And what causes the sari state? Saris do, that’s what.
Hemashree (24), the youngest contestant in the fray, is banking on her appeal as the host of a TV show that gives away saris to women.
I actually don’t find this deplorable at all. It is a given that voters will be bribed in elections, in different ways. How much I object to politicians depends partly on how much taxpayers’ money (my money) they offer as bribe. (Free TVs, saris, make-work employment schemes etc.) If this woman is cashing in on popularity that she has earned by giving away saris bought with private money, what’s wrong with that? It is at least, odd as it sounds, an honest form of corruption.
Just read that story, it’s amazing. The incestuous dad in question is Josef Fritzl, about whom I’d written here. I hope they shove him in jail for the rest of his life and make sure he’s buggered 48 times a day by a posse of trained gorillas, who then get extra bananas for good behaviour because they didn’t kill him. Justice.
You don’t need to elect film stars to parliament to get full entertainment. CNN-IBN reports:
The much-delayed Bill providing 33 per cent reservation for women in legislatures was introduced in Rajya Sabha amid high drama and protests by Samajwadi Party (SP) members on Tuesday.
Law Minister H R Bhardwaj introduced the controversial Bill in the midst of Samajwadi Party members trying to snatch its copies from the hands of the Minister. But the Congress MPs formed a human chain around Bhardwaj as he introduced the Bill by a voice vote.
To protest against the Bill, SP members also reportedly threw papers at the Congress MPs. [...]
An agitated SP MP Abu Azmi said, “If given a chance I would have torn the Bill.”
However, Congress members intervened and Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chaudhary repulsed SP’s attempts by pushing Azmi away.
I was on NDTV’s show We the People once with Renuka Chaudhary as a fellow guest—we fought over the women’s reservation bill among other things—and I can attest to how formidable she is. Indeed, you put her and The Great Khali in a ring and she will wipe the floor with that bugger and have him curling up in a foetal position at the end of it and asking for Mummy. Still, parliament is not an akhada, and if we pay Rs 26,000 per minute for its proceedings, you figure out what this entertainment costs us, and whether it’s worth it.
“Had I pushed him, there would have been byelections,” minister Renuka Chowdhury, more substantial than Kamal Akhtar, her adversary from the Samajwadi Party, later joked outside Parliament after she and some fellow women members had fought off a brawny bid to stop the women’s reservation bill from being tabled today.
Note to the reporter: are you sure she was joking?
Hot vadapavs served in corporate style with a ‘Jai Maharashtra’ greeting from an assured Maharashtrian vendor - Shiv Sena will now take the popular snack to the Marathi Manoos their way.
Announcing a state-wide network of Maharashtra Vadapav Vikreta Sena, the party mouthpiece Saamna said on Tuesday that the Shiv Sena sponsored association of vendors would be selling the popular spicy preparation comprising bread and potatoes at various stalls in hygienic conditions matching McDonalds and international pizza outlets.
What a sentence! I’m not sure a business started by a political party can work, but I’m a huge fan of “the popular spicy preparation comprising bread and potatoes,” and wish them all the best. What’s more, I demand that the vadapav be served on pages of Saamna, so that the Maharashtrian experience is complete. Hokay?
Raj Thackeray has a problem with people from Bihar and UP coming to Mumbai. And he uses the WTF analogy of the day to make his argument:
People tell me that any one can live anywhere according to our Constitution, but even in our own housing society, we disallow children from other societies. Aren’t these children also Indians? Then if I ask people from leaving my Maharashtra society, then what have I done wrong?
A housing society, of course, is private property, and its owners have the right to set whatever rules they want. So by Thackeray’s analogy, Maharashtra is his private property. Well, well, well…
And wait, there’s more. In a quote that takes WTFness to a new level, Thackeray goes on to say:
Amar Singh is a frog. He shoots his mouth off. My activists were accused of throwing bottles on Bachchan’s bungalow. If they have to throw something, they will throw cans, not bottles.
PS: Rediff quotes Thackeray as saying that his men would have thrown “not a single bottle but a whole crate” if they were so inclined. I suppose he’s confused by all the options open to him. What to throw?
Apparently some politicians in Chennai are upset that Sherawat, by wearing allegedly revealing clothes at a function, caused “mental agony to the people of Tamil Nadu.” The report is unclear on whether this was caused by her wearing too much clothing or too little, and I can only hope that the mental agony gave way to some kind of pleasurable physical relief.
But really, look at this picture from the event. Sherawat looks more ‘ugh’ than ‘mmm’, and I find the other chica with her much more attractive, with her pretty smile, dignified posture, well-tailored sleeveless kurta and the hint of a diaphanous churidar. Her name is Asin Thottumkal, and her website reveals that her “attitude to charity” is summed up by the following words: “What is done by the right hand is not to be known even by the left hand.”
Is there a lesson there for the people protesting Sherawat?
