Wednesday, August 06, 2014

Ghosts flights and legends....

A chance encounter with a revered author, a master of words, a weaver of stories, was written in my fate on my tough journey back after leaving my mater and pater at my sibling's home.

Domestic flights in India, like bus journeys in Inda, start with a jolt. In my case the jolt was the fact that they wanted to take off earlier than the scheduled time, just because all passengers had checked in. Having had paid through my nose for a decent cappuccino I was in no mood to listen to the calls of my flight. Way too early, in my thoughts. When I sauntered past my flight gate, I could see the mournful eyes of an airline attendant pleading me to finish her misery. I obliged and me and a handful of other such hanger-arounds boarded the last bus to the plane. This experience and the fact that my seat was up in the front part of the propeller-driven craft, in hindsight, reduced my time ogling at the legend.

The boy appeared to be crying. His head hung down, he held his face in his hands, and his body shook convulsively. It was a strange, soundless weeping, and Mr. Oliver felt distinctly uneasy. "Well, what's the matter," he asked, his anger giving way to concern. "What are you crying for?" The boy would not answer or look up. His body continued to be wracked with silent sobbing. "Oh, come on, boy. You shouldn't be out here at this hour. Tell me the trouble. Look up."

The boy looked up. He took his hands from his face and looked up at his teacher. The light from Mr. Oliver's torch fell on the boy's face, if you could call it a face. He had no eyes, ears, nose or mouth. It was just a round smooth head with a school cap on top of it.

..... If you haven't just colored the seat of your pants with fear, you are not normal. I was normal, at least when I first read the above lines as a teenager. The level of imagination was disturbing, and it may be the first time that I realized that imagination had no limitations.

Once I got off my flight at Delhi, a rickety old bus was waiting to take me and my co-passengers to the airport's arrival section. I managed to get a seat but then almost immediately realized that there were others who required it more so I stood up, closer to a rotund man who, in the first glance, looked like your friendly neighborhood grand dad. But something was not right. His face was quite uniquely distinguished, with an apparently permanent smile. He looked like a European but his clothes said INDIAN. He was wearing what any fellow Indian would be wearing at that time of the year, an un-tucked bush-shirt over a brownish pair of pants. And he had a book in his hands. My hands fumbled for my 'smart' phone knowing that I did not have enough time to verify the credentials. Was he the guy who made me burn my pants in our backyard which had bore the brunt of my childish fears? My 'smart' phone agreed with my hypothesis. He was. So now my thoughts were how to approach him..... Such thoughts varied from 'celebrities hate being disturbed in public' to 'he would whack me with the book in his hand'.

The book in his hand. What was one of my most revered authors reading? Thanks to my trained eyes (reading reports upside down when required), I could figure it out. It was, to my complete and utter shock, an Agatha Christie. But then I realized, what was I expecting? Crime and Punishment? Obviously he has read the classics many times over, and deserves to help his mind relax with a lollipop. Maybe the rest will ignite his grey cells for another masterpiece. I love Agatha Christies works, mind you. But it was just a complete mismatch, or as I thought initially.

By now the bus had reached its destination and my brain had still not come up with the best intro line. 'Excuse me sir, may I have your autograph? On the book you are reading?' I was obviously not carrying a single shred of paper, as could have been predicted by Murphy's Law. Or was it to be, 'Sir, I am a huge fan of your work.' And then proceeded to snatch the clipboard from the nearest security guard and take his autograph on it. Maybe a night in a cell would have been worth it.

In the end, I gave up. I could see a great Indian author make his way through the crowds, without anyone else even giving him a second glance. Was I the only one to recognize him? Maybe so, but I was 100% sure that I wasn't the only one in the crowd who knew his name.

His name was Bond, Ruskin Bond.......

Saturday, January 05, 2013

Status of Women in our Society....

