twenty2yards

Marching on Australia

2012-01-03T16:32:00.002+05:30

This article first appeared on the Big Show in December 2011. The link to the original post is here

In military circles it is often light heartedly remarked about Russia and Afghanistan that invading armies over the centuries passed by the skeletal remains of previous empires that had tried and unsuccessfully attempted to conquer those lands. In the cricketing context, it is perhaps an exaggeration to compare the unforgiving vastness of western Russia or the rugged and inhospitable mountains of Afghanistan with the pleasant and warm lands of coastal Australia. The analogy though begs the question – Is Australia the most difficult country to tour, especially for the sub-continent teams?

Statistically, Australia remains the team to beat at home. Its winning ratio over the last decade (2001-2011) is a staggering 74%. The years of total dominance in the first half of the last decade contribute significantly to this healthy number. This record at home becomes more respectable when compared with other major countries – In the same period, South Africa has a winning ratio at home of 57%, England of 61% and India itself of only 47%. Neither are Australia’s numbers bloated due to runaway successes against minnows. Its winning ratio at home in the analyzed time period against England and South Africa combined has been 67% (2 out of every 3 tests). Interestingly the only test series to have been lost at home have also been against these two countries – The 3-1 Ashes loss last year against England and a 2-0 defeat against South Africa in 2009.

For the sub-continent giants Pakistan and Sri Lanka, there has been little joy Down Under. Pakistan has lost all 6 test matches in the last decade and while Sri Lanka has only managed to draw 1 and lost the other 3. Yet, amidst all this carnage of numbers, one anomaly stands out. Against India, the Aussies have won 3, lost 2 and drawn the remaining 3 – that gives a win ratio of 38%. Against no other country at home has this number dropped below 65% for the last decade.

MS Dhoni’s team faces the expectations of maintaining this competitive posture and given the ‘perceived’ troubles with Australia in the recent times even go ahead and retain the Border-Gavaskar trophy that has been in their possession since the home series of 2008. Six months ago, this script seemed a fairly promising adventure; post England, the tale is now one of redemption. For India all the marketing jargon of ‘final frontier’ is now secondary. They must first prove to themselves and then to their fans that the ability to meet opposition head to head on foreign soil, the single biggest achievement of Indian cricket in the first decade of the 21^st century, is still alive and burning.

On each of their previous two tours, India punched above their weight. Man for man, their batting perhaps matched that of the Aussies but never have the bowlers looked as threatening as the home side’s. In 2004, Zaheer Khan showed a glimpse of his brilliance (5/95) at Brisbane before departing for the rest of the series. In 2007, he again flattered to deceive and after a 4 wicket haul in the opening test at Melbourne, missed the rest of the tour with an injured ankle. Another premier bowler, Harbhajan Singh, also missed 3 tests on the 2004 tour with an injured shoulder and made more noise off the field than on it on the 2007-08 trip. In Australia, in 4 tests, Harbhajan has taken 9 wickets at an unflattering average of 73. On both occasions, India discovered new bowling talents in Irfan Pathan and Ishant Sharma, rookies who came back home with enhanced reputations, but it was one man who held their bowling effort together and kept the Australian batsmen honest. For a spinner, Anil Kumble had two outstanding tours of Australia in 2003 and 2007 taking 24 and 20 wickets respectively at averages of 29 and 34. On both occasions, he was India’s leading wicket taker by a distance. In a country where away spinners leaked 46 runs for each wicket (since Jan 2006), Kumble with 44 wickets at an average of 35 is the leading wicket taker amongst spinners in Australia over the last ten years.

This time though India go without their holding and strike bowler of the last two efforts, which makes it absolutely imperative for the fragile ankles of Zaheer Khan and Ishant Sharma to last the distance in the Test matches. It would be a surprise and not an expectation for India’s bowlers to consistently bowl out Australia and it is their batsmen who would have to land the heavy blows to keep the team in the bout. It is on the continued success of Dravid, Tendulkar, Laxman, Ganguly and later on Sehwag that the positive results away from home were achieved. In Australia, Sehwag, Laxman and Tendulkar average above 54 while Dravid, despite a poor last tour, still averages 48. The batting order will feature two first time travelers this time – Gautam Gambhir and Virat Kohli, with Rohit Sharma who impressed in the ODI outings in Australia in 2008, as the first backup.

Unlike England, if India is to make a match of it in Australia, their batsmen have to make up for the deficiencies that their bowlers will perhaps frequently display. And therein lies the weight of India’s burden. Dravid has had a wonderful year and looks assured and settled. Laxman had patches of brilliance and Tendulkar has been laden with artificial mental burdens of late. Sehwag has only now struck form (and how!) and Gambhir averages below 30 in his last 25 test innings with no century to show. Buffering this line up are Kohli and Dhoni - for the first, this can be a career defining tour if he manages to avoid the fate that England dished out to Suresh Raina; for the second, this would perhaps be a visit where he may be required to play above his test average of 38. Indian batting faces a collective challenge which would demand the shedding of indifference and inconsistency and the adoption of bold and certain postures. The pitches would be quick, barring Sydney and the engine of Indian batting would have to chug into life quickly and swiftly. A slow start would only create the danger of a repeat of this summer, when more than the English bowlers, the lack of certainty and confidence of the batsmen did them in.

Facing India would be an Aussie side that has tasted victory against both South Africa and New Zealand recently, has discovered a new found depth in bowling riches and would in all probability have an in form Ricky Ponting awaiting India. The gaps would remain at the top and at the bottom – an opening combination that contains a Shane Watson unable to bowl at full effectiveness denies Australia the comfort of a quality all-rounder, and a rookie spinner in Nathan Lyon may not pose too many uncomfortable questions to the Indian batsmen. Barring that, Australia will come hard with (speed) guns blazing at India and will perform the basics in fielding and catching well.

For India, the story is familiar and yet slightly deviant. Their batsmen must win the big moments for them but this time they will perhaps be afforded lesser buffers of luxury by their injury prone and inexperienced bowlers. History can often be a strange companion. It can comfort, as the statistics in the opening part of this article indicate, or it can sow doubts and suspicions, as the memories of England this past summer may testify. India have fought Australia to a stalemate during their last two trips Down Under; its critical, for the sake of their immediate Test match future, that they leave a more promising legacy behind on this trip that what exists in the harsh battlefields of Russia and Afghanistan.

Statistics Source: espncricinfo.com

Beyond the Bashing

2011-08-13T22:32:00.007+05:30

(picture source: Cricinfo)

As I write this the covers are being pulled on the square at Edgbaston and MS Dhoni is preparing for another ‘loosing captain’ speech (his third in a row, an unusual event in itself) and searching for reasons to offer for a loss that was as big and humiliating as the margin suggests – an innings and 242 runs. India now have been wiped clean 3-0 by an ascending England that completes a remarkable one year of test cricket for the hosts and raises perplexing and troubling questions for visitors.

The last time India performed with such abject hopelessness in an away test series (or any test series for that matter) was Down Under in the winter of 1999. The Sachin Tendulkar led team was demolished by a rampaging Australia under Steve Waugh and the extent of the defeat then bears a close resemblance to the ones we are seeing now –

• Adelaide – Lost by 285 runs
• Melbourne – Lost by 180 runs
• Sydney – An innings and 141 runs

It was a tour equal to the current one in terms of complete batting failure with only 2 centuries and 3 half centuries being scored in response to a batting flood from the Aussies. And despite the tireless efforts of the Karnataka trio of Srinath, Prasad and Kumble, the team never even won a session against the Aussies, let alone coming close to threatening them with a draw or a loss.

View the results of the current embarrassment in England and notice the pattern – Defeat by 196 runs at Lord’s, by 319 runs at Nottingham and the latest by an innings and 242 runs. The bowlers have tried and have been handicapped by injuries but the batting has opened the floodgates and let the invaders through. The three test matches have seen only 2 centuries and 7 seven half centuries and in neither case have the hundreds been big enough or the fifties been accumulative enough to push the total beyond 300.

The difference though lies in the expectations and the historical performance. No one gave the 1999 team a chance against the Aussies. There was not much you could expect from a team that had a support cast of MSK Prasad (opening the batting mind you), Hrishikesh Kanitkar, Devang Gandhi and SS Das for the likes of Tendulkar, Dravid and Ganguly. It was a complete collective batting failure with no opening stands of note and no stand out middle order performances. During the intervening 12 years though, India have done enough to wipe the stains of that humiliation and improve their reputations from easy cannon fodder to worthy contenders on overseas tours. Between 2000 and 2011, out of 54 tests played away from home (excluding Zimbabwe and Bangladesh), India won 15 and lost 21, giving them a win ratio of 27%, which while not comparable to an Australia or South Africa, is certainly much higher than those of any previous decade in Indian cricket.

During this period, the team was served by the bowling efforts of Zaheer Khan, Harbhajan Singh and Anil Kumble, but the foundation of the victories and match saving draws were often laid down by the batsmen. It is India’s batting core of Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman and Ganguly (assisted during the later part of the last decade by Sehwag and Gambhir) that enabled it to post significant overseas victories (Headingly 2002, Adelaide 2003, Perth 2008, Hamilton 2009, Durban 2010) and often save games that could easily have been lost with a batting collapse (Nottingham 2002, Brisbane 2003, Adelaide 2008, Napier 2009, Cape Town 2011). This picture is perhaps appropriately reflected in the batting averages of the Indians away from home (admittedly not excluding Zimbabwe and Bangladesh this time) – Tendulkar expectedly leads with 55, followed by Gambhir at 57, Dravid at 53, Sehwag at 47, Laxman with 44 and Ganguly at 41. Each of them has, over the years, played a part in the setting up totals for bowlers to defend or responded to opposition’s attack with equal gusto.

It is based on the above that we must confront the critical hypothesis that now stares Indian cricket in the face as it awakens from the shambles of the England tour – India was and certainly for the near and medium term future shall remain a batting team. The bowling quartet (and a quartet it will be, for there is no genuine seam or spin bowling all rounder on the horizon) shall always possess one or at most two (if we are lucky) world class bowlers and not more. Kumble’s mantle passed onto Zaheer and from him it is now a toss up. Ishant Sharma perhaps possesses the best talent to claim it but is yet to stamp himself as a match winner as Zaheer did in 2007. The spinners will be effective at home but will remain predominantly stock bowlers outside and the seamers will never run through batting sides as the English and the South Africans now do. We will not have a Steyn or a Morkel and our seamers will always need receptive pitches to make the opposition batsmen hop.

It will therefore be the batsmen who have to bear a good 2/3rds (and at times even 3/4ths) of the burden of responsibility for winning games. They will need to compensate when the bowlers are hacked around during the first innings of a test match and will need to give enough to the bowlers to defend in the 2nd and 4th innings. This has been a pattern quite obvious in our recent one-day successes and will have to be the template if we are to be successful as a test side going ahead. Unless the soil of our pitches where Ranji games are played dramatically changes, we will need to look at our top 6 to win and save games for us.

It is here that India’s problems lie, not just as of now with the batsmen failing to fire in England, but also in the future as each of Dravid, Tendulkar and Laxman will not last beyond the next 2-3 years. Behind them, warming the benches is a lot that has justifiably failed to inspire confidence thus far. The spot vacated by Sourav Ganguly in 2008 is still up for grabs. And neither Yuvraj Singh (overall test average of 35 and an away average of 29) nor Suresh Raina (test average of 32) have managed to cement that slot as their own. Both have been patchy and inconsistent and have shown major shortcomings against the short ball and an inability to graft when the pitch is not to their liking. Yuvraj is now out with an injury and Raina, who after his knock at Lord’s could have made this his breakthrough series, has frittered away the chance and seems set to lose his place in the playing XI. That leaves four other young men who currently are lined up in the queue with an eye on the future – Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane. Kohli has started disappointingly and shown a visible discomfort against pace and bounce, even on docile West Indian pitches; Rohit Sharma has perhaps the most amount of talent but also the most fickle temperament; Pujara is only 3 games old and needs more chances and with the batting failures of England, Rahane may well find himself a part of the squad in the upcoming test series at home and in Australia.

The cupboard is not exactly bare for India’s batting but it’s a bit like sending cadets out of a military academy to replace experienced field commanders in the middle of a war. The transition, given the problems of the new crop of batsmen away from home, has to be phased and will necessarily involve pain such as that experienced in the last three weeks. It is critical that India’s new generation steps up to the mark in test cricket or else more such hidings may be in the offering. Test cricket is about the quality of effort and display of temperament and less about statistical rankings. The loss of the top spot must hurt but it is time to be realistic. A weak bowling and a declining batting line up will not take us back to the top of the summit. A more realistic short term goal would be stay in the top 3, keep in the hunt with the likes of England and South Africa and groom a new batting line up that can perform away from home. It is good to aspire for the numero uno slot but India’s priority in the near future has to be a Jardinesque obsession with building a strong XI that can play well away from home. The results and the rankings will take care of themselves by consequence.

Much would be written and lamented about the three tests lost. The bowlers were always suspect but the batting failure is inexplicable and as Ganguly has said, it seems more of a mental block than an issue about adapting to the environment. The batsmen, as has been pointed out, have been having a sub-par year and have not crossed 400 even once in the 7 test played in the calendar year thus far. It is not as if India did not have their chances in the series – they were 158/2 at Lord’s replying to England’s 474, only to get bowled out for 280 odd. Even after England recovered from 124/8 at Nottingham, the batsmen only had to score 350 in the first innings to get a sizeable lead. Instead the last 4 wickets were lost for 20 odd runs and the Houdini act enabled England to grab the psychological advantage. India turned up at Edgbaston conditioned for defeat and that is one mental spell that champions must immediately break out of.

The fourth test returns to the Oval in London. A ground where the blue of Indian fans will match the blue of the English as at Lord’s. A ground also where the pitch will seem flat and the batsmen may finally manage to play through the line of the ball with lesser risk. A 4-0 whitewash prediction was sacrilege when the series began but now seems realistic. India have been shuffling players, managing injuries and patching up their batting order. To use another military analogy, England has been pounding the heavy artillery while the Indians are still getting their battle formations in order. It is up to the batsmen to pull the team out of the current abyss. It is perhaps too much to expect a victorious turnaround or even a simultaneous coming to form for the top 6, but in this bout where India have been a mute punching bag instead of a living animated boxer, a batting effort exceeding 350 may well be a starting counterpunch.

A Right too far

2011-08-03T20:26:00.003+05:30

'Oh my love, it's a long way we've come
From the freckled hills to the steel and glass canyons
From the stony fields, to hanging steel from the sky
From digging in our pockets for a reason not to say goodbye'

U2 - The hands that built America

Noise is the hinge on which the doors of democracy open. It is the one characteristic that distinguishes it from any other alternative political system. Not for no reason was Eastern Europe referred to being under an ‘Iron Curtain’ during the years of the Cold War. And not for no reason do we see the rich and supposedly destined for greatness China going all out to block internet chat forums, Facebook and Twitter whenever civil disturbances raise their feeble head in the country. Noise denotes life, liveliness and interest. When combined with opinion it reflects participation. Democracies cannot run on mute and unlike our television channels, in our systems of governance we have to listen to all kinds of noises, wherever they emanate from and howsoever unpleasant they may be.

Developed and to some extent emerging democracies are increasing hearing new and perturbing voices. Voices they always believed the locomotives of their nations were far too superior to produce. Voices that are increasingly shrill and radical and are making those in the seat of power squirm uncomfortably. There is a direction that they are coming from. You only have to turn to your right and try and see far ahead, beyond the immediately obvious.

On 22nd of July, Anders Breivik single-handedly committed the deadliest armed attack in Scandinavia since the end of the Second World War. He blew up the façade of the Prime Minister’s office and then went on a shooting spree at the youth camp of the ruling party killing 69 and injuring many others. Before Breivik’s arrest the initial suspicion fell on Islamic terrorists and for good reason. Scandinavia has been under threat since the publication of the Prophet cartoon by a Danish daily a few years. It could have been entirely plausible that revenge had finally been sought for that perceived insult in the quiet of Oslo.

All convenient theories were however torn to shreds as Breivik laid down his automatic weapon and surrendered to the police on the island of Utoya where for more than hour he had emptied bullets on defenseless teenagers. Something that not just Norway but all of Europe and dare I say all of the developed West had overlooked or believed not to be of major consequence, had occurred right in their midst – Right wing home grown violence and terror.

Breivik’s action were an eventual culmination in practice of an ideology that has been spewing hate in theory (and internet chat rooms) across Europe over the last few years. As ‘indigenous’ population stagnated and migrants from poorer countries started entering the workforce, Western Europe’s much vaunted multiculturalism has increasingly felt the pressure coming from a Right that believes the ‘original’ nation is under siege. While till the turn of the century this debate was purely a fight for scarce resources and jobs and at one level even justifiably about illegal immigration, post 9/11 and the Afghan war, the toxic ingredient of Islamophobia has been added to the already unstable compound of frustrations.

These emotions are not confined to Europe alone. North America has also been experiencing a political divide that sharpens by the day. In the US, on the one side stands the Republican party that is shrill it is denouncement of everything that represents government. Ironically it cites the fiscally broke welfare states of Western Europe as examples of what US should not become and what its opponent, the Democratic party is hell bent on doing. The Republicans have never known to be anti-immigrant but their often harsh and illogical stance on illegal immigration (specially through Mexico) and perceived bias towards affluent and middle class suburban whites and Christian conservatives, has pushed the minority vote of blacks and Hispanics away from them. The Democrats meanwhile are ranged on the Left, resisting overt attachment to faith and counterbalancing the concerns of those who are ‘non-white’ in America. The political dialogue is mostly sharp, accusatory and bordering on the unpleasant. And it did not take long for a country where owning a gun is at times as easy as buying groceries from the nearest store, for violence to emanate from someone owning allegiance to the extreme right. In January of this year, Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives was shot at in an assassination attempt by a man who claimed that the government was ‘mind controlling’ the country and listed Hitler’s Mein Kampf as one of his influences. The shooting was clouded by what preceded it. Giffords had barely managed to get re-elected the previous November and during the campaign her office had been ransacked once and her constituency had been shown in the crosshairs of a gun in an election map put up on Sarah Palin’s website. As speculation over the cause of Gifford’s shooting continued, the political rhetoric only went up.

No society is free from violence and no society is completely open enough to accept everything and everyone it comes in touch with. But society itself is collection of individuals that have not always consented to living together with each and every one of them around. Unless we are ready to live in gated communities and by extension in gated colonies and gated nations, we will always have someone in every generation joining us as a new neighbor. Our fear of the outsider will only confine our world view, for the universe is large and our shells too small.

It is a question that we in India have grappled with as well. Our major metropolitan cities today are bursting at their seams and anti-migrant chants are not hard to hear. In Mumbai, self proclaimed cultural defenders have taken to attacking those they perceive as coming from outside and robbing locals of their jobs and draining the city of its resources. While the fight for our cities is a relatively new phenomenon, the tussle to own the heritage of the land and the country has been ongoing since the collapse of the Mughal Empire. Hindu nationalists have claimed the land as belonging to the nation’s largest faith on the basis of simple numbers and a view of history that begins only from 1000AD onwards when Muslim victories started resulting in permanent inhabitation of the conquered land. But India is much older than that and while Hinduism may have originated here, were the Aryans or the Indus Valley settlers the original squatters as far as history can logically see or did they too travel a distance before setting camp in the north-west of our subcontinent?

Within this debate are layered contexts of migration and movement? Both my father’s and mother’s family moved from comfortably settled and well to do households in Pakistan to the newly independent India during Partition. How much entitlement that does legacy bestow on people like me to call Delhi as ‘my city’ or more importantly to deny anyone else the right to enter its gates? And do I get that entitlement by virtue of birth or by ancestry? And how long does the bloodline have to run before the footprints of migration are erased forever and I become an accepted part of this city and the country?

Both Europe and the US, thus far, have experienced controlled and peaceful influx of outsiders, unlike India. Their engagement with multiple religions and cultures has been at the level and extent of their own choosing. Globalization has expanded boundaries of economies and nations while also expanding insecurities. The Indian sitting in far away Bangalore is no longer a mystic yogi for the average American but a potential job stealer. The turban wearing bearded man from the Middle East is not a carpet seller but a potential suicide bomber. The natural human response is to build walls, to appropriate resources, land and culture for those found ‘home grown’ enough. But every passing generation is layer upon one that came seeking a home. The blacks in the US came from Africa, the whites from England, Germany, Ireland, Russia and Eastern Europe. England was a Viking raiding territory before being conquered by Romans and then by the Anglo-Saxons. Germany was inhabited by fearful tribes before organized empires emerged in the middle ages.

The problem is not with nations defining boundaries or rules for admission, for that is how the modern civilized world must live. The problem lies in the politics of hate or more clearly the politics of the ‘other’. A strand of polity that solely focuses on the supposed negatives of the ‘other’ corrodes the moral correctness of the accuser. The need to banish the outsider and protect the native has now been combined with the need to protect the native culture and religion. This is the translation of the extreme right. The extreme left translated it as a battle between the earner and the seeker. Both demonized one against the other and both have not proven shy of pressing the trigger of a gunshot to make their voice heard. And while governments of the day have maintained that these mini-volcanoes of hate are too small and too dormant to release any harmful lava in the mainstream, incidents like those in Norway only reflect how day to day political speech is influencing those on the margins. It sounds uncomfortable but an Oslo bombed by an Al-Qeada trained Muslim would have been a terror attack but an Oslo shaken up by a Breviek becomes an act of a loony nutcase. As we never tire of saying, terror has no identity, religion or language. If it does not discriminate between the victims then why the discrimination between perpetrators?

The onus is on the center to balance the scale and push the hardliners to the margins. Both the Left and the Right have a place in polity but the language of political discourse needs to consider its message and those that interpret it on the outside. The shrillness and vitriol of words can soon be matched by deadly action as demonstrated in Oslo. Nations cannot open their gates with accepting arms to every outsiders, but they also cannot run around rubber stamping their citizens as owners and dependants. The creation of the planet preceded the creation of the species that now inhabits it. That should settle all disputes claiming ‘original ownership’ of land.

Manufacturing Enemies

2011-06-05T19:06:00.004+05:30

In Delhi’s political circles they are mourning the demise of the Left. And it is not just the caricatured ones from ‘civil society’, JNU and NGOs that experience this sadness. It is perhaps equally true of the Congress and its government in the UPA. For the first five years of its perch in the cockpit of governance, the party and the alliance faced internal turbulence on every issue directed at it from its own friend cum critic, the Left parties. From market liberalization (insurance and retail), to the scope and breadth of NREGA (something many journalists were quick to cite as a reason for the 2009 Congress victory) to ultimately the decisive (and fatal) clash over the nuclear deal three summers ago. Neither the Left, nor the UPA has really recovered from that collision, despite a return to power that spoke as much for the vanquished as it did for the victor.

The Congress since then has been on an auto-pilot. The Prime Minister, having braved a confrontation that many thought him incapable of causing and having achieved what he believed to be a significant domestic and foreign policy victory, seems to have lost energy and drive. It appears as if the 2009 polls for him were the end of a race and not a pit stop that many observers assumed it to be. These days he resembles an unwilling sportsman, forced out of retirement (or in his case being forced against retirement) to lead a team where disinterest is the prevailing feeling. The Congress seems to have mistaken the period between 2009 to 2014 as one that simply requires the completion of the formality of staying in office. The real pie is the next election when Rahul Gandhi is expected to take over the reigns and a new era of posturing can begin. UPA II then is the foster child the parent is not too keen to engage with. It is a necessity to be borne but the imagination is hidden for better times expected to come ahead. That perhaps explains the indifference and apathy running through this government since its inception. The Prime Minister has been low key, but unlike his first term when this was an asset, in his second term where allegations of corruption have abounded and ministers have been speaking about everything except their work, this silence has conveyed helplessness to favorable and weakness to the less charitable of his supporters.

The problem with playing a waiting game is that two critical elements, time and circumstance, always remain out of control and can turn and twist causing discomforting pain to even the most numb of bodies. In a sense, the UPA’s problems are seeded in its first term when a blind eye was turned to dirty secrets that many thought would either never come out or were underestimated with respect to their potential impact. But both the Telecom scam and the shenanigans of the Commonwealth Games have put the ruling coalition on the mat from which it is still wriggling to escape. It has not helped that multiple public agitations, high profile in nature and media coverage, have never really allowed the government to shift the focus away from the misdeeds in the corridors of power.

To use corporate jargon, the ball has been dropped. And several times over. As evidence slowly crawled of irregularities in Telecom and CWG deals, standard bureaucratic responses were dished out. There was little attempt, in the face of political compulsions, to decisively act and grab the initiative from the opposition, which despite its own disarray has managed to find a voice that it lacked in the UPA’s first term. The result has been that both the government and the party have been made to defend on the backfoot, right from the disastrous announcement of Telengana in the winter of 2009.

Democracy demands governments to possess a thick skin, but also combine it with a large heart and a sense of magnanimity. While the right to free speech requires us individually to listen to a lot of things we would privately consider as trash, governments must not only put up but also accommodate with groups, persons and views that may seem unrealistic at best and churlish at worst. Given that outcomes in our system only appear after years of grind in the bureaucratic machine, intent becomes more important than immediate action. And this government has done every action to let the voter question its intent. When the well heeled and well off middle class agitates for a stronger anti-corruption law, they must be co-opted and not discredited. When a gimmicky godman ‘fasts’ a few hours of the day demanding the return of black money, death for the corrupt and courses in Hindi, there are certainly more deft ways of taking away his sting than by forcibly evicting him and his supporters from the middle of the national capital. Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev will not stand up in polls but the UPA has now given itself the tag of being a government against peaceful protests, howsoever whimsical and misdirected.

The arrogance of power can often lead one to believe that the reaction is temporary and will not affect electoral outcomes. But in a democracy as chaotic as ours, it is foolhardy to rest on such cushy assumptions. Shifting caste identities and a perceived stamp of corruption from Bofors decimated Rajiv Gandhi’s super majority in 1989. For the Congress to think that anti-corruption anger is a middle class drawing room phenomenon and that a disunited NDA along with a beaten Left present no challenge three years from now is to adopt hubris at par with the NDA’s India Shining posturing of 2004. The electorate threw a surprise out of nowhere then and it is perfectly capable of doing it a second time. The initiative has been lost, the momentum was never there and now along with scandal comes the tag of being insensitive and brash. The government stays in office, its electoral fortunes may point north in the coming days but is moral compass is pointing a firm south.

A moment of Belief

2011-04-03T21:48:00.003+05:30

(Picture Source : Cricinfo)

As young boys, me and my cousins would scramble up to the roof of my grandparents’ single storey house in Chandigarh in our growing up years and engage in our favorite pastime. Much to the chagrin of my grandmother, we would not care a fig about the weather, most of our time together being spent during the months of the summer vacation, and run helter skelter on the roof making our presence felt to everyone down below. All we needed was a large wooden plank that served as the wickets, a smaller one that was our bat (on some occasions we managed to get a real one) and a rubber or a tennis ball. Each of us would choose a team, there being a fierce competition for who would take India. The entitlement would eventually be decided by draw of lots. We would call it our very own World Cup and the one who had chosen India would try his mighty best to justify the burden of carrying the nation’s name. 1992 went, 1996 went and so did 1999, by when all of us were in our teens. And by common consensus we had jokingly come to believe that it was easier for India to win the World Cup on our grandmother’s rooftop than in the actual cricket field.

For a generation of Indian cricket fans that grew up loving the game and following its team during the 1990s, every Indian victory was meant to be savored. For much like the legion of fans that preceded it in the earlier decades, it was more used to watching the team lose than win. We were devoid of cognitive images and memories of that small golden window between 1983 and 1987 when the world cup winning Indian team perhaps enjoyed its most confident period of cricketing performance since Independence. The 1990s had Tendulkar, the match winner and a number of dedicated performers such as Kumble and Srinath and saw the emergence of Ganguly and Dravid towards the later part of the decade. But the 1990s also had a list of test defeats all around the world, from the crushing clean sweep in Australia in 1999 to the heartbreak in Barbados in 1997 to the drubbing inside 3 days at Durban in 1996. The one day games were littered with instances of matches being lost once Tendulkar was dismissed. Barring the sandstorm series in the summer of 1998 where Tendulkar demolished the leg spin of Warne, Sharjah remained an arena identified with disappointments against Pakistan. Three world cups came and went with none seeing the team as serious contenders. The closest it came was in 1996 when a high charged triumph against Pakistan was followed by a disgraceful exit in Kolkatta.

The Indian cricket fan in that period did not take victory for granted and has suffered from perennial pessimism having seen multiple winning positions (17 runs needed with 3 wickets left against Pakistan in Chennai in 1999 being a prime example) being squandered to hand over the glory to the opposition. Thoughts of victory were entertained with extreme caution. Laudable efforts of a Tendulkar, Ganguly, Dravid or Kumble were welcomed with grave apprehension of the imminent collapse of a brittle lower middle order and a tail ineffective with the bat. Australia and South Africa were envied for their ruthless efficiency and dogged determination to win, Pakistan for its multitude of match winners with ball and hard hitters with the bat and Sri Lanka for showing us our inadequacies too often with the bat, ball and specially in the field. In the middle of it we had Tendulkar to savor, the rising graphs of Ganguly and Dravid to admire and the perseverance of Kumble to respect. Team victories were outnumbered by the losses that wounded the confidence. One of the most galling apart from Barbados in 1997 was in the 1999 World Cup against Zimbabwe when an India sans Tendulkar threw away a winning hand and the tail capitulated to grab a loss that all but ended any hopes of effective progress in the tournament.

For this generation of fans, optimism always came with a rider. The game was never considered to be over till the final run or wicket was taken (purists would say that is always the case!) and each Indian victory was meant to be cataloged in memory. It took a decade of gradual achievement, the emergence of new match winners and a captain who transformed the attitude of the team for the confidence to be planted. Saurav Ganguly became captain, a hopeless looking India performed a miracle against Australia in 2001 and a campaign in the 2003 World Cup that threatened to get derailed right at the start was transformed into roaring wave eventually to be stopped by an equally strong Australian juggernaut. The belief would grow gradually with victories in Australia, Pakistan and then England. Tigers at home and lambs abroad was a phrase we all knew the meaning of since our middle school days. It took monumental performances from the trinity of Tendulkar, Laxman and Dravid backed up by an untiring Kumble and the re-emergence of Zaheer Khan to chip away at the doubts that arose before every overseas performance. A new set of performers, emerging from the mofussil map of India, took over the reins towards the end of the first decade of this century. A new leader, exuding an almost un-Indian like calm amidst the frenzy of a cricket game, took over the reins of a team that believed in its strength (the high quality batting lineup) and was aware of its limitations (a thin and unpredictable bowling and an uninterested fielding). Yuvraj, despite his blip last year, Raina, Gambhir, Sehwag, Harbhajan and Zaheer – a new set of match winners whose rise coincided with India winning more games than losing. Dhoni’s ODI win % is close to 60. A decade back no Indian fan could have imagined this to be true for its team’s captain. A rising confident country broke its economic shackles in the early 90s. Its cricket team took a decade or so more but the reins are truly snapped now. The Indian fan now believes. There was guarded optimism in place of the superstitious pessimism when the team was tagged as favorite in the latest edition of the World Cup.

