally argue about the merits of the benne dosa as served in Vidyarthi Bhavan over those served at Central Tiffin Room. Others will slurp with nostalgia when speaking about the idli their father got for them from Veena Stores.
Whatever the debate, at least one thing is certain: those lucky to have eaten in such temples as Brahmins Tiffin Room or Central Tiffin Room know what a good idli is—or for that matter, a dosa, whether plain or masala.
Ratna Rao Shekar, editor of Housecalls, the “longest running magazine for doctors“—and “a connoisseur of the idli just as some are of wine and caviar”—in her quest for the perfect idli and dosa finds her way to Bangalore’s old eateries where idli and dosa have their own geography, chemistry and mathematics.
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By RATNA RAO SHEKAR
Just as we are eternally looking for that approximation of our first love—that girl in pigtails on the bus, or the boy with long eyelashes who sat in the back bench of the class but shone radiantly like a sharp ray of the sun—we, it turns out, will for the rest of our lives be looking for that perfect dosa or idli that we ate when we were children in a small street in Malleswaram or Gandhi Bazaar in Bangalore.
Since this is oftentimes only an ideal, like first love which is more imagination than reality, every idli that you eat later falls short of expectation. Either the idlis are like rocks that could be flung at an enemy, or the dosas are more like the ‘choppaties’ of the north, chewy and rubbery.
After a recent eating binge in Bangalore accompanied by those who know about these things, old-time friends who have grown up and aged in these parts, I am now convinced that the best idli and dosa can be had in the Silicon City. And the surprising thing is that this can be done at no great cost.
At Rs 6 an idli and Rs 20 a dosa, you do feel they would at least save on the paper on which such bills are scribbled.
I would like to call these places restaurants, but restaurants require certain standards to deserve their qualification. Some of the eateries like the old Central Tiffin Room (CTR), now called Sri Sagar, in 7th Cross of Margosa Road in Malleswaram are so dark and dingy that you need a torch to see where you are going.
Vidyarthi Bhavan in Gandhi Bazaar has scaled its lighting in its efforts to modernize, but to bright tubelights. At 6.30 in the morning, when the first acolytes are arranging themselves on the narrow benches in anticipation of that dosa that is to die for, that light is rather harsh on the soul. Even if the dosa and potato sagu is heaven on the tongue.
The seating has simple wooden tables and chairs with marble or formica tops and there is no maître here to usher you to your tables. AT CTR and Vidyarthi, it’s best you make your way to a table as fast as you can, or you will be standing until eternity watching all those dosas flurrying past you.
In fact, courtesies of any kind are to be dispensed with in these places.
At CTR, for instance, we stood near the cashier—who sat with an array of gods in the background and a simple cash book in front of him—and kept a hawk’s eye on those on the verge of finishing their dosa or puri and sagu so we could swoop in on the table even before they finished paying the bill.
Worse, in these eateries that seat no more than 50 people at a go, there are no such things as exclusive tables for a group or family. We were eating our dosa and rava idli silently (there is no room here to conduct conversations on current topics of interest such as terrorist attacks or rising prices) when the head of a family seated his oldest child next to us, while he sidled to an adjacent table loudly ordering a plate of dosa for his daughter and piping hot coffee for himself.
In Vidyarthi Bhavan we were lucky to find a table quickly, and waited anxiously for our dosa. Since the bill of fare itself is just dosa (plain and masala), vada, khara and kesari bhath, coffee and tea, the waiter does not even need to repeat your order after taking it down. He knows that most people come to Vidyarthi for the dosas.
It is practically understood that you have arrived here at this early hour (we were there at 7 a.m.) for the Vidyarthi dosa. And the dosa arrives, after a good 15 minutes, not only for us but for a whole lot of others around us who are salivating by this time.
The waiter, a veshti-clad gentleman who comes with a stack of dosas neatly balancing himself and the plates, flings a dosa each on our plates and on those of others sitting at tables around. The accompaniment is just a liquidy yellow-dal chutney that flows across the plate and submerges the dosa.
