Green drain

Will our cities ever allow us to go green?

I have been thinking about this question over and over again as I walk to my College as a green initiative at least three days a week. First, there is no road as I come out of my house, so to speak. It is gravel, sand and stones just put together on undulating patches and the rest of what is there or not there is in pits, literally. Patches have been dug up in the name of storm water drainage and it has been like that for months.

This challenging stretch leads to the chaotic four-point crossing with a narrows fifth lane pushing itself for attention.

The Chennai transport corporation buses charge menacingly, disregarding the red light. The threatened pedestrians are then forced to retract apologetically despite the signal post flashing green over the walk sign.

The SUVs and Sedans along with the two- and three-wheelers complete the chakravyuh (the circled trap), frustrating the poor pedestrians’ attempts. And, senior citizens are in for a rude, insensitive shock as they are unable to importune their way across the ominous crossing to reach their nationalised banks to update their passbooks or collect their pensions.

Once I manage to go to the other side, as a person and not as a corpse, I am forced to manoeuvre around piles of garbage, left unattended by corporation officials. The trash strays into streets after flowing out of unkempt bins. If I am not careful, I might just about squash a plastic bag of smelly, discarded sambhar or assorted plastic rubbish or used poopy nappies or even used sanitary napkins.

We want to go green. We want to walk, we want to cycle; we want to take the public transport. We want to save fuel for the next generation. We want to reduce ravaging our planet. We want our next generation to breathe easy.

There is enormous temptation to take out the car to avoid the bad roads, the disrespect of vehicles to pedestrians and cyclists and walking on trash. We will fight that. But wouldn’t it be helpful if there was some cooperation from corporation and the government and a little compassion and show of concern by our motorists?

Coming back to the question: Will our cities allow us in our green endeavour?

Salaam, Kalam

Thank you, Mr Kalam!

For maintaining a dignified silence throughout the drama staged outside the gates of Rashtrapati Bhavan;

For watching the chequered games of our political parties who are using the presidential election to checkmate one another;

For being the uninterested bystander as Mamata Banerjee performed her street plays in Delhi;

For being nonchalant when the West Bengal chief minister dragged Mulayam Singh Yadav to pledge his Samajwadi Party’s support for her choice: by the way, it was You, Mr Kalam;

For remaining oblivious to THE Congresswoman and her sycophants playing games in our democratic field and finally zeroing in on Pranab Mukherjee, who is desperate to come out of the sinking ship, also called the Indian economy;

For being non-committal from the beginning when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance proposed your name to score a point against the UPA-nominated Pranab;

Thank you, Mr Kalam, for standing by the people of this country;

For not budging from the pedestal, where you had placed yourself simply by being you;

For snubbing all those political clowns who claim to represent us.

Thank you, once again, Mr Kalam.

Post Script: I hope Mamata does not read this. I have called her tribe clowns. She may call me a Maoist and order my arrest.

Mobile revulsion

“Don’t lie,” a girl, sitting next to me in the public bus, snarled.

I looked at her, rather startled, my expression soon changing to that of amusement: I detected a wired device connected to her mobile phone that was peeping out of her bag.

A quick survey threw up an amazing answer: most of the passengers in the bus were talking into their mobiles. This was not a stand-alone phenomenon. Being a public transport user, I found this mass walkie-talkie spectacle in every bus, every train.

This mobile revolution has made all of us look like morons on the road, enslaving us all, reducing us to the lowest levels of insanity.

When we walk on the road, we see most of them talking aloud into their wired devices; most of them gesticulating with great intensity, totally unaware of everything around them. Without a dunce cap or those “mental inside” T-shirts, they would still qualify as deranged. So, passing cyclists now have the added responsibility of negotiating their way past these walkie-talkies apart from those impatient and rash two-three-four-wheelers.

We see bikers craning their neck to one side talking into their phones that precariously rest on their shoulders even as they flout all traffic rules. We see people talking on their phones while on the wheels, in blatant disregard to safety norms. We see pedestrians sauntering across busy zebra crossings as if they were in a park, their mobile conversation dictating their pace.

What we have got ourselves into is mobile insanity, mobile indiscipline, mobile helplessness; in short we have all become portable carriers of unruliness, chaos in their 2G and 3G versions.

