News

Bal Thackeray’s culture

PTI reports:

Stating that “winning and losing is a part of the game”, Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray on Monday asked the disappointed cricket fans not to attack the players’ houses.

Conceding that India’s defeat to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in the World Cup was a cause of anguish, Thackeray said in a statement that attacking players’ houses and taking out their mock funeral processions was not the way to express anger.

“This is not our culture…It does not behove us. Nowhere in the world do such things happen,” Thackeray said.

Immense amusement bestows itself liberally. We all know what kind of culture Mr Thackeray believes in. Do we not?

Beauty contests in rural India

PTI informs us:

Homegrown major Dabur India Ltd is planning to host beauty pageants – Dabur Amla Sundar, Susheel, Yogya Pratiyogita – across rural India. The competition for finding beautiful, good-natured and capable women from villages as part of its strategy to relaunch the firm’s flagship hair oil- Dabur Amla.

I wonder what will happen when these contests are held in rural Bihar and UP. Will you have local mafia dons demanding to be judges, and insisting on bikini rounds? Cadaverous caravans cascade.

I wouldn’t be worried about women being commodified by these contests, by the way. Women are already treated as sub-human in much of rural India. No?

India can still play in the Super Eight

Anand Ramachandran tells us how. Heh.

Other random links I’ve come across this morning:

A couple of posts about Nandigram by Somnath Batabyal and Yash Jain. Somnath makes an interesting point:

I see Nandigram in the same light as the horrific events in Gujarat. Yes, the number of deaths is less but it is the state machinery that went out to hunt the minority. In Gujarat, it was the Muslims, here they were poor peasants. Show me the difference? Both are minorities.

Ayn Rand once said, “The smallest minority on earth is the individual.” But some minortities, of course, are more equal than others. My thoughts on Nandigram are the same as my thoughts on Singur, which I’d expressed here.

Last link for this post: Old pal Rohit Gupta, who now calls himself DJ Fadereu, is writing a book, of which the first chapter can be downloaded here. If you like it, he is asking you to donate money that will help him write more of the book. I like the model: doodh ka doodh, paani ka paani.

What to do about Moninder Singh Pandher?

I’ve just been watching the TV news channels, and they’re all a little psyched right now. The CBI has announced that Surendra Koli is solely responsible for the Nithari killings, most of which took place when Moninder Singh Pandher was either out of the country or not in his house. The anchors and reporters are bewildered, and are hinting at all manners of dark conspiracies. There are soundbytes of relatives of the victims protesting against the “injustice.” One thing is clear: many of these people decided long ago, after a rapturous media trial, that Pandher was guilty of the serial killings. Now that he’s not even being charged of the killings, they don’t know how to deal with it.

This is especially so because a significant part of the media made it a class issue. They focussed a bit too much on the subtext of a rich, influential businessman killing off poor, defenseless kids in his neighbourhood, and much of the outrage about the Nithari killings came from the class difference. Now that storyline is sinking, and they’re trying to figure out what angle to take. Perverted psychopath killing and eating a whole bunch of kids is less juicy if it’s the servant and not the master we’re talking about.

The whole truth of the matter will hopefully emerge as the trial proceeds, and it might well turn out, as some of the reporters are insinuating, that Koli is covering up for Pandher. But it might also turn out that he’s telling the truth. Either way, should we not suspend our decision until the facts are established?

Air Deccan incompetence, and courtship at Mt Abu

Air Deccan’s getting much attention from CNN-IBN, and rightly so: their disregard for customers has been so blatant for so long that something had to give. Well, Gautam John points me, via email, to an excellent comments thread of people relating their experiences with Air Deccan. One of them, in two parts, by a gentleman named Saurabh Chauhan, is particularly hilarious, and I carry it below the fold.

Sex education in Madhya Pradesh

IANS reports that “[s]ex education will no longer be imparted in schools in Madhya Pradesh.” MP’s chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, has explained his decision with the following words to HRD minister Arjun Singh:

The union government has devaluated [sic] Indian culture and its values. I believe that the text material on the subject was not submitted before you in a proper manner or else you would have not approved it.Instead, the younger generation should be taught about yoga, Indian culture and its values.

How these old fogies take kids for granted! Biology is stronger than culture, and these kids will get their sex education whether the schools provide it or not. As for Yoga, if you teach it to them at school, they might end up hating it for the rest of their lives. Such naïveté.

Anand Jon and euphemisms

We’ll only know if Anand Jon is guilty of the charges against him when the trial is done, but if there was a law against silly euphemisms, his attorney, one Ronald Richards, would be in serious trouble. Consider the gentleman’s defence of Jon:

These girls fly in for model jobs after months of dialogue filled with flirtation, they have sexual interaction and if he doesn’t put them in the show… then sometime later they claim they had unwanted sex.

“Sexual interaction?” “Unwanted sex?” Dude?

And it’s interesting how a section of the Indian media has jumped to Jon’s defence simply because he is an Indian celebrity in the US. So we have stories with quotes from celebs saying things like “Oh, I met him once at a party, and he seemed so polite. I’m sure he couldn’t have done this!” Joy.

Madhur Bhandarkar should make a film on this.