Ferrari Ki Sawari

Saw Ferrari Ki Sawari (FKS) today.  This time we waited till we could spot the symptoms of the film starting to detach itself from multiplexes:  Perhaps it is the other way round, the multiplexes preparing to discard a film which has been milked to capacity.  The symptoms are decreasing number of shows and shifting of these fewer shows to non-prime slots.  The wait stood us in good stead.  The hall was not too crowded and there were fewer distractions.

The film centers around a middle class Parasi family in Mumbai with a very mild tempered and highly principled bread-winner, an embittered grandfather and a very talented grandson.  The talented grandson has justifiable ambitions but the family does not have the financial resources to match those ambitions.  It is surprising to find the principled father stooping to stealing to somehow raise the requisite money.  Though finally everything turns out to be well and provides relief to audiences on the tenterhooks.  And, yes, before I forget, Sachin doesn't make an appearance in the film.  His Ferrari does and is acknowledged in the credits.

Yet another interesting character is a loud and outspoken Punjabi lady who is in the business of event management and happens to gets some business from a local trigger-happy neta and his spoilt young son.  She also uses her charm to gather all the good guys to help out the good guy - the doting father.

The script also beautifully portrays a remorselessly ambitious guys subscribing to the hook-or-the-crook principle, who never develops a sense of remorse and never grants concessions to the trampled victims even when doing so may be neither necessary nor gainful.  It reinforces the theory that nobody ever deviates from his genetically coded character, except rarely and temporarily as the good Parasi fellow happened to do to fulfill his son's ambitions.

Not a bad film and definitely worth watching once.

Ocean of Garbage

Voting for municipal elections is over. All candidates have promised a neat and clean ward.  Elsewhere sadhus are staging demonstrations for making Ganges clean.  Then there is a news that the municipal corporation in Lucknow has neither vacant land(fills) nor resources for disposal / processing of garbage.  Most other municipalities including those in towns along the Ganges may be no different, and the industries releasing untreated effluents will readily advance the same argument.

The news item seems to suggest that it is not a matter of attitude towards cleanliness or the work ethics in our municipal corporations that is responsible for all the squalor around us but sheer lack of physical and financial resources.  Never mind if the lack of resources is a direct fallout of the work culture.  However, lack of resources being the case, the sadhus should not be staging demonstrations but either making generous donations to the corporations / polluters from their overflowing coffers, or else directly investing in sewage / effluent treatment plants along Ganges.  We do hope that they have, at the least, made all the proper arrangements at their ashrams along the rivers and do not add to the woes of our rivers.

Coming back to the wards of the city where we have lots of greenery, one category of garbage is dry leaves and plant trimmings.  The garbage collection agencies refuse to pick them up.  Their argument is that the corporation does not allow them to dump these at the identified locations.  Unstated reasons are their unwillingness and lack of equipments too. The agencies are, of course, private ones engaged directly by the residents.  Yes, the corporation does NOT collect garbage.  There is a long list of things that the corporation does not do.  Maintenance of gardens is another item on the list.

It should be possible to use the undeveloped parks for composting the bio-waste locally.  Somehow even that is not happening.  What is happening is described below.

The disposal of this class of waste - leaves, twigs and trimmings - is done by dumping it on the roadside, allowing it to dry up and then setting it on fire.  Loose plastic bags, scraps of paper, gutka pouches littering the streets are also put in the same dump.

The favorite locations for this yagna-like fire ritual are the four corners of the parks developed by local residents themselves and used for morning walk, yoga etc.  The time for doing so is also carefully made to synchronize with the slot in the morning when the occupancy in the park is maximum.

Our sadhus may have to perform a huge yagna with corporation chiefs as Yajmaans for putting an end to this obnoxious daily fire ritual.  At the end the sadhus should, instead of demanding Dakshina, make donations to the chiefs to enable them to process all the garbage in a civilized manner.

Municipal Elections in Lucknow

Elections for the Lucknow Municipal Corporation are on and the votes will be cast this weekend.  The neighborhood mithaiwala Mr. Shivraj Singh had made up his mind to contest the election from this ward many many months ago.  He had started collecting all his customers' mobile numbers even as he continued collecting the milk bill from them.  His aspirations got dashed to the ground when the seat for our ward was declared reserved for women candidates.

Once the election symbols were approved by the State Election Commission (SEC) about 10 days ago, the campaigning started in the right earnest.  The uniformity in all aspects of campaigning is a little perplexing.  It extends from the size and color schemes of the pamphlets distributed by the candidates to loud voices from mobile vans pleading for support and the choice of patriotic songs that serve as fillers.  However what is most remarkable is the fact that each pamphlet invariably carries the candidate's husband's photo alongside the candidate's photo!  And the husband has more of a neta look than the actual candidate.  The sole exception is the pamphlet from the mother of a martyr in the Kargil war.  The martyr's photograph - a young and handsome officer - appears at the top.

