The existential crisis of caste and other variables...

Am not a political pundit but there is one thing that I found heartening about the state elections just concluded.


The electorate are now repeatedly reminding the politicians that they are unimpressed by histrionics and are immune to the divisive politics of communalism and caste politics. And there is the Anna effect - corruption is now big factor. Starting with UPA-II and Nitish Kumar's triumphal re-election, the voters around the country are awakening the indian polity to the fact that all the mathematical equations of combinations that they had learnt regarding caste and creed, which before had assured someone like Lalu Prasad Yadav to uninterrupted rule, has fallen by the wayside.


Nitish Kumar seems to be here for the long haul because he continues to do what he was elected for. UPA-II is headed for a rout because they have forgotten.


No more will a politician thrive on top solely on caste alliances. If they cant build roads and cant provide real improvement in the life of the people, they will be booted out. And they will keep getting booted out until they learn.


And a lesson to politicians like Mayawati and Rahul Gandhi - two spectrum of the erstwhile feudal class. One playing the victim card of three millennium in order to hoard diamonds, believing that Dalits will vote for her just because she is a Dalit in power. The other, strutting around like a maharajas of old, deigning to dine with the outcast, expecting swooning crowds to vote for him, blinded by a aristocratic lineage and a dimpled charm.


The fact is that the people voted for those who advocated development. And the parties which had their ear on the ground won. A party like Samajwadi Party led by Akhilesh Yadav realized people are in no mood for the rule of old. They snubbed the people who had tainted past and claimed to be a party who is shedding its lawless image. And they won in a landslide.


Of course, all politics is local and all is fair in politics, so it for posterity to see how the elected behave. But one thing is for sure, the people are speaking up. It is for the the elected to listen...

Fallen mighties and ash-risen Phoenix - tale of two sports in a day

In the Sporting universe, yesterday was a day of extremes in a nation usually given to mono-sports mania.

Its funny how sometimes, events in a day seems so full of meaning...almost as if the gods are making an emphatic point, almost to the point of a thrusting a finger on our forehead...

Cricket in India has been in decline for some time, a decline it brought upon itself by being so popular. Which is why it attracted obscene amount of money,which like a Newtonian law attracts the wrong kind of gentlemen to this gentleman's game. So you had Sharad Pawar, who is politely called a land mafia in Pune, becoming the head of BCCI. So what did Sharad Pawar bring to the table, one may ask, to warrant being the head of the cricketing association? Nobody knows...nobody asks too openly either...

But the last few months have been downright horrible for the cricket fan in the country. Getting whitewashed in series after series is one thing, being casual about it is criminal. And the much vaunted cricket team seems to be leaning heavily towards being criminal. When the captain says that he rather not play Test and concentrate on ODI and T20, you know that the ephemeral thing called "Pride for playing for country" has been hopelessly compromised. When players refuse to play India games citing injuries but come hobbling for T20 matches, you know that they are playing a scam on you.

Things reached a nadir yesterday. After the Test humiliation, The Indian team had proclaimed "Wait for the ODI...watch us play then". Well, we watched them play...and we watched them surrender. And then we saw them complaining like  school children about umpiring decisions. Riddled with internal strife, the team is imploding. And sadly, we are seeing the cancer right there on the most gifted cricketer India has produced - Sachin Tendulkar. His walk back to the pavilion yesterday, head down, oblivious to the standing ovation, in what maybe his last match on the ground, was a sad sad spectacle. Almost as if he was ashamed of the whole damn business...

A complete contrast was to be seen at the National Stadium or Major Dhyan Chand Stadium. Under floodlights, the Indian hockey team exorcized the ghosts past - especially the humiliation of not qualifying for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Cheered on by a 15000 crowd, many of whom came to watch Hockey for the first time, the Indian Team trounced France 8-1!!!. The crowd bellowed lustily each team the team went forward, went wild each time the ball found the net. And the Hockey Team played completely outside themselves. Used to playing in front of empty stands, finding themselves in front of full throated crowd waving tricolours must have supercharged the adrenaline....Giving the best performance of the qualifier, France was made to look mediocre!! I know - I was there!!!

It takes guts and balls of steel to get here. Just a couple of months ago, the Hockey team was humiliated when a sum of Rs 25,000 was 'awarded' after they won the Asian Championships. This was about the same time that IPL auctions were buying single players for crores.