The bus stopped midway to get rid of him. The old man got down trembling. He leaned against the shutter of a closed shop, gasping for breath. Passersby saw him but didn’t offer help. They informed the Bantra police, who took hours to sort out if the case was under their jurisdiction. The man lay on the road unattended for three and a half hours until he died.
The emphasis is mine. Read the full story—at one point, when the police arrived…
… they dispersed the crowd and streamlined the traffic, but didn’t touch the old man. Instead, they informed the Shibpur police because the spot where he lay under the blazing sun was not under their jurisdiction.
To think that those cops get their salary because people like the gentleman in question pay their taxes—if not as income tax, then every time they make any purchase, for the government gets a cut of everything.
It won’t surprise me if our politicians now offer reservations as a solution. After all, won’t reserving 50% of every road for the exclusive use of historically oppressed people play a big part in correcting past wrongs?
Posted by Amit Varma on 30 April, 2008 in
India |
News
While actors are at their experimental best these days, Shahid Kapoor will not be left behind. After his stellar performance in Jab We Met, the actor is super-charged and willing to go any distance to get into the skin of the character.
Shahid, we hear, will be opting for a new long-haired look for his upcoming project, a musical, to be directed by Ken Ghosh.
So now you know what commitment means in Bollywood. “Willing to go any distance”, it seems.
I wonder what Barack Obama found out about Jeremiah Wright over the last three days that he didn’t know after two decades in Wright’s church. This certainly takes a bit of the shine off his words in his famous race speech, “I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can disown the black community.” Well, he can now, since it’s become politically necessary to do so.
As Jonah Goldberg and George Will point out, Wright’s a gift to John McCain. But will this help Hillary Clinton steal the nomination from Obama? I sure hope not.
Also read: Bob Herbert on why Wright is out “not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him,” and David Brooks on how there are two Democratic Parties, not one.
Posted by Amit Varma on 30 April, 2008 in
News |
Politics
In a grotesque incident, three educated sons of a UP Power Corporation engineer, along with a cousin, punched, kicked and beat their mother to death with a rod late on Saturday night believing that she had been possessed by the spirit of a dead relative.
The bizarre violence didn’t end there. The foursome then tried to “sacrifice” a sister-in-law in an attempt to bring their dead mother back to life. They also beat up and injured their sister, her husband, the husband’s father and two sisters, when they tried to intervene. [...]
As news of the violence spread, several hundred residents rushed to the police station to get a glimpse of the “butchers of Vijaynagar”. Some agitated residents demanded they be allowed to lynch the culprits.
To me, the worst part of this story is the last line I’ve quoted above. While superstition is rampant in our country, such incidents of madness are thankfully rare. But lynching, on the other hand, has become commonplace, almost a sort of mob entitlement. It demonstrates both a belief that justice will otherwise not be done on those the mob plans to lynch, and confidence that the mob won’t face justice either. That’s a lousy justification, as almost any justification for violence is, but a powerful explanation. And there doesn’t seem to be much hope of improvement.
Posted by Amit Varma on 28 April, 2008 in
India |
News
A man starts abusing his daughter sexually when she is 11. A few years later, he lures her to “a windowless basement” and imprisons her there. He fakes a letter from her that indicates that she has run away from home. Then, for 24 years, he keeps her in that basement, rapes her repeatedly, and has seven children with her. One of them dies after birth. Three are taken to the man’s home, where he pretends that his ‘runaway’ daughter has abandoned them, and are adopted by him and his wife. The oldest two, now aged 18 and 19, and the youngest, aged 5, remain in the basement, where they are denied sunlight, friends, the normal life above the ground. Eventually the oldest daughter falls ill, has to be taken to hospital, and the story unravels from there. You can read about it here.
This reminds me of something Theodore Dalrymple once wrote: “Men commit evil within the scope available to them.” This man’s scope was limited to his own family—but such damage is bone-chilling. I hope they lock him away for the rest of his life—though nothing he faces can equal what he made his daughters go through—but the difficult question here is not what is to be done with him, but what is to be done with us.
And here’s the WTF quote of the piece, from “deputy sarpanch of Musti village, Ravikiran Mehta”:
People have been following this tradition for almost 500 years now. They believe that if they throw the child from the roof then it does good to him or her.
I have a theory for how this tradition came to exist. Centuries ago, some village patriarch went mad and started throwing kids off the roof. The kids got brain-damaged in the process, and continued the tradition when they became parents, causing the next generation to also become brain-damaged. And so on. What else can explain such lunacy?
But wait, there’s more. The last (terribly ungrammatical) sentence of the report says:
Both Muslim and Hindu families take part in this ritual, however the state administration chooses not to interfere and provides heavy police security during the ritual every year.
Yes, the cops don’t protect the kids—they protect the idiots throwing them off a roof. If I pinch myself any more the mosquitoes will go on strike.
Update: I’d embedded the video on this page, but it kept making a pop-up ad open when this page was refreshed. I hate pop-ups, and would hardly want to inflict such inconvenience on my readers, so I’ve changed that to a link.
