(bdnews24.com, August 26, 2011)
Many years ago, when I was in graduate school in the United States, I saw my first Shammi Kapoor film. I was staying with an Indian friend and knew next to nothing about Hindi movies, stars or anything about the place called Bollywood that existed in and around my home city of Mumbai. But as I sat with my friend’s small daughter cuddled on my lap and watched this portly gentleman slide down in the snow yelling what sounded like “Yahoo!”, I caught the first spark in what eventually became a fascination with the world of Indian cinema. The word was indeed ‘Yahoo’, the snow was packed against a hillside in Kashmir and the stout man was Shammi Kapoor.
The film was Junglee, a classic black and white movie that created a special brand of history when it was released and made its hero and heroine (Saira Banu) stars. And as I started to get more familiar with the music of the hundreds of Bollywood productions that my friends knew so much about, the tunes stayed in my head, along with the many interesting bits of information I heard, read and saw about this exotic new (for me) realm.
It got better – once I started working on the Internet, creating online versions of magazines, writing content for websites and using cyberspace to talk to friends, find information and enjoy discovering new concepts and facts, Shammi Kapoor played a surprisingly non-filmi role. I learned that the star had retired many years before I saw that sliding-in-the-snow routine. He was ill with kidney trouble, underwent regular dialysis and did the occasional cameo in a film.
But, more interestingly, he had a fairly full life that had little, if any, connection with films. He was the founder and chairman of the Internet Users Community of India (IUCI) and had played a major role in setting up the Ethical Hackers Association. Best of all for his fan club, he also maintained a website dedicated to the Kapoor family.
And that perhaps is the story of a star. Born on October 21, 1931, into the first family of Hindi films, as it is often called, Shamsher Raj Kapoor was the son of Prithviraj and Ramsharni Kapoor, brother to Raj and Shashi. He spent a few years in Kolkata, where his father acted in films, and then the family moved to Bombay, as it was known then. Academics was not his forte and he preferred to start working first in his father’s company, Prithvi Theatres, and then as a junior artiste in films – he made his big screen debut as a hero in 1953, with Jeevan Jyoti, co-starring Chand Usmani.
Serious roles got him nowhere near the big time, and he was almost forced into a change of image with Nasir Hussain’s Tumsa Nahin Dekha (1959), with a young Ameeta as his heroine. Dil Deke Dekho with Asha Parekh cemented this new avatar in the minds of the audience and Shammi Kapoor was labelled a ‘star’. Tall, athletic, light-eyed and handsome, his looks made it even easier, while his wealthy playboy persona seemed true to life and won hearts all over the world. Junglee was followed by Dil Tera Diwana, Professor, China Town, Rajkumar, Kashmir Ki Kali, Janwar, Teesri Manzil, An Evening in Paris, Bramhachari, Andaz and Vidhaata.
Music played a huge part in Shammi Kapoor’s success. Most of his super hit songs came from the composers Shankar-Jaikishen or OP Nayyar, and were sung by Mohammed Rafi. They include – apart from the exuberant ‘Yahoo…Chahe koi mujhe junglee kahe’, of course - Suku Suku, Ae Gulbadan, Govinda Aala Re, Deewana Hua Badal, Tumne Pukara Aur Hum Chale Aaye,Tumse Achha Kaun Hai, O Mere Sona Re, Akele Akele Kahan Jaa Rahe Ho, Aajkal Tere Mere Pyar ke Charche, Badan pe Sitare and Hain Na Bolo Bolo. We all remember those and can sing along with them.
But even as we do, we tend to close our eyes rather than watch Shammi Kapoor on the screen in so many of his films. He may have started out as a handsome, agile, gloriously ogle-able heartthrob, but soon gained a lot of weight and became lined, ungainly, unappealing. By the 1970s he had stopped acting as hero and did character roles in films.
He even directed two films – Manoranjan and Bundal Baaz, neither too successful. And earlier this year, he managed to shoot for his grand-nephew Ranbir Kapoor’s next movie, Rockstar. But by then he was fairly seriously ill with kidney failure. And early morning on August 14, he died in Mumbai.
Shammi Kapoor is an integral part of Hindi movie history. He was called the ‘Elvis of India’ and sang, danced and romanced on the big screen like few others have managed to do. For his sheer joie de vivre and the memories of friendship, movies, music and masti that his work have given me, I will always be a fan.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Book review - The Tiger's Wife
(The Times of India Crest Edition, August 19, 2011)
THE TIGER’S WIFE
Tea Obrecht
A book is generally the sum of its parts. There is the story, the characters, the development of the plot, the point of view, the overall coherence and, of course, the writing itself go a long way to making a book readable, buyable and, eventually successful. Once in a while, the entire package comes together beautifully, and you, as reader, will not just buy the book, but read it over and over again for the sheer pleasure of imbibing something worth owning. But sometimes a book comes along which makes sense in a strange way, for just the experience of being something different, with a story that is so unlike the norm, characters that make sense but are obviously not anyone you would know well and all in a setting that is unusual, magical, enjoyable. The writing may not be the best. The language may not be the most refined or evolved or even adult. The various parts could be disjointed and not all of a high quality. But the book does well, the critics love it and you, as reader, like it without being sure what is wrong with it, though you know there is something off-kilter. But, frankly, you don’t really care.
