Dil Se

Kaun Banega Crorepati’s  Season V, currently on air, shows how TV can become a medium for the underprivileged. For, this time round, Amitabh Bachchan is in his elements wooing the havenots from all parts of lesser known India. So, if you are an upwardly mobile urban Indian, there is only a scant chance that you will ever get a call from  KBC  this year. But this new  avataar  comes across as generously good. It is very gratifying to see how a young woman in the rural heartland of West Bengal who does not even have a TV at home, actually makes it to the hotseat and takes back Rs 25 lakh despite not knowing what a  patta gobhi  is! And then there was this handicapped Muslim man Yusuf Mallu who got Rs 12.5 lakh after getting his tears wiped by an ever attentive Bachchan. He suffers from a spine injury he sustained while going for a kite snatch. Kudos to  KBC  for presenting so many inspiring stories of struggle and in its own way helping ...

Guys, as a population, we are more or less done in -- and the worst thing is that it is our very own Government that has cooked our goose. As if the Home Minister’s much publicised blind alley in the lane of terror was not enough to give you heebie-jeebies, next came a series of scarier blasts of another kind — those from the price index. These explosions are of the official kind, mandatory and meant to give you much more pain. You can’t cook much, drive much, buy much, save much, use power much or for that matter go for grocery shopping, home and car loans! Meaning to say, there is nothing that you can do anymore that won’t pinch your pockets more than you can bear. But if you were one of those weirdos bent on looking for a silver lining in all things perennially bad, here’s one in the Government flattener — think alternative. Here are your options, take them or leave them: With LPG deciding not to return from a pole vault jump, each puny little cylinder about to cost `750, you sh...

It was a routine hunt for stories this week with 9/11’s 10th anniversary beeping on the radar. Quite casually, we were discussing what we should put out as a recall on the victims of the World Trade Centre terror attack a decade ago. Just then, Delhi shook with yet another blast, this time claiming 13 lives and maiming 76 persons in the High Court premises. Being in the profession which entails routinely following scenes of disaster, terror attacks and all other incidents that take life gruesomely, a certain amount of immunity creeps in among colleagues, just like those doctor stories of those men and women in white coats having lunch over a cadaver. How many dead and how many injured is what comes out as a routine question. Condemnation follows and then one gets down to work — writing soirees on severed limbs, men and women in agony, finding out the one report that will shock as no other, etc. Over the years, reporters cultivate a somewhat deadened sensitivity to disasters which is d...

I want to file criminal charges against Roger Federer for losing the way he did in this year's US Open semifinal. He first led me on, gave me hope, made me cheer, yell and scream in joy and then came the betrayal....who in the hell loses two triple match points --- one in third set and one in the 5th one?????? Such mental disintegration shows up Tennis' Alzeimer's age... Federer is still to young, too fit, too focussed and too ambitious to become a victim of that at just 30. As for Novak, my verdict: PERSONABLE, LIKEABLE IMPECCABLE.

The magnum opus that the Anna Hazare movement has become will definitely be part of many detailed studies at a later date but, for now, it seems that the success and the boom phase this anti-graft stir is in has been due to a heady mix of five major extra-curricular factors — one, the issue of corruption itself which has riled the Indian public for a long time; two, the high-handedness of the Government in arresting Hazare when the tide’s in his favour; three, the part played by news television channels in fuelling a wave against the arrest; four, the almost perfect PR campaign that Team Anna devised to carry on the show; and five, the power of technology that disseminated information in a package that caught up with the nation’s biggest most potent force — its youth brigade. As a colleague’s status message pointed out the other day, this is perhaps the best ever PR campaign launched by any agency and that the myriad PR firms that service the media today should learn from the exercise...