There is little that helps you choose one candidate above the other.  All of them make the same promises, refrain from commenting on what has withheld and is withholding the area's development, and claim the same virtues for themselves except one.  The young ones claim youth and energy as a virtue while the older ones claim their experience and maturity as one.  They all leave the whole place littered with pamphlets after their door-to-door visit, their promises for ensuring cleanliness notwithstanding.  This pollution is later compounded by noise pollution from mobiles blaring out appeal in their favor.

While BJP and congress have fielded their candidates with the party symbols, some other parties have let their candidates contest on their personal symbol. I understand that there was a debate during the BSP government whether party symbols should be allowed in these elections or not.  The court ruled in favor of using party symbols.  I am not able to fully make out the reasons and motives for and against this practice.

An interesting thing happened on Monday.  We received an invitation to attend a Sunder Kand path by well-known Tiwari brothers in the neighborhood park.  This was being organized by three people who were not on the candidates' list.  Many people attended.  The recitation was enchanting but ended with an anti-climax. The seniormost Tiwari thanked the audience at the end of the performance and lo and behold, asked for supporting a candidate who had quietly slipped into the gathering towards the end of the performance!  Well, glory be to Lord Hanuman!

My wife and I are still trying to make up our minds on whom to support when we go for casting our vote on 23rd June, but find ourselves rather clueless.

Rowdy Rathore

Musings on Rowdy Rathore

My wife and I recently watched Rowdy Rathore simply because we wanted to see a movie and there was little choice available.  Though we went on a normal weekday, we were a little surprised to find the hall nearly full.  We surmised that the reason must be the summer vacations.

The film is about a fearless Phantom-like supercop who takes on a powerful and wicked gangster single-handedly.  As the attributes of this character require it to be dignified, a look-alike is brought in to unleash rowdism.  The look-alike takes over from the supercop in the final stages of the battle after the latter is felled by a group that is much too large even for him.  Needless to add that finally the good prevails even though it has to be assisted by some rowdism - satyamev jayate.

The rowdyism displayed in the film conforms quite well to the dictionary meaning of the word rowdy - "An uncultured, aggressive, rude, noisy troublemaker."  But what really draw the applause from the audience are the super-heroic acts by the hero and finally by the look-alike.

Though the fascination for superheroes is universal it seems to be especially strong in the third world where might-is-right prevails in its crudest forms - Baapji is an example in the film we are talking about - and there are too many of them around us.  The villains in the developed world, as portrayed by their films, are a little different and appear in the form of greedy business tycoons and unscrupulous scientists or even aliens from outer space.  They are fewer in numbers but many times more powerful and require true supermen to take them on.  In our case, the capability to take on a few dozen people seems to be enough. But then unlike our developed counterparts, we need one such superhero for each locality and then every sphere of life in that locality.  The reason perhaps being a very high goon-density compared to the developed world.

Superheroes are needed for the simple reason that the normal mechanisms in a society prove inadequate to counter a threat facing the society as a whole or a subgroup of it. Most threats, excepts those from alien life forms, originate from within the society itself. Every society is like the ocean that was subjected to churning (samudra manthan) and like it a society too gives out both life sustaining nectar and life threatening venom.  Societies are only different from each other to the extent of the mix of these two opposites.  Some have more of the first while others may have more of the latter.  Better or more developed ones will have more of the nectar while the worse ones will have more venom pervading them.

However if your villains are confined to deviant businessmen or misguided brilliant scientists only, it shows that your systems are sort of okay and one needs to be a man of exceptional abilities to subvert the system.  But if your the systems are so weak or pervert that almost anyone could yield to the desire of being a tyrant in his / her own small or big way: everyone except those few who are cultured enough or genetically indisposed to such behavior, something must definitely be wrong with the way society has organized itself and chosen to govern itself.

But the fact remains that every society will have its own share of villains and weaknesses in the system, and hence its fantasies about supermen who could deliver it from these.

But the differences between their societies not withstanding, what the superheroes from first and third world have in common is their very human weakness for a sweetheart and this adds as much color to their stories and film scripts as the villainy of the villains.

A Letter to Sri Kapil Sibal

Dear Mr. Sibal,

Like many of my fellow countrymen, I had known little about you till you surfaced on the political scene as a minister.  Most of us had an initial impression of you as a learned man with a cheerful disposition and felt happy that people like you could make it to politics.  I searched out your bio-data on the internet using Google and the bio-data, as provided by you or whoever, seemed to confirm the initial impression.  However this image gets a severe blow as one scrolls down to the end and reads the angry comments by visitors on your recent move to censor social media on the internet.