This is what happens with The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obrecht. The story is amazingly interesting, enchanting, casting a rarely used spell with its out-of-the-ordinary progress. It begins with the small girl-child Natalia being taken to the zoo by her grandfather. They have food for the animals, from cabbage heads for the hippos to sugar cubes for the pony that pulls the carriage, but what they really head for is the tiger cage. And, as they watch, the dustpan keeper is attacked by one of the big striped cats, his arm mauled and bleeding, a matter of shame for the man and frustration for the animal. When she grows up, Natalia becomes a doctor in the big city, like her grandfather was. All through her life – she ‘speaks’ when she is over 60 – the tiger has been a major influence on her family, somehow deeply connected to the copy of the Jungle Book that her grandfather has always kept, no matter what the circumstances.
Natalia is on her way to a seaside town orphanage somewhere in the Balkans to treat the children there when she is told that her grandfather has mysteriously passed away. The young doctor chases up the reason for his death, by going back along the path that he too while he was alive, going through the stories he had told her, the places they had been to together, the small pleasures that they had shared in the process. And along the way there are two stories that always resurface – of a tiger escaped from the zoo which prowled around the fictional village of Galina, and the ‘deathless man’ who is fated to live on in spite of whatever is done to him. The deathless man and the tiger walk side by side with Natalia’s grandfather through his life, whimsically appearing and vanishing in a complex puzzle that the reader tries to unravel as the story unfolds.
The tale has a special magic, the characters played out, the bonds strong, though lacking emotional depth and perhaps endurance, even the clichés making sense in their positions. Most of all it is the imagination of the author that carries most weight, making her well deserving of the applause that has come her way since the book was published. It is not an easy book to read, but it is well worth the effort.
THE TIGER’S WIFE
Tea Obrecht
A book is generally the sum of its parts. There is the story, the characters, the development of the plot, the point of view, the overall coherence and, of course, the writing itself go a long way to making a book readable, buyable and, eventually successful. Once in a while, the entire package comes together beautifully, and you, as reader, will not just buy the book, but read it over and over again for the sheer pleasure of imbibing something worth owning. But sometimes a book comes along which makes sense in a strange way, for just the experience of being something different, with a story that is so unlike the norm, characters that make sense but are obviously not anyone you would know well and all in a setting that is unusual, magical, enjoyable. The writing may not be the best. The language may not be the most refined or evolved or even adult. The various parts could be disjointed and not all of a high quality. But the book does well, the critics love it and you, as reader, like it without being sure what is wrong with it, though you know there is something off-kilter. But, frankly, you don’t really care.
This is what happens with The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obrecht. The story is amazingly interesting, enchanting, casting a rarely used spell with its out-of-the-ordinary progress. It begins with the small girl-child Natalia being taken to the zoo by her grandfather. They have food for the animals, from cabbage heads for the hippos to sugar cubes for the pony that pulls the carriage, but what they really head for is the tiger cage. And, as they watch, the dustpan keeper is attacked by one of the big striped cats, his arm mauled and bleeding, a matter of shame for the man and frustration for the animal. When she grows up, Natalia becomes a doctor in the big city, like her grandfather was. All through her life – she ‘speaks’ when she is over 60 – the tiger has been a major influence on her family, somehow deeply connected to the copy of the Jungle Book that her grandfather has always kept, no matter what the circumstances.
Natalia is on her way to a seaside town orphanage somewhere in the Balkans to treat the children there when she is told that her grandfather has mysteriously passed away. The young doctor chases up the reason for his death, by going back along the path that he too while he was alive, going through the stories he had told her, the places they had been to together, the small pleasures that they had shared in the process. And along the way there are two stories that always resurface – of a tiger escaped from the zoo which prowled around the fictional village of Galina, and the ‘deathless man’ who is fated to live on in spite of whatever is done to him. The deathless man and the tiger walk side by side with Natalia’s grandfather through his life, whimsically appearing and vanishing in a complex puzzle that the reader tries to unravel as the story unfolds.
The tale has a special magic, the characters played out, the bonds strong, though lacking emotional depth and perhaps endurance, even the clichés making sense in their positions. Most of all it is the imagination of the author that carries most weight, making her well deserving of the applause that has come her way since the book was published. It is not an easy book to read, but it is well worth the effort.
We all need a hero
For the past few months one small and unassuming man has been making a lot of noise all over my country, India. His name is Kisan Baburao Hazare, and he is usually known as Anna. He has a reason to make his presence felt and has much of this nation – educated and not, rich and poor, urban and rural – on his side, rooting for him.
The social activist is best known for his fight against corruption and, while his methods may be questionable, his goals are indeed noble, a cause worth doing battle for. And while a lot of my friends and others I know may support him and his way of getting heard, I certainly do not. But then, for now at least, he is a hero and all of us needs one of those every now and then, I know.
Hazare was born June 15, 1937, and does his work from a village in my home state of Maharashtra called Ralegaon Siddhi, a place he has been credited with helping to develop and structure into what is today known as a model township. As part of a family that was not very well off or highly educated, he was brought to the city by his aunt, who brought him up, educating him till the 7th grade. To bring some money into the family, he started working after that, selling flowers in central Mumbai. He prospered and brought two of his brothers to the city to work.
