The Nests of Nandigram

Is it my imagination
Or are there far fewer birds singing ?
What dawn do they mutely await
Through the long night of terror ?
Silence speaks of pervasive fear
And of the loss of ancestral nests.

The protector has taken an axe to the trees.
Trees fall; the earth shakes.
Raucous cries of dispossession supplant birdsong
As the khaki-clad hunters pot sitting ducks
While Zeus' swans feast on Leda's flesh.

Rejoice, my countrymen, for the prophecy has come true
-The state has indeed withered away.

LIAR, LIAR

Manmohan Singh said in his statement in the Indian Parliament:

"the agreement does not in any way affect India's right to undertake future nuclear tests, if it is necessary."

U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said :

"The proposed 123 agreement has provisions in it that in an event of a nuclear test by India, then all nuclear cooperation is terminated, as well as there is provision for return of all materials, including reprocessed material covered by the agreement,"

Both of them can't be right. Ergo, one of them is lying. Take your pick.

Sunjay Dutt and John Donne

Sunjay Dutt committed a crime, was caught, tried, and after fourteen long years, was finally found guilty and sent to jail. But this piece is not about him, not about whether he was guilty or innocent, nor about the quantum of his sentence. It's about the high decibel clamour from Bollywood protesting against his sentence. It's about everyone from Dilip Kumar to the newest wannabe shouting from the rooftops about what a saint Sunjay is, about how he was just a victim of the circumstances, about how he has reformed. To a man (and woman) they declaim before the cameras that "poor Sunjay" must be set free. The touching camaraderie almost brought a lump to my throat. The man must be a really lovable type, I thought, for all his colleagues to jump to his defence like this. Dale Carnegie's "How To Win Friends And Influence People" come to life.

Just then, my brain's resident cynical imp woke up, took one look at my train of thought and hooted with derision. "You poor mug, do you really believe that they are all so deeply concerned about Sunjay Dutt? Most of them couldn't care less about what happens to him! My poor innocent, this outrage isn't about Sunjay Dutt at all. What has got them deeply worried is that the invisible wall of immunity they have always taken for granted has been breached."

As usual, the imp was right. These people have played fast and loose with the laws of the land, firm in their conviction that the laws did not apply to them. Up to now they've got away with murder. Money, and the aura of stardom ensured that they were never called to account for their crimes - ranging from drugs to bigamy to tax evasion to posing as farmers to grab agricultural land to mowing down innocent men, women and children while drunk. To be above the law was the birthright of the stars. Sunjay Dutt's case has violated this very birthright. That is what the shrill hysteria is all about. Dutt is simply a cloak for the fear that has taken root in their hearts - the fear that tomorrow the law may call them to account for their crimes. The fear that finally the law may actually implement what was till now a pleasant fiction - that all are equal before the law.

Unbidden, John Donne's lines sprang to mind :

Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

The Bollywood bigwigs have heard the bell tolling - and they don't like the sound one bit!

"No, thank you" says Ford

Each time I think the BCCI can't do any worse, they prove me wrong by creating an even bigger cock-up. Graham Ford was well within his rights to turn down the job if he felt that the compensation or the tenure was inadequate. If the dumb clucks in the BCCI chose to go ahead and announce his appointment as the coach of the Indian cricket team without waiting for his official acceptance of their offer, he can hardly be blamed. The BCCI babus suffer from incurable foot-in-the-mouth disease and seem to count each day that they do not appear on the idiot box as wasted. I never thought I'd say this but these buffoons have succeeded in making Dalmia's reign look like a golden era. When he was in power at the BCCI I had no love lost for him and celebrated his exit as a new dawn for Indian cricket. But Dalmia was a hard-core Marwari businessman who at least got things done. Sharad Pawar has made the organisation a standing joke, albeit a very bad one. The BCCI now resembles nothing so much as a Tower of Babel, where each of his lackeys tries to outdo the others in shooting his mouth off without verifying anything. This latest fiasco only reinforces the popular perception of the BCCI as a bunch of arrogant,power-drunk incompetents answerable to no one. Someone got it spot-on a long time ago when he said that the only thing worse than a public sector monopoly is a private sector monopoly.Let's pray for the early birth of Zee's ICL (Indian Cricket League). Surely they can't do any worse than this lot!