Hockey goes to the Olympics - to try and get glory for India after 1980 (the last time they won Gold)

Cricket comes back home - eager to earn money playing in the private teams of rich men and women.

The contrast could not have been starker...

And all in a day's work!!

And you could see in the faces of the people leaving the National Stadium yesterday - They have started giving their heart to Hockey....I count myself among them...

 

Technorati Tags: india,hockey,cricket,winning,country,olympics,IPL

Kolkata in Flux - Revolutionary Jesus meets street brawling CM

Kolkata is always a fascinating case.

The muse of poets, revolutionaries and poverty tourists, Kolkata has always been a place where the old French adage of - "The more things change, the more they remain the same" seemed like a way of life.

A world-record breaking 30 year long democratic communist rule, Kolkata always seemed tantalizingly and uneasily poised between a illustrious past and a struggling present.

Kolkata always seemed like a place which was filled to the brim with the past with little space for the future. It was also a place of dreamers and poets, a place where going to the theatre still ranked in the top 5 options of how to spend the evening. It was also a place where the whole state went for a siesta between 2-4 pm, always making me wonder whether Bengalis had been secretly colonized by the Spanish conquistadors!!!

But to me, Kolkata has always been defined by polarities. The people and the capital and the state always seemed to choose one of two teams in, well...everything. Football - East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, Fish - Ilish and Rohu, Actors - Uttam Kumar and Soumitro Chattopadhyay, Sportsman - Sourav Ganguly and rest of the cricketers. Politics? - The Communists and well, anti-communists

For almost to decades, the Anti-communist crown has been worn by the street fighting, usually incoherent Mamta Banerjee. To her has flocked the Bengali herd, looking for succor after their romantic tryst with communist utopia soured after 30 long years. It has been a change for the state that can be compared to suffering a hemorrhage - like breaking off a 30 year old marriage. Its ramifications will be felt for a long time.

Some of that ramification is already being felt....

Kolkata was defined by two more things - the city with a heart and a city steeped in communist signages and ideology

It was a city with a heart - it stopped for the fallen pedestrian and it was a city where women could more or less feel safe walking down the street. I remember Kolkata in 2006, when I lived in the city for a year, pandal hopping during the puja late into the night. I did not hear of one single case of eve teasing or molestation...
It was also probably the only city in the country where famous international communist leaders found a prominent space in the park statues and the street names, long after they had been erased in their own countries - Lenin for example

But what the Bengalis and the rest of the country is seeing in wonder is something that seems to disprove their favourite French adage.

First the Communists proclaim Jesus as the original revolutionary!!! Atheists to Jesus proclaimers within a year. I mean, we all know that the communists in Bengal liked to live in the past, most particularly in the vicinity of late 1800s but to take a two millennium leap to find a source of inspiration is a feat that has led to many a mouth remaining agape!!! Next they might call Lenin a counter-revolutionary and rename Lenin Sarani as Jesus Sarani!!!

And then the image of Kolkata as the one with the heart and the one safe for women shattered with the gangrape of a woman in a moving car (and you thought they only happened in Delhi!!). As if that was not enough, worse was yet to come -

First the police to whom the woman turned to for help mocked her and one officer actually propositioned to her.

Second the woman Chief Minister said that it was all a frame-up to malign her government and led her party to attack the victim's character in public. She even makes the Police Commissioner say so...Then Damayanti Sen, inspite of all the pressures solves the case thus disproving Mamta Banerjee and is hailed as a tigress by the media

Thirdly and perhaps worst of all, the CM calls Damayanti Sen and gives her a semi-public dressing down for not going by her diktat.

Seemed more like Bihar of old than Kolkata of any age...

The Trinamool had promised "Poriborton" or change when they swept into power.

And "Poriborton" there has been!!

Communists are becoming strange animals and vigorously making Marx turn in his grave.

A woman CM is showing us the ugly scarred face of a city that everyone thought to be wrinkled but hiding a smile...

I guess it all depends on how much change the average Bengali can live with....but guess right now its a choice between a revolutionary Jesuist party and a rabble-rousing Mamta whose only plan is to do everything heinously wrong

 

                          

Technorati Tags: Kolkata,CPM,communist party,Bengalis,trinamool,Mamta Banerjee,Damayanti Sen,Rape,jesus

The story of two virals – Kolaveri Di and Aalu Anday

Here is a story of two virals.