This World Cup and its final is now the new index by which the fan would measure this team. Our minds will be pulled towards the memories of 2nd April, 2011 time and again – a World Cup final, a toss lost, a required run rate of 5 and a half, Sachin and Sehwag lost within the first 7 overs. Those demons of old made hovered dangerously when Gambhir and Kohli began rebuilding the chase. But this is a different team and these are different men. An innings of high quality and balance by Gambhir, a statement of confidence by the captain and a run chase that should serve as a template in the multitude of cricket academies all over the globe. On this night, the team soaked the pressure like a sponge and showed a deep well of self belief. The Indian fan has finally been gifted for his attachment, sometimes tempestuous, to the nation’s most popular game. An entire generation now has its moment of glory to savor. The World Cup can indeed be won by India, and not just on my grandmother’s rooftop.

Torn at the shreds

2010-12-22T08:17:00.005+05:30

2010 stands the risk of entering Indian history as the year of graft. It was a year where incidences, coverage and adjectives of corruption reached hitherto unseen limits. Instances of illegal money making were sector and space neutral. They ranged from sporting events, a cricket league, telecom licenses to the usual bad boys of real estate and mining. Some of the stories uncovered had a ‘I told you so’ ring to them, as with the 2G spectrum and license saga. Some like the Adarsh society, came out of nowhere and created a tsunami that swept all before quietly retreating into the calmer waters of middle page news. Like the scandals, their perpetrators or suspects too respected the Indian heritage of diversity. Politicians led the way, followed closely by organizers, mining barons, industrialists, high flying highly visible sport administrators and in a bit of surprise for the public at large, generals and journalists.

What stood out in 2010 was the eagerness of the corruption scandals to devour their victims, many of whom would not have been mistaken to believe that the storm was one they could ride out. Many are still battling the choppy waters, refusing to abandon ship, not realizing perhaps that the hull and the mast have suffered irreparable damage. In terms of resignations and exits, the year was certainly one of the busiest. Notable among the martyrs was a greasy Union Minister whose stubborn resistance against facts for over two years seemed inspired by a Sunil Gavaskar innings, a loquacious Minister of State who required only 140 characters to be felled, a Chief Minister who would have much wished that he could escape with the American president he was seeing off minutes before being given the pink slip, a cricket czar whose one error gave his numerous enemies the tiny sliver of opportunity they had waited all along and two senior journalists who could not keep their egos within the confines of the press club.

Towards the end of the year, the leaked Radia tapes provided a new form of online voyeurism, to which this author himself claims affliction. They provided much amusement for the listeners and much embarrassment to the conversing parties. At a higher level they brought home a painful reality we have been afraid to admit for long – the country is being run by an elite of oligarchs and politicians for whom universal suffrage is only a constitutional formality. It was not the influencing of appointments and rewards that should be a cause of worry as much the blatant system of monetary patronage of all classes of our political life. The revelations tarred all. The politician’s debauchery was only vindicated, the industrialist’s mildly affirmed and the journalist’s discovered. A smaller scale of the loot would have made the public more cynical, the current scale can only cause disillusion. The executive ran from one hiding corner to another and the legislature decided to spend time shouting for political points than discuss the corrosion. It would only be the judiciary, battling its own demons of graft more than ever before this year, that would give a call and question both the actions and inactions of the executive offices.

The Union enters the second decade of the 21st century struggling to live up to the ideals of its founding fathers and the spiritual guidance they left in the Constitution. It gasps to find substance over form. It aspires to seek its place in the world but undermines its own values at every stage. It experienced political liberation six decades ago and an economic liberation two decades ago. It will never be able to live up to its promise for all but to meet the aspirations of most, and not just a privileged few, it needs to experience a new moral discovery and liberation.

Much as it is tempting to focus on the big bang of graft that swamped all the other noise around us, the year also brought some redeeming affirmations. A high court stretched the logic of justice, summoned courage and tackled an issue that politicians, religious leaders and the society at large had refused to entangle. In their own words, the justices set foot upon ‘a piece of land where angels feared to tread’ against the advice of ‘sane elements’ who had ‘advised them not to attempt that’. They pleased none of the three litigants completely but caused much satisfaction to the man on the street. It was evidence that our noisy and chaotic democracy could find some way, even if it took decades, of tackling inflammable, contentious and religiously dividing issues. A peaceful resolution of the property dispute at Ayodha is as much a litmus for India’s social integration as Kashmir is for its political. In the valley meanwhile, the Indian state dithered, bore the brunt of stones and calls of ‘azadi’, heard calls of sedition issued from an air conditioned Delhi auditorium from a wasted socialite but in the end summoned the one quality that is the hallmark of statesmanship and is much needed for internal stability – a generosity of heart. The pain lingers but Vajpayee’s framework of ‘insaniyat’ survives. However much Pakistan, Arundhati Roy and the Hurriyat Conference think to the contrary, that framework does not stand in contradiction with the Constitution.

In Delhi, a nation held its breath and had almost collapsed out of anxiety as a mismanaged sporting event threatened to erode all the gains of the new economy. The post liberalization urban generation, used to playing with global standards of quality, watched in horror as the task of constructing stadiums and organizing athletic events turned into a business school case study of mismanagement. The world saw our lack of project management skills and for once the excuse of the slow moving democracy could not act as a cover for our exposed skins. The much heralded Indian jugaad, codified as our Sports Minister repeatedly stated, in the Punjabi wedding drama, came into play. The games and the participants, while they were on, won the city’s appreciation. The cost went to the tax payer and more damagingly to India’s image.

While Delhi went comatose in the last two months of the year, engulfed in a verbal fog of 2G, spectrum and tapes, one of the last caste outposts of the country fell and a politician swept to power on basis of a positive political perception. It will not eradicate caste from our political or social lives but Nitish Kumar’s victory will remind others that tangible development efforts have a longer shelf life than voting coalitions. Lalu Yadav discovered that this year. Mayawati and the Left seem set to discover it in the coming two. Nitish’s victory may also do the country one more benefit, if the BJP so chooses to encash it. It opens up a roadmap to victory for the wilting lotus, if only it decides to open its eyes. Gujarat and Bihar are indicative of the distance between India’s west and east and also of the political distance between the where our largest opposition party is and where it ought to be.

In this sad and at times depressing year, one can be cynical and say the winner of the year was the Chief Minister of Karnataka – the only man who successfully managed to brave the corruption windstorm and keep his chair, if not his image and integrity. But a happier event towards the end of the year provides an escape from that gloomy conclusion to this post. The greatest Indian sportsman reached a landmark many of his contemporaries and those to come in the future will view as the Mount Everest of batting accomplishment. Sachin Tendulkar completed fifty test centuries, scored a one-day double hundred and at age thirty seven pulled a fair distance away from his current crop of challengers into a summit of his own. Like always, he stood out in contrast to the negativity around us. He bore the burden of showing the discipline, fortitude and dedication that many in our public circles chose to abjure. He bloomed when many expected him to gracefully wilt. He summoned reserves of energy when the competition began to tire. He explored no short cuts and summoned no privileges. He lived up to the one lesson every dedicated teacher and parent instills into their ward – there is no substitute for hard work and honesty. It is a lesson worth recalling this new year.

Conversation on a Round

2010-09-02T10:06:00.001+05:30

So how does a nation, a community and a society react to uncertainty, scarcity and risk? Specially when the feeling of not having enough for everyone is something that it is not used to. A curious atmosphere prevails in the United States as I write this. The second summer of the great upheaval has unraveled and is about to end. Newspapers still carry pessimistic outlooks, report rising unemployment numbers and flattening economic activity. Economists hold their silence on what the near future holds, whether it is the upward climb of the V or the second drop of the W. Many commentators worry about the rising spending and many want more of it. Around the town in New Jersey where I stay, roads are being rebuilt or expanded, all under the aegis of the Obama Stimulus plan. It seems America worries. It has travelled a dark tunnel but is unsure whether to take the time spent walking as a sign of sufficient distance having been covered. It broods but does not want to show. It hopes but is not sure of the outcome.

Individuals and societies seek refuge in the familiar when uncertainty strikes. One of the most striking comments made by Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush at the onset of the economic carnage of 2008, was that unless the government stepped in decisively, the crises had the potential to permanently alter ‘ the way of life’ as many Americans knew it. ‘The way of life’ – so what is that way of life whose alteration every American perhaps fears deep down? We all have our stereotypes of burger grilling, SUV driving, holidaying, moderately (and sometimes devoutly if it is the South) religious suburban American. But is that the familiarity that the American craves? Or does he search for a feeling of reassurance that, left to the world and his ability, things will take care of themselves?

On one of my rounds at a golf course close to my hotel, I meet Waldo. A middle aged American in his early 50s, Waldo is actually a Chilean, who spent all of his growing up years and some of his adult ones in his native country. At the risk of being slightly race and color conscious here, I would admit that on the ‘face’ of it, you would never imagine Waldo to be anything other than an American. So perfect are his features and his English. As we tee off and get more familiar with each other, a fascinating conversation commences. It begins with a trifle discussion over professional golfers keeping notes that they refer to when they play in the tournaments.

‘It’s a bit like Sarah Palin reading notes from her hand’, jokes Waldo. I respond with a light laugh, careful not to assume any political preferences, lest I am drawn into a right wing vs. leftist debate. ‘Did you see her speaking today in Washington?’ he enquires.

Sarah Palin spoke last Sunday at a rally organized at the Lincoln Memorial, a rally titled ‘Restoring Honor’, that was essentially a Conservative platform to discuss and outline what is wrong with America and what it needs to do. Palin wasn’t the main speaker – a Fox News conservative host named Glenn Beck was and the rally attracted a host of people with a common underlying theme of piety and patriotism. Politics appeared thickly disguised and any criticisms of Obama and the Democrats appeared veiled. Waldo though was not convinced – ‘I saw her speaking, I saw the others too. They talk of religion, of Christianity, but it is almost as if they think that it is the path to everything. It is almost as if they want us all to go back to Christianity’. He stopped here as I sinked in a 5 feet putt. ‘They almost sounded xenophobic. It was not really like this before…’

Waldo perhaps has reason to reminisce. His story, like many others, begins at an American University – Ohio to be specific, where he recounts the enormous diversity he saw and how it amazed and delighted him at the same time. He recounts the story of a roommate who was from Bolivia but had the facial appearance of a native Indian. That roommate did a Master in Physics and went on to work for the Pentagon, and went back home temporarily, only to be derided by his countrymen as his ‘clan’ was lower in the social hierarchy. ‘It is the land of opportunity’, Waldo concludes. ‘People still judge you by your accomplishments but we seem to be headed somewhere wrong.’ And what is that wrong?

If there is one reality that the economic crisis has brought to the surface, it is that income disparities are far wider in America than many of us sitting in the developing world believe to be. The top 0.1% of the American population took away 6% of the total wages for 2007. The top 10% of the population accounted for almost half of the total wages. These are levels believed to have been last seen only in the years preceding the Great Depression. ‘We do not realize,’ says Waldo, as we make our way to the 7th tee, ‘but we are going the way of the developing countries – something we always wanted to avoid. The unemployed do not have jobs and are struggling, the rich are getting richer.’ Waldo incidentally is an indirect beneficiary of the much maligned US banks. His wife works in one of those. ‘We never had any difficulty in getting access to funds,’ he admits, but goes on to add honestly ‘there are people who struggle. And then we see all the executives who lost millions of dollars walking away with the bonuses’.

One of the things Americans rarely do outside of their operating systems is ‘save’. The personal savings rate of the average household in the US slipped to as low as 1% in 2008 before recovering mildly on account of post recessions adjustments to 5% in 2009. Radio and television programming is filled with advertisements of agencies offering ‘debt reduction’ services. And these are not mortgage debts, but credit card debts. And the rider? The agency only wants you to contact them if your debt is over $10,000. Just to add some context, the per capita income of the United States is $46,000.

Of course consumption is not bad per se and neither is the capitalist system, even if equitable distribution is not the greatest strength of the capitalist society. It still, compared to most other economic systems, rewards each accordingly to his/ her skill and ability. As we reach the green on the 7th, I tell Waldo about a term that was a favorite with my Economics teacher in school – Conspicuous Consumption. We have been quite familiar with it in India, with the socialist economy deriding the rich and the liberalized free economy now bemoaning it as a consequence of unleashed new wealth and that too not all legal.

‘I heard Osama bin Laden speak after 9/11 on TV,’ says Waldo. ‘His message and method was incorrect but you can see the frustration the Arabs feel. They have all the easy oil money and the only way they know to spend it is the Western way. The way of consumption. They are enraged at why even with the resources, do they have to follow the western way of life. ‘

‘Strangely,’ he summarizes, ‘it is a rage against money’.

I share with Waldo the Indian middle class concept of trying to live within one’s means, of the importance of savings and piggy banks instilled in Indian kids by their parents and how we spent the first forty years post our independence deriding both consumption and money. Gandhi, I tell him, famously said in the context of Western civilization, that he would keep the windows of his open so that winds could blow in from all directions but he would ensure the foundations of the house are strong enough to prevent it from being blown away.

‘He really made things difficult for you guys’, responds Waldo chuckling. We are now on the 8th fairway and I further learn that the golfer next to me was once an artist. ‘I realized over time,’ says Waldo ‘that I had spent many years of my life in fear. Fear of hell and post life. My paintings were an outlet, an expression of the fact that such fears should not exist. That our life is here. It is about what we decide to do with it here. A friend later told me that an Iranian man saw a painting of mine at a small exhibition I had and remarked that this was the message of his religion as well. I felt glad hearing that. At some level I felt I had managed to find a connect with someone from a completely different world and different culture.’

As we reach the 8th green, the light goes dark. The sun has set and it is just about 8 in the evening. We would play the 9th hole in dwindling dusk.

‘So I tell my kids,’ says Waldo, ‘that go out and see the world. Open your minds. Do not be xenophobic. You have nothing to fear. And the more you meet people and cultures, the more you would find similarities.’

‘You know,’ he says as we walk towards the 9th green, ‘when I was growing up in Chile, we used to identify neighbors by their political affiliations. The corner house belonged to a communist, the next door one was social democrat and so on. Now we identify people by the cars they own.’
I tell him that Gandhi once wrote that a man should be known by the quality of his mind and not by the quantity of his possessions. Waldo nods in agreement. We both make par at the 9th, shake hands and walk towards the parking lot.

‘Thank you, it was very interesting speaking to you. I hope I did not talk too much’, he signs off.
Our cars are incidentally parked alongside. He opens his boot, puts in his golf set and waves a final good night to me. As he does that, he points to his BMW SUV and says with a sarcastic laugh,

‘Conspicuous Consumption’

The next day I go to a golf store and buy a brand new set of golf irons for four hundred dollars.

Ladakh: Barren yet abundant

2010-07-13T01:24:00.011+05:30

Driving a few kilometers out of the town from Leh on to the NH1 towards Srinagar, you are forced to ask yourself a question – how can barren, dry, vast stretches of mountains with not even a speck of grass on them look so beautiful? That is a question that reverberates all through as you breathe, touch and feel Ladakh. The answer is not immediate; the beauty itself is not immediate. Yes, there is snow (slightly unusual for this time of the year) on top of many peaks, but it is not so much the snow as the empty tracts of mountain land that appeal to the eye. They stand, always at a distance of a long sloping ridge and gradually exercise their pull. It is only after a few moments that you realize you are seeing a natural marvel. That barren dry lands can be as beautiful as the bountiful green ones. The peaks of Ladakh stand silent and in isolation, but are a pleasing sight for eyes that have grown accustomed to watching real estate jungles and ghastly unbridled construction on the denuded slopes of India’s other famous hill stations. In Ladakh, you almost wish that you would see nothing, that at every turn you would be greeted by even more emptiness. In Ladakh, you will always feel a sense of space.

I arrive in Leh escaping the blasting heat of Delhi on the 10^th of June (yes, this blog was a little late in coming). For those of you not adventurous enough to drive all the way from Manali to Leh, the only alternative left to reach here is through a flight. A word of advice on that – get your tickets booked at least a month in advance or be prepared to pay through your nose like me. For some strange reason, only three airlines (IA, Jet and Kingfisher) fly to Leh which leads to rates being driven up artificially. And although the lady at the check in counter at Delhi airport told me that the flight was ‘overbooked’ (what the devil is that supposed to mean? Is it a blueline bus that it is overfull?? ), I have heard from others who have travelled that often flights do carry empty seats. Thankfully, the same scarcity does not extend to lodging in Leh which has a multitude of hotels belonging to different categories. The rate for each category is fixed and that provides the assurance that you are not being ripped off with a bad deal. A more advisable thing may be to book a customized travel package that takes away the headache of finding a hotel and trying to arrange a transport. In many ways, Leh is a delightful break from other Indian tourism sectors. It provides mental relaxation from the dreadful activities of haggling for taxi and lodging rates. The Leh taxi union supplies cabs to all hotels with fixed rates and reasonably good drivers. Booking an entire package that has an itinerary for each day can save you the headache of arranging transport for each day. Either way, you can be assured that you won’t be ripped off.

It is unusually wet for this time of the year for Ladakh. My driver, Zakir, who drove me around for the entire duration of my 6 day stay, tells me that it hardly used to rain in the summer months. In Ladakh, the only precipitation is snow. Rains are unknown in this dry desert. The only greenery that you will see shall exist in the periphery of the rivers – Indus on one side and Zanskar on the other. The habitation and agriculture is also centered around these water sources. The only two things that exist anywhere away from the water sources are Buddhist monasteries and army cantonments.

It is difficult to miss the influence of either. Ladakh had a largely Tibetan population in history which was Buddhist to begin with but has now starting converting towards Islam. I was a little surprised to see two mosques bang in the middle of Leh’s central market. A substantial portion of the population is still Buddhist and the influence of its culture over the last many centuries in visible in the multitude of monasteries built on hilltops dotted in Leh’s periphery. A Japanese monk in fact was so moved by the town’s beauty that he got a Shanti Stupa built on a small rising just at the edge of Leh. Today, the balcony of the stupa provides a complete view of the town and the mountains beyond. Most of the Buddhist monasteries were built in the medieval centuries which is a remarkable effort given the fact that the region remains buried under snow for almost 3-4 months of the year making any kind of physical labor near to impossible. In a sense, Ladakh is a pilgrimage site for the devout Buddhist with its multitude of monasteries dotted all around. This is confirmed by an old American rabbi, whom I bump into at the market on the second day of my trip. The rabbi and his wife are on a Buddhist expedition, seeking to explore the various sites in the region. We chat up a bit and he is kind enough to let me explore his I-pad. He is exploring religion and I technology.

The unseasonable rainfall means that the upper reaches have received snow and as we drive towards Pangong Lake on the fifth day of our trip, we start seeing patches of snow on the hills just outside of Leh. Pangong is a 13 mile long fresh water lake with a third of its area located in China. The five hour drive to the lake from Leh is long and tiring and requires one to cross the Chagla Pass, which the Border Roads Organization (BRO) claims is the third highest in the world. As we cross, the pass is covered with about a foot of snow. A BRO truck with migrant laborers from Bihar and Jharkhand has had a rear wheel stuck in the snow and the entire traffic gets held up for half an hour. The migrants, unsuitably clad for snowy and conditions, are asked to jump off the back of the truck to give it a push. Many of them dive straight into the snow lying on the side of the road. There is much consternation among them and amusement among the tourists watching it all happen.

It is a partly cloudy afternoon as we finally reach Pangong, which means that the color of the water oscillates between green and blue. The lake is a bit of a pit stop where you can either stay for an hour, frolic a bit in the cold waters and then head back or you can choose to spend a night in the lakeside camps (consisting of Swiss tents mainly). The only source of refreshment is a small stove lighted by a ladakhi under one of those Swiss tents where you can heat yourself up with some tea or coffee or even sample some Maggi. You would be advised to carry your food when driving along Ladakh; like the topography the stomachs can get pretty barren as one swings up and down the mountains.

The Army is essentially the lifeline of the area and unlike the Kashmir valley, olive green is not a hated color here. Many of the locals in fact derive their incomes by plying jobs for the army during the harsh winter months when no one else sets foot in the area. My driver is one of those – he drives officers around the many cantonments in the area during winter and thus avoids having to move out from Leh to lower altitudes, something that I heard many inhabitants are forced to do. The Army also controls the airfield, which is operated by the Air Force and is the one transportation route that connects Ladakh to the rest of the country during all seasons. At many places, the olive greens are also traffic managers, Khardungla Pass being an example. Khardungla is claimed by the BRO to be the highest motorable pass in the world at about 18000 feet. Like Changla, Khardungla too was under snow as we approached it. The pass lies on the road that leads towards the ecologically beautiful Nubra Valley (a famous tourist stop) and the world (in)famous Siachen glacier. The narrow road passing through Khardungla can experience quite a traffic jam, as we witness on our drive, with half the vehicles driving through towards Nubra and half wanting to turn around and go back to Leh. It is the jawans managing Khardungla that co-ordinate the traffic, somehow able to halt the returning vehicles and letting the passing ones through. Since we are returning back to Leh, that gives us about an hour at the pass which I use to feed myself (Maggi) and try and climb through the snow to the board that proclaims Khardungla’s feat of being the highest motorable road.

The next day I am back at the airport for my overpriced return flight back to Delhi. Because you are flying out of a security sensitive zone, you are required to personally identify your baggage before it gets loaded on the aircraft. I would think that it would be more prudent to do this exercise also for those who land into the area, but no such thing happens on the flights into Leh. Despite the table top runway apprehensions (and Ladakh is a short runway, not really a ‘table top’) the flight takes off smoothly and lands in just under an hour in Delhi, which greets us with 40C hot air. By the time I am home after a ride in a rickety prepaid airport cab, the coolness of Ladakh has worn off. The air conditioner has been switched on. Somehow I don’t crave the cold of Ladakh after being back home, I just crave the emptiness.

Tweet a Whistle

2010-04-16T19:17:00.006+05:30

Are you as mystified and puzzled by this entire Shashi Tharoor – Lalit Modi drama playing out on the TV screens as me? It is now into its fifth day and the matter has assumed such proportions that shoving aside the Women’s Reservation Bill, the Union Budget, Price Rise and the Dantewada massacre, the Opposition has deemed it fit to adjourn parliamentary proceedings over. The controversy ridden Mr.Tharoor found the Lok Sabha quite unlike Twitter where he holds forth without any interference from any pesky followers (you have to be Chetan Bhagat to perhaps have pesky followers on twitter). He was shouted and hounded and now it seems nothing short of his blood or the Prime Minister’s appearance will bring our legislature back to normalcy. Lalit Modi on the other hand has been displaced from his comfortable seating at Koel Poorie’s garish feathery red couch into the slightly uncomfortable embrace of Income Tax officials who, in a sudden awakening of Rip Van Winklesque proportions, have unearthed that there might be some hanky-panky with the way a lot of our IPL franchisees are owned.

So why if I may ask are we subjected to such craziness just the week after Sania and Shoaib? To me this is a classic case of ‘blow the horn and ask for details’ later. The last few days all I have seen in both the newspapers and the TV stations are loud tickers, headlines and allegations (That’s how the Times of India writes the word, italicized – it emphasizes that at the end of the day all they publish in their broadsheet are just allegations). Disappointingly, even the Indian Express, that beacon of investigative and uncomfortable journalism, has only been half heartedly reproducing the same text and claims and counter claims. As always, TV news anchors, specially those who wear indignation and self-righteousness on their face every night at 9pm have been quick to take sides and loudly proclaim conflict of interest and impropriety.

So all we know is that Kochi won the bid, Modi says that Sunanda Pushkar and others own ‘free equity’ in the franchise, the media takes over and says that Sunanda was the one we photographed Tharoor going around with and as per our grapevine the two are close ‘personal’ friends, Modi says Tharoor asked not to question the ownership, media says that means the Minister used a woman for proxy and benefited from the franchise win and that all that talk of mentoring the franchise for Kerela was a hogwash, Tharoor denies, IPL Kochi denies, Rs 75 crs are calculated and the opposition wants a CBI enquiry. In between all this, the BCCI, completely caught unawares by a storm rapidly engulfing them, censure Modi on Day 1 and then in their own time tested way start dealing with the affair completely non-transparently and off the record. The self righteous news anchor says Tharoor cant hide behind self-righteousness (a bit rich coming from him, don’t you think?), another anchor says the Minister should have known that getting involved in the bid would expose him to such questions and so we all await the next act of the drama.

Much like the Times of India, all I hear are allegations and insinuations along with calls for the Minister to resign. So let’s take it step by step. Tharoor encouraged the Kochi franchise we all know, he himself admitted as much on the day of the bid. The franchise has given what they call ‘Sweat Equity’ (and I must admit it is time that journos open up Google and read up what Sweat equity means), not just to Pushkar but to a host of other individuals along with Rendezvous Sports themselves in consideration of management and other services. We also know that Tharoor knows the lady in question, they have been publically seen and he has never sought to deny his close personal ties. These are all the facts that we know. The rest are the allegations, which if we talk only of Tharoor, boil down to this. The Minister used his influence, either as an MP or as a member of the Union Government, to influence the sale of the franchise to Kochi and in lieu of the same, the franchise allotted ‘free equity’ to his proxy which, given the value of the bid made by the franchise comes to a cool Rs 75 crs. So let’s take the debatable questions here –

a) a) Can a franchisee offer free or sweat equity to its owners/ members? Yes, as per law they are legally permitted to do so. In fact the ESOPs offered by the companies to their many employees are also an indirect form of sweat equity where labour is rewarded with ownership.

b) b) Should franchise ownership have been declared openly by Modi? Yes, because it is in everyone’s interests to know who owns and has a pie in the IPL but also No, if Modi as an IPL governing council member was bound to confidentiality by the franchise agreement.

c) c) Is Sunanda Pushkar a proxy for Tharoor? Maybe or maybe not. There is no definite answer to this question because it is a matter of perception. Had she been a Rabri Devi to a Laloo Yadav, the answer would have been an unequivocal yes. But if the lady has a professional background that can be proven (which is itself subject to unclear answers), then the yes get a bit diluted. Make up your mind on that. The only doubt I have, is if Tharoor was so clever as to outwit Modi and get Kochi a franchise over all others, then why would he be stupid enough to get his consideration allotted to a woman who could so easily have been discovered by the media and others? I can agree that he is politically naïve, but is he so plain dumb?

d) d) The key question though is – Did Tharoor subvert a fair bidding process and get Kochi a deal over other deserving winners? And this I believe is the crux of the argument. All other allegations of consideration, sweat equity, influence peddling and seeking to keep the details under wraps stem from this one basic point. Did the Minister in any way use his office or rank to bulldoze the BCCI to allot his people a franchise over the Adanis and Videocon? The answer may lie in the silence that surrounds this question. Modi, for all his noise and claims, has not even once brought this up. Surprisingly, the media has not asked this as well, choosing to focus on Sunanda Pushkar and the Rs 75 crs. It is easy to understand the silence though isn’t it? The moment Modi says that the bidding was subverted, the entire structure of the IPL comes crashing down on both his and BCCI’s head. For what that means then is that the IPL Commissioner and the game’s governing body allowed ‘auction fixing’ instead of raising a noise or postponing it all together. (They did postpone it earlier though when the BCCI believed that Modi had set too strong a set of conditions to allow fair bidding for the new franchises, and perhaps therein lies the answer to this story). You can see why Modi will never say this and why the BCCI will always maintain that the auction was an honest affair. Circumstantially then it is evident that the allegation of influencing and subverting a ‘sealed bid’ auction, certified as fair and proclaimed as a success by both Modi and BCCI, being guided and fixed by the junior Minister for Foreign Affairs is a bit thin as of now.

The only charge which then holds is that of someone holding consideration on his behalf. If the auction was not subverted, and if Sunanda is indeed a marketing dodo in her own capacity (would the media have raised this question if she was not a half attractive woman who was purportedly ‘seeing’ a publically visible Minister?), then what pray is the consideration for? Blessings?

Mentorship? Perhaps future insurance for government benefits? But then should it not have been given to someone in the state government from whom all the clearances and ‘benefits’ will be required? Can you think of an answer to this question?

The other charge that remains is of being associated with supposedly ‘fishy’ people and exposing oneself to conflict of interest. Since when have we started pillorying any Indian public face for being connected with people perceived to be ‘fishy’? Or have we ever questioned any politician for the conflict of interest that arises that when they get into sport bodies? Last I saw, all of them were going along fine. Media anchors and owners have conflicts of interests, giving prime time slots to their blood relatives – we never question them or bring them down.

Of course I could be wrong and Tharoor could be as neck deep in muck as Harshad Mehta, but I wonder why our newspapers and news channels don’t get away from ‘allegation’ reporting to perceptive and analytical reporting.

As for Lalit Modi, he clearly has bitten much more than he can chew and is now living on borrowed time. The one entity you do not want to confront head on is the Indian government and this is Modi’s second attempt at that after his run in with the Home Minister over the holding of IPL II in an election bound India last year. I have a suspicion that the script has not played out entirely the way Modi wanted it to and that he did not anticipate that his own neck and finances would end up on the chopping block before Tharoor’s. I also wonder whether many in the BCCI will finally see this as a chance to ease him out of the IPL or atleast cut him to size.

The Congress may be embarrassed, Tharoor maybe nervous, the Opposition belligerent but the only entity that has been harmed by this entire Modi triggered affair is the IPL. Questions will be asked and comparisons drawn with the Stanford sleaze. The tournament is estimated to contribute almost 40% of the revenues to the BCCI in the current year. No one wants a golden goose to be strangled, least of all some of India’s leading politicians who sit in the IPL governing council. Tharoor may survive if Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi can summon the patience, Modi it seems is a whistle blowing liability the BCCI can ill afford.

This and that...and tit for tat

2010-04-02T18:34:00.009+05:30

Unlike a lot of other posts that you have read on this blog, this one is going to lack a theme. These are just ramblings. I have been meaning to write but events have been out pacing me and the sudden heat that has come over North India a little too early has sapped my stamina and patience a bit. So have the mosquitoes. Summer comes and I turn into an anopheles swatter. For the first time in many seasons I did not even have the energy to stay up late and watch Barcelona and Bayern Munich play in the Champions League.