It is perhaps the next stage of his life that taught him much about strategy and battle – in 1962 the 25-year-old Hazare joined the army as a driver, posted near the Pakistan border at the Khem Karan sector. In an air attack on Indian bases in 1865, Hazare narrowly escaped death, but his comrades were all killed – this started him thinking about the purpose and meaning of life and death and set him on the path of reform and service of the less advantaged. A road accident in the mid-70s was the true turning point – that decided Hazare’s future; he vowed to dedicate his life to the service of humanity. He was 38.
Hazare retired from the army in 1978. Much of his work centred around the small village of Ralegaon Siddhi, where he worked on development and in fighting alcoholism. In that battle, he was unstintingly harsh. Hazare himself flogged drunk villagers and justified his actions: “Rural India is a harsh society. Doesn’t a mother administer bitter medicines to a sick child when she knows that the medicine can cure her child? The child may not like the medicine, but the mother does it only because she cares for the child. The alcoholics were punished so that their families would not be destroyed.” And the tough love seemed to pay off; he became the crusader, the saviour, the hero.
Soon Hazare’s work and its ambit had stretched to cover more than just one village and more than the issues he was already known for. He battled politicians and industry alike, laying the foundation for the Right to Information Act, among other milestones. This time, over the past few months, his aim is to wipe out a national ailment: corruption. He has proposed to the Indian government the Jan Lokpal Bill, a law to establish an ombudsman, or Lokpal, who has the power to deal with the problem of corruption in public office – from the prime minister to a less exalted minion in the corridors of government.
On April 5 this year, he decided to begin a fast unto death at the Jantar Mantar in Delhi to push the Indian government into taking action on a strong anti-corruption act. The fast ended four days later, when the government agreed to his demands, hoping to get him out of the spotlight, but Hazare’s name had already become a buzzword all over the country.
For so many reasons, the little man from a little village is now a national figure, respected, almost revered, by luminaries like social activists Medha Patkar and Arvind Kejriwal, former IPS officer Kiran Bedi, spiritual leaders Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Swami Ramdev and Swami Agnivesh, former Indian cricketer Kapil Dev, along with countless less well-known people nation-wide. The protests continue, every now and then flaring up into mass rallies and marches, as Anna Hazare and his team find new issues to object to – the arrest of Baba Ramdev, the draft of the Lokpal Bill, something a government official said, a new sugar factory, an obscure point in the draft being considered for approval…anything that could even remotely be contentious becomes so.
Along the way, there is a lot that I cannot understand. If – as so many people call him – this ‘new Gandhi’ is really on the side of progress, why is he stopping a city like Mumbai, the commercial capital of the country, working with his rallies and protest marches? Does he realise that one day off work can mean the difference between starvation and a meal for some of the urban poor? Why are so many people, some extremely well qualified, highly educated, reputed as thinkers, see him as such a significant presence today? Are they all – are we all – so tired of the way India survives with corruption as an everyday- every moment companion to accomplishment of anything from getting a ration card to gaining admission into primary school? We are. I am.
But do I believe in Anna Hazare as the solution to all the problems faced by a modern, progressive and developing nation? No, I don’t. I would, frankly, stop all these marches, rallies, protests and find a way to keep myself free from any taint of corruption first, be it paying a cop for a traffic offence or accepting a favour for writing a story published in a newspaper. It starts with me. As an individual, I can make a difference, quietly, effectively, without having to make any noise about it, without playing a tangled game of politics in doing it, without confrontation and hordes of unwashed people gathering in a public space and creating chaos and disrupting life. To me, for me, that is where the battle can really be won: in me, with me, by me.
The social activist is best known for his fight against corruption and, while his methods may be questionable, his goals are indeed noble, a cause worth doing battle for. And while a lot of my friends and others I know may support him and his way of getting heard, I certainly do not. But then, for now at least, he is a hero and all of us needs one of those every now and then, I know.
Hazare was born June 15, 1937, and does his work from a village in my home state of Maharashtra called Ralegaon Siddhi, a place he has been credited with helping to develop and structure into what is today known as a model township. As part of a family that was not very well off or highly educated, he was brought to the city by his aunt, who brought him up, educating him till the 7th grade. To bring some money into the family, he started working after that, selling flowers in central Mumbai. He prospered and brought two of his brothers to the city to work.
It is perhaps the next stage of his life that taught him much about strategy and battle – in 1962 the 25-year-old Hazare joined the army as a driver, posted near the Pakistan border at the Khem Karan sector. In an air attack on Indian bases in 1865, Hazare narrowly escaped death, but his comrades were all killed – this started him thinking about the purpose and meaning of life and death and set him on the path of reform and service of the less advantaged. A road accident in the mid-70s was the true turning point – that decided Hazare’s future; he vowed to dedicate his life to the service of humanity. He was 38.
Hazare retired from the army in 1978. Much of his work centred around the small village of Ralegaon Siddhi, where he worked on development and in fighting alcoholism. In that battle, he was unstintingly harsh. Hazare himself flogged drunk villagers and justified his actions: “Rural India is a harsh society. Doesn’t a mother administer bitter medicines to a sick child when she knows that the medicine can cure her child? The child may not like the medicine, but the mother does it only because she cares for the child. The alcoholics were punished so that their families would not be destroyed.” And the tough love seemed to pay off; he became the crusader, the saviour, the hero.
