Al Zajira, CNN and Terrorism

I feel so proud these days as an Indian. We have not yet sent a man to moon and we have had to lean on our Russian friends to send a person to the orbit, but we have come of age so far as terrorism is concerned. Gone are the days when people manning the PMO [Prime Minister's Office] could sit back smugly and declare the hand of our friends across the border was at work in a case of terrorist attack. We now have our home grown, home bred geniuses doing it for us.... Delhi, Ahmedabad, Surat, Bangalore, BAD or worse, are our making. These are our boys not some organised Soldier and Gentlemen across the border.... . We have finally arrived in an area we have been lagging since the 1980s when some of our sikh brothers decided there is more to be made in business than in terrorism and renewed the efforts to migrate to cooler climes.
I do not want to delve into the causes behind terrorism and the factors that will bring them down. There are people who are paid to do this [yes they get paid at the level of an union secretary even after retirement and some of their grandchildren have just become jobless post the failure of i-banks in the US so they need the money much more than we do]
The point is about the media...... Isn't terrorsim more a handiwork of CNN, Al Zajira, NDTV, IndiaTV and all other media? No? Ok.
Media would say that most people "like" terrorism on TV as much as they like seeing mothers of children who have died in 30 feet ditches, or fathers whose sons have been arrested by police as terrorists, or boys whose brothers have been killed because some rich business man or rich peasant did not want to lose honour.
Even if we want it that way, is it the business of the media to show what we want? Aren't there are some dos and donts, principles, ethics, operating principles? No?
Then let me say on behalf of a depraved nation, we want to see porn everyday especially those involving nicely done up white women and those revealing private lives of our leader, and especially those telling us whose child studies where and whose wife sleeps with whom.
We as audience are dying to know these things. Please give us a break from the gory details of people dying of terrorist attacks and please let us have some fun on TV by showing on "popular demand" the private lives of politicians and journalists. We would send your TRP shooting through the roof just give us a chance.

Delhi Women and Bearded Men

Just above the headlines the Hindustan Times carried this smaller headline leading to a news in the inside pages of the paper " Delhi women prefer to kiss clean shaven men". The Headlines screamed "Police Release Sketches of Suspected Bombers". This was a few days back and the headlines referred to the bomb blasts in Delhi.

Apart from the obvious surrealism of these two lines appearing together, the survey raises interesting questions [Quite apart from the most obvious question which shaving razor manufacturer could have sponsored the "research"?].

The first question that came to my mind was what type of women did the survey interview? Please note that Delhi is home to three of the most powerful women in India Mrs Sonia Gandhi, Mrs Pratibha Patil and Mrs Sheila Dikshit - were these and others such as Mrs Renuka Chaudhary, Mrs Jayanti Natarajan, Mrs Sushma Swaraj and Mrs Meira Kumar interviewed for the survey? I mean these are women of substance, if they were not a part of the survey on behaviour of women, the survey has no meaning.

The second question that came to my mind was in a city dominated by our Sardar and Jat friends who are very particular about their facial hair - the whole hog in the case of former and on upper lip in case of the latter - are our sisters in Delhi going Kissless for generations? Is this leading to further social tensions? Should our brothers in Delhi show some TLC to our Delhi sisters and take up that offer from the razor manufacturer to stem the tide of social tension?

The third question was more sinisiter - Do these surveys really matter to the Delhiwalla? We do not ask women of their opinion, nay dont even consider that they exist except when we feel naughty and want to pinch them and in any case most of the times we kill them even before they are born.....

There are surely better ways to sell razors to Delhi men... [what about " A lethal steel weapon, well crafted to kill and maim - you can also shave with it"]

Amen

PS: Look at the picture carefully, Aren't shaving razors beginning to look more and more like potato peelers? What does that make you, Brother?