What keeps me going though is Lalit Modi's circus. The 8pm daily dose of bat hitting the ball is not exactly just and pure cricket but it is entertaining none the less. And I am a sucker for it. This season I am specially hooked. Because it allows me to watch Tendulkar in action for a few more weeks. I have been watching him since he hit those sixes of Abdul Qadir in 1989 and this frankly has been his best year - perhaps even better than 1998. Another player whom I sit in front of my television to watch is Anil Kumble, who ironically is India's best T20 bowler at the moment, at a ripe age of 39. Besides Kumble and Tendulkar, giving the timeline and conventional T20 logic a bit of a spin is Jacques Kallis, who seems set to keep that hideous looking orange cap on his head for the remainder of the tournament. And while T20 is compulsorily required to be all about sixes, fours and batsmen carting the bowlers around, I have taken a few sighs of satisfaction at how decent totals like 160 and 180 have been competitive, at how the slowness of the Indian tracks is causing the likes of Gilchrist, Symonds and other hitters to struggle, at how, once again, a lot of young Indian players (Saurabh Tiwary, Manish Pandey, Kedar Jadhav, Umesh Yadav, Rajgopal Satish) are making their presence felt and emphasizing the fact that a team in the IPL is as much about the 7 Indian players who take the field as it is about the 4 overseas ones whom the owners have splashed cash to purchase in the high stakes auction. You only have to be supporting the Deccan Chargers to realize the importance of that last point.

But I also have my irritants about the IPL - and you shall notice almost none of them relate to cricket. Why do we need advertisements between deliveries in an over is beyond me. The only time I look forward to them is when Sivaramakrishnan has mike close to his mouth. Also, I have realized that the mute button on my TV remote has a perfect positive co-relation with the appearance of Navjot Sidhu on the screen. This time around he has a new mate in Boria Majumdar at Times Now, who after a losing his patience and opportunity to speak in the first few episodes has now decided to keep rattling along just as Sidhu does. The end result is that there is more pandemonium in that show than even in zero hour of Parliament. But of course, Sidhu would not know about that. His was one of the lowest attendances in the previous Lok Sabha.

What I also fail to understand is the complete loss of proportion when it comes to describing the action on the screen. Either the commentators have written contractual obligations that say that every wicket is a moment of success, every six has to be described as a DLF Maximum and every catch is of 'Kamaal' or they have simply forgotten how to use adjectives. I wonder what the case really is since I have noticed both Harsha Bhogle and the slyly sarcastic Ian Bishop refraining from gratifying Lalit Modi's principal sponsors too frequently.

The only silver lining with respect to the IPL coverage is CNN-IBN's late night show with Cyrus and his silly jokes and Harsha Bhogle with his matter of fact analysis that escapes most of his colleagues in the commentary box. The others either shout and scream ala Messrs Sidhu and Bor(e)ia or just seem disinterested (NDTV, with their 'expert' Ajay Jadeja going on a holiday in the second half of the tournament).

Other than that, the last few days have been about the highly relevant national icons Mr.Amitabh Bachchan and soon to be the second Mrs.Shoaib Malik. Now as far as Mr.Bachchan is concerned, I can understand his anger. Even I would be irritated if despite all the acting achievements, advertisements and other performance, people deliberately fail to recognize me and get themselves photographed with me. Mr.Bachchan is a free citizen and he has every right to endorse every brand that he likes, whether it is Mulayam Singh Yadav's (and earlier Amar Singh's too) Samajwadi Party or BJP's Narendra Modi - Ok, let me rephrase that - whether it is Uttar Pradesh's development under a benevolent sarkar (UP mein hain dum, crime yahaan hain kum!) or Gujarat's vibrant tourism. The Congress should mind its own business and let the Bachchans alone! What sacrilege to even ignore and question such a national icon!

As for Shoaib and his new wife, I am too bored to write anything. I have never been a fan of both of them, have never admired either their looks or their sporting performances. My only reaction when I heard of this union - rotf...lmao...

tepid aint it....i told you its the summer...it does that to me...

Sweet Revenge

2010-02-25T16:32:00.001+05:30

One screaming hot afternoon in Chandigarh, I settled down in front of my grandfather’s eight year old, curve screened Salora television set to watch a game of cricket. The date was the 21st of May and I had reached the city to spend the summer vacations after celebrating my birthday on the 19^th. The spirits, you can guess, were high. I was in the room to the back of the house, occupied by a cousin sister who worked with a local newspaper and who every summer would be kind enough to share it with me as I spent the days bouncing around Sectors 46, 47 and 33 of Chandigarh with a set of three cousin brothers. My sister’s room was the boiling pot of the house – even the kitchen with all the cooking, burning and frying happening in it, struggled to match the temperatures and heat that could be reached there as it was serenaded by the sun post noon since it faced west. This natural anomaly was compounded by the fact that the only mechanism to control the heat was a cooler which for some quirky reason that my grandfather struggled all his life post retirement to discover, would blow cold air only from one half of its screen while spouting the atmospheric hot one from the rest.

At half past three, a delayed start to compensate for the equally blazing hot weather in Chennai, the game was all set to begin. My grandfather and I, bathed in sweat and shirts off, considered the Indian prospects while my grandmother slept comfortably in a much cooler room in the front of the house that was far away from any rays of the sun. This was 1997, India was playing Pakistan in the Independence Cup (there was a slew of them in 97 and 98 with all the four cricketing nations of the sub-continent celebrating half a century of good riddance from the British and in case of the Bangladeshis, from the Pakistanis) and this was the big ticket clash. Both teams had a win and loss under their belt by then. Sri Lanka had already qualified for the final and this was the last league game and a virtual semi. The expectation was high, even though those were the days of the disappointing 90s when victories over Pakistan had been scarce.

In the second over of the match, came perhaps the only moment of joy of the entire evening for the Indian fan. Shahid ‘Ball Chewer’ Afridi, skied a catch that was comfortably held by Ganguly at mid-off. The danger man was gone and there was a feeling of anticipation and relief. The next few hours belied all. The languid and fluid Saeed Anwar, still in his clean shaven avataar, played havoc with the bowling. Subject to an attack that comprised of the laboring medium pace of Kuruvilla, slow predictable left arm spin of Sunil Joshi and the fizzing leg breaks of Kumble, Anwar embarked on a feast. There were the side dishes as well such as eighteen overs of part time medium pace dished out by Tendulkar and Robin Singh. And of course, the icing on the cake was the lanky seamer from Karnatka who over the course of his career helped many an international left-handed batsman such as Jayasuriya, Anwar and even Curtly Ambrose to improve their career averages – Venky Prasad. Anwar reached a quick fifty and then fell down with cramps in the 18^th over, post which Afridi came back to run for him. He reached a 100, conserved energy and drank fluids, had three big partnerships and hurt Indian egos no end. Despite all the bonhomie and friendship during those IK Gujral days of 1997, this was nothing but a plain and simple humiliation. Anwar overtook Viv Richards’ record of the highest individual one day score and a prospect of India letting a Pakistani batsman hit 200 against them in a one-day game looked very real. Six shy of that, Anwar looped a soft catch to Ganguly again at short fine leg. I was 14, had watched a lot of cricket by then, but was still fiercely parochial and patriotic and took pleasure out of Anwar being denied a double. What happened in the rest of the game was immaterial. Dravid hit a valiant hundred, was denied a runner by Pakistan who very quickly forgot how Anwar had made his runs and India fell short by 35 and were booted out of their own Independence party.

Which is why, sadistically, yesterday’s knock of Sachin Tendulkar’s is a such a big jewel for any Indian fan to flaunt. Pakistan are no longer the team of the 90s, India has far more match winners in their team than the bare looking team of 97 and cricket has come a long way in the last 12 years. But still, if there was one person whom you wished/ fantasized/ prayed for overtaking Anwar, it was Tendulkar. Tendulkar, who did it batting a full fifty overs, at a better strike rate, without a runner and still came back to field in the second innings! You may call me a meano or a jingoist, but for a young fan who sat through each and every shot of that Anwar inning, this was revenge as sweet, sadistic and cynical as it comes.

The last twenty

2010-01-26T20:29:00.003+05:30

I began my Republic Day by watching the new Mile Sur video on a news channel. Aptly titled ‘Phir Mile Sur’, it’s the same composition with the old underlying tune but suitably modified to reflect new trends in Indian music (multiplicity of instruments and fusion being prominent) as well the new faces on our Hindi movie scene. The makers could perhaps have attempted to reduce the Bollywood flavor of the video and introduced a more nuanced regional perspective (but certainly not S.Sreesanth, as one friend demanded on Facebook after seeing the video earlier on YouTube!). ‘Phir Mile Sur’, despite some tackiness quotient, is a decent reflection of how much India has changed over the last two decades. When the original was released, the year was 1989-90 and the nation was in a vortex of internal instability. A coalition government had just taken oath in New Delhi after the grand fall of Rajiv Gandhi’s super majority. Kashmir was beginning to simmer and Punjab had been festering for almost a decade. Then there were the recurring disputes of the Northeast and on top of all this was the Mandal genie released by VP Singh in the autumn of 1990 leading to self-immolations, massive protests and civil unrest in Delhi (I remember my school being closed for a few days when the situation had gotten seriously tense). For someone who would sit alongside his father and watch the state drafted news bulletin every night on gloomy Doordarshan, the words ‘Khalistan’, ‘Militancy’, ‘Encounter’, ‘Unity and Integrity’ (a favorite of the Prime Ministers of those days), ‘Tarn Taran’ (Punjab’s most violent district) and ‘Curfew’ very quickly became a part of the lexicon. And I did not even have to run to a dictionary to understand what they meant. The context of those days provided all the meaning. In the backdrop of all this and the economic uncertainty that followed a year later along with Rajiv Gandhi’s bloody assassination, India needed a ‘Mile Sur’ to make some attempt, howsoever feeble, to remind us of the clichéd ‘Unity in Diversity’ model of our political sustenance.

Two decades later, the uncertainties have changed with one critical difference. Most of them are external and not internal. The language of ‘Unity and Integrity’ has now been replaced by that of ‘Development and Growth’. The old distant terrorism that urban India knew of only through DD’s daily news is now a phenomenon that we have recognized as a daily classless danger to be lived with and confronted. Our internal contradictions of the 80s, like old skin, have been shed and our new fault lines will be a friction of ideas centering on how growing aspirations in a rising economy should be catered. Separate smaller states will be demanded, not only because they promise a symbol of identity, but because they hold the promise of overturning the economic neglect and offer opportunities for ‘sharing of riches’. The gun toting Naxal may be wiped out but discontent in rural India will not be unless we achieve a greater allocation of benefits and decide on how best to acquire land equitably. In that sense, perhaps India still needs a ‘Phir Mile Sur’ not to remind us that we share one political legacy of unity but perhaps to hold out the assertion that as the efforts of that legacy begin to bear economic fruit in the coming decades, we all are entitled to our legitimate slices of the pie.

So how much have we really changed in the two decades after that depressing autumn of 1990? I was recently watching a YouTube clip containing highlights of the games from the Hero Cup held in the winter of 1993. It’s an event cricket historians seem to have forgotten. It still remains the last time India won a five team one-day international tournament. It was also the first time that the BCCI sold television rights to a satellite TV channel (Star) instead of Doordarshan leading to litigation at one end and cricket’s TV boom at the other. On the clip I saw, the boundary hoardings consisted of the following prominent brands – Hero Puch, Modiluft, Peerless, Directors Special, Vimal, Kelvinator, Coramandel Cement, Yamaha and Pennzoil. That covers a decent number of sectors of the industry in terms of representation. Notice the one that it doesn’t – Telecom; because telecom would only be deregulated towards the end of the 90s and would go on to change lives in a remarkably similar way as the diminutive little Maruti 800 did. Notice another omission –no cola companies in the above list. While Pepsi came back into the Indian market around 1990, Coke wouldn’t come till 1993-94 and the real advertising war between the two giants for the large Indian middle class purse would begin only mid-90s onwards with star power being recruited and campaigns often turning nasty.

The cricket example above though, is only symbolic. Just as telecom is virtually a separate sector of the economy today in terms of the sheer impact it has on lives, the economic reforms of 1991 have perhaps singly overtaken any other event in defining the India of the last two decades. The reforms opened opportunities, mostly in the urban centers, brought global brands to India, gave a fillip to the economy and enlarged our wallets. Larger wallets in turn meant that the world started looking at us as a mass of people with an economic aspiration to spend and a social aspiration to climb. It is no wonder that every significant consumer as well enterprise product and service company is present in India today enamored by a market that promises top line growth of double digits which is no longer possible in a saturated market back home in the US or Europe. Good or bad, the one basic outcome of the reforms was that money was no longer a bad word. Consumption was suddenly an aspiration and not a moral sin. The political empowerment of India with the coming out of multiple political parties in the 1990s would be accompanied by an economic empowerment that would in some way, though perhaps not entirely and effectively, permeate every section of society. We only have to look at ourselves to realize the extent of the shift.

In 1991, my father’s office still had round dial telephones and there was no aspiration in my family to own a similar one at home. My father drove a white Premier Padmini (Fiat as we knew it then) that perhaps had the most awkward gearbox ever seen in a car on Indian roads. Computers and software were something you didn’t even read about in the newspapers let alone see one in your school or own one at home. TV still meant Doordarshan which would close its telecast between 11am to 2pm and 3.30pm to 7pm every day unless there was a cricket match on. Vacations anywhere in excess of 500kms meant budgeting a total of 4 days for to and fro travel by train. There were no brands of denim jeans. The only shoes you could wear were Bata, Liberty or Action. The only toothpaste you would use was a Colgate and the only soap you would use was a Hamam. The only fast food outlet in Delhi was Nirulas, the only rum my grandfather could drink was the army canteen issued Old Monk (a favorite passed on through generations) and the only decent whiskey available to him was Red Knight made by Mohan Meakin in Solan. Need I say more!

I sometimes wonder if we ourselves have grasped the impact of the last two decades. Time is never a constant and every decade or so, some nostalgic blogger like me would reflect on the years gone by and how life has changed. Every generation feels it has passed through the most impactful change. As children of the economic liberalization of this country, my generation can at least claim to have witnessed the transition first hand. How impactful it would turn to out to be for the longer destiny of India is something that as always, history and posterity can dwell upon at leisure.

P.S. – The Indian Express this morning carried a beautiful five page feature on landmark judicial cases and the personalities behind them that influenced both the working and the interpretation of the Indian Constitution. Stretching across the 60 years of the document’s existence, it highlighted the men and women, jurists and lawyers who sought to enforce the tenets of our governing document in our day to day lives. Express began the series with a case that it called the most important ever in the history of Indian constitutional law. In early 1973, a 13 member bench of the Supreme Court (the largest ever gathering of justices summoned to debate a judicial matter in the country’s history till date) decided by a wafer thin majority of 7-6 against the State and in favor of a temple priest. The judgment was historic in that it placed the Constitution above the Parliament and entailed that there was a certain ‘basic structure’ of the Constitution that Parliament could not alter even with an amendment. This basic structure included among other things the fundamental rights of life, liberty and equality. In the coming three decades, the Courts would use this principle to drive the primacy of fundamental rights (most recently in the Sec 377 case last year where the right to equality was sighted) and uphold the rights of the ordinary citizen against the high-handedness of the executive. That single judgment made the difference between the Indian Constitution being a living, thriving document impacting the lives of its citizens or being a set of rules of a banana diplomacy that a despotic government could change at will and a compliant judiciary would endlessly blink over.

Nothing Idiotic about this

2009-12-27T00:07:00.007+05:30

A couple of decades later, well after he might have hung his boots, Raju Hirani’s filmography could well be defined by cinema historians in a single phrase – Movies with a heart. His two Munnabhai ventures and the latest ‘idiotic’ expression (you could very easily call it Munnabhai 3 for that matter) are less about love, friendship and relationships and more about listening and following that instinctive beat on the left side of your ribcage. I must admit I was a bit of a skeptic when I saw the first Munnabhai movie. I sensed that Hirani hit the right issues but showed too mushy and melodramatic a way out. I guess it was just a bit of my realistic cynicism that initially rejected the ‘jadoo ki jhappi’. I saw Munnabhai MBBS thrice before turning around partially. By the time I saw Raju Hirani’s take on Gandhigiri (going to the movie alone with the parents away on a break from me) I was a convert. Through the movie, I was amazed at the refreshing take that Hirani brought on Gandhi, an individual I greatly admired but cynically (again) believed had moved too far away in history for India to reclaim him on anything other than currency notes. With his third flick, Hirani touches upon a topic that has been covered briefly before – Bollywood’s angst ridden unemployed hero of the 80s finding no use for his graduation degree, Munnabhai himself deriding medical education that treated real patients as lab guinea pigs and Aamir Khan’s own recent directorial debut that focused on the mad desire of the parents of school going kids to see them topping their classes.

3 Idiots goes a bit further and takes on the foundations on which our higher education and dare I say much of our endeavors post that rest. Before I make another critical comment on the same a disclaimer may be in order. I am very much myself a part of that system. I have been through my share of Board exam criticality talks, my mother taking a break from work during the exams themselves to ensure my three meals a day and remaining nutrition wasn’t affected during the lead up to the papers, my father silently enquiring about my preparations and then my evaluation of the performance during both the Boards and my CA exams. I have run around coaching institutes during my CA days, borrowed and copied notes, learned a lot of mumbo-jumbo by rote (forgotten almost all of it by now) and primed myself by pasting a planner with exam days and key preparation milestones on my room wall next to the study table. I might not agree with what our manner of learning produces but I must be fair enough to attribute my current position (whether good or bad) to it.

I was reminded of the same during a conversation with a couple of colleagues and my boss on a wet summer night in New Jersey about five months ago. On a dinner table populated by Engineers + MBAs and a lone B.Com + CA, I was the only one arguing against the rat race that our kids enter into high school onwards and how engineering colleges and professional degrees often are seen symbols of societal validation to be attained rather than merely as routes of academic knowledge occurring on a journey aroused by interest and liking. I wouldn’t want my kid to go through an engineering college if I could help it, I remember saying that night. Obviously it didn’t go down too well with the engineers present. It was then that my boss reminded me that it was no use if you thumbed the rat race but still remained a turtle in life. You may not like it Aftab Khanna he told me, but you are here sitting here in America because you worked hard and came out the same competitive professional system that you now very happily curse.

Yes, America…the ultimate symbol of your having arrived in your career. Remember our mothers telling us during those high school and college days about so and so’s son going to the US, sponsored by his ‘kampany’. I must confess I was lost for an answer on that dinner table at the end of the argument, wondering if I was failing to see the greys in the jigsaw and making the same mistake of thinking in a linear fashion, albeit in the opposite direction, as I shunned everything about our higher education. It was only later that night that my tubelight hit a fuse in the brain and I thought – Heck, I could have done anything other than CA, excelled at it and perhaps still landed in the US by the time I was 26. So much for an American visa!

Which is what Hirani tries to communicate with his Idiots. Its presented quite simply through the contrast between the rote learning, spectacled bookworm and easy going protagonist who can find simple solutions to everyday problems by being able to ‘apply’ his knowledge beyond the books. Its a movie without many layers and in a straightforward way it critiques the mad rush of the educated young of the Indian middle class towards societal validation masquerading as ‘success’; a message captured in a single line that a father says to his son when presented with an alternative career decision, ‘Guptaji kya kahenge?’. Hirani makes a call to listen to the heart and go after ‘excellence’ (a fluid, hard to define word) rather than marks and easy acceptable choices. It is a movie as much about self-discovery as about summoning the will to stand for your choices.

But it is the movie’s critique about the assembly line of GPA, marks, ranks and job chasing professionals that shall arouse the most questions, especially if, like me, you are very much a product of that system. Is success measured by the size of that pay cheque, the suburban apartment or house and that big luxury car outside that house? In an India increasingly experience an upward mobility of a huge mass of its people, it’s a question worth putting forward. In a debate where, over the last two decades, we had chosen Amitabh Bachchan’s ‘bangla, gaadi and bank balance’ over Shashi Kapoor’s just ‘Maa’, Hirani and Shimit Amin’s Rocket Singh that came out a couple of weeks ago, make a pitch for a middle ground for morally driven achievement driven by passion rather than naked hunger of wealth and ‘success’.

I remember my school principle, a lady whom I deeply respect and admire for the simplicity and clarity of her thoughts remarking repeatedly that the there was only slot at the top and it was tougher to stay there than getting there – a remark I heard every time she saw the ‘Ist’ rank on my report card. I was a bit apprehensive to be open about it then, but I silently disagreed with her. Over the years I have seen enough people make good in life who had been written off in school examinations. A close friend who flunked a class X subject and then gave ‘compartment’ exams a few months later with borrowed notes is a young confident lawyer receiving global offers. A cousin written off by many in the family as hopeless was just waiting to be thrown into the big bad world on his own away from us cynics to chart a course that has literally taken him places. The best Chartered Accountant I worked with during my three years with a global accounting firm was someone who missed figuring in our Institute’s merit list by half a dozen marks and who at an age of 28 can easily teach a thing or two to many senior partners of the firm. There might not be certificates to prove examinational excellence for these people, but in their own right they have found a measure of success, all because somewhere they perhaps found a calling. Yes, it’s tough being at the top and you can’t survive in a competitive world by just standing and not moving your hands. But surely, our children can be allowed to chose their battles, be given the freedom to explore fields to compete. That I guess is Raju Hirani’s message for many of us wondering where we have landed up and where we are headed (a mid life crisis possibly?). Perhaps its not worth chasing what we are running after. Perhaps the chase lies on a road we locked years ago in a corner of the study table.

Almost a decade ago, inspired by the many armymen in the family and flush with seeing images of the Kargil war I had developed a slight interest in the Services as a career option. In a pre-internet age, I remember responding to an Army newspaper advertisement that carried a small chit that you could mail back to Army HQ for a detailed brochure. My mother saw me sending the mail, was not too enthused but didn’t say anything openly. My father, who had been used to hearing his son announcing that he wanted to be CA (or a journo) for a few years now, didn’t respond initially. A few days later, on a car ride, he softly brought up the subject of my letter. I don’t mind your joining the forces, I remember him telling me, but make sure that you do it with a full heart. I want you to excel in what you eventually do, he told me,…I want you to aim for being the best amongst those around you and you would easily reach the top. He would have liked Raju Hirani’s 3 Idiots I think. Much like Raju’s heroes, he was a man with a big heart.

P.S. – Quite liked Kareena Kapoor for once btw. Cute like someone I know... ;)

Amritsar and Accountants

2009-12-01T20:56:00.005+05:30

I was in Amritsar over the weekend and let me tell you that all the things people said about the wonderful food you can get in that city are true. I am neither a foodie nor a food expert (I am assuming you can be one with being the other) but even my limited senses of taste and tongue were left with a craving of partial satisfaction. I wanted one more dinner or one more lunch. Thanks to a friend, whose brother’s wedding I was attending, I sampled quite a bit of the local stuff. The theme for one of the lunches at the wedding house was itself ‘Amritsari food’ and in there I sampled Sugarcane juice (after ages!), kulcha and chhole; thin, crisp pooris with aloo ka subzi, some amazing carrot pickle, sweet but sublime phirni and an amazing gur ka halwa that I now regret at having just taken a single serving of. On both the nights of the wedding functions (sagan and the baraat night), the variety of non-vegetarian food on offer was tempting and hard to ignore. I had some succulent lamb kebabs and amazing rogan josh (a Kashmiri and not Amritsari dish though). The chopped up mutton served dry and fresh from the kadhai needed three servings to satisfy the buds and the meal was capped off with gajar ka halwa for dessert. Now I am a bit of prick for gajar ka halwa since I have been used to having some every winter at home made by my mother. Gajar ka halwa as a wedding dessert has rarely appealed to me. There is too much khoya to compensate for sweetness and the carrots are always a pale red in color. On this occasion though, the sweetness was just right, the carrots juicy red and the dry fruits were spread liberally to create a brilliant dessert. I found myself recommending the same to practically everyone I talked to later that night.

If you are in Amritsar then you have to do two things for sure – visit the Golden Temple and the Wagah border (apart from the eating that I mentioned above). My friend, who was co-ordinating transport for almost 50-60 out of town guests, bemoaned the fact that most of his baraatis wanted to rush straight to the temple from the railway station. The poor fellow struggled in vain to persuade them to offload their luggage at the hotel first and have a meal at the wedding home. Now I am not sure how it works, and perhaps I do not even care enough, but there was this strange sentiment amongst those headed to the temple to not take liquor or non-vegetarian food prior to visit. I saw the poor mutton being abandoned and the bar being deserted by men who couldn’t separate themselves from either the night before (And post the visit they were back to mutton and whiskey at night).

Wagah though makes no pious demands from you. All it requires are strong vocal chords and a little bit of enthusiasm. We went there on a Saturday expecting huge crowds and sure, the seats were filled. Someone in the group arranged for VIP access (that typical and shameful Indian privilege) and we got quite decent seats to watch the action from. Both the BSF and the Pakistan Rangers men turned up dressed in their regal uniforms, though the BSF guys had some trouble maintaining their elaborate head gear that kept slipping on them occasionally. The announcers from both sides worked their audiences and cries of ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’ and ‘Hindustan Zindabad’ went up the air. It was pop patriotism at its best. The audience was egged on to out-shout their Pakistani counterparts and many in the crowd took it open themselves to lead the slogan shouting. The entire martial spectacle obviously rouses emotions which quickly get dispelled the moment it is all over. Everyone rushes in a stampede like fashion to get a glimpse of the border gates, get photographs clicked with the BSF guards and then it’s back to usual grind of littering garbage at the bus stand, leering at women and being the model Indian citizen. Two things about Wagah that day though – First, while the Indian stands were packed to the seams, the Pakistani stands were half empty. Now I imagine it might have been because it was the day of Bakr Eid but I wonder if there are larger signs to be read into the same. The second – Indians of all faiths and colors and foreign tourists alike, no one had a problem shouting ‘Vande Mataram’ that evening.

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It is election season once again (no I am not talking about the Jharkhand polls. Ha! Caught you didn’t I? You barely knew there were polls going on in poor Maoist infested Jharkhand). It is election season for the ‘vibrant’ and ‘esteemed’ community of Chartered Accountants (this is not an attempt at self-aggrandizement but simply words that I have picked up from one of the myriad campaign mails that have flooded my inbox over the last two days). Being a professional community, the campaigning is also professional. SMSes, emails and telephone calls are passé. They are the lowest common denominator. Candidates resort to innovative vote catching methods. One of them is alumni meets. A candidate tries to align himself with some entity or a CA coaching institution and an invitation is sent for an alumni party calling all to attend and of course in return for a free night of socializing, light ego massage, food and drinks (depending upon average age profile of alumni and the social sophistication of the candidate) the attendees are expected to vote for the implicit host. Some of the candidates with more elaborate social connections organize musical nights to promote their agenda for the development of the profession. I was told that during the last election one candidate had girls standing outside the polling booth and handing over flowers to everyone coming out of the booth who had voted for him. How the girls managed to figure out who the voter had cast his preference for in the secret ballot is something that was not explained!

This takes me back to the last CA elections held in the winter of 2006. The firm I was employed with then had one of its senior partners standing as a candidate for the Central Council. The council is the supreme governing body of the profession and has equal representation from all the five zones of North, South, West, East and Central. Our region was North and six candidates had to be chosen out of a field of maybe ten to twelve. A large number of the resources of the firm were sent to polling booths on the voting day and I found myself with a senior colleague in a small town in North India overseeing a small election stall in the local town school. Only one observer was allowed in the actual polling room, the principal’s office, and my colleague was stationed there along with representatives of five of the other candidates. Being a small town, the number of eligible voters was limited; around 50 odd if I remember correctly. There was much bantering going on in the voting room with tea and snacks being served for the local representatives camped there. My colleague, slightly uncomfortable with the celebratory mood would keep coming out often. Voters came in at a trickle – 4 or 5 every hour. By late afternoon, I had wrapped up my stall and was all ready to scoot back to Delhi the moment voting got over at 6 in the evening. However, it was then that all the drama really began. With half an hour to go for the voting to end, my colleague and I were strolling in the school lawn when two of the local agents of the candidates came to us with a proposition. Only around half of the eligible votes had been cast. There was no point in ‘wasting’ the ‘precious’ remaining votes. Let us all oblige each other and split the remaining votes equally between the six candidates whose representatives were present. Signatures on the voter sheet could be forged and the school principal who was the returning officer for the town could be convinced. Quite obviously, we were taken aback. Our first and natural instinct was to refuse. ‘Nahin aaya koi to nahin sahi’, I remember my colleague remarking to the others. Ten minutes later, after a huddled conference between the other representatives, pat came another offer. We could take majority of the remaining votes for the Central Council (as many as we wanted!) but the North India Council votes had to go to their preferred candidate (a voter votes both for the Central as well as the Regional Council). We were cajoled to talk to our ‘seniors in Dilli’ and discuss with them. Voting had finished by now and the ballot box was yet to be sealed. My colleague and I, slightly disturbed, decided to call Delhi and inform the election managers of this offer and our intended response of refusal. Incredulously, the senior manager we spoke to responded by asking us, ‘What do you think? Should we accept this?’ Upon hearing this, my colleague insisted on speaking to the partner in charge of the campaigning, who promptly asked us to refuse any such deal making and leave the place immediately after sealing of the ballot box. Our response disappointed the local agents. They were guarded and muted in their remarks. I could sniggers of ‘Yeh Dilliwale kya jaane’ and exhortations of how ‘aadmi aadmi ke kaam aata hai’. Ballot boxes sealed, we rushed straight into our car and headed back home.

It is easy to understand the attachment small town CAs have for the elections. Infact, this holds true for most CAs outside the corporate or the Big 4 set up. As someone running his own practice, it is of immense benefit for you to have friends in the right places in the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI). They ensure that your firm’s name comes up for empanelment for bank audits, that any disciplinary proceedings against you are ‘taken care’ of and that you constantly keep getting invitations for technical forums and seminars and other ‘social’ events. For many self employed CAs such an association carries the prospect of visibility, professional networking and improved social standing. How such deal making and shenanigans help the profession is something that I am yet to find out. All the campaign mails received by me thus far have been individual focused. So and so has been serving the profession for X years (usually above 15), has been on various committees of the Institute for X years and has done such and such while on such committees. In a year when the profession took its severest hit ever in the form of Satyam and its missing cash balance of Rs 5000cr, no one talks of the reform both the system of studies of CA (the new course requires students to choose between graduation or CA; if you want to pursue it post grad, be prepared to spend a minimum of 5 years) or the conduct of the members of the profession need. No one talks of how frauds like Satyam can be avoided and where the auditors are going wrong. No one talks of regulation and the Institute’s role. All you hear of are personal bio-datas, social gatherings and mud-slinging at others. Given all this, is it any surprise that Satyam happened and that the man who signed that Balance Sheet for many years and has been in jail since January, was a member of the Central Council and that had Satyam not broken out he would perhaps have become the President of the ICAI a month later?