Soon Hazare’s work and its ambit had stretched to cover more than just one village and more than the issues he was already known for. He battled politicians and industry alike, laying the foundation for the Right to Information Act, among other milestones. This time, over the past few months, his aim is to wipe out a national ailment: corruption. He has proposed to the Indian government the Jan Lokpal Bill, a law to establish an ombudsman, or Lokpal, who has the power to deal with the problem of corruption in public office – from the prime minister to a less exalted minion in the corridors of government.
On April 5 this year, he decided to begin a fast unto death at the Jantar Mantar in Delhi to push the Indian government into taking action on a strong anti-corruption act. The fast ended four days later, when the government agreed to his demands, hoping to get him out of the spotlight, but Hazare’s name had already become a buzzword all over the country.
For so many reasons, the little man from a little village is now a national figure, respected, almost revered, by luminaries like social activists Medha Patkar and Arvind Kejriwal, former IPS officer Kiran Bedi, spiritual leaders Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Swami Ramdev and Swami Agnivesh, former Indian cricketer Kapil Dev, along with countless less well-known people nation-wide. The protests continue, every now and then flaring up into mass rallies and marches, as Anna Hazare and his team find new issues to object to – the arrest of Baba Ramdev, the draft of the Lokpal Bill, something a government official said, a new sugar factory, an obscure point in the draft being considered for approval…anything that could even remotely be contentious becomes so.
Along the way, there is a lot that I cannot understand. If – as so many people call him – this ‘new Gandhi’ is really on the side of progress, why is he stopping a city like Mumbai, the commercial capital of the country, working with his rallies and protest marches? Does he realise that one day off work can mean the difference between starvation and a meal for some of the urban poor? Why are so many people, some extremely well qualified, highly educated, reputed as thinkers, see him as such a significant presence today? Are they all – are we all – so tired of the way India survives with corruption as an everyday- every moment companion to accomplishment of anything from getting a ration card to gaining admission into primary school? We are. I am.
But do I believe in Anna Hazare as the solution to all the problems faced by a modern, progressive and developing nation? No, I don’t. I would, frankly, stop all these marches, rallies, protests and find a way to keep myself free from any taint of corruption first, be it paying a cop for a traffic offence or accepting a favour for writing a story published in a newspaper. It starts with me. As an individual, I can make a difference, quietly, effectively, without having to make any noise about it, without playing a tangled game of politics in doing it, without confrontation and hordes of unwashed people gathering in a public space and creating chaos and disrupting life. To me, for me, that is where the battle can really be won: in me, with me, by me.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
The freedom to be independent
(bdnews24.com, August 14, 2011)
It is the 65th year of my country’s independence on August 15, and I feel a strange sense of joy at knowing I am part of a nation that has earned its freedom. We – my grandparents’ generation actually – fought long and hard to earn that right and took huge risks, sacrificed their lives, their homes, their families to get it all. They gave it to us as a kind of birthright, something we never worked to get, something we took and still take for granted. And 64 years is a long time for anyone to learn how to be free. But what bothers me is one simple question: Have we deserved that same freedom? I wonder.
With freedom comes responsibility, maturity, ambition, ethics, honesty, reliability, accountability…so many add-ons that it gets bewildering. Freedom is not just about not needing to carry a permit to get in and out of anywhere, to be able to work and live as you may wish to or to be able to exist without persecution and prosecution for your sheer existence. It is far more than material; it has to be ethical, almost spiritual. Freedom is about giving as much as it is about taking; it speaks of a need to be a useful productive, supportive, grown-up member of a family, a community, a society, a nation.
And so I wonder, are we doing all that? Are we, in fact, capable of doing any of it? I am honestly not too sure about that one.
Consider life as it is today. We face major issues like corruption, terrorism, inefficiency, instability, poverty, backwardness and goodness knows what else, all issues that seem to have no real solution, not unless we stop, end everything and start over again. We cannot, obviously, afford to do that. We have over the past few years battled immense economic problems, recovering amazingly well from a downturn, a recession, a gradual climb back up and a volatile job market that still is not up to par in many fields.
We have battled graft in so many different forms at so many different levels, finding the corrupt in more high places than we would ever have expected, from heads of state governments and prestigious departments to chiefs of the biggest and most successful corporations. Terrorism has been less terrorising than even a year ago, but the violence has not stopped – just recently there were three bomb blasts, one rapidly following the other, in parts of Mumbai that are highly populated and thus vulnerable.
There has been environmental crisis, with oil leaking into the sea after a ship was holed and slowly sank just off the coast of my home city; another threatens even as I write this. Our roads are a mess, with the infrastructure victim to corruption and inefficiency, putting lives at risk every day in every way – people die in uncovered manholes, after skidding on badly surfaced roads, after accidents caused by potholes and rash driving. And our government…well…the less said about its functioning and organisation, the better.
So are we a bad people in a bad nation? No, not at all. We have the drive, the knowledge, the experience, the ambition and, best of all, the ability to be all that is good and positive and successful. And we are, in many pockets, in many fields, in many ways. But, as always, the bad tends to overshadow the good, working against what we actually are and highlighting what we seem to be. We are a people of God, in so many ways, a people who believe that good always triumphs. We are a people who always accept, often understand and are willing to believe, just because that is the tradition we grow up with. And we are willing to work hard, in our individual capacities, to get where we think we should be, without shortcuts, if the system permits.