The Yanks are worried

The Yankees are worried - and it's showing in their cartoons. Have a look at these two from the International Herald Tribune.

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1126/525746127_dd25b86969_o.png

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1188/525746131_859b8720d5_o.png

When issues move from ivory tower editorials to newspaper cartoons one can safely say that they've become topics the man in the street talks about. Score one point for us, chaps. They've lectured the world on the virtues of a free market for decades. The shoe's on the other foot now.To use their idiom, they've talked the talk. Now it's time to walk the walk. Without whining that the shoe pinches. (Pardon the mixed, even mangled, metaphors but the temptation to crow a little bit was irresistible))

BBC, the Queen's English & I

About an hour ago I was watching the news on BBC World. Their reporter was talking about the organ transplant trade in China and about how, in response to international pressure the Chinese government was trying to set up a regulatory framework for organ transplants.

The caption on the lower part of the screen read :

"VOLUNTARY ORGAN TRANSPLANT TO BE MANDATORY"

No, I'm not making this up, you read that right. After listening intently to the report I finally managed to work out what they meant - that consent from the deceased's family would henceforth be an essential prerequisite to the harvesting of human organs. Ah well, the pressures of 24*7 reporting! It's nice to know that the Beeb can goof up like all the rest of us. The next time I make a dog's dinner of the Queen's English I can at least be assured of being in elite company.

Manmohan Singh throws off his mask

The mask is off.Officially. Manmohan Singh has now gone public with what had so far only been suspected by many of us Indians. I quote,

"They (Muslims) must have the first claim on resources."

We Hindus are back to being second-class citizens in our own country, The minorities (read Muslims) have priority in everything - the country's resources, education, wealth, opportunities - everything. If any of us had dared to say this aloud before yesterday, the pseudo-secularists would have shouted him down. There would have been howls of protests from the Left and the Congress and the person who said it would have been labelled immediately as a "rabid Hindu, fascist, fanatic, communalist, obscurantist, etc. etc." And these are only the printable names he would have been called. But the cat is now out of the bag. The Prime Minister of India, no less, the Honourable Manmohan Singh,has declared in a public speech that the minorities take priority. Period.At one stroke fifty-nine years of independence have come to nought and we Hindus are back to being what we were for a thousand years before 1947 - inconsequential slaves about whom the rulers do not care two hoots. We are back to the days of Aurangzeb and the hated 'jizia' tax. Once again, to be born a Hindu in India is a crime.


Yet again, it is our own fault. We elected a government where the power behind the throne is a Catholic foreigner, the figurehead Prime Minister is a Sikh and the President, a Muslim. We were gullible enough to believe that this was a symbol of our 'tolerance', our 'secularism', our 'assimilative culture'. We proved that we have learnt nothing from the multiple Muslim invasions of our land, from centuries of Muslim and British rule, from Mir Jaffar and Plassey. We continued to bury our heads in the sand. Like the Bourbons, we have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.We continued to be our own worst enemies, to fiddle while our hard-won independence was undermined. It is our somnolence, our refusal to stand up for our rights, our pusillanimity that has emboldened Mr.Manmohan Singh to go public with his government's so far hidden anti-majority agenda.
The response to this most outrageous of statements by the Prime Minister has been even more shocking. The television news channels, otherwise always on the hunt for 'Breaking news', have barely mentioned it in passing, devoting far more time to the latest film gossip. The newspaper I read,DNA, had a front page headline and article about how the corporate world is unable to find good CEOs. Manmohan's missile was hidden away on page 7. Blink and you'll miss it.The channels have no time for serious issues and are slaves to TRPs.The print media is in the hands of Leftists and government toadies.The internet and the blogosphere is probably our last chance. Let us at least raise our voices of protest here. Before they are silenced forever.

'Hu's ' Arunachal is it anyway?