Update December 30th, 2012

Do we REALLY want to change things to improve the safety of women in our society? If so then get rid of the basic social 'customs' which demean the women. Get rid of such 'festivals' (which have absolutely no religious origins) such as KARVA CHAUTH which basically treats women inferior..... Make sure you shout down people making comments such as "ladies hain, unkey liye ye kaam theek nahi", or "ladies should not do...." etc etc etc.It is ingrained in our society and just improving and implementing laws (which is ALSO very important) will not be enough.


BASIC SOCIAL REVOLUTION is required. If we do not have the balls to do all this then we just need to SHUT UP and go back to our hidey holes.....

Back in anger......

Update December 29th, 2012

India is a democracy, where people have the right to protest injustice. Government has no right to block such protests as long as they are peaceful. Being a democracy is India's last claim to the civilized world..... we just cannot afford to lose that!

Sunday, October 26, 2008

The Moon Vehicle

"Chandra" "yaan" the first, lifted off a few days back carrying the hopes of a billion people to the moon..... do people really care? Yup, defying all odds, they really do!! And are hoping against hope that it doesn't end up being Chandra-yawn!!!
But that is not the reason I am writing this blog. I just had a simple query.... while watching the news-clip showing the jubilation in the control-room of Chandrayaan-I right after lift-off, was I the only one who noticed that ALL the people in the room looked like the Druid Getafix (or Dumbledore for the new-gen)??? Do they really think the Indian space "set-up" can become a full-blown space "industry" if they are planning to keep the young scientists out of the loop? Or have they found the "spring of life"?
Please don't get me wrong. These "druids" have done great magic for India and I, like millions of others, respect them greatly for that. But many observations liken them to NASA..... the combination of the great minds of the old NASA as well as the rigidness of the new NASA. The whole point about ISRO is that it is different from NASA and not JUST in being much more economical. We are not and SHOULD NOT try to be the China of the space industry (moreso since even China is doing really well in that respect)!!
I really hope this mission goes well and that at the same time the younger generation of scientists get to play a role in it.......

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Pesticides are good for our health.....

FT reporter in ND, Jo Johnson, quotes “a person close to the situation” that “These are world-class and symbolic US companies getting kicked.” Both, Pepsico and Coca Cola seem to be saying that their drinks have “insignificant levels of pesticide as compared to milk, eggs and meats available in the country”. Wow! I wonder whether they would dare to even make such a statement (let alone keeping such high levels of pesticide) if this had happened in a non-“Third World” country!

And what happened to their claims that there were NO pesticides in their drinks when the NGO found same results last year? Only when this NGO repeated its tests did these multinationals change their tune. And look at the way they are carrying on about FDI to India being affected if any legal action was taken against them. Dear CC and PCO, FYI not all FDI is made by people hell-bent on getting the most out of India by selling inferior quality products and services.
The icing on the cake was when CC sent their own samples to an private lab in UK and paid for the tests. Lo behold! The lab said that the drink was absolutely compliant of EU standards.......
Samples THEY sent to a lab of THEIR choice for the tests which THEY had paid for would obviously be COMPLIANT of the highest standards. Is it a surprise???
And I was a Coke fan...... I am now off all soda drinks. Hey beer, I am back again!!!!

Interesting reader comment on FT

Financial Times August 11, 2006

“How independence for India affected history of Mideast”
From Mr Guy Wroble Denver, co 80220, US

Sir, Stanley M. Spitzer (“To get to the truth you must go back to November 1947”, Letters August 8) that November 27, 1947 was the crucial date in the origin of the current problems in the Middle East. On that date the United Nations passed a partition plan for Palestine that was rejected by the Arab League. Unfortunately, he misses the mark by two-and-a-half months.

The telling date is actually August 15, 1947 – the date India became independent. This marked the beginning of the end of the era of European colonisation.

The notion that the Arab League could have sanctioned the establishment of a European/Jewish colony in Palestine so soon after a fifth of humanity had been set free from imperial rule is a remarkable misreading of history.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Media tyranny

Tyrants? Haven't heard that word in a long time, have we? Just to jog your memory, the Merriam-Webster definitions of the word are:
1 a : an absolute ruler unrestrained by law or constitution b : a usurper of sovereignty
2 a : a ruler who exercises absolute power oppressively or brutally b : one resembling an oppressive ruler in the harsh use of authority or power

NOW you must be wondering why we don't use this word more often these days! In the last few years the tyranny has been absolute in some countries (North Korea, Turkmenistan, China), benevolent in some and hidden in the rest......