Now there is the problem. Very often, the system does not permit. We get stuck in the cracks that have developed with time and negligence and, to come extent, habit. We know that, for instance, it is easy to get away with a traffic offence, especially if it is minor, like jumping light or driving without a seatbelt; all we need to do, we have seen, is pay off the cop who has stopped us and then we proceed as if nothing had happened. We know, for instance, that to get a passport, we can, if we are willing, pay a gent standing outside the passport office and thereby jump a lot of lines and shortcut a lot of procedure that would normally take longer than we like. We know, for instance, that we can get a job that we are not really best qualified for by telling the headhunters that we are related to so-and-so or you-know-who and get a salary we do not really deserve. It is all a matter of the life we know…and this, unfortunately, is it.
So whom do we blame? Ourselves or the system? Either, both, all of the above. Freedom is a flexible concept that we can easily learn to use. We should start by doing a little growing up…then we will indeed be, as they say, Indians shining!
It is the 65th year of my country’s independence on August 15, and I feel a strange sense of joy at knowing I am part of a nation that has earned its freedom. We – my grandparents’ generation actually – fought long and hard to earn that right and took huge risks, sacrificed their lives, their homes, their families to get it all. They gave it to us as a kind of birthright, something we never worked to get, something we took and still take for granted. And 64 years is a long time for anyone to learn how to be free. But what bothers me is one simple question: Have we deserved that same freedom? I wonder.
With freedom comes responsibility, maturity, ambition, ethics, honesty, reliability, accountability…so many add-ons that it gets bewildering. Freedom is not just about not needing to carry a permit to get in and out of anywhere, to be able to work and live as you may wish to or to be able to exist without persecution and prosecution for your sheer existence. It is far more than material; it has to be ethical, almost spiritual. Freedom is about giving as much as it is about taking; it speaks of a need to be a useful productive, supportive, grown-up member of a family, a community, a society, a nation.
And so I wonder, are we doing all that? Are we, in fact, capable of doing any of it? I am honestly not too sure about that one.
Consider life as it is today. We face major issues like corruption, terrorism, inefficiency, instability, poverty, backwardness and goodness knows what else, all issues that seem to have no real solution, not unless we stop, end everything and start over again. We cannot, obviously, afford to do that. We have over the past few years battled immense economic problems, recovering amazingly well from a downturn, a recession, a gradual climb back up and a volatile job market that still is not up to par in many fields.
We have battled graft in so many different forms at so many different levels, finding the corrupt in more high places than we would ever have expected, from heads of state governments and prestigious departments to chiefs of the biggest and most successful corporations. Terrorism has been less terrorising than even a year ago, but the violence has not stopped – just recently there were three bomb blasts, one rapidly following the other, in parts of Mumbai that are highly populated and thus vulnerable.
There has been environmental crisis, with oil leaking into the sea after a ship was holed and slowly sank just off the coast of my home city; another threatens even as I write this. Our roads are a mess, with the infrastructure victim to corruption and inefficiency, putting lives at risk every day in every way – people die in uncovered manholes, after skidding on badly surfaced roads, after accidents caused by potholes and rash driving. And our government…well…the less said about its functioning and organisation, the better.
So are we a bad people in a bad nation? No, not at all. We have the drive, the knowledge, the experience, the ambition and, best of all, the ability to be all that is good and positive and successful. And we are, in many pockets, in many fields, in many ways. But, as always, the bad tends to overshadow the good, working against what we actually are and highlighting what we seem to be. We are a people of God, in so many ways, a people who believe that good always triumphs. We are a people who always accept, often understand and are willing to believe, just because that is the tradition we grow up with. And we are willing to work hard, in our individual capacities, to get where we think we should be, without shortcuts, if the system permits.
Now there is the problem. Very often, the system does not permit. We get stuck in the cracks that have developed with time and negligence and, to come extent, habit. We know that, for instance, it is easy to get away with a traffic offence, especially if it is minor, like jumping light or driving without a seatbelt; all we need to do, we have seen, is pay off the cop who has stopped us and then we proceed as if nothing had happened. We know, for instance, that to get a passport, we can, if we are willing, pay a gent standing outside the passport office and thereby jump a lot of lines and shortcut a lot of procedure that would normally take longer than we like. We know, for instance, that we can get a job that we are not really best qualified for by telling the headhunters that we are related to so-and-so or you-know-who and get a salary we do not really deserve. It is all a matter of the life we know…and this, unfortunately, is it.
So whom do we blame? Ourselves or the system? Either, both, all of the above. Freedom is a flexible concept that we can easily learn to use. We should start by doing a little growing up…then we will indeed be, as they say, Indians shining!
Potholing could become an Olympic sport!
(bdnews24.com, August 7, 2011)
I was out yesterday and most of the time, trying to navigate the roads of my city, Mumbai. It was not just a time-consuming effort, given the traffic bogging up every street, but also a rather painful one. This, because at every six or so paces or so the car dipped in and out of a pothole, often unexpected, that bane of the Mumbai municipality’s infrastructural department.