The dosa is crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, the potato sagu unobtrusive on the tongue without too much of chillies or garlic. And it is made with ghee (or benne, as Kannadigas call it), not Saffola or any other oil that heart doctors recommend!
I was waiting for sambar as in other restaurants, when my companions, having already eaten half their dosa, urged me to start eating without further delay, as sambar was an alien concept at Vidyarthi and an import from neigbouring Tamil Nadu (with whom they were currently at war over language, water and other issues).
Vidyarthi, as its name suggests was started to cater to students in 1943 by two brothers Venkaramana and Parameshwara Ural from Udupi. In the 1970s it was taken over by Ramakrishna Adiga whose son Arun Kumar now oversees operations.
The who’s who of the country have eaten here, from scientist Sir M. Visvesvaraya, actor Raj Kumar, playwright Girish Karnad to cricket’s leg-spinner B.S. Chandrashekar. It is said that filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt was so impressed with the eatery that he made a two-minute documentary for BBC on the dingy hall called Vidyarthi where at one time, when short of space, they would seat you in the kitchen itself!
How many dosas in a day do you serve, we ask the cashier.He tells us reluctantly (these are matters of some secrecy) that he serves around 1,000 dosas in a day on weekdays, and on weekends it goes up to at least 2,000.
In fact, when I arrived here on a Sunday I was literally told to go home as it was already 12 noon, and didn’t I know that Vidyarthi closes at 12 on weekends (and in fact by 11 on weekdays)? No, I did not, though many others who looked suspiciously like Kannadigas from Santa Clara and Palo Alto seemed to know both timings and the menu, from the satisfied look on their faces at having consumed their Sunday’s worth of dosa and coffee.
The interesting thing about these eateries is their timing, which can even put the precise Germans to shame. They open without fail by 6.30 or 7 in the morning, and by 11 or 12 are ready to go home.
S. Pradeep of Veena Stores on Margosa Road in Malleswaram wants to offer us something when we arrive at 11.30, but is unable to give us anything we ask for, whether idli or mere coffee, as everything has been sold out like tickets of a Karan Johar film. He does finally give us coffee, but says with an apology that it’s only Bru instant.
“Come tomorrow in the morning,” he says, sad that he could not offer any of the items from his famous store that has men in Malleswaram rushing here in the mornings to fill their steel tiffin carriers with idlis and chutney.
“If organisations like the Sri Rama Sene are keen to uphold Indian cultural values, they would do well to draw a lesson or two from the country’s long tradition of cultural tolerance. If they are keen to improve the lot of women in this country, there are any number of issues they could address. They could start with fighting female foeticide, for instance or the practice of dowry. If they find ‘pub culture’ a corrupting influence, they should set an example for youngsters by not frequenting bars themselves. Engaging in rowdyism is not the way to uphold Indian culture.”
Chandana, the Kannada television channel of Doordarshan, created history of sorts by getting three visually challenged persons to anchor news bulletins through the day on Sunday, 4 January 2009.
The heart-warming move was made to mark the bi-centenary of Louis Braille, the man who invented the script for the blind, according to a report in the Kannada daily Vijaya Karnataka.
Accordingly, the anchors Manjunath from Devanahalli, and Srinivasamurthy and Ashok from Chamarajanagar, read a part of the news from their Braille script during the six bulletings from 7 am to 9 pm, with a fullfledged anchor by their side.
The activities of Madhu Singhal of the non-governmental organisation Mithra Jyothi gave Doordarshan director Mahesh Joshi (picture in newspaper tear) the brainwave.
“No TV news channel in the world has so far done this. Visually challenged people have a very sharp brain. We wanted them to show them that the world is with them. This will give them confidence,” Joshi was quoted by the paper as saying.
Manjunath who read the news said: “Society does not take note of us. Therefore such a platform is essential. We believe endeavours like these will spur people to empathise with us better.”
Chandana now plans to make this a monthly event.
For the record, the Bangalore newspaper, Deccan Herald, employs a visually challenged person on the news desk, L. Subramani, that is a signal lesson in corporate social responsibility not aimed at burnishing the brand-name.