But tyranny is not always in a political form in the so-called democracies of the world. There can be regional tyranny (US, Israel, Australia, North Korea), bureaucratic tyranny (found in most commonwealth countries), media tyranny (BBC, FOX), tax tyranny (eg. in Scandinavian countries) and, ofcourse, tyranny of terror...... (BTW tyranny and terror have different etymologies)

Media tyranny??? A few days back there was an article on the BBC website 'warning' bloggers that BBC reads all comments written about it in cyberspace...... Get the idea? The media giant is a far cry from what it used to be a couple of decades back, steadily moving away from plain honest reporting to something of putting its opinions in its articles such that it sounds like a fact. Take for example an article from today. The reporter is comparing China and India and also mentions that he has ".......spent the last eight years living in Beijing, and only four days in Delhi, so comparisons are difficult....." But that doesn't stop him from completely blasting everything he sees in India. First he stays at some shitty hotel in Delhi and then spends a few paragraphs writing about it...... serves him right. Any idiot would live in a good hotel if going to a new country if he/she has the money (And PLEASE don't say that he didn't have much dough!)........ What did he expect? Then he talks about the airport....... What has he really compared? Streets of two major cities, airports? I am sure this reporter would fall in love with Pyongyang if his reporting skills are soooo limited. Talk about objective journalism. Mark Tully was a BBC reporter, he remained objective until he fell in love with India. I wouldn't call him objective anymore (wrt India), but then he isn't with BBC anymore!

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Blocked blogs and pants

Hey guys, guys, guys (which includes gals),
Hold your horses….. I know banning websites makes the Indian government look like the Chinese/North Korean/US/Saudi Arabian (etc) ones. But other than that fact we need to analyse what’s going on first before we start filing PILs (by the tons) against them.

I finally got a list of some of the banned websites from BBC (and NO, they haven’t banned the entire blogspot.com):

www.hinduunity.org
exposingtheleft.blogspot.com
pajamaeditors.blogspot.com
commonfolkcommonsense.blogspot.com
www.hinduhumanrights.org/hindufocus.html
princesskimberley.blogspot.com

I visited them all (I could coz I don’t live in India) and it seems that the banned websites fall under three main categories:

1. Completely innocent and VERY boring blogs which are trying to act as if they are doing a great favour by publicizing their conspiracy theories about the US government/other US politicos
2. Hindu extremist websites who make the KKK look likes peace-corps in comparison
3. Plain news blogs (with some mild bias)

One of the sites didn’t fall into any of the above categories: it was completely blank…… blank maybe coz they got caught with their pants down?

So? What’s actually going on? Unnamed sources of the Indian gov have been telling the media that some these sites were passing coded messages to terrorists in India.

Considering the content of these sites (except those which fall in category 2) I can’t think of any other reason these sites could have been blocked for.

While I agree that the government has to be really careful of not stepping on the right of freedom of expression, I really don’t think that “….The ban is cutting us (Indians) off from the people”!! Come on!!! Why didn’t you all file a PIL against the July 2003 ISP law that the government had passed? Coz now their move is VERY legal!

Anyways, the hullabaloo goes on…..

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Mumbai Metro

At long last Bombay is going to get its Metro! But according to the media: "There has been some criticism of the Metro railway project by the city's environmentalists who say it will mar its skyline."

Are they serious?? Have they ever seen Bombay's skyline? I haven't..... coz I cannot! It is physically impossible...... Now now, if you are going to say that gaze out from Juhu etc, then, my dear fellow, the Metro is a surface and underground feature...... NOT an over-water one!

arrrrrgghhhh! The epidemic of grey-cell reduction is going to be the death of me.........