There were, of course, alternatives to sitting in a comfortable automobile doing little more than checking text messages or talking gently to the driver and my co-passenger. I could have started a small business in milkshakes, adding flavour to milk and letting it froth happily in the spin, whirl and rattle of the road against the wheels. I could have started a whole range of milk products, really, churning butter in the boot, fluffing up espresso in the front seat and making cheese under the hood. But the fallout of all my mad entrepreneurial thoughts? And that long bumpy trip in the car: a severe backache, a cricked neck, stiff legs and a whacking great headache.
The main topic of discussion these days in any home from almost any socio-economic stratum is the state of the city and its various essential services. In other words, whatever affects the ordinary resident of the megalopolis, from the price of milk to the number of potholes to the collection of garbage to overall cleanliness is up there for hot debate that can include everything from curses to the government in general to vexed noises about the vegetable market that tends to accumulate garbage and thus pests and thus illness.
And along the way there will be many rude words said, many dire predictions made, many what-ifs and opinions aired. Reams of newsprint and hours of airtime will be occupied with the ramifications of the problem, and audits will be done on whether any solutions have been found and, if so, how effective they have been and for how long. But along the way, people seem to forget one simple way into and around the whole issue of civic maintenance, be it road surfaces, garbage heaps or prices of essential commodities.
The ones directly impacted are the users, the customers, but the ones almost directly responsible for the problems are, in fact, the same users, customers.
Consider my horror some years ago, when I started commuting by the local trains – those amazingly efficient (especially considering the load they carry and the conditions they need to function in) metal worms that wind their way around my city transporting millions of commuters from one place to another – and found that personal space and habits lose all importance. I sat there watching life out the train window and inside the compartment, wondering at the number of people piling in and out of the bogies at breakneck speed. There were people spitting, throwing plastic bags, pieces of paper, fruit peels and who knows what else on to the rails, children squatting on the tracks doing a happy and thorough bowel-cleansing and, alongside, women cutting vegetables and meat, vendors selling fried snacks and cotton candy, stalls hawking assorted local medicines, hairclips, T-shirts and umbrellas and so much more.
When I started driving to work in my own car, I would see men in suits leaning back in fancy, foreign-labelled, chauffeur-driven limousines casually tossing empty plastic mineral water bottles out of the window, women glittering with diamonds and immaculate manicures flicking things out of their cars – biscuit packets, magazine tags, plastic bags, even orange peels and chocolate wrappers.
And there will be the civic authorities, made responsible for the task of getting the city’s infrastructure working to par. Highly placed officials finance their luxury homes and travel jaunts abroad with bribes taken to ignore the quality of the asphalt used to pave the streets. Contractors responsible for getting the job done, be it resurfacing the roads or installing safety devices for a metro-railway will use the payments they receive to make their own lives more comfortable, compromising on the effectiveness of whatever task they are assigned, and putting so many lives at risk.
Huge budgets allocated for making my city – or, indeed, so many others all over the world – a better place to live and work in will be used to line pockets of those who hardly deserve the rather dubious honour, destroying any chance of making life better for those who provided the money by paying taxes or creating corpus funds.
The result? Backaches, headaches, miscarriages, accidents, deaths.
Roads once built and surfaced should stay that way for a few years, if not decades, able to withstand the onslaught of heavy container trucks and the lightest of footfalls from a beauty queen alike. Instead, one shower of rain and the potholes appear, reappear, and again. The sand is washed away, the bricks come bursting out and it is as if nothing has been fixed, nothing is built to last, nothing has been done to make life better, nothing changes.
I was out yesterday and most of the time, trying to navigate the roads of my city, Mumbai. It was not just a time-consuming effort, given the traffic bogging up every street, but also a rather painful one. This, because at every six or so paces or so the car dipped in and out of a pothole, often unexpected, that bane of the Mumbai municipality’s infrastructural department.
There were, of course, alternatives to sitting in a comfortable automobile doing little more than checking text messages or talking gently to the driver and my co-passenger. I could have started a small business in milkshakes, adding flavour to milk and letting it froth happily in the spin, whirl and rattle of the road against the wheels. I could have started a whole range of milk products, really, churning butter in the boot, fluffing up espresso in the front seat and making cheese under the hood. But the fallout of all my mad entrepreneurial thoughts? And that long bumpy trip in the car: a severe backache, a cricked neck, stiff legs and a whacking great headache.
The main topic of discussion these days in any home from almost any socio-economic stratum is the state of the city and its various essential services. In other words, whatever affects the ordinary resident of the megalopolis, from the price of milk to the number of potholes to the collection of garbage to overall cleanliness is up there for hot debate that can include everything from curses to the government in general to vexed noises about the vegetable market that tends to accumulate garbage and thus pests and thus illness.
And along the way there will be many rude words said, many dire predictions made, many what-ifs and opinions aired. Reams of newsprint and hours of airtime will be occupied with the ramifications of the problem, and audits will be done on whether any solutions have been found and, if so, how effective they have been and for how long. But along the way, people seem to forget one simple way into and around the whole issue of civic maintenance, be it road surfaces, garbage heaps or prices of essential commodities.
The ones directly impacted are the users, the customers, but the ones almost directly responsible for the problems are, in fact, the same users, customers.