The Obama Nobility

2009-10-09T21:42:00.004+05:30

So Barack Obama’s love affair (or rock star story, as cousin of mine in the US put it) with the globe continues. What began with a rapturous reception in Berlin in the summer of 2008, when he was still a candidate running for the Democratic nomination has now reached the hallowed halls of Oslo and culminated in a Nobel Prize. The Nobel Committee has cited the President’s effort at multilateral diplomacy and reconciliatory foreign policy as reasons for the prize. They have also stated that the award is not prospective (for what the current US President may achieve) but retrospective (for his diplomatic efforts over the last year). Based purely on cold logic and his presidential and senatorial resume thus far, Obama’s claim seems quite thin. But the Nobel has a patchy track record when it comes to peace awards. Many past winners have been awarded after decades of work – Jimmy Carter in 2002 after his two decades of trying to (and partially succeeding in 1978) promote peace between Israel and its neighbors; Nelson Mandela at the very fag end of apartheid in South Africa. But equally many other winners have been greenhorns - German Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1971 was awarded just after entering office like Obama, but his policy of engagement with Eastern Europe is said to have contributed, along with Mikhael Gorbhachev’s perestroika efforts (another Nobel Winner in 1990) to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the eventual end of the Cold War. Many awards have gone to those who haven’t really been the symbols of peace (a belligerent Teddy Roosevelt in 1906, for example) and many true worthies like Gandhi have been ignored.

So did Barack Obama, the individual – Harvard graduate, lawyer, community worker and first time Senator from Illinois, deserve a Nobel Peace Prize? No. But ponder this a moment – Did Barack Obama, the elected President of United States, deserve a nomination, if not the actual award for what he has stood for over the last two year since he threw his hat into the ring of the Democratic primaries? Perhaps yes. Here’s why –

Obama’s Nobel is as much his as it is of the Office he occupies and equally as much of those who voted to put him in that office. He is effectively, at the moment, a symbol of reconciliation of both the United States as a society and United States as the pre-eminent political power in the world. For a nation, that till four decades ago, was battling riots in the streets of its Southern states over whether blacks should be allowed to enter the same universities as whites, it is a reflection of America’s evolution as heterogeneous society and its final acceptance of ability over identity that Obama, an African American representing 13% of a segment of the population that till a few generations ago was officially existing as slaves, is now occupying the highest executive office in his land. Of course, you can turn around say that simply belonging to a disadvantaged community is no criterion for a Nobel prize. If tomorrow, Mayawati was to move into Race Course Road, we wouldn’t be petitioning the Nobel Committee for rewarding her in Oslo – we would perhaps all be applying for Norwegian or any other visa ourselves!

But Obama’s significance, as I had mentioned in a post just after his victory in November last year, lies not in the fact that he won because he was black but in the fact that he won without putting himself forward as the ‘Great Black Hope’; he pitched himself as the Great American Hope and when the issue of race did present itself in the form of some embarrassing comments by his pastor in Chicago, the Democratic candidate went ahead and made a remarkably delicate but prescient speech outlining why race as an issue was a problem of not just whites but also of the blacks. On most domestic issues that tend to divide America down the middle, Obama has adopted a non-partisan approach, shying away from the arrogance that control over both houses of Congress can breed into presidents. On abortion, the president gave a brilliant address at Notre Dame University during summer outlining why despite being pro-abortion, he was willing to acknowledge that the other side has relevant arguments of consideration. On healthcare, he has been critiqued by left wing Democrats of trying too hard to get Republican backing for his legislation and thus opening the gate for irresponsible fear mongering being spread by the conservatives.

This approach has replicated itself into foreign policy where multilateralism is back into the dictionary of US foreign policy. Obama has held to his promise of reaching out to both Europe and more importantly to the Muslim world as well as to Iran. Has it borne fruits? Where are the results during the first ten months of the President’s term? On the ground, Obama’s ‘change’ has been limited. Washington remains partisan domestically in the Congress, North Korea still thumbs its nose at the US and Afghanistan is still a quagmire. So where is the peace and the world without nuclear weapons? Of course, it’s a bit unreasonable to expect Obama to solve all our problems.

The difference is in ‘perception’ and ‘recognition’ – intangibles which the George.W.Bush years in the White House have proved can swing global opinion and create nuisance for tasks undertaken, to give Bush (but not Dick Cheney) the benefit of doubt, with good intentions. Obama has attempted to change the global perception of United States both towards its allies and towards the conflicts it faces in Muslim nations. He has re-emphasized the importance of engagement over belligerence that rides rough shod over any opposition. More importantly, he has lent an ear to a world that had started to believe that America had put cotton in its ears as it undertook a cowboy march through Iraq and Afghanistan. We may not agree with Obama’s policies but we certainly can’t ignore that he himself acknowledges that he and his administration do not have all the answers and that he is willing to listen.

That approach is refreshing breath of honesty coming out of a White House that claimed to know all for the first eight years of this decade. In that sense, Obama has shifted the moral compass of the United States and its outlook towards the world from the vision of Alexander Hamilton to that of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, perhaps the most erudite man ever to occupy the White House, believed that the United States would be a beacon of leadership in the globe not because of its commercial and military strength but on the basis of the moral strength of the vision of its founding documents – the most significant of which (The Declaration of Independence) was authored by Jefferson himself. Jefferson, while being inward looking on occasions, favored engagement over belligerence and had a constructive global vision of his nation. Obama’s popularity to an extent is because of his recognition of the limits of Hamiltonian diplomacy and the requirement on part of the United States to urgently correct that perception.

As he faces three more certain, and four more potential years in the White House, Obama would do well to use the Nobel as means of momentum to a vision he has articulated. He would do well to remember the weight of expectations that he now faces as the honeymoon starts to get stale by the pressure of passing time. He would do well to treat the Nobel as a call to action. The prize is an endorsement of what he stands for but Barack Obama faces a challenge to leave a justification for posterity. For that, he would do well to read the words of another great US president – in the summer of 1864 as the American Civil War neared a battle of attrition and the Union started to gain a sustained advantage over the Confederacy, Abraham Lincoln admitted honestly in a letter that “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me”, - in a justification of how he had married his personal vision of abolition of slavery with his higher responsibility of preserving American unity as the President; an accomplishment which historians often cite, came about only by the President’s sustained and deep commitment to the vision of a united America even in the deepest times of despair when the conflict seemed never ending and unity a lost cause. If Barack Obama sustains his marriage to his professed vision, he would do well to live up to a premature global honor that on this occasion has rewarded ideals and vision over factual accomplishments.

Decoloring the Picture

2009-07-31T03:08:00.002+05:30

It is believed that the first forced migration from the African continent to the New World took place around the 1530s with the Spanish hunting for labor to tend to their plantations in the Caribbean and American territories of modern day Texas, Florida and South Carolina. Four and a quarter centuries later, the black color from Africa and its consequences tend to dominate the political events of this nation. African Americans constitute roughly 12% of the US population and yet their impact on the national conscience is much more disproportionate. The fact that race continues to be an uncomfortable issue in the United States has been borne out by two recent incidents.

The first was the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Gates by the local police. Trying to force the jammed front door of his house, Professor Gates appeared to a neighbor as someone trying to break into the house. She did what any normal American would do – call 911. By the time the police arrived, Prof Gates was in his house. This is where the story gets fuzzy. The police claim that the academic started a confrontation and hurled racist invective and abuse against the Police sergeant who came to the house. The professor claimed that despite proving his identity he was harassed and ultimately arrested. Adding color to the situation (pardon the pun) is the fact that Prof Gates is black, Sgt. Cowley of the Cambridge police is white, as was the concerned neighbor who dialed 911. The Massachusetts Governor (also black), criticized the police, saying that such discrimination was a fact of daily routine for blacks. What really gave fan to the fire was President Obama’s reaction to the situation. Speaking at the White House press conference on Health care, Obama was asked to comment on the situation and instead of side stepping the question in a way any normal politician would have done, he took it on and called the conduct of the police as ‘stupid’. Republicans, Police Unions and right wing commentators jumped on him. Accused of commenting without knowing the full facts, he was called irresponsible and asked by the Police Unions for an apology.

I guess there are natural fallouts of speaking your mind openly as a politician. Obama is discovering that slowly. He is a front on talker, someone who likes to engage issues rather than side step them. A few weeks back he spoke at the convocation ceremony of the Notre Dame University in Indiana. A university run by the Catholic Church, Notre Dame is anti-abortion while Obama is pro. Students protested against the invite to the President and he was heckled during his speech by a tiny section of the crowd. Obama trod on, talked of listening to voices of disagreement, talked of how sensitive abortion as an issue was to the Americans and how reconciliation would only be achieved by listening to the other side and finding a middle ground. In the incident of Prof Gates, he was quick to realize that he had overstepped the line of tactful distance that a Chief Executive must often maintain. To his credit, instead of hiding in the White House, he came out in the open, confessed that his comment was inappropriate and has now tried to reach out and attempt reconciliation by inviting both the academic and the policeman in question to the White House for a round of drinks.

The second incident is related to Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s pick for a Supreme Court seat that goes vacant soon. Since Supreme Court judges in US hold office for life, very rarely does a President get an opportunity to appoint one (The most famous Judge in US history, John Marshall presided as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for 34 years and swore in more Presidents than any other). The appointment of any Justice has to be confirmed by the Congress and each candidate is summoned by the Judiciary committee to a hard round of grilling. Old verdicts, opinions and stray comments are dug up and questioning is challenging (depending upon which party is in opposition). Sotomayor, a Hispanic, has been questioned for some of her own comments from a few years back (she had remarked once that a wise Latina woman can deliver a better judgment that a White man) but almost in parallel, one of her most influential judgments was reversed by the Supreme Court this summer in a narrow 5-4 verdict. The ruling related to the Fire Department of New Haven city that had cancelled the results of a promotion test after the black candidates were found to have scored too low a score to merit promotion. The city feared a lawsuit by the minority candidates due to its impact on the minority (there have been such lawsuits in the US before where courts have struck down such tests). The city’s concern lay in the principle of ‘disparate impact’ enshrined in the US employment law that prevents employers from adopting practices that are neutral on the face but discriminatory in application or effect on a protected community. It includes within its purview, a substantially different rate of selection for promotion or hiring that works to the disadvantage of any sex, race or other group.

17 White and 1 Hispanic firefighter, who were denied promotion, protested through a suit against the city Mayor alleging reverse discrimination. The district court upheld the cancellation of the test and so did the appeals court where Sotomayor was Chief Justice. The US Supreme Court though struck the ruling down stating that city had no ‘strong basis in evidence’ to show that it would have attracted lawsuits had the results been certified. The Court walked a fine thin line in the judgment and acknowledged that discrimination prevention can also lead to discrimination.

Sotomayor of course would go on to be confirmed. Obama enjoys a comfortable majority of Democrats in the Congress. But the fact that America still faces questions of race and how to overcome its historical and potential future impacts is a sign of how despite the economic advancements, social borders remain fuzzy. While attitudes may have warmed and black and white walls of discrimination may have been tore down, at its edges, along the greys America still finds the question of race standing at the corner, and mostly finds it terribly uncomfortable to reach out and address it.

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This is a bit late in the day but I wanted to draw attention to the Delhi High Court’s landmark judgment on Sec 377 of IPC. For all the abuse that modern India throws at Jawaharlal Nehru it is worthwhile to ponder that the court invoked Nehru and the Objectives Resolution that he moved in the Constituent Assembly in 1946, as India’s wisest men sat to frame a Constitution for the country. Quoting Nehru, that ‘words are magic things; often enough, even the magic of words sometimes cannot convey magic of human spirit and of a nation's passion’, it turned the wheel back to clause 5 of the resolution that stated the following as the foundation stone of this country –

“WHEREIN shall be guaranteed and secured to all the people of India justice, social economic and political : equality of status, of opportunity, and before the law; freedom of thought, expression, belief, faith, worship, vocation, association and action, subject to law and public morality;”

These words would go on to transform into the fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution. While in India, we may not remember him enough, it took a Pakistani blogger across the border to put the issue in perspective by claiming that ‘Nehru’s glorious legacy had brought another freedom to India’. In the India of 1950s, Nehru was called as the country’s friend, philosopher and guide. To this day, his words and actions stand as guardian angels of the democratic spirit he wanted his country to so dearly possess and embrace.

Vignettes

2009-06-25T21:18:00.000+05:30

Summer was waited for eagerly here in Jersey. Sunday was June 21, the solstice day when summer is officially supposed to begin. Of course when you are from India you really don’t need a day in the calendar to tell you that summer has arrived. The first drop of sweat that falls from the forehead in mid to late March is enough. However, here, in cold and damp Jersey (it rained all of the last week with a thunderstorm thrown in between), they can be allowed to be romantic about the sun. Temperatures in the summer barely cross 30 degrees Celsius. For the American it’s warm, for an Indian its heaven. The one difference here though is the sharpness of the sunlight, particularly the post rain sun. I have been advised repeatedly to use a sun screen. Considering it too feminine, I desisted; was advised again and finally bought one from a Wal-Mart. Since then, only once did the weather and my work schedule given me the opportunity to apply it on the weekend.

Americans might end up screwing up wars and their foreign policy but the one thing they get right with deadly accuracy every day is their weather predictions. So much so that there is a dedicated weather channel, called ‘The Weather Channel’ (TWC). Newspapers carry detailed forecasts every day and TWC and its affiliate websites carry hourly forecasts as well. Most people are simply interested in knowing whether their weekends would be sunny. The weather guys may not be able to give sunny weekends but they do give the right forecasts. During all of my stay here, not once have they got it wrong. The weather channel in itself is an interesting concept. I caught a live telecast the other evening from Nebraska where a tornado/ twister was rummaging its way through an open field. The weather channel correspondent had found a convenient spot far away at the edge of the road and was shouting excitedly in the mike. Indian reporters get this excited only when the government has fallen or if they have seen Shah Rukh Khan. I wonder if anyone has thought of a weather channel in India. Give the multiplicity of floods and cyclones we have every year, there will be plenty to cover. The tragedy of the weather disasters may get lost on them but our channels would surely provide us with much comic relief.

If you thought that right wing fundamentalism and violence is an exclusive Indian phenomenon, then think again. Over the last month or so violent attacks by individuals attached to or proclaiming right wing conservative ideologies have seen a sharp rise. Last week a pro-Nazi, holocaust denying 88 year old barged into the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. and killed a security guard before being overpowered himself. A week before that a prominent doctor who ran an abortion clinic and provided late term abortions was shot outside a church in Wichita, Kansas. Abortion providing doctors in urban centers like Chicago have also complained of their clinics being picketed and their staff threatened with dire consequences (Abortion perhaps is to the American right wing what Conversion is to the Indian right wing). The Wichita murder drew applause from far right groups who are anti-abortion. Some of the leaders of such groups claimed that the murderer had served god by eliminating a ‘child killer’. These incidents had the saner television channels (excluding Fox of course that is more right wing than the right wingers themselves) debating whether America was tolerating too much of ‘Domestic Terrorism’. Part of the reason for the growing activism of the fringe groups is the current predicament of the mainstream political right wing conservative formation – the Grand Old Republican party (GOP). After its drubbing in the last elections in November, the GOP has stumbled from one embarrassment to another. It is groping for a leader and an issue to take on Obama. John McCain, perhaps the most balanced figure in their ranks, is now moving towards the sunset of his political career. The party has faced one embarrassment after another – today the Governor of South Carolina, someone who was close to clinching the Vice-Presidential nomination last year and was thought to be a potential Presidential candidate for 2012, came out after a week of absence. His staff had been explaining to the press that the Governor was out hiking on the east coast while the man in question was in Buenos Aires to carry out a clandestine affair. He is the second Republican office holder to come out in the open in the last couple of months admitting an extra-marital affair. The extent of the chaos in the GOP can be realized from the fact that their most public face these days is Sarah Palin. She has been seen at fundraisers, commemorative functions for Ronald Reagan (where she spoke a speech plagiarized from a text written by another Republic leader) and has been picking a fight with the late night host David Letterman for cracking jokes at his daughter. In many ways, the GOP is facing the same predicament that the BJP faces in India. There is the burden of an electoral defeat, lack of clear leadership and absence of direction.

America is a country of extra large sizes. The smallest size is large. At lunch I have to implore the servers to give me a ‘small’ serving. Half of the small glass of coffee or tea that I take goes waste because it is, well too large. Some of the sizes of the soft drink glasses at fast food outlets are obnoxious. I am not sure the Americans see it but outsiders do. My sister in law, a Canadian, was quick to point out the consequences of such huge servings, ‘That’s why so many people in this country are obese’. One place where the Americans understand the meaning of small are the hair salons. I only had to say three words to the barber, ‘Short, really short’ and I was out in 15 minutess with a very satisfying haircut. Only if they appreciated small elsewhere.

Flight and Crash of the fanciful

2009-05-18T02:21:00.004+05:30

On an early summer day in the year 1526 a light, swift fighting force backed by about 15-20 pieces of field artillery faced a monolith of an army in the dusty fields of a tiny hamlet in North India. Underestimated, unknown but highly mobile with a well trained cavalry, Zahir al-din Muhammad Babar’s Mughal army routed the forces of Ibrahim Lodi, whose chief weapon on the battlefield was the elephant. Scared by blasts from the Babur’s artillery, the tuskers ran amok all over trampling the men of their own army and paving the way for the fall of the Delhi Sultanate. It would be the last time when the elephant would be used as a major fighting weapon in any action on the Indian sub-continent.

1526 is how far back you would have to go in Indian history to see when the ‘elephant’ suffered its last defeat in the field of battle. 2009 is when the elephant has suffered its first defeat in electoral politics. It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall in Behenji Mayawati’s mind right now; to listen to the thoughts churning there, to behold the surprise. The BSP has been used to winning thus far, albeit at a very gradual pace. The grand majority in UP two years back heralded a new sunrise of the party. It was expected to move beyond its core constituency of Dalits and solidify a rainbow vote combination that also included the Muslim minority and the Upper castes – a combination that could propel Mayawati not just in UP but also in other states where such low hanging fruits existed. That she wanted to assert herself nationally was visible through the number of public meetings she addressed in different parts of the country. Mayawati was in Maharashtra, MP, Rajasthan, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh – all states with significant Dalit populations. She was the dark horse, the unannounced leader of the third front, the kingmaker of the new Lok Sabha, the woman who would decide India’s destiny, a woman whom the even the Economist found worthy of mention. (This author himself, thought she would at least get 30 seats in UP alone). Prominent political commentators predicted her hold over the proceedings to follow post elections.

Well now Mayawati and her elephants have been tripped by an electorate that hates nothing more than being taken for granted. Behenji lost her mandate for exactly the same reasons for which she had first won it. You cannot enrich yourself at the cost of your voters and simply assume they would follow you on empty promises of identity and protection. The Congress lost its vote bank in north India because for years it simply assumed that it would be followed blindly; that it possessed a hereditary right over the votes of the marginalized. Behenji too simply assumed that Dalits and Muslims of UP would stay solidly behind her and that by calling out the Dalit identity in other states she would cast her die for the dream national role. In the end, all those fancy statues and stone parks in Lucknow have come back to haunt her. She may cry all she wants about a conspiracy hatched by her rival parties but the reality is that she has been dumped for non-performance. As the editor of a prominent national daily said on counting day, India wants to vote for aspiration and not for settling scores. You would have a difficult time winning over people’s aspirations if your entire energy is spent in satiating your megalomania. Mayawati won 21 Lok Sabha seats, 2 more than last time and clocked a national vote share of 6.17% - to use a colloquial Hindi term, with these numbers, for Mayawati ‘abhi dilli bahut door hai’.

Behenji’s vote share though is third behind the Congress which received 28% of the total votes and the BJP which tallied a disappointing 18%. Why a party that was a strong, natural alternative to the Congress a decade ago is now a full 10 percentage points and 85 seats behind the leader is a matter that both the bigwigs at Delhi and Nagpur must address through their frequent ‘chintan baithaks’. A strong right of the centre national alternative is needed for a Congress but a right wing fundamentalist alternative will get whipped election after election. While his rhetoric may have worked in the case of Varun Gandhi, the party itself managed only 10 seats in the state of UP – the same number that it had in 2004. In the riot torn Kandhamal constituency of Orissa, which was ‘perfectly baked’ as per the BJP’s model of winning elections on the back of polarized electorates, the party’s candidate lost by over a lakh of votes. He too will get much time to do ‘chintan’ in his jail cell where he currently sits.

Has the BJP learnt nothing from 2004? It had a host of issues and a lot of time to play its cards right six months back. Then it allowed two men to completely derail its campaign – Narendra Modi and Varun Gandhi. From standing outside the Oberoi when the encounter was still going on to using the ‘gudiya-budhiya’ rhetoric, Modi did much to divert the agenda away from development. The school bully image was at complete contrast to the quiet manner in which Rahul Gandhi went about his campaign – both Mayawati, who ridiculed him for sleeping in a Dalit’s home and Modi, who never stops taking potshots at the Gandhis, have been proved ineffectual. In Gujarat, which the saffron party was supposed to ‘sweep’, 8 candidates personally chosen by the Chief Minister lost. His gain from 2004 in the state is just one seat. The only state where the BJP did better than 2004 was Bihar – and even though he hugged Modi in far away Punjab, Nitish Kumar didn’t allow Modi to enter the state before all the votes were cast. Nitish has won as decisive a mandate as Modi ever has; then why the Modi model of rioting and development and not the Nitish Kumar, Shiela Dixit and Shivraj Chauhan model of good inclusive development should be the answer to India’s problems, is something that any supporter of this ‘Hitler with a beard’ is yet to explain to me.

If anyone in the BJP is interested in paying attention, in the lack of that explanation lies their route back to power in Delhi.

Indian elections can often turn out to be an exercise in humility for its participants. The Left, which held a stronger veto over the previous government for four years, than even the one that Soviet Union held at the UN for forty years, now stands with its back to the wall and facing the unthinkable possibility of losing the next assembly election in Bengal. The many aspirant ‘Prime Ministers in waiting’ will now do just that – wait. Their despondency was summed up by Sharad Pawar who, first took his hat out of the ring, a day before the elections, and then was the first one on the day of results to concede that the Congress had the right to decide who would be the Prime Minister.

As far as the victor of this election is concerned, the Congress will do well to consider the hubris that led to the downfall of its rivals in the last two elections. It will face anti-incumbency and vote fatigue in different states after 5 years, the only insurance against which shall be performance. Its gamble to stand on its own feet in UP paid off and underscored the point that often in elections, winnability is simply about providing a fresh alternative to the voter.

As far as projections go, no one saw this ‘landsweep’ in favour of the Congress. Yours truly had stuck his neck out in March and predicted a tally of 148 seats for the party with Andhra, Rajasthan and Maharashtra being the bellwether states. He had also predicted of a long political summer of negotiations and side changes and deal striking with the most probable scenario being the return of the UPA with a little help from the Fourth Front and splinter groups of the Third Front.

Proved wrong. Period.

Warming on the East Coast

2009-04-28T04:30:00.014+05:30

We get such days only 10-15 times in a year, said my cousin as we negotiated our way through a choc a block Boston Central Park which was teeming with men, women and kids indulging in all kinds of activities ranging from simple sun bathing to baseball catching, dancing or just walking. Its a sunny sunny day on the North American east coast with the day temparatures hitting the late 20s and early 30s degree celsius. As an Indian i wonder what the fuss is all about, in fact the high temparatures disappoint me. I was hoping for slightly cooler climes. I am sweating in Boston in a simple tee and my jeans. Its a bit like spring temparatures back in India. Boston and North East America arent grudging their sunshine though. A cousin sister gently rebukes me not to 'lagao nazar' to this heralding of early summer.

Boston is one of North America's oldest cities. The city was founded by colonists from England way back in 1630. Part of the reason for its early growth was access to the sea and a thriving harbour, which still exists today. The harbour was also the site of the famous 'Boston Tea Party' in 1773 when American protestors dumped British tea into the water as a protest against 'taxation without representation' (why a protest was called a party was a matter of much curiousity and amusement amongst my high school pals during our class ix history class). The city was also at the forefront of the revolution - the first major battle took place just outside of the city at Bunker Hill with the British suffering heavy casualties in a phyrric victory. Boston produced several principal figures of the revolution as well - John Adams, the cantankerous lawyer who led the push in the Continental Congress towards Declaration of Independence and went on to become America's second president; his cousin Samuel Adams who was one of the first opposers of British rule in Boston and was also a signer to the Independence declaration; John Hancoc k, a principal businessman of those times who was also a close friend of George Washington; and of course Paul Revere, the man who rode at midnight sounding the warning 'the British are coming'. Boston has done well to preserve its historical heritage - there is a 'Freedom Trail' - a path outlined on the sidewalks that snakes around the old part of the town and leads visitors to important monuments, including the graves of Revere and Sam Adams.

My cousin lives in South End, which is to Boston what East Delhi is to India's capital - till now a run down place not looked too nicely upon but now enjoying a period of resurgence. South End has pockets inhabited by higher income groups which are surrounded by lower income government subsidized housing. The locality recently experienced settling in by homosexual couples (in 2004 Massachussets became the first US state to legalise same sex marriages). So the logic is that since gay/ lesbians couple cannot have children, most of their income is disposable and they like to spend it on good clothing and eating. This has seen the sprouting of many new eating joints and other commercial establishments which has improved the profile of the area - so much so that now my cousin and his wife are out hunting for a house to buy and finally settle in there.

On the same topic, same sex marriages continue to divide America - Supreme Courts of states on the liberal North East coast have passed judgements approving these unions. Politicians have tried to veto it. In Vermont, the state legislature over ruled the Governor's veto and allowed the unions to be legalised. Some states like New Jersey offer 'union' but not marriage recognition - a convenient way to skirt the argument that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. California, the state of Harvey Milk and an early pioneer of gay rights recently had a referendum where the public rejected the legislation to legalise gay marriage.

The influence of the strong Christian right and conservative groups can be seen in this ideological fight in the US. Its northern neighbour Canada passed a national law two years back legalising such marriages. European nations such as Belgium, Netherlands and Sweden too recognise such marriages. Even the much derided South Africa, considering its grave HIV problems legalised these unions three years back.

The riches of any town in the US is based on the value of its land, I am told. The more valuable your land, the higher taxes those inhabiting them pay and the more revenue the city council generates. Poor neighbourhoods mean poorer values and poorer cities. I am visiting the almost four hundred years old Harvard University campus. Being one of the oldest institutions of America, the university enjoys a lot of clout and a non-profit entity status - which means that it is exempt from paying taxes on the huge real estate it occupies. That has resulted in lower revenues for the council of Cambridge, the town that Harvard is officialy located in. So the neighbourhoods around Cambridge are not as affluent as the University that sits there. I am told its a great place to see and walk around only as long as you confine yourself to the campus. I have heard that line being said to young women for a few spots around my city of Delhi.

Train delays are all too common in India. We are used to our trains stopping in the middle of the countryside with passengers having no clue as to where they are and why they have stopped. On my way back to Boston, the Amtrak train looks all set to take more than its scheduled time of 4 hours. Just before New York, one of the overhead lines have tripped and the electricity has failed. We are informed over the PA system of the train that there might be an 'unspecified' delay since a diesel engine may have to be called to tow the train in case the power isnt restored. I am laughing and giggling in my seat everytime this announcement is made - Go get Laloo and learn a thing or two! A bullock cart towing an electricity train....now wudnt that be exciting.

Eventually they do fix the electricity and we move. I miss my first connecting train to New Jersey and spend another three quarters of the hour waiting for the next one. Its almost half past eleven when i reach the my suburban station. With no shuttles or cabs available i have no option but to work a sweat and walk the 2 kms to my hotel. The roads are deserted, the houses are dark and quiet and all through my walk i see only a handful of cars passing by but not a single soul on the road. I am not sure i would be lining up for more of such bravado walks.

P.S. I am not missing the IPL too much here in the States. You dont get live streaming or TV telecast, but I did miss out on the fakeipl player blog. Read a bit of it yesterday and it is simply hilarious! Poor KKR - wat a season they are having. And SRK as Dildo?!! rotfl! They are wondering who is writing it - some speculate it is Harsha Bhogle, some say Aakash Chopra. Both are too nice and civil gentlemen to indulge in this. Given all the SRK and KKR bashing going on there my guess is its Aamir - Dildo...Bhookha Naan, BubLee, Little John, Lordie.... :D :D

A for Amreeka

2009-04-23T05:17:00.001+05:30

Deep down perhaps every Indian middle class young boy harbors a dream of visiting America. It is shaped in many cases by a desire to replicate relatives in the family who have been to the land or in most others by the exposure to soft culture of Archies, Hollywood and Mcdonalds. If you are a graduate techie being turned out of those myriad engineering colleges of India, then the US of A is your ultimate onsite destination.

Unlike the previous occasion, this time my journey to the airport from my house is smooth. That’s because my flight is before the mad rush hour at midnight and beyond and also because the day is dry and there aint any rain to clog Delhi roads. Check in is slow and it takes me 15 mins for reach the counter from the end of the line. It takes another 10 for the check in counter official to weigh my baggage and get my boarding pass out between his chuckles and jokes with a colleague. There are somethings even a swanky modern airport cannot change.

The immigration officer is interested to know what Accenture (my employer) does. By now I am tired of giving this explanation – despite the huge sums that we spend on television advertising, people still do not know us. Or well at least the average common man doesn’t. Even the urbane ones who might be watching English news channels where our advertisements are a regular feature are clueless when the name is mentioned. Neither have past full page ads in newspapers been of any help. I am also tired of referring to the firm as the one with Tiger Woods ads. No one seems to have a clue about Woods. So now, I just let it be – I politely inform the immigration officer of our scope of services. He asks whether we are still recruiting. I sense this as an inquiry of an interested father for his kid than that of a customs official. He says the outlook is improving and that things shall change in the next few months. As evidence he points to the upward movement in the ‘market’. I want to believe him, I am flying to the States – someone must be needing my services.

Emirates has an in-flight entertainment system that simply captivates me. There is a good variety to choose from amongst movies, TV shows and songs (the 13 hour flight from Dubai to JFK had about 20 new movies on the menu along with countless older ones, including Hindi classics such as ‘Golmaal’ and ‘Chupke Chupke’). There is an informative section that tells you about the movement of the flight and metrics such as altitude, speed, time at the destination and the distance travelled. What takes the cake are the two cameras installed on the exterior of the plane whose live feed can be seen on the screen by passengers – the first camera is on the nose and the second on the underbelly. It’s a treat to switch either of those on during take off and landing. I didn’t miss my window seat on both the flights courtesy the cameras.

