blame it on gurgaon

What if i were to say that the situation in mumbai due to the floods would not have been so bad had it not been for the police beating of honda workers in gurgaon. Most of you would have a hearty laugh at my expense but i am not joking. it all has to do with that fascinating pillar of modern indian life-the 24 hour news channel. these channels, due to the nature of the medium, are over-the-top ,sensationalistic ,populist; their reporters are loud,stupid,amateurish and ask amazingly inane questions. Forgive me, i digress. lets get back to the central point of the post.
on monday evening(25/7) the police quelled an industrial protest in a brutal and cruel manner avenging the beating of cops by a mob of workers who started the violence. the whole incident was captured on tape and played over and over and over again by the afore-mentioned channels. and why not. the pictures were a great example of the power of images and shocked a nation. a figure of 700 injured was thrown about without any credibility and the channels went on an almost-evangelical crusade to expose the police and state administration as agents of the japanese mnc while sympathising with the poor workers(the guys who started it). their blatant partisanship stoked an already-raging fire leaving the situation in gurgaon and in parliament very volatile the next day. the entire morning of the 26th was spent covering gurgaon while a 1000 km away another tragedy was unfolding and the media was totally oblivious to it despite it being in the country's largest city. after battering the konkan coast for a few days the rains moved to mumbai. by 11 a.m. the kalyan-kasara and kalyan-karjat train lines were blocked basically stopping 75% of the passenger traffic in and out of the city and the key thane-belapur road was blocked. on a slow news day, this would have been major news but the editors in the newsroom were so focussed on gurgaon that they hardly paid attention. that was the big mistake-they simply failed to comprehend the story breaking in front of them and because the news channels were not reporting anything people assumed nothing was wrong. nobody went to pick up their kids from school, no one left office early, people were still flying into the city oblivious. by 1 p.m. most roads were choked; by 3p.m. the city was basically in lockdown. still, it was not till 4 that the channels really picked up the story. by then, it was too late. would everything have been fine if the coverage had started earlier. of course not but it would have been better. remember, 94 cm of rain doesn't fall in a couple of hours.

Well,its not raining in my neighbourhood

most of mumbai might have gone underwater (with no help from global warming) but you wouldn't guess it in my locality. where i live(southern tip of the city), it hasn't rained for the last 7-8 hours, the roads never got flooded,traffic flowed as usual,the most efficient power supply(BEST) in the whole damn country didn't trip up even once,phones were working and i even managed to go and have a haircut. in short, i had no fun over the last two days. i have no fascinating stories to relate about my experiences on the day parts of mumbai received 94cm of rain(highest single day rain ever recorded in this country) but since i am a sucker for such stories myself(and i hope you are too) i will relate to you the adventures of my friend AA who returned home this evening after 36 hours .
AA leaves home on tuesday morning at 7a.m. to go to college in andheri(about 20 k.m from his house on altamount road),gets there without any hassles and when college gets over at 3 he thinks he can get back as easily.but the roads in andheri are now flooded and he has to wade through knee-deep water to get to andheri local station. on reaching there, he finds out that the locals have stopped and he can't get home. the cell networks are down, the power(Reliance Energy) has gone off in the whole area, nearby buildings are all flooded including those of his friends, food is hard to find and very expensive( a soggy banana for 20 bucks). with nowhere to go, he decides to spend the night at the only place with some lighting-the railway station where he can only sit on the ground packed like a sardine. after a sleepless night, he decides to return to his college where he finds tons of arbitrary people who spent the night in the classrooms.the canteen's been cleaned out...nothin to eat there and nothin to eat anywhere around. he now decides to go to the international airport hoping that there'll be some transport from there. after wading through now-waist deep water, he gets there to find out that there is no hope there...the W.E. highway is flooded till waist height with tons of cars stranded...its early afternoon...he's hungry and wet...when he makes the fateful decision...to walk(or is it wade) it home.he starts his journey...on the way he encounters a foreigner in a business suit who just abandons his jacket(immediately picked up by someone else)because its weighing him down...another one who'd even got rid of his shirt..and his trousers, he sees a bus but the driver tells him he's been sitting there for 25 hours, and a dead body with rotting skin hanging from a pole. near mahim,the water is head high so he has to clamber up on the top of a truck and travel on it. somewhere around 6p.m. he finally staggers into his house and after a long bath and a hot meal, he's telling his story to a very inquisitive friend. he's very pissed and very bitter but his friend instead of being sympathetic can't suppress a grin during most of the story. finally, the friend asks him
"did you have an umbrella". AA, unfortunately, doesn't find this very amusing.

Tour de Lance

Last evening, Lance Armstrong retired from cycling after winning his seventh straight Tour de France. When a sportsperson retires, it is the appropriate time to talk about something called Legacy. Is Armstrong the greatest sportsman of our time-arguably; the most dominant-probably; the most inspirational-definitely. You would have had to have been in Rip van Winkle mode for the last 10 years not to have heard his story-he came back from cancer to win a cycle race seven times. But, that's not even half the story. He survived major brain surgery and intensive chemotherapy and less than three years after his diagnosis started a run that would see him go undefeated till his retirement in the toughest athletic challenge in the world today. In doing so, he not only changed the face of his sport but made a race, from a niche sport, popular only in Western Europe famous worldwide. Sure, he got Americans into it, but how many Asians or Africans or South Americans had heard of the Tour de France before he came along much less followed it. Armstrong made the Tour de France global. His critics (mostly french sportswriters), who have never really accepted him(because he's american), say that he isn't the greatest cyclist of all time, that eddie merx is; they don't really get it,do they? it is not really about whether merx would beat armstrong in a head-to-head, what makes a sportsman stand out is his impact on his sport in particular and society in general. Armstrong transcends cycling, he transcends sport itself. He has given hope and joy and inspiration to millions. If he is the Michael Jordan of cycling, he is also the Christopher Reeve of cancer. Forget sports, he is probably one of the greatest men living.period. Following him on his incredible journey has been one of the great priveleges of my lifetime.