Consider my horror some years ago, when I started commuting by the local trains – those amazingly efficient (especially considering the load they carry and the conditions they need to function in) metal worms that wind their way around my city transporting millions of commuters from one place to another – and found that personal space and habits lose all importance. I sat there watching life out the train window and inside the compartment, wondering at the number of people piling in and out of the bogies at breakneck speed. There were people spitting, throwing plastic bags, pieces of paper, fruit peels and who knows what else on to the rails, children squatting on the tracks doing a happy and thorough bowel-cleansing and, alongside, women cutting vegetables and meat, vendors selling fried snacks and cotton candy, stalls hawking assorted local medicines, hairclips, T-shirts and umbrellas and so much more.
When I started driving to work in my own car, I would see men in suits leaning back in fancy, foreign-labelled, chauffeur-driven limousines casually tossing empty plastic mineral water bottles out of the window, women glittering with diamonds and immaculate manicures flicking things out of their cars – biscuit packets, magazine tags, plastic bags, even orange peels and chocolate wrappers.
And there will be the civic authorities, made responsible for the task of getting the city’s infrastructure working to par. Highly placed officials finance their luxury homes and travel jaunts abroad with bribes taken to ignore the quality of the asphalt used to pave the streets. Contractors responsible for getting the job done, be it resurfacing the roads or installing safety devices for a metro-railway will use the payments they receive to make their own lives more comfortable, compromising on the effectiveness of whatever task they are assigned, and putting so many lives at risk.
Huge budgets allocated for making my city – or, indeed, so many others all over the world – a better place to live and work in will be used to line pockets of those who hardly deserve the rather dubious honour, destroying any chance of making life better for those who provided the money by paying taxes or creating corpus funds.
The result? Backaches, headaches, miscarriages, accidents, deaths.
Roads once built and surfaced should stay that way for a few years, if not decades, able to withstand the onslaught of heavy container trucks and the lightest of footfalls from a beauty queen alike. Instead, one shower of rain and the potholes appear, reappear, and again. The sand is washed away, the bricks come bursting out and it is as if nothing has been fixed, nothing is built to last, nothing has been done to make life better, nothing changes.
Style vs substance
(bdnews24.com, July 29, 2011)
The Indian media has been buzzing madly with news and views on the visit of Hina Rabbani Khar to India. She landed at Delhi airport a few days ago with all the noise and fanfare that only a young and good looking woman from a traditionally male-dominated country with a history of hostility with our nation can drum up.
We the media, in various ways and various means, were waiting with anticipation and breath baited (literally) with speculation, and came up with all sorts of reasons for her appointment as foreign minister of Pakistan, known more for its restrictive Islamist attitudes towards the fairer sex rather than equality or even any degree of suffragette-like freedom.
Most believe that it is cosmetic — a token gesture to please the western world who expects sexual parity, at least to some extent. Some believe that it is due to the fact that Ms Khar comes from a very wealthy and extremely influential family, which could help the political balance in Pakistan tip in favour of those connected with that same family. And a few believe that she actually will do the nation and its rather troubled image some good, that she is a shrewd politician, a sharp operator and a very clever negotiator with carefully honed skills in observation and analysis.
And her speeches have certainly been clever and careful. She arrived in India last Tuesday to meet and talk to Indian foreign minister SM Krishna, with the optimistic statement hoping that India and Pakistan can “move forward… that these two countries have learnt lessons from history, but are not burdened by history and we can move forward as good, friendly neighbours who have a stake in each other’s future and both the countries understand their responsibilities to the region and within the region”, she said, with doubtful English but earnest intent.
And the meeting and talking was with some focus on bilateral issues, from confidence building between the two nations, to India’s concerns on terror attacks and on the Jammu and Kashmir argument (to put it mildly). Ms Khar is understood to have said to the Pakistan media that she and her government are looking forward to “pro-active, productive and result-oriented engagement” with our nation on everything that is planned for discussion.
Along the way, peace has always held centre stage. According to Ms Khar, both India and Pakistan are determined to commit to an “uninterrupted and uninterruptible peace process”, something that is often and tragically interrupted at frequent intervals by a terrorist incursion and attack on (usually) Indian soil, leaving us as a people and a nation stunned and shocked to the point that any trouble that cannot be accounted for as perpetrated by any single individual is automatically and inevitably blamed on Pakistan, its government, its government-supported militants or anything in that context.
So the meeting that Ms Khar had with the Hurriyat leaders could be a matter for concern, though the powers-that-be insist that it will have no effect on the peace process in general. According to the Dawn, “What Pakistan’s Foreign Minister and SM Krishna, her Indian counterpart, have achieved arouses hopes for a tension-free relationship between the two South Asian neighbours.” We can only keep our fingers crossed that media optimism is indeed made concrete with deed rather than merely word.
In this very sunny environment, however, there is a note of caution that needs to be sounded, clear and very loud. The media in India, whether local or international, seem to prefer seeing Ms Khar as a glamorous female presence rather than a woman of substance, one who was in India for a definite, important and very necessary process. Her star power, her fashion statement, her sunglasses…all theses became much more important than why she was actually here.
As one scathing and well-deserved editorial said, “Just how little was achieved at the summit is demonstrated by the fact that the talks themselves were a sideshow obscured by Khar’s star power. In just one day, she has become a bona fide celebrity in India, not for her diplomatic skills but for her looks, sense of style and pricey handbags.” Ms Khar’s presence was made notable for her Birkin bag, especially, which bodes well for the just-opened Hermes store in South Mumbai’s elite shopping precinct, but not happy for the diplomatic raison d’etre of her visit.