Just a few days before the Chinese President is due to arrive in India, the Chinese ambassador declares to a news channel that Arunachal Pradesh is a part of China. Typical of the Indian government, there is no strong condemnation of the statement, just a milksop statement that this is just a re-iteration of the known Chinese position. True, but the Chinese never shoot from the hip in diplomacy.This statement to the press at this juncture is a part of carefully thought-out strategy to raise the ante ahead of any negotiations that Hu Jintao may have with Manmohan Singh.We, on the other hand continue to stick to our time-honoured tradition of ad hocism and of dealing with issues only when they explode in our faces.

Pranab Mukherjee, the new Foreign Minister tried to put on a brave face in front of the cameras and said that the whole of Arunachal is a part of India and that there could be no exchange of populated areas. But the damage has already been done. The Chinese have succeeded in setting a cat among the pigeons. There has been no response from Manmohan or from the super-PM, Madame Italiano. The Indian Commies are scrambling for cover & wondering how they are going to justify this Chinese salvo. Till their Chinese masters dropped this bomb, these self-same Commies were pressurising the Indian government to allow Hu to address a joint session of the Indian Parliament, a privilege we hadn't extended even to George Bush! Karat, Yechury & company were also raising Cain because Chinese companies were not allowed to bid for projects in Indian ports or to invest in sectors like telecommunications, etc. for security reasons. Next, they'll want us to allow the Chinese and Pakistanis to design software for our armed forces and our intelligence agencies. After all, fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Heartbreaking but hardly surprising

The result of the India-Australia match on 29th October could hardly be said to be unexpected. The Aussies, though an increasingly ageing side and no longer invincible, are still the strongest team in world cricket. The Indians, on current form, probably rank just above Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and England.
To any objective observer of the game (unfortunately that seems to rule out a huge percentage of Indian fans) the Indian team's decline in the last 8-10 months has been obvious. Yet, ostrich-like, the great Indian cricket-loving public continued, till yesterday, to bury their collective heads in the sand. After every defeat the captain would claim that 'the boys' had done their best, winning isn't everything, etc. etc. Before the start of each match he'd claim that they'd put the past behind them. Regrettably the past seems to have other ideas and is currently clinging to Dravid & co. like a limpet or a long-lost brother.
Since every cricket-loving Indian has either seen the game on the idiot-box or has read all about it in today's newspaper, I'll skip the match details. (Nobody's paying me to do a report on the match!) Rather, I'd like to put to the blogosphere at large a few questions which have been nagging me since the game ended.

1)How many members of the Indian team were actually playing for India as opposed to playing to secure a spot on the South African tour? Kaif's stubborn refusal to play shots almost certainly forced Dravid to play the horrible stroke which cost him his wicket. Dinesh Mongia's prime concern seemed to be to get to 30-40 odd at any cost, no matter how long it took him. The less said about Raina the better. And while Dhoni managed a run a ball, he seems to forgotten how to hit boundaries. This is no longer the free-spirited Dhoni who used to wield his bat like a mace.

2)Can anyone remember when was the last time Sachin Tendulkar came good when the chips were down ?

3)Why was Kaif sent in to bat ahead of Dhoni when acceleration was the need of the hour?

4)Why does the Indian team always slow down to a near crawl between the twentieth and the fortieth overs thereby frittering away any advantage a good start may have given them? A propos the same point, why does every Greg, Dick and Harry in the support staff have a laptop if they can't do simple multiplication tables to work out when the batsmen should start putting their feet on the accelerator? Rocket science it isn't.

5)Why did the Indian team walk out to field believing it had already lost? Their body language made it obvious that they were simply going through the motions.

There are many more such questions but answers, frank answers, do not seem to be forthcoming. Meanwhile Indian cricket goes round in circles losing on the swings what we'd gained on the round-abouts. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose " which translates as "The more things change, the more things stay the same"

Pop goes the NPT

So Kim Jong Il yesterday proved to the world what everyone knew anyway. The North Koreans have had the atomic bomb for some time now.