New York is cloudy and damp when I land. The last few minutes of the flight witness my attention being captured by an engaging conversation on the seats to my right between a US national of Somali descent and an white American lady from Florida. The Somali is bemoaning the state of his nation, his inability to meet with his Syrian wife and kids and the plight of his family back home. Conversation turns then to the scourge of piracy affecting the seas of the coast of Somalia and the lack of action by the international community to correct the state of affairs in the nation. It is difficult to escape the passion of the Somali as he stresses the failures of his nation and more so of those who could have prevented them from occurring.

‘Khanna as in Vinod Khanna?’ asks the woman at the prepaid taxi service counter at JFK upon seeing my passport. She is of Thai origin and finally helps me with a reservation after two of her colleagues tell me that their cabs don’t travel to the town where I am staying (Parsipanny in Jersey, an hours’ drive from NY). She informs me that she met Shatrughan SIngha at the JFK once and is aware how actively both the above mentioned actors are involved in politics.

There is a debate going on in America after President Obama subtly switched his stand on torture investigation and stated that Justice Department officials who approved of torture techniques may be investigated. It’s the first indication that the Bush administrationmay be hauled for its brave efforts to ‘change the world’. The Republicans of course are up in indignation and Dick Cheney has issued a war cry. On my cab drive, we are listening to a radio station which is blatantly Republican. The radio jockey after interviewing a dumb bimbette who claims she made her two daughters to run up and down a mile long road on a cliff so as to stop them from fighting each other, then proceeds to take calls. A caller says that torture is not what is done to Al-Qeda but what was done to victims of 9/11, that watching people jump from burning high rises is torture. This jockey then in a grave somber tone that sounds straight out of a campaign race proceeds to tell ‘American people’ that they are not safer than they were pre 9/11, that the current President has no stomach to fight enemies of the nation and that torture is done with the aim to achieve the ultimate good of ‘extracting information’. Next morning at breakfast I watch a Fox news telecast that is debating the same – it has three panelists on the show, two of whom are blatant republicans while one tries to strike a middle ground. The anchor again reminds us that torture yields information that is essential to save the country. The President is castigated by the Republican leaning panelists of succumbing to left wing liberals while deciding to investigate tortures. Listening to this debate, you wouldn’t be surprised that Americans are so reviled in the countries which are the worst sufferers of Islamic extremism. You would also not be surprised that despite 8 years of ‘war on terror’, the US still has no clue about the root causes of the threats faced by it.

Roll the dice gentlemen!

2009-03-26T21:41:00.009+05:30

Posted by Aftab Khanna, who on the gentle goading of Tony Sebastian, has finally decided to try and foresee things before they have happened

“The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win” – Leonid Brezhnev

Comrade Brezhnev might well have spoken for all us sitting at our homes in front of television screens and twiddling our thumbs as the great Indian tamasha gets underway once again. Opinion polls have been banned this time around – thus sparing the politicians many an anxiety and depriving our pollsters of their moments under the arc lights. The election process, one cant help but feeling, is poorer for the same. It was fun seeing spokespersons of major political parties denying all the poll findings if they were against them and then crucifying the pollsters on counting day when results went in their favor. Conversely the party projected to win would end up being cheated by the pollsters and suffer a reverse at the hustings. The spokespersons would go on to deride the very same polls that they were trumpeting a few weeks back.
India is a strange democracy and stranger still are its elections. It’s a country where the Intelligence Bureau instead of gathering evidence of upcoming terror strikes (I am sorry for making them sound like a music concert, but that’s the regularity and seriousness they acquired under the UPA) actually goes out and collects intelligence against the political rivals of the incumbent. The IB is the oldest pollster in the country and perhaps has a higher accuracy rate than even the likes of Prannoy Roy and Yogendra Yadav. You would have heard the old cliché – Indian elections are notoriously difficult to predict. It got a shot in the arm in 2004 when all the opinion polls (and surprisingly even the exit polls) got their results completely wrong. The electorate is so fragmented and so diverse that to reach the correct prediction is to play a game of snakes and ladders on a thousand square field. Yet there are some who carry the burden of psephology (would you believe it, MS Word 2007 does not even have this word in its dictionary; pollsters rival only investment bankers these days when it comes to earning discredits) and enlighten us as to the fate that awaits us ahead.

Yours truly is not a bearer of this burden – simply a patient of swivel chair (that’s the one I sit on) analysis. Hence, as Sir Tony would agree, in an extraordinarily courageous display of pre-emption, he now goes ahead and puts his neck on the line and attempts to gaze into a very hazy crystal ball.

The Congress: The grand old party of India is losing allies as its vehicle chugs along the bumpy electoral road. Lalu Yadav may have been temporarily estranged (both him and Mulayam would come back to the UPA to demand their pound of flesh in a post poll scenario) but it is the loss of the PMK in Tamil Nadu that would perhaps hurt the party the most. It would struggle to retain its tally of 10 seats in the state and its alliance partner DMK seems to have already thrown in the towel. The party seems set to gain in Punjab and Kerala and would lose in Haryana, Bihar, Jharkhand, Assam and Tamil Nadu. Key to the Congress’ fortune would lie in the states of Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh (with the last two being bellwether states in my estimate). The party would need to rout the BJP in Rajasthan, retain more or less the same seats in Maharashtra and minimize its losses in Andhra to even entertain hopes of government formation. Anything under 140 seats and the Congress would be at the mercy of Mamta, Mulayam and, in scenario nothing short of a nightmare for them, perhaps Jayalalitha and the Left.
Projection – 135 to 148 seats

The BJP: The Bhartiya Jalopy Party would be hoping for a repeat of the fortunes of 2004, not of their own but of the Congress! The Congress went into the polls then with no one giving it a fig leaf’s chance and trumped all the analysts and pollsters. Unlike the Congress in 2004 however, the BJP has failed to stitch together coherent alliances and seems set to pay the penalty. Its loss of Naveen Patnaik would cost it in Orissa (though like Lalu, the BJD too would come back to its erstwhile ally if push comes to shove) and the party would suffer reverses in Rajasthan. It seems set to more or less even out gains in J&K, HP, Gujarat and Jharkhand with marginal losses in MP, Chattisgarh and Maharashtra. Key to its fortunes would be to achieve damage limitation in Rajasthan and hope that Nitish Kumar swings Bihar their way with at least 20+ seats. But it’s still a tough shot for the BJP to emerge at the same levels as 1999. It would need to surprise us all a bit – sweep Gujurat, Karnataka and MP massively, raise its tally in Maharashtra and most of all, grab at least 20 seats in UP. That seems asking for a bit too much from Mr.Advani. The party’s only route to power is thus to cobble up around 140 seats on its own, hope that Jaya sweeps Tamil Nadu, the TDP alliance sweeps Andhra, Naveen Patnaik takes Orissa handsomely and all of them return to the NDA fold – if Mr.Advani and Mr.Jaitley pull that off, then I for one at least wont grudge them their 5 years of power.
Projection – 120 to 135 seats

Third Front: Can the reincarnated ‘Teesra Morcha’ grab power from under the noses of the UPA and NDA? Despite all their media blitz and ‘shor’ this cabal of regional players (accept it, the Left is a regional player) faces some quite steep hurdles. The Left is all set to slide from the high of 59 to around mid 30s in the new Lok Sabha. Naveen Patnaik, if he chooses to go with the Third Front, may not deliver the same seats as last time (11 of 20), since he fights alone and faces anti-incumbency both at state and parliamentary level. Third Front’s door to power rests on several shaky hinges – Mayawati has to outperform in UP and come close to a tally of 50, TDP must win around 30 and agree to stay with the Front and Jayalalitha should also reach a tally of 30. With these numbers and around 35 seats of the Left, the Front would hit 140+; that’s a range at which both Lalu and Mulayam (sure to underperform and return with lower numbers) may decide to grab a bite at power and change camps. If Naveen Patnaik too takes the third turn, then with numbers in excess of 150, the Third Front dream can hope to face the dawn of realization. The Congress may then be called upon to support the front from a position of weakness and we can all happily return back to the days of 1996.
But will it happen?? Will Mulayam join a front with Maya? More importantly will Mayawati reach near that figure of 50 in UP? Will both the TDP and Jaya outperform? And will the Congress agree to bide time and prepare for 2014 and extend outside support?
Projection – 110 to 125 seats

So what are we looking at after the polls? Make no mistake, India might well face a long summer with political parties slugging it out in the lack of a clear mandate. Deals would be struck, sides will be changed and there will be plenty of entertainment on offer. One won’t be surprised if there is a complete deadlock for a few days and the new Prime Minister gets sworn in only around late June. Here’s how the scenarios may pan out –

Probable– Congress reaches around 140; Lalu and Mulayam, both emerge weaker but rejoin the UPA and a Third Front constituent joins in while a couple of existing and dispensable allies are ditched. The alliance scrapes through to 272.

Somewhat Likely – Congress on its own is around 125 - 130 but the Third Front, let down by Mayawati’s inability to effect a decisive sweep, is also not strong enough to stake an independent claim. In a grand reconciliation the Left decides to bury its differences and carries along a couple of its Third Front partners to the UPA, once again supporting from outside. In such a case, Manmohan Singh might have to end up paying for his anti-Left tirade of the last 12 months.

Slightly less likely – Mayawati trumps everyone, sweeps UP and establishes presence through wins in Punjab and MP. She commands the Third Front along with Jayalalitha who also decimates the DMK in Tamil Nadu. The Congress, stranded at around 120 is left with no option but to cede momentum to the ladies.

Less likely – The NDA sweeps Gujarat, MP, Bihar; improves marginally in UP and Maharashtra and minimizes losses in Rajasthan and Orissa. It reaches a tally close to 200; the Third Front breaks up, the AIADMK and TDP with around 30 seats each finally propel Mr.Advani to Race Course Road.

Of course, I could be massively wrong. The least likely scenario may well turn out to be the most likely after the votes are counted. Predictions in Indian polls, more than astrology, can go horribly off the mark. Hence, you are advised to add a pinch of salt to your popcorn, as you read the same. And in case you feel badly let down by this author when the results finally come out, you are welcome to return to this post and smash some eggs on its face.

A Dirty Rag

2009-03-13T20:21:00.010+05:30

If you ever needed evidence that the institution of ragging needed strict regulation, then ladies and gents you have it right here before you. A young boy, a year out of school, with dreams and aspirations in his eyes, yet to come of age and discover the cynicisms of this world has paid the price with his life for upholding the grand legacy of this so called annual tradition in our colleges. This sadly is what ragging has come down to in our ‘professional’ institutions; what kind of members such institutions shall contribute to their professions is a question to ponder over. Doctors/ Engineers/ Lawyers who would not think twice before banging someone’s head mercilessly into a concrete wall. People who see nothing wrong in subjecting those junior to them (in age, perhaps not in mind) to the worst of psychological humiliations and physical abuse. People who are able to conjure up strange notions of power within their fiefdoms of college hostels and exercise that power brutally. People who get away every year with the tacit approval and lack of action by the institutions they supposedly claim to study in. Welcome to the grand tradition of college ragging, under the guise of which we have been passing off abuse and harassment – and now murder.

The Supreme Court came out with its anti-ragging guidelines in 2001 – the very year that I entered college. At that time I remember it sparked of a debate in the college circuits. Delhi University students were bristling with self righteousness and proclaiming how ragging was an ice breaking institution that was high on the fun quotient and necessary to initiate their ‘fucchas’ and foster camaraderie between the freshmen and varsity. Of course, they had a point. On the very first day of college that year, Hindustan Times photographed five varsity students of Hindu College making three freshmen to go on haunches, put their hands to their ears and become what our schoolteachers used to say in an age long gone by, ‘murgaas’. That photograph, of five laughing seniors and three bended juniors made the front page of the newspaper the next day and all around my class there was one sentiment – how idiotic! Couldn’t those fools see that they were being photographed? (The seniors in the snap were temporarily suspended)

Every year our colleges put up notices ‘advising’ students against ragging. Every year stories come out. There are the first set of stories – the polite ones, the tellers of which will come up and claim what a wonderful tradition ragging is. Stories of vulgar songs being asked to be sung, stories of sexually driven young boys who have had limited interactions with the other sex asking their juniors to ‘go and propose to that girl’. These are stories whose veil you would never care to lift. You would smile, pass them on as signs of coming of age, ignore the signals and turn a blind eye.

And then there is the other set. The one that flows out of our medical and engineering colleges. Ask any student who has passed out of such an institution and you would know where I am coming from. I have heard tales of people being asked to strip, humiliated because they belonged to a particular caste, being told in the middle of the night to fetch liquor from outside for their seniors, people being slapped, caned, pulled by their hair and beaten up and girls being asked to dance nude. Now I know I sound a bit of an idealist on this blog at times, but please pray tell me in what civilized world does all the above count as steps of ‘initiation and building of espirit de corps’? And if indeed such acts are vital to break down walls of inhibitions that juniors possess when they enter college, then why don’t the same rules apply when our kids enter kindergarten or high school, when recruits enter the army or when we join a job after getting out of our colleges? My question is quite simple - would you accept your workplace tolerating your boss slapping and stripping you and pulling your hair? Would you laugh off lightly if tomorrow your kid’s head is smashed into the school wall when he enters kindergarten?

I can see where the strength and reasoning for ragging is derived. Colleges are places without codified rules of behavior. There are no codes of conduct, no uniforms and no class teacher to make you behave. It is a place for losing your innocence, for venturing into the big bad world after coming out of the protecting environs of your home. Young kids, specially in hostels, come across a diversity that they perhaps have not seen before in their lives. There is a sense of community and belongingness, driven by the feeling of everyone being far away from home. The hostel is your home. Your mates your brothers. A sense of authority prevails over those who enter the premises under you. A culture of patronage and protection – all under the garb of fostering ties and interaction. There is a sense of power hitherto unknown. Combine that power with regional and caste biases, a thrill at the ‘adventure’ on offer, a closeted sexuality demanding exploration and a knowledge that you are ‘one in a mob’, that ‘everyone does it, so why shouldn’t you?’ What do you get? Lifelong friendships – maybe. Camaraderie – maybe. Murder? Ah well, that’s just an unfortunate byproduct. So what if some people are abused and their heads smashed? We must have our dose of the cocktail of power.

The only explanation of ragging that anyone could offer me was – ‘Because I also got ragged’. Every batch claims it was more progressive than its seniors and that they ‘didn’t rag as much as they had suffered’.

The colleges, of course, can only shrug their shoulders every time an incident happens. In the recent case, the principal accused was a repeat offender – yet hadn’t been reprimanded even once. Institutions won’t act due to influence, fear of negative publicity and police scrutiny. The students won’t complain because they have to spend their academic life with those who harass them. They will simply bear the pain and insults and smile on gamely. And this ‘grand tradition’ of crass display of power derived from coercion will continue to roll along unabated.

Well, I am afraid but as the recent incident demonstrates this is a matter where we have exhausted all limits of self regulation. Unfortunately, Indian courts, police and the executive will now be called to enter into our colleges – not to frame educational policies and reform the functioning, not to demand an increase in budgetary allocations, not to call for improvement of infrastructure, but to police the students. And that, if you have passed out of a college in this country, along with the death of Aman Kachru, is a matter of utter collective shame.

With much Fan fare

2009-03-02T13:55:00.003+05:30

Is it only me or are there other people also out there who think that there is something fishy about all these Bollywood movie awards? Times of India yesterday ran a full page story on this year’s Filmfare awards (Filmfare being a sister publication commanded natural space) and the list of awardees was well, how should I put it, a bit like reading a half well selected Indian team. It raises your eyebrows but only in a mild arc. Of course, you can always argue that all the awards doled out in India end up raising more than just arc – usually they raise a ruckus, mostly by those who have missed out and in the case of Milkha Singh a few years ago even by those who have received it. So why should yours truly raise his eyebrows only at poor Bollywood and at Filmfare? Perhaps because they came a week after the Oscars and howsoever illogical this may sound, I couldn’t help drawing a comparison. And perhaps because, Filmfare still claims to award India’s equivalent of the Oscars. It is rightly the oldest film awards function in Bollywood and can claim to command a certain degree of respect, perhaps by its sheer weight of history.

In the recent years of course, that respect, credibility and the comfort zone of Filmfare has been challenged by a slew of ‘me too’ clones. All you need these days of course is a publication that lends the media machine to your awards, a television channel that will ensure the sponsors and the entertainment factor and a lead sponsor to shell out all those mega bucks to the dancing stars. The trend was started by Screen (with Indian Express and Star), followed by Zee and now you have those hideous India International Film Awards that are a blatant way to rip off money from all those pravasi bhartiyas crazy about Hindi films (to the extent that they are held every year in an offshore destination; though I would like to see how many dollars the pravasis would shell out in this time of a downturn or perhaps it might well be yours and mine TV eyeballs that would bankroll the event). What all this does mean is that there is a competitive pressure amongst all these awards and since sponsors and revenues shall all be decided by the TV ratings, it becomes imperative to ensure that those don’t drop. And the safest way to guarantee TV ratings is to make sure that you get SRK to dance. But why should SRK dance at one function and not at another. So in this competition enters another element now. Give the star an award, give him a reason to attend and then make him dance. Everyone goes home happy – the star gets awarded, the commercial film gets lauded, sponsors make money and TV gets rating. And credibility? Ah pray what’s that again please??

Of course, the above is just a theory and conjecture (I want to qualify that, you never know when this blog might hurt the sensibilities of an idiot who might then drag me to court, as is happening with disturbing frequency recently) – but as I look down the list of the Filmfare awardees this year I can’t help but get that uncomfortable churn. Was Hrithik’s seriously a better performance than Nasser’s in ‘A Wednesday’? Was ‘Jodha Akbore (oops Akbar!) seriously a better film than say a ‘Mumbai Meri Jaan’ or an ‘A Wednesday’, a ‘Dev D’ or even ‘Rock On’ in terms of its narrative, tightness of script and communication of message? To satisfy any such concern, all these awards have found a convenient circumnavigation tool called ‘Critics Awards’. It’s a bit like handing out a return gift to the kids at a birthday party, a mere tool to acknowledge a presence and to keep the noise level down. So this year, Mumbai Meri Jaan has taken most of the Critics Awards. Movies like Oye Lucky have also found luck in the technical categories like Dialogue, categories about which the TV viewing public and the sponsors don’t give a fig about. But when it comes to the big draws, the Best Actors, Directors and Movie, big budget cinema (I won’t use the word successful since there always seems to be a debate about whether a movie was ‘hit’ or ‘miss’) called the shots.

Whatever we might think about the snobbishness and early morning shenanigans of the Oscars, you have to give them credit on two counts. One, they manage to achieve the right amount of slick quotient required for high quality TV coverage and second, agree or not with the final list of rewards, you would hardly find any controversies about the nominations. Most of them would deserve their place. In fact the Academy quite often supplants the big studios and doles out Uncle Oscar to the small budget ones. Surprisingly they manage to affect this snub and still put forward an effective TV show. A movie like the ‘The Dark Knight’ managed two Oscars out of eight nominations with one of them being the certainty of Heath Ledger’s win. Had it been India, the movie would have swept the awards circuit by the sheer weight of its collections. Not taking away anything from Chris Nolan who as a critic remarked ‘created Shakespeare out of a comic book’, there were perhaps other and deeper performances that pipped the caped crusader. Of course, the Oscars are not without their share of murmurs and some newspapers claimed that Slumdog was nominated and won a bundle of awards simply to ensure that TV revenues from the sub-continent were high. It was a bit like that old argument about Indians winning Miss Universe and Miss World titles so that Fair and Lovely could sell more (when was the last time an Indian girl won a beauty pageant by the way?? And is Fair and Lovely still selling despite all those national setbacks at Miss Universe and Miss World contests?)

Perhaps a way out could be to have an industry body conducting the awards. I remember seeing a Producers’ Guild Awards on NDTV last year and you could instantly see why such an idea will hit so many roadblocks in India. The audience present could not even fill a school auditorium and almost none of the major winners in the ‘popular’ categories of music and acting were present. Maybe in India we should stop fretting and simply accept that our awards are weighed towards commercial success and that it shall often be difficult to break that glass ceiling and bring an element of credibility. The only way out is to then treat them as those doling out these awards do – not recognition of cinematic excellence but simply as toffee handouts on the birthday party. The bigger fist shall get the lion’s share. The spectacled geeky boy shall be shoved around and then pitied and handed a token to assuage everyone’s conscience.

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Can the Election Commission please announce the election dates and spare us all the agony of looking at full page government advertisements and blaring declarations of achievement on radio by various state ‘sarkars’. I am amazed to see that after so many years of inactivity, every day India is seeing a flurry of inaugurations and foundation stones. Of course, in our country, foundation stones remain just that - stones. The only ones benefiting from all this wasteful expenditure of your and my money are media companies designing these ads, the singers and actors finding employment in them and the print media that gets almost five to six pages of sarkari income every day. Perhaps the government can put a charitable spin on it and say that this is a thinly veiled bailout package for the Times of India and the Hindustan Times. Who cares about public money as long as the monkeys can scratch each other’s backs?

Quixote at the mills

2009-01-21T13:28:00.003+05:30

There is a strange kind of debate going on in the Indian media as Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire prepares to hit the screens this Friday. One of the disadvantages of round the clock media coverage, as we have all realized by now, is that a lot of inanity finds prime time viewership that is quite disproportionate to its significance to public debate. The arguments over whether Slumdog glorifies Indian poverty and thus consequently establishes that only Indian slums sell to the west is one such. The Hindi news channels, having by now long forsaken any pretense at news coverage and generating public opinion, have concentrated all their energies on blowing the trumpet for the movie and blaring its soundtrack even more diligently than MTV or the radio channels. Slumdog hardly needs any pre-release publicity; the mad frenzy that has gripped our news networks, who have by now done multiple interviews with anyone remotely associated with the movie, has ensured that enough people will be queuing up to buy tickets on day one even without posters, television campaigns or star appearances of its cast of actors. The English media, particularly the television one, has taken up the cudgels and run debates on whether the four Golden Globes amply prove that a romanticized picture of Indian poverty presented by an acceptable foreigner is enough to set the critics from New York, Hollywood and London running. Is Slumdog glorifying and selling Indian poverty?

Forgive me for being a bit thick, but there are far too many layers that I detect and am unable to unravel. At one level, there is the old fear. That of being identified still as the land of elephants and snake charmers and sadhus lying on bed of nails. This is the fear of the India of thirty years back – that realized too late that much of its spiritual charm for westerners lay in its image of being a place of hardship and renunciation. Placed alongside that, the snake charmers, the slums, the sewage and the grime seemed to complete an appropriate picture. India was a yogic land content in its dirt and at ease with its nakedness and flies. Of course, by the time India itself realized this image, a lot of time had passed and a lot of catching up to be done. This is an image that every Indian now seeks to suppress. Added to this is a new generation of monetarily empowered middle class Indians, the beneficiaries of the unlocking of gates achieved in 1991. And it is this semi-professional, confident and semi-nationalist Indian who now cringes at the mention of his country’s scars. For this Indian, the rise of an Infosys, economic growth, fancy office s and glitzy malls and rising consumer choice and consumption are enough to show that the tide has turned and the dirty, spiritual home of hippies is now a bright spanking Elevate. More than movie critics, it is this Indian who wonders why Jamal Malik’s and not his story makes the Western audiences sit up and award Golden Globes. This Indian begs the question as to why, when he has achieved skill based growth, must the world still look at Dharavi for inspiration. This Indian essentially contests the fact that Jamal Malik and not he is the true representative of his nation.

Alas, statistics, our urban landscape and daily realities of life are against him. For while he might have grown, a great of number of his countrymen are still slumdogs. More importantly, what he forgets is that the person sitting next to him on the high table of self achieved prosperity had some generation of his family that rose from those slums. He overlooks the wonderful stories of those who found inspiration to break out of those stinking drains and cramped houses and let their height grow to catch more the sun. He forgets that in India’s slums are born the dreams of desire. He forgets that he is the inspiration for those dreams. That those living cheek by jowls in India’s many Dharavis look to him and say to themselves – if he can, we can.

Essentially, this young Indian is insecure. Insecure of being pushed back to the land of renunciation and sadhu ashrams. Insecure that the world may fail to recognize him as it looks at India slums. He forgets that what he protests against is a story similar to his – a story of rising against adversity, of facing challenges and summoning grit to achieve a holy grail. Jamal Malik typifies India – yet to let go of it slums and scars, but not lacking in spirit to rise in this world and seeking a better life on his credentials alone. Slumdog is a tale of an India in transformation and howsoever much wealth the insecure Indian may amass, he cannot ignore the slums that dot his urban landscape. For in those slums lie the dreams of tomorrow and from there came the achievers of today.

I put this state of needless debate as my Facebook status and received some interesting responses. One friend was particularly galled by what he called Western hypocrisy in not showcasing their own poverty. That I believe is bit harsh. The West has been more self critical and inward looking that any other part of the current world. You only need to dive into the body of work of a Quentin Tarantino or a Martin Scorcese to explore the cinematic depiction of the underbelly of America. Another friend wondered whether all it takes to win a Booker these days is to get a degree from a foreign university, write about India and romanticize its poverty, corruption and caste system. He believes the west is excited about India’s plagues. I beg the question – Is India aware and excited about it plagues? The answer I leave for you to ponder. I could write another post defending Arvind Adiga’s book but I will mention only two points – read it and judge if you disagree with the picture of rural and urban life of India that he paints. And the second – all around me I see protagonists of Adiga’s book emerging. My grandparents’ young servant – son of a landless labourer from Bihar has taught himself to read English, owned and chucked a cell phone, bought a DVD player, likes to get his hair gelled and coloured, swears by the principle of ‘living within your monetary means’ and not taking debt and dreams one day to be an entrepreneur caretaking multiple residential dwellings. When I look at him, I realize that Adiga and Boyle do not speak to me in an alien language. These stories are resonating around India. These ambitions shall propel India. We must embrace them rather than shying away from accepting the place of their birth. We are, as a nation, surely self-confident enough to look at ourselves honestly in the mirror – to admire our beauty and understand our warts.

Satyam Skeletons Tumblelum

2009-01-08T10:34:00.001+05:30

In this season of terrorist strikes and bomb blasts, Satyam chief Ramalinga Raju has left potentially the most damaging piece of explosive amidst the set up of corporate India. If Raju’s suicide note/ confession/ conscience call/ whatever you may choose to label it based upon whatever levels of credulity are still left in you after today, does not shake the susceptible foundations of corporate conduct in India then believe me, nothing will. For ladies and gentlemen, this is not a government controlled sick PSU that has been eating away public money for ages and now has come into the limelight. This is a success story (or an ex success story, again based on your remaining levels of optimism about the company) of the new Indian economy and its sunshine sector. This is the sector and the industry that we sell to the world, this is the service our nation is now synonymous with instead of bullock carts, elephants and snakes. In one stroke of his pen (literally!), Mr.Raju has done tremendous damage to this nation’s reputation and effectively signed away the one asset that any business can possess and lose only once – credibility.

For years we have been making jokes about Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Andersen; now we have our very own corporate fraud to humour ourselves with. Yours truly has gone ahead done the same with the title of this post. But this is no laughing matter after all. This is a heady cocktail of corporate fraud, auditor negligence, regulatory oversight and boardroom corruption all mixed together. Raju is nothing but the tip of this iceberg that might well leave more than a few cracks in different corporate Balance Sheets that now seem nothing less than floating Titanics.

Satyam’s fraud has taken the sheen off the Indian IT sector and smashed all concepts of corporate governance and Clause 49 to bits. You wonder what chance corporate governance can have in a country like ours where you can buy your way into anything and where CFOs, Managing Directors, Independent Directors and Auditors can sign off on Financial Statements misstated by crores. And the saddest truth is that all of this would have conveniently been undetected had the dominos not started falling post that abortive attempt to acquire family held companies by the Satyam chief. You and I would have gladly believed Satyam to be a blue chip stock on account of its high revenues, operating margins and huge cash reserves. We would have bought the stock at the markets and hoped it to stay steady as the market rides a recession. None of us would have ever known that revenues are overstated, margins are scanty (3%!!), cash reserves simply don’t exist and that the tone at the top is one set by crooks. In a sense Satyam has belied our faith in the accuracy of corporate announcements, results and financials – there seems little ‘satya’ in all the jargon spouted by the companies and the analysts. You and I will now look at every success story in India with a degree of scepticism; every corporate profit surge will now have to pass the ‘Satyam test’ and this loss of faith is one reason sufficient enough for Mr.Raju to be prosecuted criminally. If you can make fat bonuses and salaries by running your company and make gains through insider training, then you might as well face the flak when the chickens come home to roost.

The question everyone will (or atleast should) ask is, how can Rs 5000crs of cash and bank balances be overstated? As someone who belongs to the profession and has audited cash and bank balances numerous times, I can safely state that such a fraud is simply not possible without connivance of either the auditors or the banks. Audit firms at end of every period compare bank balances in company books with bank statements and balance confirmations obtained on bank letterheads and signed and stamped by the banks. Clients, if they are really innovative, can circumvent this check by printing/ obtaining forged bank stationery and stamps to fool the auditors. This amounts to a scam of Telgi proportions! Auditors can guard against this risk by confirming bank balances independently of client intervention by writing directly to banks – this exercise is adopted at each year end for both debtor and bank balances. During my days as an auditor such letters sent directly to the banks were even posted by us by our very own hands and near our houses so that the client could not lay a hand on them! Now, do you realise why we should all be so interested in finding out the answers that the auditors have to offer? Satyam’s failure is a serious blot on Indian financial reporting and must be treated as such. It calls to question the emphasis that audit firms now place on dressing up audit evidence rather than on actual procedures (all Big 4 practitioners will have some tales to recall in this regard). It also questions the golf course and meeting room kind of corporate deals that occur between large investors, merchant bankers (Merill Lynch by selling shares a day before Raju’s confession might have some questions to answer on its own), CEOs and auditors whereby all financial problems of the company miraculously vanish.

As this story unfolds you would have people appearing on television screens stating how this is a one off case and will not have a long term impact. Well if you want to turn this nation into a banana republic where money can buy anything, then yes Satyam will not have an impact. But make no mistake, this is not an isolated case. Open more books and you will have more dirt tumbling out. We live in a world of Russian roulette – the one that gets caught is a thief, the rest are all saints…till another knife gets thrown and another target is struck. Sadly, I fear nothing much will turn out of our mad flapping. We need an accounting, financial reporting and corporate governance overhaul. We need to make financial frauds and fraudulent reporting into criminal rather than civil offences. We need an accounting regulator that realises that regulation is not about conducting exams and getting the government to issue notifications that guarantee bread earning certification for their vote bank of CAs and most importantly we need a SEBI with sharper teeth that possess a vicious bite. From what I have heard on television all this evening, I doubt any of this will happen. Business channels are worried whether Satyam’s fall will stop the short term rally in the markets. Can you believe it? The world is falling on the Indian IT sector and all that CNBC is concerned about is where the stock market will go! In fact, if anything is to be learnt from this episode, it is that market price of a share simply cannot be used as a barometer of company performance. Today no one cares for Cash reserves, profits accumulated or sound business models – all we care for are quick bucks on intra day trading and short selling. In a sense, the Satyam fall serves all of us desktop/ laptop stock market players right. We invest blindly and the Ramalinga Rajus of this world deservedly rob us of our money. Perhaps we can do better by realising that the BSE levels are not the end all and be all of corporate India’s performance. Perhaps its time to get back some qualitative aspects into businesses. Perhaps its time to get back some virtues that we teach to our kids day in and day out. I suggest we begin with the much abused virtue of honesty.