Manish Tiwari, the Congress spokesman, on the arrest of Hindu sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur and her accomplices, the involvement of the Hindu right wing organisation Abhinav Bharat, and the rumours of the possible arrest of BJP MP Yogi Adityanath, in connection with the recent bomb blasts in Malegaon:
“Earlier it used to be ‘Muh mein Ram Ram, bagal mein churi’.
“What is surprising, however, is the response of the spokesmen of the Parivar. They disown any association with sadhvi Pragya and other civil suspects held for the Malegaon bombing. Yet they take the line that Hindus cannot be terrorists and that the armed forces are a part of Indian society which has been horrified by the pusillanimous and apologetic approach of the UPA government to terror attacks and cannot therefore be blamed for patriotic reactions.
“This apologia comes close to showing sympathy for and indirectly condoning what is undoubtedly a grave dereliction of duty and rank indiscipline. It echoes the chorus from across the border in praise of “freedom fighters” as opposed to terrorists, “our” boys versus the dreadful “other”. Such pernicious double talk is scarcely in keeping with the Parivar’s insistent demand for “strong” action against terror.”
K.S. NIKHIL KUMAR, an intern at CNN-IBN, produces the picture of the day—Sunday, 2 November 2008—when a swarm of photographers crowded around Anil Kumble after he announced his retirement from the game, to provide him the warm afterglow of limelight one last time.
“I grew up in Bangalore’s Basavanagudi locality, very close to where Kumble lived for most of his life (he’s recently shifted to Banashankari, very close to where I have also shifted!), and I’ve been constantly connected to and inspired by his persona in a unique way. As a wicketkeeper, I rarely got to have a bowl at the nets, but whenever I did I would sometimes choose to bowl leg-spin of the Kumble variety – fast flippers that kicked or rushed on to the batsman….”
Photograph: courtesy K.S. Nikhil Kumar/ The Printers (Mysore) Limited
“Dr Manmohan Singh said, on his return from France, that incidents in Orissa had shamed India before the world. That is important, but far less important than the fact that the violence in Orissa has shamed Indians in India….
“The Bajrang Dal’s violence in Orissa shames me because it represents the destruction of the idea of India as shared space for all faiths, with each Indian guaranteed equal rights. This too is a form of terrorism.
“It has been pointed out that some of the conversion literature distributed by missionaries — for instance, a booklet titled Satya Darshini, where remarks have been made about Urvashi, Vashistha and Lord Krishna — is offensive.
“If that is so, there is a democratic way of addressing such issues. Who gave any fundamentalist the right to rape and kill? Governments that have tolerated this will suffer not only the shame of present censure but also the whiplash of public anger in the next elections.”
“You cannot compare today’s Dasara with the one that was conducted by my forefathers. The present Dasara is neither a festival nor an exhibition of military power. It is not held as mentioned in the Puranas, Mahabharata and Ramayana and according to me it is off-track.
“Mysore has a rich history and it is believed that 15 demons were vanquished by Goddess Chamundeshwari. These are mentioned in Kayaka Purana, Markandeya Purana and Padma Purana.
“In West Bengal, according to Bengalis, their region is known as Punya Bhumi and the Mysore region as Karma Bhumi. The only difference between West Bengal and Mysore in regard to celebration of Dasara is that there the celebrations are held as per the Puranas whereas it is not so in Mysore especially after the government took over the responsibility of holding Dasara festival every year.
“The last three days of Dasara is celebrated with pomp and pageantry in Bengal, whereas in Mysore it is a colourful celebration on all the 10 days. While Bengalis immerse the idol of Goddess Kali, in Mysore the idol of Goddess Chamundeshwari is taken out in a colourful procession on elephant.”
The following is the full, unedited text of a quarter-page advertisement issued by a Delhi-based NGO called PATRIOT, that appears on the business page of Deccan Herald today.
Deccan Herald and its holding company The Printers Mysore Limited, in a disclaimer at the bottom of the advertisement, have clarified that they have no interest or input in the content and that they do not take responsibility for the statements made.