9th October 2006 was just the day they made it official. Yet all the big guns have suddenly started running around like headless chickens. The U.S., Japan, China, Russia, the E.U. all making the usual threatening but essentially meaningless noises. The funniest sight was John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister making bellicose statements in the Australian Parliament. Good show, John.I'll bet Kim and his friends were quaking in their boots. Psst, John, it isn't as easy as decimating the poor Aboriginals. Even the Americans couldn't win the Korean war, remember ?
The frustrated Americans can sabre-rattle all they want but the reality is that they can't do much.The military option was ruled out (unless the North Koreans themselves start a war) some years ago when it became evident that the Koreans had developed the bomb. Otherwise George W. would have invaded North Korea instead of Iraq.After all, it was numero uno in his 'Axis of Evil' comprising N.Korea, Iran and Iraq. Since the South Koreans and the Japanese would rather not have nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles raining down on them, Iraq seemed the easier option at the time. As for sanctions, there are already quite a few sanctions in place. N.Korea is economically in such bad shape that things can hardly get any worse for them. Not being burdened with the necessity of having to face elections as the free world knows them, the regime does not have to bother about public opinion. Media pressure pre-supposes the existence of independent media - again, something Kim doesn't have to lose any sleep over. Therefore, unless the U.S.A. can get China to turn off food and oil supplies to its recalcitrant ally there isn't much George and Condi can do but gnash their teeth. Perhaps John Howard got it right after all. Since there is nothing else to be done, chest-thumping at least gets a decent press !

Thirteen long years

Finally, after thirteen long years, a verdict. But let's not start celebrating just yet. At his present rate of eight a day, it'll take the judge a few weeks just to deliver his verdicts. That's the easy part. Then comes the sentencing. The lawyers of those convicted will speak at great length (yawn) extolling their clients' many virtues, portraying them as being more sinned against than sinners. In turn, the prosecutors will demand the maximum penalty leviable. Finally the judge will decide and hand down the sentences. The bad guys will be hauled off to jail to pay for their crimes. End of ( a rather long-winded ) story.

Wrong!! Only a foreigner or a retard would believe in that rather naive ending. Haven't you heard of the 'Great Indian Appeal Circus'? All those convicted will appeal to the higher courts protesting their innocence, and the prosecution will appeal against all acquitals. That process should, at a conservative estimate, take the best part of five years. All through this enthralling spectacle there will be entertaining side -shows about bail, permission to leave the country for work, etc. [After all, poor Sanju baba has all those films to shoot! Did I hear mutterings about thousands of undertrials rotting in jail waiting for their day in court, even their appeals for bail awaiting a first hearing? Hey, this is India. We don't believe in all that Western tommy-rot about the law being the same for all. A film star with a film star-politician father and a politician sister and with connections to the Dynasty! How can you equate him with those people? ]

"Satyamev jayate" - Truth alone triumphs - is the motto of the Indian judicial system. Like most mottos these days, it sounds more like a forlorn expression of hope than anything else.Two famous quotations spring to mind

1. "Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.'
2. " Justice delayed is justice denied."

It doesn't need an Einstein to figure out which is applicable, does it? So, don't open that champagne just yet.

P.S.
For those of you who can read Marathi, here's my Marathi take on the issue : अधीर

Vande mataram

In the end the Vande mataram centenary turned out to be like the Y2K issue - much ado about nothing. Our politicians behaved in their usual divisive, fractious manner, turning every question into a Hindu-Muslim issue, spouting asinine garbage and playing to their respective galleries as the ordinary Bharatiya on the street watched helplessly! Last week a news channel had waylaid many of our 'rulers' - MPs and ministers outside Parliament and had asked them simple questions like who wrote 'Jana gana mana', what was Gandhi's full name, etc. Over 90% of them hadn't a clue! Yet these self-same ignoramuses waxed eloquent on both sides of the Vande mataram controversy. Hardly any of them can even quote two lines of either 'Jana gana mana' or 'Vande mataram'. As to understanding what the poems mean, perish the thought.

When will public debate in Bharat ever rise above gutter level? When will informed and reasoned arguments take the place of illogical insults, name-calling, distortion of historical facts? Watch the so-called debates on television - they are nothing but slanging matches with each political lout trying to outshout the others. Parrot the party line and impress the 'High Command', do not preserve even the basic decencies of debate, do not allow anyone else to have his say, and duck all uncomfortable questions by burying them under a barrelful of verbal diarrhoea! Is anyone really interested in finding solutions, in reaching the truth? You must be joking, mate!

And what about the media? Is it any better? That rant can wait for another post.