Err...Pottermania

I want to share with you the funniest thing i have ever read on the front page of a newspaper.

From the front page of the Sunday Times of India(Mumbai edition) dated july 17, 2005:

"By 6.35 am IST on Saturday morning, some intrepid-or Potter-crazed, depending on your point of view-senior editors of the TOI had already got their eager hands on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.Seconds later, they were frantically turning its 600-plus pages . By 6.45 am, the teleconferencing had begun. Hours later, a high-powered huddle was still taking place in our offices. The secret was out, we knew the identity of the major character who dies in the book. The big question- should we tell the world?"

Its very reassuring to know that the "world's largest English-language newspaper" has its journalistic priorities spot on.

P.S: Even though the Times ultimately didn't reveal the big "secret", another Times group paper, the Mumbai Mirror (such a flop that they distribute it free with the Times of India nowadays), no doubt after a high-powered meeting of its own, revealed the shocking identity in its Monday edition.

He Roars Again

" Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?"

He's back.When he won the Masters in April it was a real scrap and he almost choked...twice.When he made a late charge on that extraordinary final day at the U.S Open
but then missed a couple of short putts to finish second, they said that in the old days his mere presence on the leaderboard would have intimidated his rivals into submission and this was now a more mortal version, that the old domination would never return. They obviously didn't count on four days at the Home of Golf...a course so tailor-made for his game that its scary.Forget for a moment that he's become only the third man to win 10 golf majors,forget that he's only the second man after nicklaus to win all four majors at least twice,forget that he's only 29(still young for a golfer)....forget all that. What was most impressive about the weekend at St. Andrews was that he won in a fashion that can only be described as Tigeresque. He grabbed the tournament by the scruff of the neck early on and didn't let go.His game was intimidating, his demeanour was intimidating,hell, even his soundbites were intimidating.He seems to getting back to the form of the summer of 2000 when he won the U.S. open by 15 shots(in the most dominating display ever in a golf tournament) and the British open by 8 at St. Andrews. In this form his only competition is with Lance Armstrong and Annika Sorenstam-to be the most dominant sportsperson of this generation.I've heard they've started taking bets on the margin of victory at the PGA championship in August. All i can say is put me up for seven shots.

Give TV a chance...

satellite television came to india when i was around six years old and it changed my life. it became trusted friend and companion to a shy,introverted boy who was not much of a sportsman nor a voracious reader...it became almost like the fifth member of my family. to a large extent, television defined me...my interests, my beliefs, my influences. without television i might not have been a sports fan at all (like others in my family) leave alone a keen follower of sports like golf and baseball, my passion for international politics comes from having spent hours watching cnn but most of all, it spawned a great love for english television shows(due to the place i grew up in and the school that i went to i never really got into hindi television which might be just as well) which finally brings me to the point of this post.

A few days ago, the show Desperate Housewives premiered. It is the most hyped english show ever in india and justifiably so. it was charming and interesting and quite entertaining. i would however like to talk about something that happened the day before housewives premiered. another show premiered on the same channel with so little publicity that i found out about it merely a few hours before it aired (the exact same thing had happened when the West Wing premiered a few years back). The show's name is Arrested Development. It won the emmy award last year for best comedy. this is how Star World treats it. Unfortunately, this is the rule rather than the exception,which brings me to the two reasons why english television has failed to take off in india-lack of audience and attitude of the channels. unbelievably, the people who are supposed to make money from these shows are the ones who more often than not, ruin them. many would be surprised to know that a few years back Zee Cafe(then Zee English)
had the three best shows on television-the Sopranos, the West Wing and Six Feet Under. the reason you would be surprised would be that the channel never bothered to tell you about them. AXN axed the most influential show of our generation-Survivor because a bunch of unemployed "nature-lovers" objected to scenes of people eating bugs. Star World prefers advertising ninth reruns of a rather mediocre show (Friends) than telling us about shows like the Office.

However, worse than this is the attitude of the public.i am not talking about people who are not comfortable with english or anything like that. i am talking primarily about the urban youth...people who grew up speaking english, people like myself.When i ask many of my friends which shows they watch, half say they do not watch television, the rest say Friends full stop. When i ask them why, the same old reasons come up-no time,i prefer new movies or books or music,tv shows are stupid. at this, i stare at them with incredulity...do they not realize that the great artistic thrust of our time is not in movies(going through a dark age) or music(most people i know listen to bands from the 60s) or literature(harry potter is considered the great literary achievement of our time)...it is in television. i have seen both the Godfather and Goodfellas and find the Sopranos a better portrayal of the mob, the West Wing is the best political drama to come out of any medium in ages and though reality tv might be slightly voyeuristic and exploitative, it is truly on the cutting edge redefining the meaning of entertainment .okay,it is difficult to watch repeatedly week after week but the emotional payoff is also much greater...i can still recall the unmatched exhilaration after watching the finale of the first Survivor,the tears that came down my eyes when Kevin Arnold's wonder years ended,the sorrow and sympathy i felt for Tony Soprano when he killed his best friend, and the regret i still feel for having missed the final chapter in Mulder and Scully's unforgettable odyssey.when i look at others who missed out on these moments, i feel a bit sorry for them but i mostly hope that they will shake off their biases and give tv a chance