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All India Advertisement
INDUSTRIES FRIGHTENED IN KARNATAKA
(Turning West Bengal/ Bihar way)
Some misguided individuals/organisations becoming stronger in the guise of getting 100% Kannadigas employed in industries under threats, which situation is not prevailing anywhere in India, despite the new chief minister being pro-industrialisation realising well that “industry is a self-generating economy” providing not only massive employment but also generating revenue, earning foreign exchange and raising living standard of the people.
In fact, they have no locus standi under any law to play such destructive role, but are taking the law into their own hands by spreading the dangerous wave of Kannadigas vs non-Kannadigas for the last 4-5 years in the guise of democracy.
Earlier, Karnataka was known as the most peaceful State and its people law abiding and were welcoming industries.
It is expected Government, having strong teeth, will invoke Sections 383/389, 153-B, 291, 441, 503, 146 of IPC and Sections 35, 38, 54, 55 of Karnataka Police Act, 1963 and ban these destructive organisations by throwing their so-called leaders into jail for their anti-development and anti-people activities, in the interest of the people’s prosperity through industrialisation.
The Hon’ble Supreme Court in one of its judgments has observed “The greater the percentage of population i industry and lesser in agriculture the more prosperous the country.”
In Karnataka, 80% and in India on average 75% of population depend on agriculture—hence the poverty.
Moreover, we have examples of Japan, Germany and Korea which were almost ruined during second world war but now they top the list of most prosperous nations due to industrialisation only. Similarly, in our own country, look at Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, most prosperous States due to industrialisation. On the contrary, look at Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal, starving due to criminalisation and goondaism.
PATRIOT, a well-known NGO, registered in the year 2000 having made extensive research on various complaints of this nature, has cautioned entrepreneurs individually and through FICCI, CII, ASSOCHAM, all Chambers of Commerce, Associations & Federations to know the reality before stepping into karnataka so long as these anti-social elements and wave of Kannadigas vs non-Kannadigas are not curbed realsing the consequences of similar mean-thinking in West Bengal during 1968 to 1974—driving away the industries followed by starvation and lawlessness massively.
The aforesaid anti-development groups getting frustrated owing to the intervention of Hon’ble High Court and Hon’ble Supreme Court judgments in other cases, have now changed their direction alleging that the industries are committing atrocities on Kannadigas. By this, they are doing more harm and giving a clear signal that industries are unwanted in Karnataka.
So, it is for the State Government to compare with West Bengal/ Bihar and decide. However, if these groups and leaders have an iota of sense and are real saviours of the poor, innocent and illiterate masses mostly living in villages, they should request/move the Government with close follow up to make it mandatory on all industries to adopt 1 to 100 surrounding villages as per capacity/size and provide basic amenities like potable water, eduction, medicines, jobs, sanitation, hygiene.
In case of failure/violation, such industries as well as the concerned public servants be taught a good lesson instead of harassing and attacking the law abiding, peace-loving and benevolent/respectable people purely in self-interest. This will be the real service to Kannadigas. By this, nobody is loser but all will receive God’s grace.
President, PATRIOT (Regd), 22/12, 1st Floor, Yusuf Sarai, New Delhi 110016
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Are the claims true? Are the demands correct? Has the perception of the character of Karnataka/ Kannadigas changed in recent years? Is this situation unique to Karnataka? Are we going the way of Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal in terms of criminalisation and goondaism?
Who could be behind this ad? A political party, an aggrieved industrialist? And what is the ad’s intent: to correct the situation, alert the world, or plain mischief?
R. Akhileshwari, Deccan Herald’s veteran Hyderabad correspondent, quotes Andhra Pradesh activists working in Orissa as saying that the empowerment and economic improvement of Dalits is at the core of the Hindu-Christian face-off following the murder of VHP leader Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati:
“The anger against Dalits and tribals, who have been the main targets of Hindu fundamentalist groups and organisations, [is] against the increasing empowerment of the traditionally oppressed people….
“Dalit assertion that is visible in many ways like wearing better clothes and speaking English language is not to the liking of the entrenched merchant-fringe Hindu fundamentalist groups who have aligned themselves to ‘teach a lesson’ to the Dalits.”
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