Year on Year

2008-12-26T23:30:00.003+05:30

I have the latest issue of the ‘Outlook’ magazine lying next to my bed and it asks a pertinent question on its year end cover – Was 2008 India’s ‘annus horibilis’? It’s a question that occurred to yours truly sometime around Diwali, when in a moment of somber reflection, memories of the previous ten months came flitting by. A year that even till then, had been a blood soaked one. A year that had seen multiple bomb blasts (worryingly most of them caused by home grown terrorists), had seen reverse terrorism by a section of the Hindu right, had witnessed brazen vandalization of churches and attacks on its faithful across Orissa and Karnataka, had given enough perceived reasons for the majority to doubt the minority, had seen politics plumb to newer depths with wads of notes being placed on Parliament’s table and had brought with it the final nail in the coffin of the once glorious and golden national sport of hockey.

At that moment of reflection, I quickly dismissed the thought. We had seen worse and we had overcome it. During my own cognitive lifetime, 1992, the spring of 2002 and the summer of 2000 had been much more depressing times on account of different reasons. But as Mumbai singed, struggled and wept my heart sank with it. Those four helpless days of end November, while not shaking my faith in the structures bestowed upon us by the founding fathers, made me question to a great extent our honesty and sincerity in preserving and improving them. We might be a nation of young people, with a fast growing economy and skilled population, with a mostly tolerant and cordial multi-cultural society but, and this is a significant but, if we are not honest towards our nation and our ideals we will be like a beautifully dressed ship standing in the middle of the ocean with no fuel to propel us towards safer shores; sitting still and vulnerable to plunder of every passing pirate.

So was 2008 India’s year of horror and will 2009 with its promise of continuing economic downturn, a divided polity, unending terror, troublesome and failed neighbors be year of horror raised to the power two?

No, says the ever erudite and balanced Ramachandra Guha in the middle of the ‘Outlook’ issue. No, if you lived through 1948 (the year of Gandhi’s death, Kashmir war and continuing displacement of partition in a new, uncertain nation) or through 1984 (the real annus horibilis if you ask me – Sikh terror, Operation Bluestar, Punjab under martial law, Indira Gandhi’ death, massive riots in Delhi and the Bhopal gas tragedy – a black year of death). With not much to be optimistic about as we turn gingerly into 2009, here’s to the one hope we can all carry – maybe 2009 will not be a 1984, maybe it will not even be a 2008; perhaps this nation will once again summon reserves of resolve that it did after the gloomy winters of 1984 and 1992. Despite the pessimism that surrounds us, yours truly is glad to be coming to you at the end of 2008 and not 1984.

There is no point to a year end post if I don’t subject you to a year end list, and you are perfectly excused if you want to put on your parachute and jump out of this web page now. Still I shall continue with my list, biased towards a natural Indian perspective, but still containing some global names and achievements. If you are still reading, then you may agree or disagree – either way you are perfectly entitled to add/ delete to or modify this list.

Event and person of the year: On a slightly cold early winter morning, change came to America. As Barack Obama accepted his victory in front of a packed Chicago park, the world watched, many with hope, some with uncertainty and some with disillusionment. No one backed him when in January he pitted himself against the might of the Clinton machine. Obama’s achievement was not that he won or for that matter that he won as a black man, but in the fact that he won by remaining honest to his beliefs and ideology. It is a fact which you realize after reading his brilliant book ‘The Audacity of Hope’. Throughout his campaign, Obama never shied away from confronting the tricky, thorny issues that define the fault lines of America today. When faced with embarrassing comments made by his black pastor about 9/11, Obama gave perhaps the best speech of his entire campaign. In an honest appraisal of America’s doubts he talked of how blacks still faced subtle economic and political resistance, of how the nation had still not pulled them out of their ghettos; but was balanced enough to point out that if his elderly grandmother felt uncomfortable when walking across two young black men on the street, then there had to be something wrong with the way they conducted themselves. He did not back down from questioning the commitment of young black fathers who abandon their kids and called for more responsibility to be taken by the community (you almost wish someone would cajole the Indian Muslim community the same way). Often accused of talking down to the blacks, Obama won neither because or despite his racial color. He won because he represented a fresh, honest and balanced face to America. There is much he stands to lose. Cynicism can quickly replace hope; events can quickly overwhelm individuals and Obama faces a Mt.Everest of problems on hand. The world watches as Obama sizes up the peak – the price of disillusionment will be high.

Worst call of the year: Political analysts might debate if John McCain’s presidency bid would have turned out differently had he not picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. One thing though, seems sure, McCain would have commanded a lot more respect and maybe even votes had the bimbo from Alaksa stayed as far away from his campaign as Anchorage is from New York. As the pitbull turned hockey mom slipped from one embarrassment to another, America found a reason to laugh amidst the economic gloom. The much proclaimed ‘Palin Effect’ did come, but in a direction reverse than that in which it was supposed to go. Now she wants to run for President in 2012. I can’t wait for the jokes to begin. Palin confirmed that age old adism – style without substance never sells.

Political coup of the year: No, this isn’t a military coup – it’s a coup that Manmohan Singh managed to pull off (with some help from another Singh) despite all the odds against him. When it seemed that the nuclear deal’s death was a ‘done deal’, Singh cocked a snook at the outdated Marxists, gave Prakash Karat a convenient goodbye and showed remarkable political acumen to bail his government out with considerable ease. Akshay Kumar acted in the movie but this year clearly there was another Singh who was King.

Gaffe of the year: I am spoilt for choice for this category. Not to be biased towards anyone’s propensity towards idiocity, it is fair that it should be shared by all the deserving. Simi Garewal for making us realize that our slums are mini-Pakistan, Narendra Modi for standing outside the battlefield of Oberoi Trident in Mumbai and showering his state’s crores on slain policemen, Sarah Palin (again!) for all her utterances, Oscar Fernandes for justifying the lynching of a corporate CEO and Mukhtar Naqvi of the BJP for making us look at the powdered and lipstick bearing faces of the women protesting against terror on our streets.

Worst business decision of the year: Granted that we are in difficult economic times, yet Jet Airways’ decision to sack around 1500 employees in one go secretly and without any notice period was nothing but an invitation to trouble. That the sacked employees, large enough in numbers to get organized and be noticed, went straight to the North Indian hating Raj Thackeray did not make matters any easy for Jet chairman Naresh Goyal. Overnight, he had a change of heart, realizing that the employees were like ‘family’ and he had responsibility towards them. This father won’t be shedding any extra kilos in the near future.

Villain of the year: But for Mumbai on 26/11, this award would have gone hands down to Raj Thackeray. The North Indian hater ‘marathi manoos’ caused much agony to his home city of Mumbai, made his goons bash up poor taxi drivers and railway exam students, tore away Mumbai’s remaining claims of cosmopolitanism and even managed to get the Marathi middle class to theoretically back his arguments. He was upstaged by his own city. Mumbai’s date with terror made Raj cower in fear in his home (his Sena all withdrew into their rat holes) and brought a new villain to our front pages – Ajmal Kasab might be a young gun toting brainwashed terrorist but he is symptomatic of our western neighbor that has no clue as to where it is going. Like Kasab, Pakistan is flailing its tentacles in all directions, firing mindlessly, hoping to catch anyone who comes in the line of fire. Yours truly has been calling it a failed state since the turn of the century. 2008 was the year when the world discovered this truth. As world opinion turned against it, Pakistan began the year with uncertainty (in the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination), elected a civilian government, saw the exit of a discredited dictator and installation of a discredited politician as President, endured bomb blasts caused by its own monsters and ended the year short of being officially classified as a rogue state. Pakistan though lives in denial – it still believes that it can use its home grown militants to achieve ‘strategic depth’ in Afghanistan and bleed India with thousand cuts. The army remains unrepentant and unwilling to acknowledge its lack of control, the ISI is still a state within a state and Pakistan has now turned in to a whore state – throw some billions at them and you can make them agree to do what you want. Like a prostitute, Pakistan can give you fake pleasure but not sincerity of purpose.

Movie of the year: Without a second thought it has to be ‘The Dark Knight’. A movie that turned the concept of superhero comic flicks on its head. The beginnings of shades of reality began with the new Toby Maguire Spiderman movies, was carried on by Chris Nolan’s ‘Batman Begins’ and finally came full circle with ‘The Dark Knight’. It was bleak, pessimistic, deep, and subtle with many layers of meaning and with surely one of the finest performances in a negative role in Hollywood history. How much did Heath Ledger’s premature death contribute to the movie’s success is a matter of speculation but Ledger is well on his way to a posthumous Oscar. The Knight acquires deeper significance in the environment of violence that we live in. In one of my favorite scenes from the movie, Batman’s butler Alfred narrates the tale of a Burmese thief of jewels who would hide in the jungles and steal valuables for pleasure. Alfred’s point being that some people are not after anything – they are in it for the sheer pleasure of anarchy they cause. When Batman asks as to how the Burmese thief was caught, Alfred nonchalantly replies that he wasn’t; the forest had to be burnt down. It illustrated the dilemmas that the protagonist of the movie and the world today face – whether the rules of civilization can be preserved in the fight against evil. The Joker calls upon people to spread anarchy, chaos, expect the unexpected and leave everything to random chance- see any resemblance with the mindless anarchy spread on our streets by gun wielding terrorists who want no money and no hostages? Like the Joker, they delight in seeing our disorder. The Dark Knight is perhaps then, a lot more relevant that what we might have thought it initially to be.

Failure of the year: The Australian cricket team. Ricky Ponting promised us new age cricket when he landed in India but instead oversaw the rise of a new age that promises to usher in an element of vulnerability in Australian cricket. After the disgrace of Sydney, Australia lost the off the field battle with the BCCI over the racism row and Ponting lost it on the field against a young gangly fast bowler from Delhi. Two consecutive lost tests at Perth, loss of their home one day series and a drubbing by an inspired Indian team – is it any wonder that Kevin Pietersen and England cant wait for the summer of 2009 to arrive and the Ashes to begin. The golden age of Aussie domination seems well and truly ‘over’.

Sporting moment of the year: In a year in which Indian cricket had much to cheer about and Indian hockey much to cry over, it is perhaps fitting that the list should recognize that one man who literally shot his nation to glory. Abhinav Bindra finally fulfilled his potential, shot a perfect round and in the terribly competitive world of shooting brought India its first individual Olympic gold. Whether this feat inspires more to emulate Bindra will depend upon whether Indian sports is governed by those who harbor love and affection for it. Indian sport can do with scheming Pawars and Dalmiyas but not with arrogant KPS Gills. Individually, MS Dhoni, Vishy Anand and Jeev Milkha Singh shined; Vijay Mallaya bought a sub standard team that gave a sub standard performance, both in F1 and IPL, Sachin Tendulkar exorcised ghosts of fourth innings failures, Virendra Sehwag found redemption, Saina Nehwal gained in stature and boxing promised current and future glory. But for the sheer weight of his achievement, Bindra upstaged them all. His victory was truly well its weight in gold.

Rub those eyes and open them please

2008-12-04T11:56:00.002+05:30

One of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoons is the one in which a daydreaming Calvin is suddenly woken up in his Geography class by his teacher Miss Wormwood. Oblivious to her question, Calvin gets a shock when Wormwood screams at him, “Calvin! Pay Attention! Now what state do you live in?!” A puzzled Calvin immediately responds with glee “Denial”, much to the exasperation of the hapless Miss Wormwood. Viewing and hearing the events and happenings of the last few days, you would think everyone around is living in a state of denial. Everyone, except the man on the road. For long, it was the average Joe traveling on a local bus or a suburban train who bore the brunt of our violent urban upheavals. Then came the turn of the middle class salaried professional and employees, shaken out of their assured world of housing EMIs, car loans and daily grind of work emails. Now it’s the elite; the swish set who even take a coffee break in a five star hotel; people you would find making a beeline in their expensive luxury cars to grab a table at the latest gourmet sensation at the swankiest of five star hotels. Across the spectrum, all the three sets of people are angry. Angry at those all around them who live in a state of denial.

Our political establishment is the obvious target and this time they have taken it in the full, smack in the middle of the face. And of course, they haven’t done themselves any favors by completely refusing to recognize the magnitude of the events that has struck the nation. Perhaps it is a different world that they inhabit, insulated from the grime, dust and above all insecurities of life outside of security cordon. You only had to hear Narendra Modi, RR Patil, the Kerala CM and Mukhtar Naqvi to realize how trivial our concerns are for them and how condescending they think they are being when hear what we have to say. What Naqvi and the Kerala CM expressed was nothing short of ridicule against those demanding some answers from them. Of course, theirs is a state of denial which refuses to believe that not every family in India wants a political spectacle made out of the martyrdom of its son and that in a democracy people, irrespective of the cost of their lipstick brand, have a right to peaceful protests that raise questions.
Modi and Patil along with Vilasrao Deshmukh live in a world where the concept of ‘sensibility’ does not exist. For Modi, it is essential to prove that he is the martial answer for the effete Hindu religion against a marauding Islam that threatens to swamp India. Hence, there he was, with absolutely no business to be standing at an encounter site in another state, holding forth on how the treasury of his prosperous Gujarat will be opened for an officer whom he believed to be anti-national and anti-Hindu a few days ago. My suggestion at that point of time was that Modi should have been made some use of and ushered into the Oberoi Trident by the NSG. His self proclaimed ‘chhappan ki chaathi’ (chest with a size of 56) could have been utilized as a safety shield by the battling commandos and we would all have found out how martially gifted our latest prime ministerial aspirant actually is. Patil and Deshmukh have of course done an admirable job of shepherding Mumbai from one disaster to another – each time they have been Neros watching the spectacle of a burning Rome; be it the floods (an annual occurrence now), train blasts, Raj Thackeray’s violence or the latest terror strike. Not once, has either one of them made an effort to connect with those they govern and offered either an understanding of emotional upheaval or showed grace in their response to the situation in hand. Instead, we have witnessed statements dismissing the attack as any other and the conducting of guided tourist tours for the CM’s friends. Taking your actor son along to a terror site may not be improper, but in a city singing with anger and despair, it smacks of a complete inability to comprehend the nature of the event and its impact on those affected by it.

The Indian state lives in its own world of denials – a world whether words can substitute action, where loyalty commands a greater price in the market than competence, where it is believed by those running the reins of the establishment that setting up committees rather than acting on implementation of their recommendations is enough to take care of a charged public opinion. The State it seems in complete denial about any need for reform, blind to the deficiencies and inadequacies of its intelligence apparatus. Faced with an angered electorate, the State is extending a long rope for itself – it needs to act and let me repeat again ‘it needs to ACT’ before that rope turns into a noose around its neck.

Like India, Pakistan too has put on the blinds. We may deny our need to reform but our neighbor denies the dilemmas of its existence. And now its military ‘establishment’ refuses to accept the presence of the monsters crawling under its bed, monsters that may lash out at a passer by with their extended claws but which would not hesitate a moment to turn inward and search for prey. Pakistan is a nation that faces a deep internal catharsis, it has a frontier that it cannot govern, it has a government that cannot take any hard decisions and it has an army that is adamant on the fact that it can sleep with the tiger at home and let it hunt abroad. Simply put, the army refuses to acknowledge the extent of the threat, stressing that it still has control, that it can talk and temper its terror machine. It’s an army that is yet to lose faith in its Frankenstein. By the time it does, there may not be a nation left for the soldiers to defend. And the price will be paid by the larger neighborhood where the brimming cup of instability will overflow.

But while nations on our eastern and western frontiers sink into a quagmire we must not fail on two counts. The country is disturbed and impatient and demanding action. And the state, to ensure its legitimacy must give them the same. While it’s essential to handle both Pakistan and Bangladesh with deft diplomacy, we must urgently raise the heights of our walls even if our options are limited with respect to use of force beyond them. Internal security has been crying for reform for decades and we have paid a heavy price for our bureaucratic ignorance. We must not, any longer. This author does not need to draft a ‘to do’ list for the incumbents in power. Numerous committees, appointed by different governments, have submitted relevant recommendations. Those measures deserve a better place than a babu’s dust filled closet. They must, literally, see the light of the day.

Let this be a warning to the Indian state. The citizens may not want a military invasion of Pakistan, but they do crave for a sense of security, and even more than that for a sense of action and a certain degree of sensitivity towards their losses. Any State that fails to meet these expectations stands to lose its citizens’ loyalty and faith – the first step in turning a man into an anarchist is to make him believe that he has no stake in the system and that the system does not exist for him. We must not allow such a path to appear.

Triumph of the Intangible

2008-11-05T17:48:00.004+05:30

Hope and dreams are two much abused words. Overused, oversold and perhaps exaggerated on occasions. They have this intangible quality to them that makes the hard nosed realists amongst us to treat them with their opposite feeling – cynicism. Both hope and dreams carry with them a cruel companion named reality that does not always allow them to reach their intended junctions. But hope is a foundation for action and dreams a foundation for ambitions. They are the first tentative, hazy steps in a journey called realization.

Barack Obama reached one stage of that journey today as he became the first African American to claim the Presidency, an attainment that this author had certainly not thought possible for another two decades and many of his slightly more cynical friends, during their entire lifetimes. But Obama is now at the summit of political power – and he has been propelled there by the intangibles of hope, change and dreams that we often dismiss as being out of place characters in the political drama. Across the United States, Obama, a political greenhorn in terms of his Washington experience, has performed two actions that few politicians are able to achieve – transcend barriers of identity and make people believe that they have a stake. He is not a black President, for blacks could simply have not voted him into power. He has projected himself as the American president, consistently called for an end to the bitter divides between liberal and conservatives, white and black, Democrat and Republican. By acknowledging concerns on both sides of the debate he has brought a tone of moderation into his political language. He risked his credibility amongst blacks by calling for them for being more responsible as a community and as individuals, and also staked his white votes by reminding them that the animosity of racial discrimination still haunted the poorest of America’s communities. He has won by talking to the people and not at them. Credit it to his rhetoric, ideas or just youthful energy but he has made young Americans believe that they can change the way the nation is governed by casting their ballots. It’s no surprise that his win has come on the back of large voter turnout and that many first time voters went with him. Young men and women are more perceptive to the happenings around them, more aware of their surroundings and across the world more and more cynical about their political systems and the vested interests that govern them. Obama has made them believe in the political process and that is an achievement in itself.

But make no mistakes; this is not a rout as the Electoral College vote will tell you. Obama has won a 52-47 popular vote mandate, which still reflects a nation with two halfs at odds with each other. In his book ‘The Audacity of Hope’, Obama talks of how President Bush was emboldened and gung ho after a 51-49 victory over John Kerry in 2004 and how the White House had forgotten that there was a section of America that hadn’t voted for it. In his acceptance speech, Obama talked of being a President also for those whose support he had not won; of listening to his people, particularly when they disagreed with him. He would need to live up to his word, for in a Washington now set to be ruled by Democrats, a humble and gracious President would need to engage in dialogue to overcome the bipartisanship that he mentions as disturbing in his experiences. Obama, the author, critiques how ‘we paint our faces blue and red and cheer our side and boo the other; and if takes a cheap shot or a late hit to win the game then so be it, for it seems that winning is all that matters.’ An Obama presidency will need to avoid the same pitfalls.

It would not be wrong to say that in this moment America needed an Obama as president more than he needed the seat himself; simply because of the message it sends to the world. I am not a romantic and don’t think that America’s problems will be solved in his tenure but Obama’s election signals a shift of view point in America. It signals a break from old prejudices, from hidden biases of the ‘Bradley Effect’, from the Guns, God and Gays rhetoric of the neo-right. But more importantly it symbolizes an electorate willing to choose ability over identity – the very principle of foundation of the American nation. And as the demography of the United States increasingly yields more space to the non-whites, a new generation will hopefully not be entrapped by their limited visions and dare to look beyond.

But is Obama a socialist and an uncomfortable President for India? If he succumbs to the protectionist and non-proliferation lobbies of the Democrats, then maybe but so far he has demonstrated to be his own man. In his book Obama devotes a chapter to ‘Opportunity’ and opines on big government and globalization. He mentions how ‘the conservative revolution that Ronald Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan’s central insight – that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic with Democrats more concerned with slicing the economic pie than enlarging it – contained a good deal of truth.’
He further states that ‘America can’t compete with China and India simply by cutting costs and shrinking government - unless we are willing to tolerate a drastic decline in our living standards. Nor can America compete by simply erecting trade barriers and raising minimum wage - unless we are willing to confiscate all the computers of the world. We don’t have to choose between an oppressive, government run economy and a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism. Like those who came before us, we should be asking what mix of policies will lead to dynamic free market, widespread economic security, entrepreneurial innovation and upward mobility…. Let us begin with those investments that can make America more competitive in the global economy – in education, science, technology and energy independence.’

These to me are hardly the words of a socialist, much less a protectionist. Obama has displayed an understanding of Pakistan and its equation with India and Afghanistan. It will be up to South Block to appraise the latest US President of Indian concerns and apprehensions. The world’s largest democracy should be able to hold its own irrespective of any White House occupant. Will he be a friend of India? Given Obama’s respect for democracy, dialogue, tolerance and natural justice, I can stick my neck out and say a confident yes.

Barack Obama has talked about the need for a ‘deliberative democracy’, to understand ‘that we must talk and reach common understandings precisely because all of us are imperfect and can never act with the certainty that God is on our side; and yet at time we must act nonetheless, as if we are certain, protected from error only by providence.’

The world awaits Barack Obama…..Hope and Dreams wait in the shadows, packing their bags for a journey ahead.

Jumbo & the Prince

2008-11-03T17:40:00.009+05:30

I was at the Ferozshah Kotla last Saturday as India tried their mighty best to let Michael Clarke and Australia to escape with a draw in the third test. The crowd, frustrated after the string of dropped catches, was pleading for a quick end to the Aussie innings and the only bowler on the field who seemed capable to them of doing that was Virendra Sehwag. But Anil Kumble was his usual stubborn self and in another display of perseverance kept bowling continuously from one end after tea. Amit Mishra was at the other end and seeing no sign of their beloved Sehwag the chanting for a change started in the stands. But it was a strange kind of chanting. It was more an entreaty, a pleading request to an elder brother to kindly pass the ball to his younger one. ‘Kumble bhai’, went the leader of the chant, ‘please yaar…samajh yaar, Viru ko de yaar please’. In my almost two decades of watching cricket, I have heard people comment in varied hues on different Indian cricketers. Most of them have been lauded on their successes and mercilessly beaten down on their failures. Even the great Sachin Tendulkar, while growing above the game for most Indian fans, has not been spared of accusations of batting selfishly for his hundreds and failing to perform in fourth innings of test matches. One man who has been spared of all accusations and critiques by the general public has been the quiet and hardworking Anil Kumble. Cricket journalists and ex players may have questioned his ability to spin the ball (stupidly in my opinion, when there was already a precedent of a fast and zipping leg spinner taking more than 200 test wickets in Chandrasekhar) but for the average Indian cricket fan on the street Anil Kumble has been a synonym for trust and reliance. Dravid may have lost his form, Ganguly may have been erratic, Sachin may have compromised belligerence for quiet run gathering but Kumble was still the same as he started out – economical, at the batsman and accurate. To understand the importance of Kumble you have to turn the clock back to mid and late 90s. Before Harbhajan burst on the scene and Indian cricket enjoyed a diversity of pace bowling riches, Kumble was both a stock and strike bowler for his captain. After the opposition’s opening batsmen had laid into Srinath and Prasad, both Azhar and Tendulkar would invariably turn to Kumble. On innumerable occasions, Kumble was the man Indian captains looked towards for blunting the impact of the likes of Jayasuriya, Aravinda De Silva, Saeed Anwar, Aamir Sohail and Adam Gilchrist. Coming on within the first 15 overs with field restrictions, Kumble relished the challenge and would immediately plug the flow of runs. While the other Indian bowlers would have economy rates of tending towards or in excess of 5 an over, Jumbo would walk away with a dignified number of 3 an over against his name. In many games his spell was the difference between a total of 280-290 and a chaseable 250 (remember this was mid to late 90s, before the 300 + chase became an achievable rather than an unlikely possibility).

If he lived with one albatross around his neck, it was that of not being able to take wickets on foreign shores. He responded in the only way he knew best – through hard work and perseverance of effort. Over the years he shortened his run up, raised his jump to exploit his height for bounce and added a crafty googly and a turning leg spinner to his repertoire. He buried the ‘non-performer at overseas tag’ with two sterling displays – the first in Australia in the winter of 2003 where he was the most successful Indian bowler (24 wickets from 3 tests at 29 runs apiece) and in Pakistan in the historic tour of 2004 (15 wickets from 3 tests at 25 apiece). And yet, despite his limitations, Kumble perhaps like his spinning counterpart Muralitharan remained a solo match winner for India for a long duration. His impeccable record at home underscores his importance again in a period when pace bowling had not yet started winning games for the country. He needed no certificates from the media boxes – there were ample batsmen to vouch for his trouble making abilities. None more so than Stephen Waugh, no less a persevering batsman himself. He credited Kumble with being at the bat all the time with each and every delivery. And every word of that appreciation was true. You only had to watch him bowl that first delivery to Hayden at the Kotla in the second innings to realize that Waugh wasn’t exaggerating. A fizzing leg spinner that was in line with the stumps and almost sneaked through to trap the batsman in front.

Anil Kumble retires like few Indian cricketers have in recent memory – with hardly any qualifications in his record and mutual respect and admiration from everyone around him. He retires an achiever all right but without any pretensions. He retires a team man to the core, his place safely reserved in history as the best to ever hold that red cherry in his hand with an India cap on.

I had planned on writing a farewell for Sourav Ganguly at the end of series after he had played his last test innings. Anil Kumble’s retirement now demands a packaged farewell for both. Not that Ganguly’s achievements are any less diminishing in Indian cricket. Statistics will tell you that he has been the most successful Indian captain. India’s results and style of cricket in the 21st century will tell you that he has undisputedly been the best Indian captain. You cannot even give Ganguly the gift of being ‘at the right place at the right time.’ If anything, he took over Indian cricket when it was at its lowest trough, post the match fixing saga. Sourav not only had to deliver results but also restore credibility, and the second task, as any incumbent politician will tell you can be quite a daunting one. Ganguly’s contribution lies not just in bringing a sense of ‘in your face’ confidence in the way India conducted themselves in the field (he staked his personal reputation on this by frequently getting into arguments with opposition captains and match referees) but also in the way he nurtured a talented crop of youngsters who shall take over the torch from his generation. Harbhajan would surely have been a Sikh migrant sitting in the US today had Sourav not insisted on his inclusion in 2001 and Yuvraj, Zaheer and Dhoni all made their debuts under him.

In the midst of all this appreciation of his captaincy, one almost forgets that Sourav was a tremendously talented one day batsmen. He formed the most successful opening pair with Tendulkar and brought the similar aggression to his batting by frequently hitting bowlers over infield to get India going. His test innings of Lord’s and Brisbane are frequently cited but he also dug deep and bailed India out of trouble during the series in South Africa in 2006 and England in the following year. To say that Sourav Ganguly reflected the ‘New India’ is to overstate a cliché, but he definitely changed the way India shaped up towards other teams in the cricketing world. His tenure marked Indian cricket matching its performance on the field with its clout in the money stakes. He took an India languishing near the bottom and left it sniffing the soil of the top. As he retires, Sourav may well thank Dravid and Laxman for that incredible day at the Eden Gardens in 2001 which changed the fortunes of his captaincy. Had India lost that game and the series with it, Sourav whose off field activities liaisons were being reported daily by the media would not have carried on at the helm much longer and Indian cricket would perhaps have not seen the rise which that ‘come from the dead’ victory over Australia propelled.

Shakespeare depicts King Henry V of England exhorting his soldiers at the Battle of Agincourt by stating that whosoever shed his blood in battle would be his brother that day and together their army would constitute a ‘Band of Brothers’. Sourav Ganguly created a merry band of his own, one that effectively changed the standing of his Indian team in the cricketing battlefields that they took to.

To Sir Tony :)

2008-10-06T11:36:00.005+05:30

The Pauper poetry below is in response to Tony Sebastian’s ‘Nash –ty poetry’ a couple of days back. I started by writing out a comment on his blog but then could not control my instincts and decided to put this stuff here. Sir Tony would not mind – free publicity never hurts :)

Young lad Tony wanted to explore
Perform some sin and make a roar
Sadly for him the times weren’t right
And his stock crashed before its flight

The lad decided to give up the carnal
And take to singing with the nasal
But alas that space was taken too
And young Tony could only sing in the loo

He then ventured to emulate Nash
Write some poetry and earn some cash
So he took on the veggie food
And left the conservatives in a fowl mood
Corrupting our religion and our kids, now they say
Throw him into the sambhar sea and show others the way!

Tony knew he may have bitten too much
And now pleaded as such
‘I only wanted to see some action
Alas my drivers suffer from too much traction
I thought I would indulge
And give myself a little bulge
Now I am swimming in spicy seas
Surrounded by potatoes and peas
I am now ready to wear a halter
But do not sacrifice me on this alter
Spare me the misery and get me out
And I promise never to raise a shout
Only allow me a little bite
Chicken during the day and sen-sex at night!’

The Vanishing Money

2008-09-19T12:23:00.004+05:30

There is something about the vanishing of a large global corporation that makes everyone sit up and take notice. It’s akin to the sinking of the Titanic – something that is considered huge, grand, unassailable and unsinkable. Not just because of its own size but more so because of the quality of minds powering it. But Titanics are mostly victims of their own inflated self, and in their high, long term, grand vision of their crownests often ignore that creeping iceberg that lies beneath the surface and inflicts unmitigated damage to their shells. Step into New York today and you will see a Titanic at every corner, some already confined to the waves of history, some struggling to stay afloat and hunting desperately for lifeboats. And sadly, these behemoths are not just confined to the Wall Street alone. Bigger, larger and grander Titanics across the globe are hearing that creaking sound in their hulls – a sound of metal breaking and a potential flood waiting to crash in.

