3G According To Manmohan Singh

Sonia-ji, Rahul-ji and Priyanka-ji.

Posted by Amit Varma on 14 November, 2008 in India | Politics

All The News That’s Fit To Dream

If you’re already tired of 2008, take a look at the New York Times edition of July 4, 2009. This is the online version of a fake edition of the paper, of which thousands of copies were distributed free across New York in a fantastic hoax. I don’t know why the NYT itself is calling this a spoof—this doesn’t make fun of the paper, but instead uses it to present the vision the authors have of America under Barack Obama. I’m sure they’ll end up disappointed—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

But it’s very funny. Someone should do one for the Times of India…

(Links via separate emails from Gautam, Udhay and Gaspode.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 14 November, 2008 in Journalism | Media | Miscellaneous | Politics

185 More MG Roads

Rediff reports the WTF news of the day:

The Gandhi Monument Council, headquartered in the United States of America, has approached mayors of 185 cities in 39 countries to name a major street after Mahatma Gandhi .

The cities contacted included hugely-populated ones like Seoul (peopled by over 10 million), Tokyo, New York and London, to sparsely populated ones like Eschen (in Liechtenstein, with a population of about 4,000), Valletta (Malta), Encamp (Andorra), Dudelange (Luxembourg), a press release from the GMC stated.

The office bearers of the GMC have begun a hunger strike that they have promised not to end until all the cities comply.

Ok, fine, I made that last line up. But not the first two. If Gandhi himself was alive, I suspect he might have taken a break from ahimsa and strangled these GMC dudes with some homespun khadi threads. He was a master of using symbolism to inspire people—that charkha, that fistful of salt etc—but it was always tactical, aimed at fulfilling a higher purpose. This is just pointless idol worship.

(Link via email from Rajeev Mantri.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 11 November, 2008 in India | News | WTF

Remembering Ponty Manesar

The England cricket team is in India, and I can’t wait to see what young Ponty Manesar gets up to this time around. Here are his adventures from 2006:

The adventures of Ponty Manesar
Further Adventures of Ponty Manesar
Even More Adventures of Ponty Manesar

Posted by Amit Varma on 11 November, 2008 in Sport

‘At The End Of The Day…’

Vinjk points me to a list compiled by The Telegraph of the top ten irritating phrases in the English language. Some of them, I am ashamed to say, I find myself using in everyday speech—though I try to avoid them in my writing. Nevertheless, when I am lazily blogging in the middle of the night, a careless phrase or two may slip through.

In an old essay, The Dialect of a Cricket Writer, I’d written about how cricket writing in India is full of clichés, and how it is every writer’s duty to avoid them. When I wrote about cricket, I tried to do just that. But I hadn’t, at the time of writing that piece, done any live commentary.

A few months after that essay came out, I covered India’s tour to Pakistan for the Guardian, during which I also gave hourly radio updates for the BBC. Those updates were 60 seconds each, and a dude who ran a local Pakistani radio station heard me at work and invited me to do a stint of live radio commentary for him. When we are young, we are foolish, and I agreed.

What a disaster I was! Whenever I needed to say something, only clichés would pop into my head—and being live on air, I had no time to think of alternatives. A batsman french-cut a ball for two, and after describing the shot, I said, “it doesn’t matter how they come, as long as they come.” The game reached its final stages and I said, “Every run is crucial now.” By the time the game was over—I forget who won that one—I was more despondent than the losing side. Amit Varma the writer witnessed Amit Varma the radio commentator in action and unleashed a series of angry WTFs. Amit Varma the radio commentator, duly chastised, resolved never to do live commentary again.

That doesn’t mean that I will go easy on cliché-mongers—professionals have a duty to work at their craft till they get it right, and you will never hear a tired phrase from Harsha Bhogle when he does radio commentary. But it did make me empathetic towards writers who use clichés in their writing. That said, just as I never did radio commentary again, they too should give up writing and find some other work.

Posted by Amit Varma on 11 November, 2008 in Journalism | Media | Personal | Sport

Guilty By Association?