The wise claim that technology has shrunk this world. Yes, it has blurred geographical distances. But hasn’t it increased distances among us? We prefer talking to people far and away, but do not feel it necessary to interact with those we rub shoulders with.

In a restaurant, very few tables will witness family time well spent. Most families look fragmented, with spouses on the phone, texting or talking. I recently saw two families sitting on a table together, apparently to celebrate someone’s birthday. But they were all talking into their respective phones. When the chef approached one of them to check when the cake would have to be delivered, he had to wait there for a good 5 minutes for the instructions because the guests and the hosts were all busy interacting with the world outside.

What is this mobile revolution getting us into? Is this a good idea sirjee?

I call this a mobile revulsion.

Mamata’s Knight out

Eden Gardens was packed, inside and outside; but there was no match being played there. It was an ecstatic Mamata Banerjee and her team who led a victory lap for the Kolkata Knight Riders after a felicitation ceremony outside Writers Buildings that included flowers, shawls and shondesh for the players and glitzy team owners. And, in the stadium, the West Bengal chief minister actually shouted into the mike, goading the crowd to chant the korbo-lorbo-jeetbo war cry. News channels went live to capture the moment. The crowd, too, went berserk outside the VIP gates and had to be pushed out with police batons. It was as if the entire city, specially its glitterati, had converged to participate in the celebrations. What’s more: the West Bengal Governor was present during this post-IPL tamasha. It was indeed a tamasha. The Bengali film fraternity was present to full strength, desperately trying to snatch the attention from the victorious team members. They refused to budge an inch from the front row, even as players disembarked from their bus towards a smiling Mamata outside. The chief minister took it upon herself to even control the crowds. She was all over the place, mike in hand, giving orders to people, press, policemen, and Shah Rukh Khan. “Shah Rukh, ekhane esho (Shah Rukh, come here)”, she said, delegating some chore for him. And, the obedient Shah Rukh Khan gave an award-winning performance of that gracious, humble Bengal brand ambassador, occasionally showering affection on his fiery didi. Or was that act to avoid him being labelled a Maoist? Poor guy is already barred from Wankhede stadium. He has been sued for smoking in Rajasthan stadium. The US is always asking why his name is Khan. Keeping didi in good humour is probably the wisest decision. Television viewers across the country were treated to some news reporting fun too, when channel reporters screamed into their mikes over the Bengali film brigade’s attitude. “They have no right to be there. These players have sweated it out and won for the city. These actors have no right to be at the centre-stage,” shouted the Times Now correspondent. These high-decibel sound-bites, though an ear-sore for viewers, showed another angle of the tamasha. So why were these IPL winners given a state welcome as never seen in the earlier four editions? True, KKR won after a five-year-wait. But was it really a victory befitting a state honour? There can be arguments for and against. The fans will obviously agree that their heroes made their city proud. That the city is marked bold on the IPL map after those four years of poor showing. The critics will call it a waste of time, energy and money. I would like it see it this way. Mamata showed a lot of promise when she was sworn in. But she has not been able to evolve from being a street-fighter to an administrator. She has been berated for continuing to be a stormy petrel, rather than managing a debt-riddled state. She has been a trouble-maker rather than a trouble-shooter most of the time. Her weakness comes across with her Maoist paranoia and the subsequent intolerance to uneasy cartoons and debates. In this mood, Mamata’s goading the crowd to sing the KKR’s korbo-lorbo-jeetbo anthem was parochialism at its best. But it seemed like her desperate attempt to prove a point through the IPL victory. After all, IPL is a corporatized sport. And it really need not be made into such a big, proud moment. All those who have been associated in the event have laughed loudly all the way to the bank, ruining for others all those precious and productive man/woman hours spent in front of the television set and stadia from April 4 to May 27. I see this entire exercise not as a routine felicitation event, but as an emotional appeal to the people of Bengal to support her and her endeavours. She is trying to give her message to the youth of Bengal to work, fight and win (that is what Korbo-lorbo-jeetbo stands for). And, to be fair to her, she needs the youth to wake up and fight to get Bengal onto the political and economic map of the country.