The crisis, as everyone from Delhi to Dallas, tells you is one of liquidity and confidence. Or well a lack of them. In very crude layman terms, its about people borrowing huge sums of money and being not able to repay them. In a bid to stave off their hungry lenders, as they run around to borrow more, they are summarily dismissed by other lenders who now have no confidence in their ability to generate earnings from the money sought. I would add one more word to the description in the line above. In effect, this is a crisis of credibility. Credibility of banks, brokers, traders, speculators, merchant bankers and their ilk. And this sadly is a strong indictment on those running these institutions. Those ‘quality minds’ who exit the hallowed lawns of the brightest B-schools and then enter the bull ring of our financial markets. The knife twists further into the flesh when one realizes that the Balance Sheets that went broke were of those for which the ‘best and the brightest’ from these schools chose to work for. (TT Ram Mohan has provided an insight into how the hollowness of the so called intellect of these firms and the people who inhabit them in the Economic times a couple of days ago)

Not that there haven’t been crises in the economies before. But this one has a marked difference on two principal counts. Earlier crises have been closely driven by the real economy; the brick and mortar or the tangible elements – due to sectors, companies & currencies with weak fundamentals which you could see and their inability to drive promised earnings leading to a crash of over invested money put in them. ‘Fundamentals’ is a much used word in all that we read today. Simply put, it effectively means that if you take a housing loan of Rs 60 lacs and if you possess a full time job paying you even Rs 6-7 lacs minimum in a year, your fundamentals are strong at the time of borrowing; simply because you possess the means to repay the money, albeit slowly. The current crisis though is that of the unseen or more so that of the un-understood and difficult to comprehend instruments. Even those well versed with the financial markets are finding it hard to pin point where the trouble lies in the opaque Balance Sheets of the collapsing institutions. And the final defaulting debt lying on such Balance Sheets is distanced from the real economy (in this case the house sold on the mortgage) by a significant web of complex, inter woven and hard to unravel securitized assets.

The second major difference is that of risk appetite and its assessment. Economies pass through routine cycles of booms and recessions on account of heavy investments driven by a hunger to risk big for bigger returns. What is unraveling now is a risk appetite among major investment banks and other institutions that had gone beyond the roof. Continuing with our previous example, it’s a bit like you possessing an uncertain job (or no job) and your bank stilling willing to lend those 60 lacs to you. In what economists call the ‘rational human mind’, such business with no assurance of repayment and no collateral (another asset that will cover your risk of default) or bad collaterals will simply be labeled with one word – preposterous. And yes, this is pretty much the kind of thing that was going on in the US. The ‘best of the best’ rode this bandwagon and put more money in the hands of those who did not have the means to repay it, in the hope that if the borrower defaulted the underlying house for which the loan was given would be sold at a premium and money would be recovered.

But of course, you can realize premium on the sale of one house but not when all the houses are out for sale because everyone lent money in the same reckless way as you did. The prices crash (supply exceeds demand) and you simply have nothing to cover your backside. This kind of dealing is not an illegal act but bad and greedy investment. And bad investments, as we all know, yield no returns.

Some major home truths have emerged from this crisis which should guide the response of those in the thick of the action now. First, no matter how free and competitive a market may be, you still need a strong statutory/ government regulator to bail out collapsing institutions that can have a domino effect and derail a lot more than just their immediate neighborhood. Second, bad assets WILL NOT create good earnings no matter how much ‘smart analyses’ may justify it. Third, no corporation is above board or unsinkable. The moment the fountain of money runs dry even the largest giant will find it difficult to stand tall. And fourth, its time for all the regulators to pull up their socks. One cannot prevent an investment from taking place in a bad market but tighter solvency norms and higher provisioning requirements (effectively asking institutions to park enough money for the ‘rainy days’) need to be looked at anew to barricade future such spectacular implosions.

And all the players need to ask some serious questions. The ‘smart guys’ in the banks need to reflect how such bad investments were allowed a free run. The regulators need to question their norms and whether corporate governance fulfilled its role in preventing such a rush towards manic opportunities that have resulted in a zero gum game. The auditors need to ask themselves how they missed seeing that the assets reflecting against the loans taken were nothing but pieces of papers. And investors like you and me can do well to pay attention to the dissenters like Nassim Nicholas Taleb who argue that all those experts hypothesing over the market movements daily on our televisions, perhaps simply don’t know what they are talking about.

The kids aint dumb

2008-09-04T13:03:00.003+05:30

Since my school days, when I started to develop an opinion on the happenings around me, I have always been critical of any attempts made to insult the intelligence of young children. I guess being adults, the distance that age puts between us and the children, makes us adopt this know-all, condescending attitude. The sophisticated name of course is ‘generation gap’. But my argument is not so much against this inevitable differing of viewpoints between two sets of people who stand at different co-ordinates of the time graph. My problem is with ignoring how the world has changed since the time we were in childhood and thinking that our kids are not smart enough. Two recent incidents reminded me of this belief and prompt these words.

My 12 year old cousin Karan lives and studies in Canada. An ice hockey and baseball freak, he isn’t too far away from his Indian roots as well. With relatives around, he takes sadistic pleasure in subjecting us all to his smattering of Hindi and Punjabi, often mixing up his tenses, phrases and expressions (‘I touch your feet’ becomes for him ‘Mein aapke pair khaata hoon’). Of course, all his Hindi is purely picked up from the television serials that his grandmother watches and which he is forced to watch as well as he waits for the commercials to catch his sports action. You might pass him off as any other North American Indian kid with his brown skin, accent and possessing knowledge of Indian customs that marriages, gurudwara trips or diwali gatherings have afforded him. But he possesses two qualities that would mark any kid out - inquisitiveness and observance. Out on a drive in the city with his parents, me and my mother, he started off on his usual trip of speaking broken, illogical Hindi. It was all fine before he suddenly turned towards my mother and asked her, ‘Aap Hindu ho yaan Punjabi?’

His mother wasn’t exactly enthused with the question and quickly responded with a ‘Karan, you don’t ask such questions.’ She turned to me and explained how schools in Canada discourage students from asking about the religious identities of those around them. At first glance, you would perfectly understand this dilemma of a newly multicultural and multi religious society. A society in which public display of religion is not common and not stressed. A secular state that would want religion to be confined only in the homes and places of worship of those who follow it. A state which perhaps believes that asking a person’s religion and acknowledging its difference from your own in the first step in societal segregation.

I must admit that at first I felt a degree of understanding towards this approach; till of course Karan came up with his response,

‘No! I am asking because agar aap Hindu ho to why don’t you have a bindi here (pointing to my mother’s forehead) and red colour (now pointing at her hair above the forehead) like all other Hindu women’

For a moment, we were all silent in the car. Karan’s dad, not exactly sympathizing earlier with his mother’s admonishment, announced triumphantly
‘See! He has a logic for his question’ And indeed he did. None of us knew where this kid had picked up concepts of vermillion and bindis. And how he had come to know its significance for a Hindu woman. His probing of religious identity was not to place a mark of segregation or assert affirmation with those around him, but simply an attempt to obtain cultural understanding. And in that sense we were all wrong to assume that his mind, even in today’s religiously charged and to an extent divided world, would function only on one dimension – a dimension of creating and not breaking walls.
I wondered later whether that tiny episode had a lesson for all us. Is denial of identity and closing of mouths to discuss it another form of segregation? Are we creating walls or breaking them when we seek to create a society where school kids are ignorant of the diversity of the cultures that they inhabit? And as liberals are we correct in being so squeamish about discussing religion with our children? Is it so hard for us to educate them and then set them on the path of moderation and tolerance? Why are we allowing Osama bin Laden and not our school teachers to introduce our children to their religion?

***********************************

The second episode relates to a 14 year old boy Siddharth, the son of one of my mother’s old friends from office. I recently visited him and by chance my curiosity forced me to have a look at his school textbooks. I was sort of making impromptu comparisons on the extent of change in the NCERT textbooks from 11 years ago when I was in the same class in which Siddharth studies today. In the middle of my exploration I chanced to lay my hands on a colorful and deftly prepared paper folder which had his details written on the face of it with some skillful crayon work.
‘My holiday homework’, informed Siddharth. ‘I had to do two book reports’. Inside were two pages of a A4 size containing his ‘book report’. I read the first one. It was on ‘Life of Pi’ by Yann Martel. As I read those five hundred odd words that he had written. I was a little amazed at the quality of the language as well at the abrupt nature of the presentation of the report. Siddharth probably sensed it,
‘I copied it from the internet’. That explained it. Schoolboy level detailing mixed with book review level kind of passages. When I asked why, he responded laconically that ‘who had the time to write so much’ and that he had done his report in the last week of his vacations. Now I am someone who really isn’t enthused about people substituting originality with Google, but I carried on as Siddharth next placed in my hands his holiday homework list. It was a bunch of 4 pages photocopied and stapled together (just the way it used to happen in my time – it seems the idea of mass computer prints is yet to strike any one in our schools). The contents of that homework did not carry any surprises for me. The only addition in the quality of the work required from the students, in the space of a decade, has come in the form of a Disaster Management project mandated by the CBSE. The holiday homework had a section for each subject. The sciences & mathematics required students to answer a set of questions which were nothing but a revision of either what they had studied before leave or would study out after leave. The social sciences and grammar subjects too could not think beyond the realms of the textbooks. In fact I was shocked to see that the Hindi homework required students to write a letter inviting their friend over to their birthday party! I remember writing such a letter when I was in class 3 and that was a good 17 years ago! Of course, in the world of CBSE, our schools and Indian education they still believe that a kid writes and posts letters to all his friends asking them to attend his birthday celebrations. The concepts of telephone and emails are as far away as the third millennium.

In short there was nothing in that bunch of papers that could have challenged Siddharth’s imagination and creativity. Perhaps the only thing that he would have enjoyed doing was preparing the cover of his book review.

What is wrong with our teachers and our schools? Why can’t we leave textbooks and courses aside for a month and a half in the year and let our kids THINK? Is it so hard to ask them to chuck their books and prepare a 5-6 page project on something that they have interest in? (Siddharth has an active liking for cars. In a brief span of twenty minutes he had given me all the gyaan about the new models hitting the Indian market). Why can’t we allow our children to be creative for once and escape the drudgery of ‘Answer the following in your own words’? I am not proposing that every kid has a fountain of creativity bubbling inside him but then is it so hard to assume that when faced with acting around a topical interest not just kids but even elder men find hidden reserves of imagination and creativity? And is it so difficult for schools to see that a diversified range of interests in their students will automatically lead to an enhancement of knowledge sharing between the kids themselves? Why are we allowing the unimaginative to recklessly suppress the imagination of our kids?

But of course these are vain questions; because from what I saw with Siddharth I was certain of one fact. Dinosaurs can reappear on our planet but to expect changes in the manner in which we teach our kids is asking for a little too much. On this teacher’s day, sample this thought.

The Untouched

2008-09-02T14:10:00.013+05:30

People got a little riled with all my camera antics on the vacation. Most of the family that was around couldn't comprehend why i was so obsessed with my Canon powershot (AS710). In the 12 days that i stayed in Toronto, i clicked close to about 1100 photographs...staggering you might think....it took a cousin to put matters into perspective - 'he lives by the camera'...for some of those days, i actually did

below are some pics that did not make it to the facebook and web albums...random shots...some which were noticed, some which werent by those who saw them

The name of the park was 'Maddil Common'. It was nearby the house where i was putting up...and on a quiet Friday evening (yes it was about 6 when i went there) it was absolutely desolate....quiet, windy and desolate

I took a myriad pictures from the top of the CN tower...this one was perhaps the best...447m above the ground (apprx 114 storeys)...it captures the skyline, the shadow of the clouds, a city strechting itself limitlessly and half clear half filled sky...

Taken from the 22nd floor apartment balcony, it isnt the cleanest picture...the balcony railings intrude in a significant part of it...but dnt make a mistake, the light is not camera induced sepia but natural...there was a slight drizzle and a setting sun when i took this snap...and the interplay of water (notice the drops on the glass of the railing) and light was something that i could not get on any other evening...

A picture that can almost pass off for a painting...a view of the east bank of the ottawa river from the river cruise boat

A quiet patch of woods....on the river bank of the ottawa river...

This is how small some of the islands actually were on the 'thousand islands' cruise that happens in a small town called Gananoque on the shore of Lake Ontario

The serenity of the lake front at Gananoque was only matched by that of the town itself....

In the background is the Canadian parliament house....as seen from behind a fountain at the ottawa museum

And finally the national symbol...the maple leaf...just beginning to dry from the summer

Ball Game watching

2008-08-11T10:09:00.010+05:30

Well its an experience in itself to watch a ball game in a North American town...though the crowds are not as raucous as the ones in our IPL games, the level of involvement is still the same. The marked difference of course though is with respect to spectator comfort; getting in the stadium, finding your seat, having food and beverages...is all a comfortable experience....and so even though the home team lost, i didnt really mind cause, one i got a hang of baseball and two i had a good time clicking away...here are some of the better ones :)
P.S. Kudos to Abhinav Bindra...champions stuff!!

a neat sports pic....the bases were loaded and the cleveland indians scored a run of the hit that followed..

The Rogers centre with the game in progress...and the roof closed due to rain

a foul hit...notice the ball flying away at the back

a decent sports pic....the pitcher throws...the ball's mid air

Leaving on a Jet Plane

2008-08-10T02:20:00.004+05:30

9th August: Coming to you somewhere from North America
Believe me when i say this, Gettting out of India aint easy...literally or metaphorically. They say outside that you cant take the India out of an Indian. Well, if your trying to catch a plane from the Indira Gandhi airport at New Delhi you can see a perfect demonstration of that state sponsored hospitality. No i did not miss my flight, in fact i reached the port a good two hours before the flight time. But on the way and till the time you actually board the plane, you heart wouldnt really be at rest. Thank god for we dont have asylum seekers running away from this nation...they would probably just collapse at the airport entrance.
So my airport misadventure began when i was a good 15 kms and 6 hours away from my flight time. As i left office that evening, the heavens decided it was the perfect time to open up and grace us with good weather. As yours truly had played weatherman in the morning and predicted that there wudnt be any rain (and thus consequently left his umbrella in the back of the car), he had to run half a kilometer in blinding rain. And voila, the moment i hit my car...yes yes the heavens stopped...so there was i, wet all over sitting in my car and driving like craxy back home..no wait, i wasnt going home..i was stopping at a sweet shop, cause sweets were needed at my destination for a wedding function. and i stopped at a grocery store to pick up 4 kgs (!) of rice cause you see, rice is still a lot cheaper in India despite all the inflation and all that nonsense spoken by Condi Rice and her President about Indians and the Chnese eating all the rice of the world up. So i dashed more and picked up the rice and the sweets, stacked them in the suitcase, saw myself being forcefed dinner by my neighbours (it was their grandson's birthday) and finally sat in the cab at 8.15 for a midnight flight just in time to see the heavens open again.

Now i wudnt have been cribbing here had i got to the airport all easy...but frankly fate chose that evening to make my tryst with every red light on the way to the airport (dont ask me the number, i gave up count after the 11th). It wudnt still have been bad if it hadnt been raining with vehicles crawling all along the floor. it would have all been forgivable if the cabbie hadnt committed that worst sin..despite my insistence, he took me from a construction site called Vasant Kunj instead of the slick and open Dhaula Kuan. Result - stuck for 45 mins trying to cross...ya you guessed it, a red light...i swear i cud have clubbed the cabbie right then and there, but i had an airport to go to and to be fair to him he picked up the pace and had me at the port within 15 minutes of crossing that light.
But that aint where the misery ends. Despite all the slickness inside the renovated airport, two things still make it unpleasant to leave India. Firstly, the approach roads are all jammed. Why we cant figure out a solution to that is beyond me...maybe we can have an underground car park where people get dropped...maybe wider roads..i dont know, but it kills when you see that it takes 20 mins to cross 800 mtrs and reach the point of drop from the main entrance.
And the second are the CISF people standing on the gates. Now i appreaciate the security concerns in the subcontinent, but does the guy have to read everything written on our passports and tickets? why dont they just match your name on the ticket and passport and let you in and let the check in guys from the airlines handle the rest? 15 mins to clear the line for the CISF check after you have taken the trolley. Which is all a shame, cause really once you are in, there really arent any pain points. Check in, immigration and security is smooth - it took me only 20 mins....and too at peak hour...
well i cud stop here but you wud accuse me of being anti-indian and enamoured by all the stuff that the goras put up. So let me speak of Paris, my stopover. The airport is huge and it takes 15mins just to go from one terminal to another. What helps are the multi-lingual directions and the courteous staff. Sadly, the coffee sucks. And yes even there, people dont queue up to board the aircraft, they have to be told to let the kids and the wheelchair passengers in first.

Courtesy was in short supply at Toronto. The security staff just at the exit of the aircraft cudnt believe i had come for a wedding; i then had to give my job credentials to her and explain what a Chartereted Account and Accenture meant. Heck, at Toronto even the immigration does not smile at you and for some reason they all wear police like uniforms. And for all their sophisitication, they took 45 minutes to get out baggage out - apparently because it was raining with the threat of lightening and all vehicular movement in the open was stopped!! And when the baggage came, many of the bags were wet!

The flights themselves i may not crib about much - guess there isnt much to when you watch two movies, an episode of friends and get to drink chardonnay and champagne...now only if they allowed to sneak some of those wine bottles out....

Irritating Pangs

2008-07-21T12:39:00.003+05:30

‘People only do the right things till the time their spirit is broken’. So says Heath Ledger as he plays the maniacal, diabolical, chaotic but an enduring Joker in the latest edition of the Batman franchise. The Joker, of course, is taunting the Caped Crusader, trying to poke him into a realization that when the stakes on the table get personal every man gambles for himself. The question then to be asked on this humid morning is whether the Joker’s remarks find resonance in the environment around us. Have we all really sacrificed our morals on the altar of opportunity? Have we finally decided to put self – interest over the much abused ‘longer term larger good’? Look around you and maybe you will find examples galore. We have a government that is scraping every crumb of political opportunity to ensure its survival. We have an opposition that is making every effort to outdo the incumbents in this game. Political beliefs have been conveniently side stepped for the ‘larger goal’ of saving/ toppling the government (depending on which camp you are in). You could also argue that short term political convenience has once again replaced long held (or supposedly professed!) political beliefs. And in between all this back door dealing and stealing going on in the Lutyen’s zone, we wonder whether those who had tread the path of political probity have too decided to jump and swim in the shark infested waters of this mud pool.

Both Manmohan Singh and Prakash Karat are men of principle. Neither has won an election but neither has given room to political opportunism. Right or wrong, both have stood steadfast on an issue of conviction. And now as both face a test of validation for their stand, they are both playing the same, though slightly unfamiliar, game. Karat has gone ahead and tied up with a chief minister accused of wealth accumulation and corruption and is ready to vote with his thus far biggest enemies, the ubiquitous ‘communal’ forces, with the sole intention to topple the government. The PM and his party too are now going all out to seduce fence sitters, many of whom are facing criminal cases or are already in jail, with cabinet berths and other promises. The backdoor talk of crores being exchanged to switch loyalties remains just that till now, backdoor talk…but it remains.

I wonder what would be going through the PM’s mind as he enters Parliament today and tomorrow and crosses the portraits of those two great founders of modern India – Gandhi and Nehru. Both of whom enacted their philosophies in a different but perhaps an equally complicated era. Would the PM’s eyes contain the look of son who stares at the face of his moralistic, straight and honest father? The look of a son expected to bear the burden of probity, morals and uprightness. A son who knows he must sacrifice honor to save the family silver. A son who must make peace with short term compulsions and antagonize long held beliefs.

Perhaps, the joker is right. The instinct of self-preservation is too powerful too ignore. It can manifest in either actions or non-actions. Actions where compromises are made – a bribe paid, a short cut taken, a rule bent, a terrorist released – all to preserve the present but perhaps knowingly or unknowingly to damage the future as well. And then there are non-actions – a crime ignored, a statement denied, a witness hostile – all of which enhance our preservation at the cost of the world we live in.

But is the past as clean as the present supposes it to be? Weren’t Nehru and Patel both accused of sacrificing a united but weak India in the favor of partition and an India controlled by the Congress? Didn’t Indira Gandhi permanently damage the Indian polity by introducing the ‘make and break’ culture just to save her government? The only two men who perhaps stood to their ideals stubbornly (rightly/ wrongly) in contemporary Indian history were Gandhi and JP. Both walked their last days in solitude. One received a bullet, the other ignorance from those very people whom he propelled to office.

So are we finally in a time of short term opportunism? And as I had queried in a post sometime ago (and got rapped on the knuckles for making that suggestion) does our self interest today conflict with our morality and ideals? And is the only path leading to moral uprightness ending in the destination of loneliness? Is it too much to ask for someone to drink the poison of convenience? Is none of us capable of swallowing the poison and holding it in our necks? Or are we all too scared that it will escape into our stomachs and burn our innards? Is Batman right when he says that his city deserves a vigilante because he can get away with making choices which others can’t? Because he can be what self preservation stops us all from being? Are our only saviors now lonely isolated men or dark knights? Has Heath Ledger said something in death which we are all too scared to recognize in the living?

P.S. - On a lighter note, this is my 51st post. Didnt realise i had touched fifty. Bat raised, i stand on twenty2 yards and wait for the appluase. Drumrolls!! :P

P.P.S. - Woops! Jumped the gun..the count of 51 includes 5 drafts...the drumrolls will have to wait :(

The case of the strange summer

2008-07-14T11:19:00.002+05:30

It’s been a bit of a strange summer in Delhi this time. The weather has been freaky; in all the memories that I can summon of the previous years, I can’t recall a time when there was a summer where the number of days on which the temperature breached the 40C mark could be counted on your fingertips. And I can hardly recall such wet months of May and June. The monsoon came early, the heat vanished and while I am not complaining on this strange turn of the climate towards a cooler trend, one cant help but wonder what is amiss. It’s been a strange political summer in Delhi too. The momentum of inflation that began in spring (coming on the back of the gradual rise in oil prices and the stock market crash of January) seems to have been the only thing that picked up some steam this summer. And now it threatens to scald those that are desperately trying to calm the fires down. It’s been a pain of a different kind and relief from it seems as distant as the winter currently, maybe even more.

But more critical political events have overshadowed all the heat generated by the rising prices. The government is now battling for survival after the Congress party, in an unusual and perhaps accidental show of spunk, thumbed its nose at the communists and called their bluff. It seems all the energies of the climatic heat have been manifested not from the sky but from the inhabitants below. Rarely did the UPA show such political frenzy in the last four years as they have shown over the course of the last three months. Whether by design, through the resistance of the Prime Minister or simply by the force of events, the Left parties now find themselves out of the ruling coalition and face to face with some hard political realities that they chose to ignore during the term of this government thus far, screened as their eyes were by a combination of power of veto without responsibility and outdated idealism befitting the political climate of the 1950s.
Since the day the government decided to go ahead with the safeguards agreement and approach the IAEA, the Left has been… well, sort of Left out. They have been lurching from one confused step to another, all the time tearing away the political fabric which they so diligently stitched for themselves as they sat out and observed the Manmohan Singh dispensation with a godly gaze. The commissars first asked the PM when the government would go to the IAEA so that they could withdraw support then. They then decided to wait till the PM arrived back from the G-8 summit so as not to cause him the embarrassment of the government being toppled while he was meeting the world leadership (small mercy after four years!!). Then when it was clear that the PM would announce a go-ahead on the deal after his meeting with Dubya Bush, a divided Left pre-poned the pulling of the trigger. Now as the government readies for a trust vote in Parliament where every MP is worth his bunch of crores (apologies but the going rate in the market was not available at the time of writing this piece), the commissars are pushing the Speaker of the house, who is one of their MPs, to put in his papers and vote against the government. Somnath Chatterjee, for his part is reluctant, not wanting to relinquish the post simply to spite the government. The politburo has forgotten that in case he goes, the Deputy Speaker would preside over the house and he is an NDA MP. So one additional vote against the deal gets offset by another. And now comes the latest gambit in the form of an understanding with Mayawati. And in doing so the Left leaders have compromised the one asset they had, compared to all their political peers – a spotless white image. Mayawati may or may not be more corrupt than Mulayam and Amar Singh with whom the Left was tangoing earlier but so brazen is her disregard for the process of law when it works against her that the idealistic politburo seems slightly incongruous standing next to her. And only now after four years in the government have the commissars woken up and realized that Madam Maya is being witch hunted down by the CBI.

And in between of all their confusion, they have been politically checkmated and routed by the ever opportunistic Amar Singh who has displayed far more political savvy than what Prakash Karat has possibly summoned all his life. And while the UPA finds new partners, the commissars are now head deep into the monsoon muck of Delhi’s political akhada – hunting for allies, negotiating with all and sundry, counting each and every MP, mouthing invective at the government and even going to the extent of saying that they are ready to join hands on an issue with the ‘communal’ BJP. Their starched white plain handloom house kurtas sullied by the recent efforts, the Left has abandoned the idealistic high ground and stepped down into the opportunistic playground of Indian politics where the likes of Lalu, Maya and Amar Singh rule. The Left has finally woken up to some hard political realities…pity it couldn’t do so when it was supporting the government.

**************************

‘We the People’ had its second Aarushi episode last night in the aftermath of Dr.Talwar’s release. The theme was whether the media and police should now apologize to the Talwars. No, said Ashutosh from IBN 7 flatly (he is the guy with the white mop who heads their Hindi channel). More restrained but equally unapologetic was Punya Vajpayee from Aaj Tak (which on the day of the CBI’s press conference ran a story where a woman did a voice over for Aarushi and described to the viewers how ‘she’ was murdered.) At this defiance a bristling hot Harish Salve launched a tirade against the two comparing their coverage with Ekta Kapoor’s soaps. And between all the hungama , one of Aarushi’s aunts broke down and begged the media to take their cameras away from their home and let them grieve in peace. As I have pointed out in an earlier post, none of the three parties (the police, the media and us the viewers) are over board in this episode. We all have contributed to this circus; the police through their innuendos and leaks, the channels with their Sherlock Holmes meets Ekta Kapoor kind of coverage and we viewers who simply refused to believe that the parents slept through as their daughter was murdered and kept lapping each and every straw thrown at us.

So should the media apologize? In any other matter I would have been as adamant on a no as Ashutosh. But somehow in this case, some of the invisible lines of decency have been crossed. MMS clips were shown which were attributed (wrongly) to the slain girl, her Orkut profile and SMSes were flashed to the public, her telephone records shown on TV with one network even going to extent of redialing all the last made calls and asking pesky questions from the receivers. The thin line between reportage, investigative journalism and playing detective has been breached. Even worse some of the coverage has landed in the zone of sleaze and indecency which no matter what the justification is simply unacceptable.

The Times of India took the lead and carried an apology the day CBI announced that Dr.Talwar would be released. And compared to the vernacular channels (and I am sorry to sound so class biased but they really have plumbed the depths barring a couple) their coverage was an epitome of softness. My concern is that the more brazenness we see from the media the more it will wean away the public from them. My bet is that the public opinion is against them as far the Aarushi coverage goes. And tomorrow if another such case happens and another family is traumatized, the government might just let the Broadcast Bill genie out of the bag and the public might well just side with it.

Six months back as a citizen the idea of the bill itself was abhorrent and against the spirit of democracy for me. Six months later I might just well be willing to listen to the government’s view. Another Aarushi and I might just agree with the government. That is a scary thought. And all those political editors running our news networks must wake up to the possibility of such a shift taking place. They might get away in the case of Aarushi because it was the police that outran them in the race of indecency by maligning a dead girl without a shred of evidence, but sadly it seems, the media is showing all the enthusiasm and zealousness of an Olympic runner to win the race the next time an opportunity comes along.

Wiping the Slate Clean

2008-07-10T23:14:00.004+05:30

I once met a man who said he could erase time
go back in the past and remove those memories of mine
my pain and my sorrow
that never coming tomorrow
my days filled with delight
that vision without a sight
the darkness of despair
my loneliness in betrayal
that false dawn that i saw
the cliff that i had to claw
i want to forget those hours, those days, those years
can you fulfill this one wish of mine...
find me the man who said he could erase time....

In Rememberance

2008-07-02T10:06:00.004+05:30

Field Marshal Sam 'Bahadur' Manekshaw
(1914 - 2008)
One of the greatest to ever don the Olive Greens

Arses for Courses

2008-06-13T23:30:00.002+05:30

Let it never be said that when the world was caught in the grip of a raging fuel crisis, our government sat on its haunches twiddling its thumbs waiting for Mother Nature to relieve itself….er… I mean relieve the agony…of the fuel prices of course!! To prove that we are responsible organization indulging in responsible journalism, today along with an exclusive interview on Page 1 with Rakhi Sawant’s new boyfriend, we bring to you the full details of the proceedings of a high powered meeting of the government, opposition, industry leaders and other prominent celebrities chaired by the Prime Minister to find a solution to the oil crisis. Our editor, Digdeep Sardesai, showing extra-ordinary courage and presence of mind, managed to sneak into this meeting by dressing as one of the canteen boys supplying tea and biscuits at this meeting. He was carrying a tape recorder with him (brought to you by Sony, our Page 1 sponsors for today!) and recorded the transcript of the meeting. (We have already decided to recommend Digdeep for a Padma Vibhushan for this amazing scoop.)

Note - Please excuse the slight interruptions and incoherence in the transcript below – Digdeep was directed at times out of the room to bring the beverages and because he drank some of them on the way (who can blame the poor soul in this hot and muggy weather?) he had to relieve himself and thus miss some portions of the meeting.

Meeting – Everyone is seated. Prime Minister Moneymohan Singh is sitting at the head of the round table with The Oracle sitting in a sphinx like silence next to him. All around the PM sit members from his government, the oppositions and other famous people. It is a gathering which will put King Henry’s (was it him only??) round table of knights to shame!!