Way back in 1959, a doughty 24-year-old girl from a very rich, and well-connected Agrawal family residing in an elaborate  haveli  in Dariba Kalan declared she would be marrying a good looking boy from a South Indian  uch koti  Brahmin household. The ripples of disbelief were immense. An inter-caste, love marriage that too between two financially far removed families was rare. But the girl was to sweep all objections away with a clear headed flourish that was to signify her long and eventful life of 76 years, 50 of them in the household she chose with no looking back. That was my mother. She passed away on August 8, without any premise and yet again she was the one who had decided it was time to change course — this time from life to death. Those who knew her were unanimous that she was a distinct woman of unbending will power and it was this trait that powered the last 17 years of her life in which she was bedridden due to a paralytic stroke. Those who did not know...

So, what’s wrong with Sonia Gandhi? She flew out to the US in utmost and uncanny secrecy, for an undisclosed surgery, while the nation speculated (and continues to do so) intensely about the nature of the ailment that rushed the Congress chairperson — and in every way its nerve centre — to foreign shores for an operation. It’s uncanny because for a party genetically compelled to fawn over the slightest of issues around anyone from the famed Gandhi dynasty to actually have been able to pull an iron curtain of secrecy around its most treasured asset was quite an effort. As twitter and other networks on the web peaked about what ails Sonia, one wondered why there was need for such secrecy around the medical bulletin of a person of her stature which should have been an essential national announcement. It’s surprising why at all there needs to be secrecy on what ails any national leader. Generally, it’s the Communist leaders of the world who have been known to wrap a veil around their aili...

Don’t be too surprised if you see many a rural folk zip across the Greater NOIDA Expressway in a diesel Scorpio, clad in stiff white cottons and a neck full of bawdy gold chains not to mention the heavy rings which might look to be giving weight training to their fingers. He will also have a glitzy mobile phone in psychedelic colours, shades several inches above the brow and friends of similar ilk stuffed into the backseat with pop music blaring out of the tinted windows. The speed of his vehicle will, of course, be more than 100 km an hour and the horn blaring loudly even though this youth brigade may have nothing to do with the billion rupee F1 track coming up on their very land. For all practical purposes, these youth and their families are convinced they have finally arrived. Why? Because they have got some lakhs stashed away in their newly acquired bank lockers to take care of at least two generations, if not more — or so they think, having come into quick money due to either hou...

The NOIDA Extension land and housing mayhem has just about started, and the shivers are running deep into customers’ backbone. No one really knows what’s going to happen in the final analysis but the buyers seem to be the ones bearing the brunt of all the illegalities that the courts and the farmers are suddenly discovering in most projects. Those who did not book despite being pressurised by friends to make “sound real estate investments” are the ones who are breathing a sigh of relief. Those who got lured into investing their hard-earned lakhs into barren land sites where flats were to come up, are, as one of the customers said, “waiting with bated breath for some clarity to emerge on the issue.” Take the case of X. He booked a flat in NOIDA Extension and had been dutifully paying his hefty five figure instalment by the month. He still is doing the same. “We have been sandwiched badly. If you put a stop to instalments, you end up risking proceedings by the bank, and if you carry on ...

The Home Minister of India tells you after serial terror blasts — not the first or the second or third but umpteenth ones claiming a whole lot of lives — that the explosions were not due to Intelligence failure. The projected Prime Minister of India is more candid the next day. He says it is not possible for the Government to plug terror blasts. Maharashtra’s Chief Minister goes on record two days later to say giving the Home portfolio to his alliance partner NCP was a huge mistake. The Prime Minister, as usual, expresses grief and nothing else. The Congress chairperson decides it is time to pay Mumbai a visit. Should we read the writing on the wall? That our political masters have washed their hands off their responsibility to provide a safe country to the citizens? That the political will to curb terror is absent? Or, for that matter, that the Government is totally clueless, if not unconcerned, about how to translate its zero tolerance claims into reality? Indeed, the recent Mumbai ...