'Us' and 'them'

There is a certain level of expected snobbishness to the Supreme Court upholding the Right to Education Act for children between 6 and 14 years. The law requires both public and private schools to set aside a quarter of their seats for children from low-income families.
This step has obviously evoked mixed reactions from a cross section of people, with a level of predictability coming from the upper class/upper caste sections. But what stirred in me a concoction of fury and disillusion was a reaction from a few students of two of the most reputed schools in Chennai that pride itself in having the most number of NRI alumni after having helped them past the imposing gates of IITs and medical colleges. These students have said they would now be “forced” to study with “them”. To quote one: “Our school inculcates value systems in us. We follow rituals like doing sandhya vandanam and eating vegetarian food”.
Sandhya vandanam is a Brahminical ritual observed twice a day by boys and men post their thread ceremony. That this is part of their value system was more shocking than surprising. Added to this was the students’ concern about their vegetarian food atmosphere being “polluted”.
This brazen haughtiness is so typical of the crop, sown so deeply in the soil of such schools that simply aims at spreading its roots of denial to weaker sections of society. This “us” and “them” approach and the subsequent creation of a structured “elite” class is a dangerous proposition to a democratic society. What is worse is that these schools choose to boost their self-esteem by marketing themselves in their websites, saying a chunk of their alumni were settled in the US and Europe! Isn’t that what we call the brain drain?
So we have an India of private schools that produces “brilliant” students rubbing shoulders with like-minded peer group in a “superior value system”. This has skilfully taken forward a system of exclusion, creating a vertical “us” and “them” chasm.
Another thread of argument against the ruling is that the economic affluence of students from private schools may emanate an inferiority complex among their classmates from poor families. Isn’t that another smart exclusionary tactic?
There were reactions from the “them” sections as well in today’s newspapers, with many fruit vendors, flower sellers and domestic help expressing happiness over the chance to compete at the national level. They said this will now enable bright students from their families to shift from the pathetically-run government schools.
The court ruling is aimed at sensitising students of private schools and helping them liaise with their peers from less privileged background.
Education is the greatest leveller, and this will, let us hope, dilute elitism and casteism and also discourage our powers-that-be from using the much-abused the caste card. This could add maturity to our democratic set up. Shall we at least try and be more accommodative?

Pune, I hate to say goodbye...

As the first sheet of the bubble paper is unwrapped from the roll by the packers tomorrow, the one bubble that had rested in my heart might burst, oozing out my emotions and angst at having to leave Pune.
Ever since the seeds of my relocation plan germinated, I have been trying to keep it away from sunlight, lest it sprouts faster, grows taller and blooms, all too soon. I had watered it all right, sunned it, too, occasionally, but also kept it under shade, carefully soaking it into my Pune stint. I did not want it to snatch from me what this city showered me with, apart from warmth and cheer. It gave me the most delightful gift that life can offer: it gave me friends.
The relocation spasms might not have been so alarming had I not met my friends here. Three years ago, when I had to relocate from Chennai, I was not so devastated as I knew a new life beckoned my family, away from the hustle of the big city life. Pune? How will the city be? But the city began drenching me in its character almost spontaneously. The city was nonchalant, but not cold; it was laid-back, but not indifferent, it was quiet, but not dreary. Pune had a heart of a small city with a soul of a large one; it opened its warm arms to me and my family.
Now the shift is happening again; this time the city is not alien. After all, Chennai had tolerated me for 10 years. The lanes will be familiar; and I hope to find the familiar faces of the milkman, the boy at the neighbouring grocery store, the vegetable seller. The city has been special to me in a number of ways. It helped me evolve from being a Calcuttan to a Chennaiite with much ado. It slipped its easy charm into my psyche and I took to the city like a fish to water.
Today, as I think about moving out of Pune, I am swarmed by a thousand emotions. I am not really apprehensive. But I can spot a few butterflies, flapping their colourful wings in my stomach, making me wriggle occasionally. I do hope to soak in the same camaraderie that Chennai as a city articulated when I arrived one November morning from Calcutta.
So as the final bubble paper is wrapped and the lorry loaded, I will have managed to snatch from Pune a rich treasure, a plunder, a cache……of friends. What better return gift can I ask for from any city?