Moneymohan Singh: Friends, Romans and …
The Oracle: (A groan of admonishment)
Moneymohan Singh: Sorry madamji, very sorry…Friends, Indians and…
Mycash Ambani: Yes, yes…Mumbai Indians…my team, very good team. We played very good cricket with very efficient turnarounds and accountable performance. But alas, those foreigners let my Indians down….
Moneymohan Singh: Oye hoye! O I do not mean those Indians!….I meant the citizens of India…
Aala Loo Yadav: Arre Moneymohan ji, this is not address to nation bhai. This is a meeting….arre why calling all other friends…arre we are also your friends na…all allies are friends, except these people sitting on the left…hehehe
C.Dumberam: Please, please! Lets not digress. We need to address this issue. Lets come to the main point. Globally oil prices have risen. Crude oil is now set to go to $150/ barrel. These opposition walas had it so good, in their time it was only $30/barrel. Now all our oil marketing companies are losing money because they are selling at old prices. If we don’t raise prices we shall run out of money to buy oil and then….
Mytake Ahluwalia: Then no more cars, scooters, buses and no more fuel…
C.Dumberam: For my annual trip to Davos!!
Prakash ‘Only sticks, No Carrots’: We shall not sign the nuclear deal with the imperialists Americans!!
Moneymohan Singh: Oho Carrot ji! You are mistaken, We are not discussing the nuclear deal! We are discussing a rise in oil price.
Aala Loo Yadav: Eh….who is this Davos bhai?? Anyway, Moneymohanji, if no buses then it s good for your party only na bhai…all these BRT buses and corridor problem come to end and Shiela Fixit ji winning elections easy…hehehe. Oh by the way, hum excuse chahta hoon…abhi aaya..
(Door closing and Aala Loo going out of room)
Moneymohan Singh: (sounding worried) Arre meeting has only begun and Aala Loo ji has already walked out in protest.
C.Dumberam: Not to worry sir, he has only gone for a Loo break.
Moneymohan Singh: Okay okay…coming back to the rise in oil price, we propose a rise in price of petrol and diesel and …
Prakash ‘Only sticks, No Carrots’: We shall not sign the nuclear deal with the imperialists Americans!!
Moneymohan Singh: No No Carrot ji!! You are mistaken again…we are not discussing the deal!
Pahalwaan Singh Yadav: Arre bhai, why all this noise about rising petrol prices? Who uses petrol here bhai? Arre bahi Summer Singhji, do you use petrol ji?
Summer Singh: (Flustered and embarrassed) No No Pahalwaan ji…we all use petrol only in our cars no...And all the bus wallas use only diesel.
Pahalwaan Singh Yadav: Petrol in my car?? Arre I never knew bhai… (Laughing) Payment hee nahin kiyaa kabhi…hehehe…Driver gets it filled and bill comes to sarkar…
Moneymohan Singh: Oho! Can we please discuss raising the prices??
Prakash ‘Only sticks, No Carrots’: We shall not sign the nuclear deal with the imperialists Americans!!
(Moneymohan Singh slams a hand on his forehead)
Pahalwaan Singh Yadav: Arre Moneymohan ji, why bother…let petrol run out…to all the car wallas your sarkar can gift one free cycle. The cycle drives the hand and the hand drives the cycle….Let people ride the Samajwaadi cycle and also stop all this pollution.
Summer Singh: Oho! What an idea!! This is toh like that only….
Petrol hua mehnga, car mat chalaana
Ghar se office tum, samajwaadi cycle par hee jaanaa!!

Wah Wah!! Wah Wah!! Aadab aarz hai!!

Moneymohan Singh has his head in his hands in desperation.

Mahamaya Bhenji: Oye honorable Summer and Pahalwan Singh!….why should people ride your bicycle?? Promoting your party symbol so blatantly! Shame on you! Oye if people have to travel pollution free then they should travel in my symbol- the elephant! Oye Honorable Moneymohan! I demand that you provide an elephant to every car owner and yes I want for 50% of elephants should be of lower caste…er... I mean they should be owned by lower castes!
C.Dumberam: Davos on elephants!! They would think I have landed out of a tropical jungle! And how would I climb that animal with my dhoti??
Alaa Loo re-enters the room.
Aala Loo Yadav: Arre kahe shorwa macha rahein hai? Raise the price bhai…let everybody travel by humra rail! Hum apna rail diesel ka place main steam engine se chalaunga!
Shared Power (Maharastrian Ally): Moneymohan ji, the solution is very simple. As President of the Board for Making Money from Cricket in India (BMMCI) I propose we have another IPL 20-20 tournament where all money collected from TV, sponsor and public shall be handed over to our oil companies. Arre such is the power of the BMMCI that the next seven generations of the oil companies will not need to make money! And the public will be so entertained!!
Aala Loo Yadav: Arre humra bitwa bhi kirkeet khelta hai Powerji…This time he will be the star. In the last IPL, he played for the…arre bhai kaa naam thaa uska team ka..yes..Delhi Devil May Care.
C.Dumberam: Delhi Daredevils!!
Aala Loo Yadav: Yes, yes that too…
Moneymohan Singh: (now thoroughly exasperated) Oho! Stop all this cricket-shiket nonsense…we have to discuss oil!!...lets get some views of the opposition parties…
Prakash ‘Only sticks, No Carrots’: We shall not sign the nuclear deal with the imperialists Americans!!
Moneymohan Singh: Oho Carrot ji! I meant the dejure opposition and not the defacto opposition. Settledji…what are your opinions?
Settled Bihari Bagpayee: (snoring) Zzzzzzz….
Moneymohan Singh: Settledji!!!
Settled Bihari Bagpayee: (waking with a start) Tel ke daam badhaana……………………………………………………..yeh achi baat nahin hai……..
Moneymohan Singh: Oho that doesn’t help one bit…Akashvaniji , what about you?
LK Akashvani: Moneymohanji! All the answers to your questions can be found in my autobiography released recently…’My Country, Your wife’…I have given a free copy to Madam Oracle (who turns her head coldly to the other side)….I urgently insist that the entire Union Cabinet read my book to find a solution. I remember, in the 1970s when the OPEC raised oil prices, our Janata sarkar combatted the price rise by raising duties, lowering taxes, raising prices, providing subsidies to the poor….
C.Dumberam: Arre wat all contradictory nonsense you are saying Akashvani ji!!
LK Akashvani: Arre arre listen me, listen me!
Aala Loo Yadav: Arre chup rahiye burbak…kuch jante nahin hain..want to be PM...huh!
Mytake Ahluwalia: Can we please agree to raise prices??
Prakash ‘Only sticks, No Carrots’: We shall not sign the nuclear deal with the imperialists Americans!!
Moneymohan Singh: Oho…rest assured Carrotji we shall not….Can somebody offer a way out…Our esteemed guests from the entertainment industry…what do you think sirs??
Dukh Sukh Khan: In my adopted city of Kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk………Kolkata….
Bigger than everyone else B: Arre my dear Dukh Sukh, you are already stuttering like a car that has run out of petrol. Moneymohan ji, I am honoured that you have solicited my opinion. I am a small man, a humble farmer and a modest actor. Please do not raise any prices….Jaya has a lot of difficulty in managing the household expenses and Abhi-Ash have not been doing to well in their films lately….
Summer Singh: Arre wah bade bhaiya! Kya baat kahi!! Wah Wah! Wah Wah!
Moneymohan Singh: (about to collapse from weariness) I understand your compulsions Mr.B….Can anyone here please suggest a solution?? (Pleading now)
Aala Loo Yadav: Arre kahe na worry karte hain….drink tea and eat biskoot....i say make a committee, let them decide which price to raise and which not…and by the time the report comes...it shall be elections and the headache of Akashvani ji….he will find all solutions from that encyclopedia of his….hehehehe!!
Moneymohan Singh: And who do you propose should head this committee Aala Loo ji??!
Aala Loo Yadav: Arre that new boy has come na..ka naam hai uska….ummm…yes! Bullocks Osama!
Prakash ‘Only sticks, No Carrots’: We shall not sign the nuclear deal with the imperialists Americans!!
Transcript ends, Moneymohan faints….

Miss Marples walk in

2008-06-03T21:47:00.001+05:30

It is every writer’s dream plot. Blood, mystery, murder, illicit relationships and the unsaid. Two dead bodies in one small house. No one having any clue as to what happened on the fateful night. A father in prison, an unconvinced mother and a set of bungling cops. And, as much of the public now believes, a killer at large. You could write these words on the back on a book jacket and expect the thriller to fly off the shelves. The only problem is that this is not a plot or a story. In the middle of this all, Arushi Talwar and her servant Hemraj (have we all forgotten him in this ‘Arushi murder case’?) are dead and no one including the police it seems, even after two weeks of the murder, has any clue as to who killed them.

It is a murder that has captured media space like no other, which has held us in a thrall and made couch detectives out of all us. We have all heard the police, some of us believed them, some didn’t. We have all had our theories; have had our explanations for the actions and the events of the dramatis personae as described to us by an ever ready media. We have speculated on the unsaid, pondered the said and gone over and over again with the sequence of events, Arushi’s mails and messages and her and the parents’ profiles as described by those who know them. And at the end of the day all of us are still where we were when the young girl’s body was first discovered on the morning of May 16th.

So why does the ‘Arushi murder case’ refuse to go away from our newspapers and television screens? And why are we engaged now in such a huge debate over the ethics of the way we all have conducted ourselves over the past two weeks? My guess is that a combination of factors have all come together to place the Talwar family in a centre of a media and police circus (and I hate to use this word but no better synonym comes to the mind straightway) that no other family has been subjected to in 24 hour news channel history. I wonder whether this case would have received so much attention had Hemraj’s body not been discovered on the roof of the Talwar residence the very next day after the police had announced him their prime suspect. Had Hemraj actually murdered the girl, robbed the house and ran away with the booty this case would have died a natural death…just like so many other cases of murders of senior citizens by their servants appear and vanish in a flash from our media networks. But the moment Hemraj’s body was discovered that morning, Arushi’ case was granted a boon of immortality. An immortality that would last perhaps till the time the court convicts a killer. And even then I wonder, many of us shall still keep speculating over the questions, the instances and the acts that would remain unanswered or unexplained.

As I said in the beginning it has all the ingredients of a potboiler ready to be served on instant television. A middle class family of professionals, a servant, a residence in a well off colony of a suburb and a young school going teenager who, as now appears from her private details being flashed in public, loved hanging around her friends and was the only child of her parents. This then is the perfect archetypical middle class urban Indian setting. A family, a servant, a girl next door. The sense of identity of a large section of the television and newspaper audiences with the Talwars is complete. Above that there is the compelling curiosity of an unsolved murder. But perhaps the biggest turn on of the entire saga is the role of the parents and till date none of us is convinced as to their actions and intentions of that fateful night. Some suspect the father; some question the total ignorance of the mother. Some of us were even surprised and shocked as to how calm the mother appeared on television channels when she finally spoke to the media. Could the parents have slept through a double murder in a small flat? Did the father actually kill the daughter because she knew of his illicit relationship as the police claim? Somewhere deep down all of us fear that Arushi’s murder might well be the first instance of cold blooded killing of a yuppie teenager by her educated and professional parents in urban India. And not all of us who harbor that suspicion believe that honor killing is the motive behind that. So there it is; you and I neither know the killer nor the motive. We are still on square one. And that is the most compelling factor drawing us voyeuristically towards this case everyday.

And what about the media? The bunch of people who have been painted as nosy intruding private Sherlocks on the one hand and skeptical journalists busting the police theories on the other. The media has fed our hunger, has been spurred on by the mysteries and inconsistencies of the entire episode and has splashed the Talwars all across the front and the city pages and the news bulletins. Infact the murder made it on the front page of the city magazine of one of Delhi’s leading dailies yesterday under the title of ‘Whodunit?’ a first perhaps for such city magazines. In a vigorous and lively debate on ‘We the People’ last night Barkha Dutt (playing the devil’s advocate as the anchor) and Deepak Chaurasia of Aaj Tak made a spirited defense for the role of the media in the entire case. Their basic lines of defense went as follows – a) The media’s job is to report and that is all it did, whether it was when the police first declared Hemraj the suspect or when they later trained their guns on Dr.Talwar. b) The media (at least Deepak’s channel as he claimed on the show) quizzed the police as to why a dead young girl’s character was being questioned when there was no concrete evidence to support their ‘objectionable but not compromising position’ theory. c) The media have covered the case in an unbiased manner and have focused on the servant as much on the girl and did not exercise the bias of access (portraying Dr.Talwar as guilty initially and immediately turning in his favor the moment his wife started granting television interviews).

To be fair to both Barkha and Deepak, no one is questioning their right to report the event or for that matter even to quote the policemen and pronounce the servant or Dr.Talwar as the prime accused if the police has announced them to be so. It is not the media’s primary job to discover bodies, clues and killers. They are there to report. But a concoction of police callousness, middle class anxiety and media overzealousness has lead to some distasteful consequences in this entire affair. Principally the objections towards the actions of the journalists’ tribe are based on the following counts.

One – A young girl’s life, her private messages, social networking profiles and emails have all been laid bare open in front of the entire nation. When the television channels had reached a conclusion that there was nothing incriminating in Arushi’s messages and mails to her father then was there a need to splash them across out television screens and newspapers? More than the journalists the blame for this crass treatment of a deceased young girl and her servant must lie on the police. Charges of sexual intimacy between the two victims, extra marital affairs of Dr.Talwar and innuendoes of wife swapping between the Talwars and the Durranis have been made on and off the record without a shred of evidence. The police have been hungry to come on camera, eager to tell the people that they know all when the reality is that even now they know hardly anything. And a hungry pack of journalists, camped outside the victim’s residence and the Noida police offices has lapped up every crumb thrown at it and flashed it before us without assessing its worth.

Two – No matter how smart you, me, Barkha or Deepak may be, at the end of the day we are NOT detectives. It is not our job to sit in our studios and couches and speculate on who was the murderer. The attempt by the vernacular media to play Sherlock, reenact the drama, claim secret sources and arouse viewer curiosity by tantalizing titles such as ‘Arushi ka kaatil kaun?’ have simply been attempts at shooting darts in the dark with a blindfold.

And finally there has been this entire matter of crime shows and news programs where reporters have posed as the victim, mouthed dialogues such as ‘Papa aapne mujhe kyon mara?’ (so the father is assumed guilty?) and ‘Main Arushi hoon…suniye meri daastaan’. The vernacular media as always has found it difficult to maintain a distinction between coverage of a murder and the dramatics of an Ekta Kapoor serial and have tended to be swayed towards the latter. A Hindi channel showed an explicit MMS claiming it to be of Arushi. Eventually it was not, but there has been no trace of apology coming from the channel top bosses.

In a case which keeps getting complicated by the day, the media has tied itself up in knots and shown both its halos and its warts. It has been the watchdog as well as the scoop hunting bloodhound. It’s an act inherently full of contradictions and hence I guess the discomfort of us all as we see this playing out in front of us. So who killed Arushi Talwar and Hemraj? Sitting on my computer I cannot find out. Maybe the CBI will answer that question for all us. As for the Noida police, there can be only one word to describe them – irresponsible. The sack was the least they deserved.

A Verdict Delivered

2008-05-29T10:10:00.001+05:30

What you and I suspected (and perhaps believed) for long has now been confirmed by a court of law. Vikas Yadav and a brother of his have been convicted for the abduction and murder of Nitish Katara. And today’s verdict brings to an end the saga of three high profile murder cases each of which was uniquely different but each of which shared an intangible common thread. The shooting of Jessica Lall, the rape and murder of Priyadarshini Mattoo and the abduction and consequent murder of Nitish Katara – each a crime of a different nature committed by unrelated protagonists; yet each a crime which represented the catharsis of a rapidly changing urban India and which more importantly shook, tested and finally to a certain degree vindicated the faith of the urban middle class in the country’s judicial system. Each case involved a cold blooded crime, each had an accused with powerful police and political links and in each case the process of justice was tried to be subverted through every possible way. In two of them, the defense actually succeeded at the trial stage before the prosecution was redeemed by the Delhi High Court. It is to the credit of Neelam Katara and the prosecution lawyers that Nitish Katara’s case did not suffer the same fate in the trial court. In spite of a six year long trial, repeated witness absences and hostilities, the court managed to pass the only logical verdict possible in the litigation.

Do I seem biased? Had I made my mind even before the trial about the guilt of an accused man? Am I as guilty as the media of pre-judging a case and passing a verdict even before the trial has been completed? Perhaps I am. But consider the Nitish Katara episode – a young man in the prime of his life is murdered on the outskirts of Delhi. His head is split open by being bashed with a heavy object and his body set on fire to avoid identification. Eyewitnesses see him last being escorted out of a social function by two heavily built men. One of them is the goonda and criminal son of a goonda, muscleman and criminal Member of Parliament (all in that order of achievement). The father son due are the acknowledged bahubalis of a Delhi suburb and have a range of criminal cases pending against them. The son is considered the prime suspect by the police. The motive is established when the victim’s mother discloses the intimate letters and cards sent by the accused’s sister to the victim. There is photographic evidence of the two (batch mates from a MBA program) together and the sister post the murder is packed off to the UK for further studies. The big picture – Just because Vikas Yadav did not like Nitish Katara dating his sister, he abducted him along with a couple of like minded goons and killed him in cold blood. The still bigger picture – A Jessica Lall was bumped off by a Manu Sharma, the son of Congress MLA with powerful contacts in the administration and police, in the presence of a page three crowd just because she refused to serve him a drink as the bar at a private party was closing. A Priyadarshini Mattoo was stalked by a fellow law student (son of top ranking cop in Delhi Police) who finally decided to enter her house, rape her and go on to murder her brutally.

The bottom line – In urban India, you can shoot, rape, abduct and kill someone whom you do not like (Vikas Yadav) or whom you do like (Santosh Singh in the Mattoo case) or someone who just annoys you with a refusal (Manu Sharma) at the drop of a hat and then walk away as if nothing happened. You can care two hoots for the law and sit back and relax because your Daddy dearest has contacts in the police who will subvert the investigation for you, he has the money that will allow you to hire expensive defense lawyers who have sold their conscience and morality to money (Ram Jethmalani) and also arrange for your defense to buy out/ threaten prime witnesses who decide to depose against you. And voila! In no time are you back at home declared a free and wrongly condemned man.

Is it any surprise then for you to see where the sympathies of the media and the general public lay in each of these cases? You might argue that for the media it made a David vs. Goliath, the corruption of the lower judiciary, subversion of justice and such other kind of juicy stories. But what of the general public? We were not in it for the stories and we certainly did not wish convictions in each of these cases because we had something to sell. We identified and sympathized with the victims because deep down we realized that it affected us. That instead of Jessica Lall it could have been one of us at that party, that instead of Priyadarshini it could have happened to one of us in our Delhi University days and that instead of Nitish Katara we could find ourselves being butchered by a non-approving brother with his musclemen. In each of these instances, the victims were young middle class educated urban Indians trying to make a life for themselves in an honest way. And in each of these cases, they found themselves slain by those who thought they could get away with anything. Is it any surprise for you then why we sympathize with the Lalls, Mattoos and Kataras of this world?

For if the young and the educated have to seek a future in this country then its courts must guarantee them protection from the wolves like Vikas Yadav who roam our streets with impunity, who drive in their tinted glasses SUVs, run people over under their luxury cars, threaten those around them on the hollow strength of their musclemen and believe that money and power can protect them from anything. The Indian state needs to show these illegitimate sons of illegitimate and corrupt power their true place. And the only way to that is through indiscriminate policing and judicial enforcement of laws.

The natural process of law enforcement requires us to presume a man innocent till he is proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That is the only moral obligation that our courts cast upon us. We are not obliged to feel for them or extend any benefits of doubts to them. If they are found guilty at the end of a fair trial they deserve their dues. And you and I can argue whether they would have got away with their subversive and manipulative tactics in our courts had not their every move been scrutinized by an intrusive, aggressive, perhaps pre-determined but certainly a vigilant media. For once a witness turning hostile or forensic report being fudged gained more prominence than a female actor’s evening gown. For once this aggression made you and me believe that something fishy was going on and we all stood vindicated as the courts delivered their verdicts.
The wheels of justice turned, albeit slowly, but surely. And at the end of it I have only three words for the three convicts who thought their fathers could get them through anything – rot in hell. They may rest assured that Indian prisons would be much worse off than that.

Cricket at the Kotla

2008-05-27T16:20:00.006+05:30

In a pose that would do any politician proud. This is after the win...and the excitement was palpable. At one stage Delhi seemed in trouble, but Dinesh Karthick played an uncharacteristically aggressive knock to guide his team home. I am wearing the Daredevils jersey which i had bought just before the game for a thousand bucks (!). Worth the money, as the team won. And now they are in the semis, so i have another day to wear the jersey. :)

A delirious crowd after the Daredevils had completed the victory.....

Sachin Tendulkar is clean bowled and the crowd at Kotla erupts. Uptil then we a chant of 'Sachin! Sachin!' was rverberating all around me (and i was joining in as well). The moment his leg stump went for a toss, i instinctively found myself jumping out of my seat. Something that has never happened before in the 19 years of my watching Tendulkar play. Mr.Modi, you can count me amoungst those who have taken to city based loyalties.

The view from where i was seated. First innings, Jayasuriya has just started to open up his arms against the Delhi bowlers.

An evening of Despair

2008-05-14T01:33:00.000+05:30

There is a certain sense of identification associated with a tragedy. It is popularly said that every American alive on that date remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard of the Japanese bombing of the Pearl Harbour and the assassination of President Kennedy. Tragedies, particularly the sudden, unforeseen, irregular and unexpected ones have a shaking up effect. One might think that natural disasters like cyclones and earthquakes occur so frequently that we have become numb to their havoc, but the fact is that it is not the extent and the magnitude of the damage but the complacency which it shatters that makes a tragic event leave a scar. Sometimes, for the unfortunate ones, on the body and almost permanently on the mind. Independent America never thought an enemy would reach its shores and bomb its naval base or smash its proudest towers into dust with such impunity. In those heady days of hope in the early 60s no one ever thought that a President so loved by his people would be so brutally killed on the street. When traders stepped into the Bombay Stock Exchange on a sunny morning in March of 1993, nothing unusual was expected. It was business as usual. Stock exchanges never had been targeted through an act of violence and on that spring morning too there was nothing to defy the belief. Nothing to indicate that the Sarojini Nagar market where one picked such nice bargains would ever be abandoned all alone with a bomb. No reason or historical fact to presume or believe that when people walked in for a laser show at the Lumbini park in Hyderabad, some of them would not be returning home.

We never believe that tragedy can strike – either at us or a few feet away from us or for that matter at those spots where we frequently dine, shop or eat or in that city in which unhindered movement we take for granted. And it is because we do not expect it to happen to us, to our places, to our town and to our city that when it actually does happen, it leaves us numb.

Tonight, another Indian city has had its first brush with terror. Jaipur has withstood seven bomb blasts one after the other. Each timed to perfection, placed meticulously and each kept to go off in places where ordinary people like you and me would go on ordinary days to perform ordinary activities thinking nothing extraordinary could ever happen. Well, tonight it did. 60 people are dead and more than a 150 are injured. And a vibrant, bustling and busy city has lost what it can never regain – innocence. More than 200 families spend this night in anxiety, pain, agony and despair. Men, women and children – all out on daily routines of life have been punished for just that – living. Not for committing murders or looting or demolishing mosques or temples but simply because they did that one simple thing that all of us strive to do – live our daily lives. To say that their death is a waste of human life is an understatement. The answer to the ‘Why’ behind their death is even more eluding and frightening. Why did men so upset and angry about what is happening with their religion in the bloody streets of the middle - east turn towards innocent people thousands of miles away to express that anger? Expect no simple answers.

My only brush with terror, if I may call it that, came when three serial bomb blasts shook Delhi in late October of 2005. It was a couple of days before Diwali and I was on my way home looking to a week long break when the radio broke the news. One of the blasts took place at a chaat stall in the Sarojini Nagar market. An innocuous eatery at a busy market, crowded with hungry Diwali shoppers. Everytime I now go to Chandni Chowk and stand near the Town Hall to eat the Dahi Bhallas, my heart invariably skips a beat of awareness. A busy eatery at the corner of a congested lane. Shoppers, customers, cyclists and rickshaw pullers all milling around. Electric wires hanging overhead and a footpath with hardly any space to walk in the normal course, let alone run in case of a need. A perfect setting I say to myself everytime I stand outside that lane to eat. A perfect setting I say to myself whenever I am at the railway stations. Crowded platforms, unmanned metal detectors that do not work, no screening of baggage and no CCTVs. One can walk into a train with a bag of explosives without even being touched or stopped.

In a country where the value of life is so cheap, such blasts as those borne by Jaipur will not blow the wax out of our ears. Unfortunately the death and the injuries of those 200 odd citizens will not force the Indian state to sit up and acknowledge that it does not have an anti-terror policy and that it needs to urgently draft one. That’s its Intelligence set up needs drastic streamlining and restructuring. That’s its police needs reforming and should be out patrolling our streets rather than being holed up in the VIP zones of our cities. We are a soft state not because we do not have the resolve to act against terror but because we are not able to instill a fear of law in them and play the game with as much single mindedness and brutality as they do.

And while the Indian state ‘reflects’ on another set of lives lost and damaged, you and I can only do what we do everyday. Get out on the street and live our lives. Walk the roads, travel the footpaths, shop at the markets, eat at the roadside eateries, and venture out on Diwalis at crowded and potentially unsafe markets. You and I must continue to live our lives even though on days such as today we may never be able to trace our steps back home, even though on days such as today events may not leave us with the bodily resources to walk back home, even though on days such as today we may be facing the prospects of funeral pyres. You and I must walk the roads, for the right to live is a right greater than any enshrined even in our Constitution. It’s a right granted by humanity. And you and I must not allow any person to browbeat us into mortgaging it away.

Protests Pics and the IPL

2008-05-06T15:11:00.005+05:30

Ferozshah Kotla from the top tier stand under floodlights as Delhi take on Banglore

CP gets blocked as the cops watch...it would be another 15 mins in the sun before the road was cleared

Medicos are out on the streets chanting slogans against Arjun Singh....again

Summer Mutterings

2008-04-29T14:52:00.000+05:30

I begin by putting forward a simple question to you. Which Indian state in the recent past has witnessed that maximum political agitation over the most trivial, divisive and inconsequential issues? You would not have to be a ‘paanchvi paas’ to reach the correct answer. It is Maharashtra of course. Trace the course of Maharashtra politics over the last few years and you would traverse such glorious and nationally relevant milestones such as digging up of the pitch to protest Pakistan’s cricket tour, renaming Bombay into Mumbai, agitation over disenfranchising of Bal Thackeray for vituperative writings, Mee Mumbaikar campaign, a lot of song and dance (pun intended) over the dance bars and the girls who perform there, the whole anti-North Indian protests on the road and now this fresh political initiative to curb the skin displays of cheerleaders at the IPL games. For a nation that revels in trivializing its political debates, Maharashtra sets the benchmark. You could scarcely imagine, following the course of the above events, that this is a state whose capital was sunk under water for two days a couple of years back, that the security of the sate capital is constantly under threat, that its farmlands are dry and farmers eating pesticides to end their lives as crops routinely fail and that its status as the prime industrial state of the nation in the last decade has now been taken over by Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. As Maharashtra has decayed and declined, so have its opportunist politicians. In a game characterizing the most crass form of competitive reactionary politics, the parties involved have routinely stirred up the pot and tried to grab media space through non-issues.

Perhaps Maharashtra’s problem stems from the multi-polarity of its political landscape and that, unlike the cow belt states in the north, its political parties have seen their dedicated vote banks being shaken over the past few years. The Shiv Sena has been on the far right of the political space for four decades, yet has not been able to establish itself as the most dominant party of the state simply because of its reactionary agenda, propensity of violence and inability to offer a mainstream developmental platform. The one time when Uddhav Thackeray tried to adopt a more centrist position, he found himself being jostled out of the far right by an even more reactionary and narrow minded cousin Raj. As both the Thackeray cubs (or pussy cats as we may call them more deservingly), fight for the same space, each shall try to outdo the other by engaging in similar tactics of targeting outsiders, minorities and anyone else whom they can paint as a devil for all the problems of Maharashtra.

What surprises one in all this is that in the recent past, it has been the NCP and the Congress who have been at the forefront of pursuing mindless and irrelevant. The Home Minister RR Patil went after the bar dancers with a missionary zeal and it is the NCP itself that has now assumed the BJP and RSS’s mantle of guardians of the Indian culture and protested against the IPL cheerleaders. And while one may grudgingly grant the Home Minister the leverage of his ideological and cultural affiliations, it is clear that the NCP is clearly trying to expand its space and be a milder version of what the Shiv Sena used to be. The idea of course is clear, push the Sena into a further corner and marginalize it more as it grapples with dipping popularity, a revived Raj Thackeray and a new leader who can’t replace the old and aging patriarch. The Congress instead of the occupying the Centre space and adopting a conciliatory position has backtracked, observed without any action, not made an effort to focus attention on more burning topics of the state and dilly dallied and prevaricated in its response to everything. In all the Congress position has been to bury its head in the sand and wait till the storm passes or plead helplessness in the face of a hostile opposition and alliance partner.

The central issue is not whether cheerleaders in skimpy costumes are an offence to Indian sensibilities or whether cricket has been trivialized by having them around (basketball and American football wasn’t and T20 would also not be). NCP and Congress leaders frequently occupy front rows in Bollywood functions where actors in skimpier outfits perform on the stage and those who have performed on the screen are honored with awards. The moot point is whether the costumes of a few young women looking to make some money by doing a perfectly legitimate activity in public space is a matter worth debating in our assemblies and parliament when the nation grapples with a rising inflation, an impending slowdown in the economy and an agricultural slump. Are IPL cheerleaders more important for our politicians than these pressing concerns and if yes, then is there something wrong in the way we elect them or have we simply failed to get the message across to them that all that they need to do is govern and make our lives simpler and not pretend to govern and find helpless scapegoats to exercise their supposed moral assertions on?

A decade ago, in the context of its industrial development, it was said what Maharashtra is today India should aim to be tomorrow. Today, India would serve itself well to show Maharashtra the light.

**********************

So the IPL is up and running and whatever the critics may say (Mukul Kesavan wrote a scathing article lambasting the concept on Cricinfo last week), the tournament has been a hit. Attendances may not have been full (it was close to 85% in the first game at Mohali that I witnessed myself) but the television ratings have been high, despite Sony’s shoddy production values. Like DD in the past, Sony too does not believe in showing you the activity after the last ball of the over or the replay immediately after a wicket falls.

My only concern with the format thus far - the boundaries are pulled in a little too much turning even mishits into sixes and fours. IPL can avoid shortening the dimensions of the grounds simply to broaden the egos of the batsmen. The talented ones will clear the ropes anyways. My picks thus far – Warne (for the way he has lead an unfancied team), Ravindra Jadeja (for all that he brings to his team), McGrath (still as sharp), Dhoni (he ain’t no fluke as a captain), Rohit Sharma (for reaffirming his talent) and all the Aussies who have demonstrated that they do remain the ultimate professionals in the game. On current form and player strength Chennai, Delhi & Kolkata look set to reach the semis while Mohali/ Jaipur/ Deccan might battle for the last spot. Mumbai have been the biggest disappointment. Sachin’s injury and Bhajji’s slapping have made more news than their actual performances. At $110 mn they seem to be the most expensive failure of the tournament. After retail, another example of Reliance getting a business wrong? Chotte bhai Anil must be laughing away in some corner. Mukesh’s team won’t last this marathon for sure.

Chandigarh Pics

2008-04-21T13:13:00.002+05:30

2008-04-21T13:11:00.000+05:30

2008-04-21T13:08:00.001+05:30

2008-04-21T13:06:00.000+05:30