Somewhat erroneously, the Neeraj Grover case is being compared to the 1959 Prem Ahuja/Nanavati murder case. But the two cases could not have been more diametrically opposite. Cut out the superficial similarities of both the killers being Naval officers and that in both cases someone connected to the wife/fiancee was done to death in a fit of rage, there is nothing more to suggest that anything else was similar.  Meenakshi Rao  recalls the Nanavati case which was a watershed in the genre of crime of passion cases If Emile Jerome Mathew’s act of murder is all about cruelty, brutality and inhumanness, Kawas Manekshaw Nanavati's was about romance, rage and propriety. Or, at least, it was perceived as such. Hence Nanavati, despite murdering ritzy playboy and serial womaniser Prem Ahuja, garnered so much public support that there was hardly anyone, except of course the victim's sister Mamie Ahuja, who sought life or death for the much celebrated naval officer, or for that matter hi...

  As I write this piece, one more girl has been put to death, very, very violently and by none other than the two people who were meant to protect her from every vagary of life. Apparently in a Meerut village, a father and brother dragged the teenaged girl out of the house, forced an animal deworming bottle of liquid down her throat, pushed her into the mound of sun-dried cow dung cakes and set her afire. She died burning under weight of the cow dung mound as the entire village watched in silence. Her crime? She said she did not want to get married just yet. Such cases and the like have become too frequent for cover. Maria Susairaj assists in cutting a body of her friend into more than 200 pieces, without any qualms. She goes scot-free in just three years, which makes her brazen enough to actually get out and hold a Press conference of all the things she could’ve done! A man kills a woman and parcels her body through a courier company from Delhi to Ajmer. No one knows where he ca...

Incest has been a done to death story in the media which sociologists say has no cure. But Kerala recently told you how it is no longer an in-the-family-under-the-blanket-ageold-horror — how it has become an even more heinous offence. Though one fails to understand what really can be more heinous than your own father, brother, cousin or uncle raping you when you are at your most tender age and in need of a cushion of love and protection, something that the Constitution tags as child right, the sex scam in Kerala shows how much worse a familial crime like incest can get. Not only is there more than one story emerging about a father raping his own daughter but this has often become just a pre-meditated ploy to ultimately initiate her into the sex trade. This also brings to the fore the alarming fact that despite sex with minors carrying a stiff penalty under the Indian Penal Code it is one of the worst kept secrets of India’s sexual deviancy, or should we call it preference. While Keral...

his one is a different Anna from the ones the Indian middle class has grown up on — yes, he is the big boss but not in the manner that the Bollywood’s larger than life Annas ( bhai logs  from down South) have been down the ages. In Hazare, we have an Anna fighting for the right cause and getting an above board support from across India. Strangely however, those who have so spontaneously extended support to this long awaited cause seeking an audience are the very same people who have in their big and small ways given fillip to the issue of corruption. Let’s start with the corporates extending support to Anna. Corruption at highest places is courtesy these very corporates for whom oiling the machinery has become a necessary fineart. From hiring dubious lobbyists, to finding company moles in the system to according fantastic freebies to  babus , to being convinced that the easiest way to get their businesses going is to have their money and men as spokes in the wheels of governa...

As a colleague pointed out the other day, the entire nation at this point of time wants to get into the mind, heart and soul of Aarushi’s parents Rajesh and Nupur Talwar to know what’s going on inside them. Did they have a hand in killing their 14-year-old daughter? If yes, was it in a fit of rage or was it cold-blooded and well thought out? If not, how are they dealing with the unraveling situation in which they now officially stand accused of killing their only child, a charge that had remained in the realm of sheer speculation thus far? What could have been their motive? The Central Bureau of Investigation has said in its closure report that despite its best efforts, and despite the fact that all circumstantial evidence points to a role of the parents in the killing, it has been unable to find a motive to the crime, or for that matter, the murder weapon. Was the Talwars’ alleged tampering with evidence merely fuelled to save their daughter’s reputation ante mortem? Or was it to scr...