Just yesterday the Indian media was jumping up and down in celebration because they had discovered an Indian name among Barack Obama’s advisors—that of Sonal Shah of Google.org. Well, now they’re all jumping up and down in righteous indignation because she was once allegedly linked to the VHP. My friend Reuben Abraham knows Shah well, and delivers an impassioned defense:

As a friend of mine said at the time, these people are doing to Sonal exactly what the right-wing loonies tried to do to Barack Obama with the Bill Ayers story, i.e., guilt by association. If you have made the mistake of being somewhere near Bill Ayers, by definition, you’re “palling with the terrorists.” This is vile. This is wrong. This is destructive. This is disgusting. And this is precisely the sort of vile politics that the United States needs a break from; the sort of politics the average person is tired of, if Obama’s mandate is anything to go by.

More than Reuben’s personal testimony, Shah’s record speaks for itself:

While she was at Clinton’s treasury department, she worked actively in Kosovo and Bosnia in setting up the central banking system and refloating the currency, both measures vital to the stability of the new states, and especially in preventing hyper-inflation. She also worked in Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis with Robert Rubin’s team. Lest the irony be lost, all three countries are predominantly muslim, not exactly the natural home of the anti-muslim fundamentalist some of these news reports imply Sonal is.

Fawzia Naqvi, a Pakistani Muslim, also pitches in for Shah in Reuben’s post.

If the elections were still on, poor Obama would no doubt be accused of “palling around with Hindu fundamentalists”.

*

Imagine this: You die, get to Heaven, and God greets you at the door. “Let me in,” you say. “I’ve been good all my life, I’ve helped old ladies cross the road, administered first aid to a fly, procreated for the grace of God, I mean You. Now let me into Heaven.”

“Aha,” says God. “You didn’t read the small print. The large print in the contract says that you don’t get into heaven if you have sinned. The small print says that you don’t get into heaven if anyone you know has sinned.”

“Anyone I know?” you protest. “But that’s absurd.”

“That’s the way it is,” says God. “And if no one you know has sinned, I might just invoke the six-degrees clause. You thought Earth had global warming. You ain’t seen Hell yet.”

Posted by Amit Varma on 10 November, 2008 in Dialogue | India | Journalism | Media | Politics

Slap The Messenger

PTI reports:

Bhartiya Janshakti Party (BJS) National President Uma Bharti today blamed the media for blowing out of proportion the incident when she had slapped twice a worker of her party at Chhindwara.

“My slapping the worker was not a big deal at all but the only thing was that it was captured on camera by a private news channel,” she told PTI.

[...]

Bharti said that had the incident not been captured on camera, no one would have come to know about it and the person who was slapped would also not have left the party.

In other words, if it’s not on the news channels, it didn’t happen, it doesn’t matter. What to do about people who treat life like a reality show?

(Link via separate emails from Pritish and Sanj.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 07 November, 2008 in India | News | Politics | WTF

A Ban For Mr Ramadoss

Rohan D’Sa of Daily Humor sends a correspondent to interview Anbumani Ramadoss. Here’s what happens next:

(Comic reproduced with permission. If you enjoy such comics, also check out Fly, You Fools. Excellent stuff.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 07 November, 2008 in Freedom | India

Sunscreen For Plants

That’s No. 44 in Time’s list of the best inventions of 2008. I love technology.

What will next year’s list contain? I’m betting on moisturizers for camels.

(Link via email from Ambuj.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 07 November, 2008 in News | Science and Technology

The War Against Monkeys

IANS reports from Lucknow:

With an estimated 3,000 monkeys at large in certain residential areas of the Uttar Pradesh capital, local authorities are chasing the animals on a war footing, particularly after a child lost his life to a marauding simian pack.

[...]

After chasing monkeys for nearly 48 hours, they had their first success on Tuesday afternoon when they trapped two monkeys.

So after “nearly 48 hours” of being on a “war footing”, our state authorities caught 2 out of 3000 monkeys. I’m just glad they didn’t shoot a couple of stray cats in an encounter.

It seems that the municipality had tried to catch monkeys earlier in a public-private partnership with “monkey catcher Harbans Singh”, who IANS quotes as saying:

Earlier I have trapped as many as about 500 monkeys, but my bill for more than 100 monkeys was pending for more than two years. So how do you expect me to do anything?

So now the government is doing the job itself. I can imagine Mayawati sending a minister to Lucknow to question the official monkey catchers on their progress. He walks into their office and asks, “Hello boys, how’s it going?” And then they jump on him with a net and pin him down. The local counselor asks, in horror, “What are you doing?” And they say, “We caught a third monkey! We caught a third monkey! Give advance Diwali bonus!”

Previous post on monkeys: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Posted by Amit Varma on 07 November, 2008 in India | News | WTF