What is encouraging is that Ms Khar herself is not especially happy with her positioning as a ‘fashion icon’. She is reported to have been quite annoyed at the coverage in the press for her style and attitude, saying that “You see paparazzi are everywhere. Besides, you (media) should not do such acts.” And thereafter she refused to answer any more questions. So is she serious about her diplomatic intent doubted during her visit to India? We give her the benefit of the doubt, but wonder, especially since she does not have the experience that a diplomat ideally needs for this delicate job. But the Wall Street Journal said it all, with “From her blue tunic pants ensemble to her Roberto Cavalli shades, everything grabbed Indian eyeballs, with media coverage of her accessories practically overshadowing the India-Pakistan dialogue….”
And at the end of it all, the Hermes Birkin bag grabbed more headlines with the general public than Ms Khar did as foreign minister of Pakistan. And that, amazingly, amusingly, is how that cookie crumbled.
The Indian media has been buzzing madly with news and views on the visit of Hina Rabbani Khar to India. She landed at Delhi airport a few days ago with all the noise and fanfare that only a young and good looking woman from a traditionally male-dominated country with a history of hostility with our nation can drum up.
We the media, in various ways and various means, were waiting with anticipation and breath baited (literally) with speculation, and came up with all sorts of reasons for her appointment as foreign minister of Pakistan, known more for its restrictive Islamist attitudes towards the fairer sex rather than equality or even any degree of suffragette-like freedom.
Most believe that it is cosmetic — a token gesture to please the western world who expects sexual parity, at least to some extent. Some believe that it is due to the fact that Ms Khar comes from a very wealthy and extremely influential family, which could help the political balance in Pakistan tip in favour of those connected with that same family. And a few believe that she actually will do the nation and its rather troubled image some good, that she is a shrewd politician, a sharp operator and a very clever negotiator with carefully honed skills in observation and analysis.
And her speeches have certainly been clever and careful. She arrived in India last Tuesday to meet and talk to Indian foreign minister SM Krishna, with the optimistic statement hoping that India and Pakistan can “move forward… that these two countries have learnt lessons from history, but are not burdened by history and we can move forward as good, friendly neighbours who have a stake in each other’s future and both the countries understand their responsibilities to the region and within the region”, she said, with doubtful English but earnest intent.
And the meeting and talking was with some focus on bilateral issues, from confidence building between the two nations, to India’s concerns on terror attacks and on the Jammu and Kashmir argument (to put it mildly). Ms Khar is understood to have said to the Pakistan media that she and her government are looking forward to “pro-active, productive and result-oriented engagement” with our nation on everything that is planned for discussion.
Along the way, peace has always held centre stage. According to Ms Khar, both India and Pakistan are determined to commit to an “uninterrupted and uninterruptible peace process”, something that is often and tragically interrupted at frequent intervals by a terrorist incursion and attack on (usually) Indian soil, leaving us as a people and a nation stunned and shocked to the point that any trouble that cannot be accounted for as perpetrated by any single individual is automatically and inevitably blamed on Pakistan, its government, its government-supported militants or anything in that context.
So the meeting that Ms Khar had with the Hurriyat leaders could be a matter for concern, though the powers-that-be insist that it will have no effect on the peace process in general. According to the Dawn, “What Pakistan’s Foreign Minister and SM Krishna, her Indian counterpart, have achieved arouses hopes for a tension-free relationship between the two South Asian neighbours.” We can only keep our fingers crossed that media optimism is indeed made concrete with deed rather than merely word.
In this very sunny environment, however, there is a note of caution that needs to be sounded, clear and very loud. The media in India, whether local or international, seem to prefer seeing Ms Khar as a glamorous female presence rather than a woman of substance, one who was in India for a definite, important and very necessary process. Her star power, her fashion statement, her sunglasses…all theses became much more important than why she was actually here.
As one scathing and well-deserved editorial said, “Just how little was achieved at the summit is demonstrated by the fact that the talks themselves were a sideshow obscured by Khar’s star power. In just one day, she has become a bona fide celebrity in India, not for her diplomatic skills but for her looks, sense of style and pricey handbags.” Ms Khar’s presence was made notable for her Birkin bag, especially, which bodes well for the just-opened Hermes store in South Mumbai’s elite shopping precinct, but not happy for the diplomatic raison d’etre of her visit.
What is encouraging is that Ms Khar herself is not especially happy with her positioning as a ‘fashion icon’. She is reported to have been quite annoyed at the coverage in the press for her style and attitude, saying that “You see paparazzi are everywhere. Besides, you (media) should not do such acts.” And thereafter she refused to answer any more questions. So is she serious about her diplomatic intent doubted during her visit to India? We give her the benefit of the doubt, but wonder, especially since she does not have the experience that a diplomat ideally needs for this delicate job. But the Wall Street Journal said it all, with “From her blue tunic pants ensemble to her Roberto Cavalli shades, everything grabbed Indian eyeballs, with media coverage of her accessories practically overshadowing the India-Pakistan dialogue….”
And at the end of it all, the Hermes Birkin bag grabbed more headlines with the general public than Ms Khar did as foreign minister of Pakistan. And that, amazingly, amusingly, is how that cookie crumbled.
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