It seems that what is exercising the collective public consciousness and hogging the eyeballs today is not your impressive bio-data.  Instead it is the collection of vakeel-like tricks that you have been trying out, albeit unsuccessfully, to confound the 2G case, then to browbeat Baba Ramdev, subsequently to infiltrate the Anna Movement and tarnish it jointly with another outspoken colleague from your profession.  I have deliberately used the hindi word vakeel as like neta it is used in a not-so-flattering sense and no longer commands the respect that it may have initially done.

It is sad indeed that you remain undeterred by your failures and are now trying the same dirty tricks to force censorship on the social media on the internet.  You cannot be fool enough to believe that you will succeed in this matter that is so close to the hearts of public at large.  And you must also know that you are making yourself look like the villain of the piece.  And if you still persist in the matter, it must be on account of a conviction that the electorate is powerless against you and your class.  Perhaps this is why you and other of your ilk keep on challenging Anna and other crusaders to contest the elections.  And this is why the politicians are even more afraid of demands for changes in the electoral system than the fight against corruption.

Well this state of affairs will not last forever and your own actions will provoke the public to force changes down the collective neta throat that keeps gulping nation’s resources shamelessly.  But till it happens, enjoy your antics.

Yours musingly

JANATA

Persecuting Kiran Bedi

I haven't researched much about Kiran Bedi and my opinion about her is based on her coverage in the popular media over past several years. These have shown her to be an upright police officer and individual who strived to break free of the set mould and bring about changes in the system for the better. Chances are that you haven't researched Ms Bedi's life very thoroughly either.

However our politicians, their stooges, and agencies that are at their beck and call, seem to be making up for this lack of research on Ms Bedi. Never mind that these agencies are frequently admonished for public, media, and court for their dilly-dallying in many important and crucial cases awaiting swift action from them.  But they have all the time in the world for inspecting Kiran Bedi's life with an electron microscope!

Their hard academic work now shows that Ms Bedi has refused to pass on the benefits of certain concessions to sundry organizations and business houses. She became entitled to these concessions through her meritorious work. There should be little debate that the monetary value of these concessions belongs to her and hence it should be her decisions as to who would benefit from them. So she is very much within her rights if she decides that the benefit should go to her trust and not to a commercial organization that may have invited her and agreed to bear the costs. In fact even if she chose to retain the benefit for herself, it will be absolutely okay because the concessions are meant for the recipient as an individual. So what is all the brouhaha about?

The netas and agencies have further made a brilliant discovery that Ms Bedi's trust received a donation from Microsoft. As this can not be labeled wrong by any stretch of imagination, a vague accusation is being made that it has not been used for the purpose for which it was meant. Though Microsoft has never made any noise about it. 

All this is being done without sharing the specific details of their research project with the public.

So what signal is being sent out?  Are the netas asserting that they can be as vindictive as an underworld Don? Are they desperately trying to prove that the crusaders against corruption are also tainted, howsoever lightly, and have no right to question their huge blots?

We must send out a clear and strong message to the netas that their games now stand painfully exposed and they must mend themselves instead of persecuting those who urge them to do so.

Is there a civilized Alternative to slapping?

Slapping of Sharad Pawar by an irate youth is being hotly debated. Pawar refuses to forgive him. A section of public opinion says that while the anger and frustration of the young man is justified, the way he gave vent to it is not. This anger and frustration was reflected in Anna Hazare who asked if he was slapped just once. Another section, miniscule but vocal, proclaims it as a grave offense and demands most severe punishment for it. This section has also called for enhancing the security of Pawar and other leaders. This confirms and underscores what I said about providing security to all sorts of netas in my earlier blog.


In the political arena initially a proper facade was maintained and the all the murky business was kept carefully hidden from public view and knowledge. Thanks to the media more and more detail of the murky dealings and goings-on are being dug out and exposed to public view. And the public is becoming more and more desperate and irate and getting more and more exasperated by the unabated murky dealings and irresponsible statements and acts of the political class. The political class, in turn, is getting more and more brazen. Their smugness comes from the knowledge that they have the levers of the system firmly in their control and an electorate hopelessly divided along the lines of religion and caste is in no position to displace them. With all these deep divisions the politicians need not work too hard at getting votes either. They can win by bagging a miniscule percentage of votes. And a disappointed electorate has no right to recall either.


So what does a deeply aggrieved member of the public do? How does he vent his anger? Well, if he is daring enough, he goes ahead and slaps any politician within reach. And politicians clamor for more security instead of mending their ways!!! I reiterate the need to take away all protection from politicians except those occupying the topmost positions like PM and President. Doesn't each party have its quota of goons who can protect their leaders as was done recently to protect Rajiv Gandhi? The same goons can also serve to attack the leaders of other parties. Leave the security forces alone and let them protect the public that is their primary job.