Hardening Up

It has happened to me quite a few times in quite a few places. The first time it happened was when I was 14 years old and standing in a rather violent queue for a first day first show in my native land. A boy of my age decently attired came up to me and said that he had come from the nearby town and had lost his parents and did not have the bus fare to go back. I trusted him and gave him two rupees [the cost of the cinema ticket was three rupees just to give u a sense of "relativity"]. Crooked that I was even at that age, I started thinking if I had done the right thing or if I was royally cheated [My friends took me for a fool] and I promised not to be so gullible again.
The next time it happended was in Calcutta again at a cinema ticket counter, this time I was old enough to watch adult movies. A smartly dressed gent came up to me and on the pretext of losing his wallet asked for 25 rupees. I hesitated for a moment and then give away 25 rupees [a dress circle ticket at New Empire cost only 5.75 rupees then, u get the "relativity".
The last time it happened was in New Delhi railway station one fine morning when I was catching a train to Bihar. Again well-dressed gentleman with a wife in tow came up to me and said they they too were victims of pickpockets and had lost their money and tickets to Patna. Yes once again, I forked out 300 rupees again with that nagging feeling at the back of my head "was I being taken for a ride?".
Many years passed without trouble and things started improving. In fact for six years in my small way, I started paying a pound to homeless, buskers and drunks in various nooks and crannies of London. But the deal was simple, you give money for food or beer [no busker claimed to have been cheated by a recording company and no drunk claimed to buy vitamins]. And I started thinking world had changed while I was getting older - we were moving towards more transparency and clear RoI on charities.
So when this old lady stood in front of my seat in the AC first class compartment of Rajdhani Express one evening at Mumbai Central and claimed that she wanted to go back to Azamgarh and needed six hundred rupees, I hesitated checked my head first and then my heart, the latter once again won and I parted with the money feeling rather smug having helped an elderly person reach her family.
My happiness lasted for two weeks. Exactly a fornight later under exactly the same circumstances, I found the same lady in front of me with the same story asking for exactly the same amount of money. I will not tell you what I did... But all these and many other stories came to my mind that night and I was convinced that all my life I was gullible and a victim of cheats.
Now I am a hardened man, [I have even stopped paying the beggar at Defence Colony the customary one rupee that I paid everyday for three years].
Can you blame me? I keep feeling guilty though, especially when I pass under the Andheri flyover in Mumbai or the Moolchand crossing in Delhi.

End of the World

My seven year old daughter asked me last night before going to bed: "Dad are there going to be Earthquakes tomorrow? Are we all going to die". I explained to her that these were rumours floated by people who did not know what was happening and what were the implications of the experiments carried out by CERN. She was assured and went off to a peaceful sleep.
But I was not very reassured myself and sat up and read up about the experiment and the arguments for and against it.
Now I am of a scientific bent of my and am fully aware that from a particular perspective, we live under the threat of extinction every day what with so many zombie like asteroids, planetoids, cosmic rays, planets going around the solar system, it is most surprising that we are still around after so many billions of years. You just need to look at the surface of the moon to know what I mean.
However some fundamental questions came to my mind and I list them in no particular order:
1. While scientists were planning this mega planet blower experiment, Indians were begging to be introduced to much less harmless nuclear suppliers group and people were seriously debating if India should be allowed further nuclear tests. I found it ironic.
2. CERN are the same group of people who discovered quite accidentally the Internet while researching some aspects of nuclear physics. It's a bit like Christopher Columbus... He became a famous discoverer after having preciously failed to discover what he wanted to doscover. I mean how seriously should we take cooks who set out to make samosas and end up making rasgullas instead [delicious though they might be]?
3. Fundamentally, how would we benefit if we are able to know precisely what happened after the big bang? Will it help us in any practical way? I know where I could have used that 5.5 billion dollars more fruitfully.
4. Should not there be more information sharing and debate before some such groups start on some such experiments? I mean here people are stripping naked to save some whales from wily Japanese and here there is not even a modicum of debate over what some people think is the end of the world. Remember human cloning is banned in many countries becuase of its moral implications.
5. Finally, I trust the scientists to the extent that they are not sucidal and will start off an experiment which will kill them first. But then who knows? It was after all some very gentlemanly but nutty scientists who handed over the atomic bomb to Oppenheimer.
6. Finally, please do not take such opportunities to seek the services of God. He will not be of much help, he never is.
But by God! if the experiments goes horribly wrong what a way it will be to go..... I wonder will it end with a bang or a whimper.