Hindustan Times

The Hindustan Times, arguably the largest circulated English language newspaper in Delhi has undergone some dramatic changes in the last few months. The regular readers would not have failed to note these changes. First it was the cricket led headlines evey day of the T20 championships, then there is a great page on "user generated content" the best one being "Your HT Your Photo" section. The general tenor of the newpaper now is peppier and happier and I assume it is trying to move away from stodgy old readers like me and move on to greener pastures, becoming the newspaper of the future, so to say. The Sunday edition especially in the post edit page has seen some drastic though not dramatic changes. Thankfully for us Vir Sanghvi still writes his liberal democratic columns and I guess most us oldies read it because of him [although he is now into cooking and lifestyle, he remains, I think along with Vinod Mehta, an old fashioned editor]. Regretfully, Karan Thapar is still there, writing about his daddy and mummy and all those he met through them. Manas Chakravarty has made an appearance as has Indrajit Hazra; the first makes economics easy for us and the second makes reading difficult for us, both of them bring some amount of pleasure.
However, overenthusiasm must be curbed at all costs, they do sometimes cost dearly and make a laughng stock of the paper. And here i am not talking about spelling errors but other interesting goof ups: Here are some: a) Cricket might be a passion of the country but not headline stuff every day even when a tournament is going on. b) circket leads to major goof ups like the one day after India won a match it had almost lost. The headlines read something like "India at the verge of loss", but India had won the match at night after the paper went to print and in the morning everyone had a good laugh. Just imagine what would have happened in a match where India snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory. The headlines would have read "India at the verge of winning" and would have lost the match while the paper was in print. We would have read the headline and cursed the paper. c) The most interesting, the YOUR HT YOUR PHOTO Column carried the photo of a langur with a bold caption "your HT your photo"; Yeah I guess if I am still reading HT I must be a langur.
Running a newspaper in this day and age can be a monkey business afterall.
Jai Hind [the last word to be pronounced as in hindi not as in English:)]

Ram Setu or Hanuman Setu?

I have always wondered why I can't think straight. Believe me I have tried for many years to think straight but failed. Now I guess I am too old to even try.
There is a great debate going on in country at least it was on sometime back, between the secularists and religious fellows; between rationalists and those who believed in the power of the myths, between the north and the south, between those who belived in the power of cement and those in power of scriptures. These debates are nothing new in our vast country. In fact they are very common. This is what inspired Amartya Sen to write a tome called the The Argumentative Indian to much acclaim and which also I guess signalled the end of his career as an economist [nothing much is left in that discipline post Nobel prize and one needs to move on in life]
Be that as it may, what is important in India is the topic of the debate not the two sides [the two sides remain the same whatever the topic] And what is more important that the topic is the fact that there is a humongous effort the reduce any debate to two sides only by simplyfying, recalssifying the many other sides.
The current debate was on the benefits of dredging a piece of sea which was either built by Lord Rama [the pious kind who always doubted his wife] or by a stroke of nature; depending on which side of the debate you are on. Obviously, by common agreement, it was accepted that for the country it was more important to debate how the bridge [Google can help you locate the bridge or the sea depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist] came to be, rather than whether it was economically, socially and politically beneficial to dredge the piece of sea and make it navigable.
Was the bridge built by Lord Rama while on his way to Sri Lanka to kill the demon king Ravana? Or was it built at some geological time when the continent of India separated from the Island of Sri Lakna? The debate continues.
However, in spite of having an opinion on things I know and also things I do not know, I am unable to offer an opinion on this. Not because I want to sit onthe fence, nor because my head is somewhere and my heart somewhere else, not even because I am scared of being beaten up by either side. None of these.
But for the fact that the debators have got it all wrong once again. The debate should ideally have been on whether the bridge was built by nature or by hanumana [the monkey god much revered or as much revered as Lord Rama in certain parts of India]. If you go throught the Ramayana, it is clear that Rama caused the bridge to be built, he did not build the bridge. The bridge was built by Hanumana and his cousins. having reached the sea in hot pursuits, Rama simply took the decision to build the bridge [as anyone else in his place would have]. The full credit of building the Bridge must go to hanuman and his "associates". if you realign the debate thus, it would be interesting to see how many of the Ram supporters are ready to take up the cause of his trusted lieutenant Hanumana. My guess would be not many. Is that a better way to take the winds out of a good debate? Shall we wait for some hanuman fans [we would have all the kids on our side] to raise a hue and cry against Rama for getting all the credit?
While of course, the nature continues to do its work quietly on the far margins of this debate. One more tsunami, well targetted, we may have a six lane sand highway to Sri Lanka or a Palk Strait which can take the largest Oil Taker.