The scorned scion

So Akhilesh Yadav’s red cap got the green signal from the Uttar Pradesh electorate, which has systematically ripped apart Rahul Gandhi’s white topi that lies tattered in the dusty terrain of the state.
The electorate spurned the advances of one scion, but warmly embraced the other. Wonder why the Congress failed to make any dent into its once-strong fort? Worse, Amethi and Rae Bareli, the Nehru-Gandhi family’s traditional boroughs have left the dynasty battered and bruised.
Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party had to go anyway because of the elephantine levels of corruption her regime took the state into, making it even more “bimaru” than ever. The only imprint of her government had been her multi-crore giant statue projects that are left littered all over the state, specially the capital city of Lucknow. Maya’s phenomenal rise to power and her promises to uplift Dalits and raise their standard of life has remained empty, unlike her overflowing personal coffers.
Coming back to the Congress question: why couldn’t Rahul Gandhi manage to leave a mark despite his attempts at taking himself so seriously as the leader of the masses? Akhilesh Yadav scored all his goals with his “bicycle kicks”, leaving India’s post-colonial dynasty scurrying for cover.
The country has had enough of dynasties I think. The Congress and its sycophants have dented the democratic principles of the country enough. The electorate of the 1950s and 60s, fresh from a colonial hangover, rooted for this dynastic concept to fill up the leadership vacuum. They wanted monarch-style icons and the Congress was only too pleased to have its plate full with the Nehru-Gandhi lineage. What the party could not do was look ahead and groom a few leaders. They stuck to the idea of “ruling” the people rather than getting people to “represent” the electorate.
Today, people want someone from their own to don the leadership cap. Agreed, Akhilesh Yadav is also a scion, but has probably managed to connect better with the electorate with his rustic image, far removed from the sophisticated one of Rahul Gandhi.
But the Congress will never give up. In all probability, it will begin portraying Rahul’s sister, Priyanka, as another leader to reckon with. But the electorate is tired of the ultra-chic and stylish Gandhi family. The mandate’s message is clear: they want representatives, not rulers anymore.
Elections and the polity with its lack of convincing leaders are left with a hope: that Akhilesh Yadav, who might seem promising enough with an environmental engineering background, does not become another non-performing asset of a rich, influential family.

The dirtier picture!

Where is the colour of ethics in our country’s saffron citadel? The self-styled moral policemen, the guardians of our culture, the keeper of our women’s chastity and the Hindu religion have tainted their own starched saffron robes.
Three ministers of Karnataka’s ruling BJP have been caught watching pornography on a mobile phone device! Ironically, one of them, C.C. Patil, seen peeping into Minister for Cooperation, Laxman Savadi’s phone and gesturing mirthfully is the Women and Child Welfare Minister. The other partner-in-crime was Minister for Ecology, Environment and Ports, J. Krishna Palemar.
At one level, we have the saffron brigade baring its fangs at inappropriately dressed women, attacking women at bars, or vandalising gift shops to embitter the Valentine season. And, to think that all this have happened in a state where the BJP is in power, speak volumes of the Sangh Parivar’s double standards.
The Sri Ram Sene had brutally attacked women in Mangalore night clubs. The organisation had also announced an action plan to target people observing Valentine’s Day in Bangalore, saying its activists would go around with a priest, a turmeric stub and mangalsutra, and drag such couples to nearby temple and ritualise their marriage.
Interestingly, this minister for women and child welfare, C.C. Patil, had said recently that provocatively dressed women would inevitably invite sexual assaults. He had suggested that women must pay attention to wear “decent” clothes to “prevent” being sexually abused.
Sigh! Little did these ministers realise that their tiny mobile-screen pleasure while the House was in session is going to get ticklish. Mr Savadi then made a preposterous statement in a face-saving press conference that Mr Palemar was showing him a video wherein a woman was gang-raped in a western country. “It looked like a blue film, but that was not what it was,” he said.
So sorry, Mr Minister, this is not a blue film. This is voyeurism at its best. We have a women and child welfare minister getting ghoulish pleasure watching a woman’s body being exploited. And, an environment minister joining in this supremely revolting conduct even as his state’s environment is in abysmal health, raped as it is repeatedly by miners and land sharks.
By the way, the house was discussing drought conditions in the state when these ministers were caught on camera quenching their thirst!
The Chief Minister, Mr D.V. Sadanand Gowda, made an even more outrageous statement today: “I am happy with their conduct,” he has said. “They said they hadn't committed any big mistake. They have resigned on their own. This is honourable behaviour in democracy.''
This is indeed a matter of honour, Mr Chief Minister!
Now a six-member inquiry committee will probe the conduct of the three BJP MLAs. And, like any inquiry committee, we all know which way it will go. Into oblivion!
Will this hypocrisy ever end?