Separated by a border, two very different videos went viral in the last two months of 2011. Both shared so much in common and were oh so different

Probably what goes viral depends on the current cultural temper of that country. What it considers as an echo of its voice, however subconscious or sublimal

One viral goes on to become a case study in IIMs and goes into the handbook of aspiring social media managers. Sung along by people who didn't care what the lyrics meant. Catapults the singer to national stardom, gains him a lunch with the prime minister….

The other one. One of the most courageous (some would say suicidal) acts in modern times taken in a stand for the freedom to speak the mind. Created and uploaded secretly on YouTube to avoid official censure and blackout. A song that openly mocked holy cows in a country where a state governor is assassinated by his bodyguard for speaking his views.

A song that ended with the words - “If you want a bullet in my head, like this video”.

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IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH – Learn this by heart or else Save internet

There is a lot of gloom and doom on every channel these days. From each continent tales and images of discontent and protests and resistance.

A world economy that since 1970’s has been built on a whiff of air and a bit of hash is going down the drain. An indebted world is printing cash to try to save itself. Like pouring oil on fire to quench it. And Greece is already having visions of slipping hundreds of years back into feudalism.

And how do we find out about all this so easily? Where do we get the videos and views and opinions of people, all of which mainstream media will not touch with a pole? From something that the Americans built to preserve communication during a nuclear holocaust – the internet.

Like a pygmalion and a hundred headed hydra, the web is something that the anarchists always dreamt of – existing outside any government control and used and maintained by people without any fixed ideology or lobby. Growing and changing faster than anything that can be built to control it.

Controlled by none, used by all according to need and want, becoming a way of life, giving vent to fantasy and reality of the pervert and the revolutionary alike. And since all of us are a bit of both, it works for us.

Rapidly it has become a weapon that has toppled governments – From Tahrir Square and spawned civil protests – From Occupy movements to Anna Hazare at Ramlila.

 

That is when it caught the attention of all even more – not since Gutenberg sparked the end of the Dark Ages by democratizing knowledge has a more potent weapon come in the hands of the comman people

Which is why it will be fought now. The Bastille versus the Monarchy, all over again…

And so the fundamental fight has begin – to save the internet and to save the light. A war declared by the same people who purport to understand the economy and how people’s lives work. Fought by the anonymous multitude, as hackers, as ordinary bloggers, in conversations…

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Do not go gentle into that good night…

Dylan Thomas knew what he was talking about when he penned his powerful paean about dying to that stage of our lives which forces us to come face to face with ourselves with terrible clarity – the stage when the curtains are coming down on us

Open Culture, that wonderful website of all that is interesting on the web, posted this article – The top 5 regrets of the dying

At someone at my stage of my life, at the launch-board of a ‘career’, so to say, what this says especially strikes a chord – especially when we become very much aware of the much philosophized word – choice.

The choices that we make everyday – that extra hour at work, the postponement of the vacation, that extra effort to drop in a hello, choice to let something make us happy or not, the laziness to do what we like in place of what we must. All of this shapes us who we become.

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Sacred Hindu vs. voluptuous TOI

Many of us would have been highly amused at the recent and on-going war of ads between the two newspapers – the venerable “The Hindu” and the king of media - “Times of India”.

Times of India has been trying to penetrate the bastion of “The Hindu” in Tamil Nadu. The marketing and brand manager would have done his 4P exercises and realized that Hindu has an image of being somewhat cerebral and therefore deemed dense by the segment eyed by TOI. This is when they came up with this ad

TOI has been getting a lot of flak on social media for this ad for being tasteless. I am not a fan of TOI but I think that this is a smart ad. TOI is not targeting the reader who wants to read an analysis of the Syrian situation or how Chavez is transforming Venezuela. The typical TOI reader is the type of reader who would read a typical tabloid in London. This is the reader who wants a twitter style news. TOI gives it to them and these readers would give attention to this ad

Coming to “The Hindu”, I have loved their response to this. If TOI had mocked the brains behind the editorials of Hindu, those same brains have come out with an aggressive ad response that completely turns around the logic of the TOI ad. These were the ads…Hilarious!!!

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