Update 2: Krishna Prasad writes in pointing me to his post last year about a similar ritual in North Karnataka. Ah, tradition!
Posted by Amit Varma on 28 April, 2008 in
India |
News |
WTF
Compared to Indian hockey, cricket in India lives up to the cliché of being a gentleman’s game: at least players don’t hit each other, as in common in the sport KPS Gill destroyed. However, Harbhajan Singh seems to have forgotten which sport he was playing yesterday. NDTV reports:
Mumbai Indians captain Harbhajan Singh and Kings XI paceman S Sreesanth were on Friday involved in a bitter row, following which the fast bowler was seen crying bitterly on the ground at the end of their IPL match here.
Harbhajan allegedly slapped Sreesanth after the paceman said something to Harbhajan which offended the off-spinner.
Sources close to [Sreesanth] said that after the match a smiling Sreesanth walked up to Harbhajan - the captain of the losing Mumbai Indians - and said “Hard luck”. “That was enough for Harbhajan to lose his cool and hit Sreesanth under the eye,” said sources close to the fast bowler.
‘Sources close to Sreesanth’ would generally be Sreesanth himself, but I could be wrong. Both the players involved are characters—Sreesanth’s an immature buffoon, Bhajji’s an unmannered lout—but regardless of whether Sreesanth really said something as innocuous as “hard luck,” Harbhajan deserves to have his ass kicked by the authorities. Hitting fellow players just isn’t on, and if they set a precedent of non-punishment, Andrew Symonds and Matthew Hayden might just get wicket wicked ideas.
And really, how could they have made Harbhajan captain of Mumbai Indians? I’d put VVS Laxman down as being the worst captain of the IPL so far, but Harbhajan seems to have brought an extra dimension to the job. Maybe he has a future in parliament.
(NDTV link via email from S Jagadish. Picture courtesy Rediff, who caption it: “India pacer S Sreesanth sheds tears of joy after the Punjab team finished with a 66-run victory.” Eh?)
Update: Rediff’s changed their caption!
Posted by Amit Varma on 26 April, 2008 in
News |
Sport |
WTF
The WTF quote of the day comes from Nawab Malik, an NCP MLA who opposes sex education in schools:
What is the need for us to appoint sex gurus? Europe needs sex education because of its declining population rates.
There are other quotes on that page as well, invoking “Indian culture”, “the socio-cultural fabric of the country” and suchlike. Yawn. All these gentlemen seem to think that sex education means learning how to have sex, and I think they need to be educated about sex education. I suppose you could call that sex-education education.
Posted by Amit Varma on 24 April, 2008 in
India |
News |
WTF
In unnecessary gizmos for government bigwigs—especially ones that will keep them occupied during traffic jams. Mid Day reports that Mumbai’s mayor Shubha Raul recently threw a “tantrum” and demanded a laptop.
“Raul liked the additional municipal commissioner’s laptop and said she wanted one like it, but we gave her a better model,” said an IT officer. “It’s the best laptop in the BMC.”
Raul obviously is happy. “Who doesn’t want to get the best in the world? I am no exception. At least now, when I’m stuck in traffic jams, I can entertain myself with the laptop. I have never been tech savvy, but I will learn,” said Raul.
I don’t grudge our mayor a laptop, even if her post is largely ceremonial, but see the one she got. It’s a Toshiba Qosmio G40 costing Rs. 1.65 lakh. That’s like buying a Merc as an official car—it’s simply not necessary. I bought a beautiful Dell Inspiron 1525 a month ago for 45k, and it performs every function the mayor could possibly require—unless she’s editing films or creating special effects for Star Trek .
And see the woman’s gumption. Who doesn’t want to get the best in the world? she says. That’s my money you’re spending, Mrs Raul. Have some shame.
(Link via email from Amol Chavan. For more on how our government loots us, check out my Taxes Archive.)
The life of 20-year-old Emine, and her 24-year-old husband Ramazan Çalçoban was pretty much the normal life of any couple in a separation process. After deciding to split up, the two kept having bitter arguments over the cellphone, sending text messages to each other until one day Ramazan wrote “you change the topic every time you run out of arguments.” That day, the lack of a single dot over a letter—product of a faulty localization of the cellphone’s typing system—caused a chain of events that ended in a violent blood bath (Warning: offensive language ahead.)
The surreal mistake happened because Ramazan’s sent a message and Emine’s cellphone didn’t have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter “ı” or closed i. While “i” is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn’t exist in most of the terminals in that country.
The use of “i” resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word “sıkısınca” it looked like he wrote “sikisince.” Ramazan wanted to write “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments” (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, “You change the topic every time they are fucking you” (sounds familiar too.)
Read of the rest of the Gizmodo post to see what happened next. (Basically, much violence, and both Ramazan and Emine are dead now.) And when there is strife, don’t bother with messages: just call.
In my 34 years of existence, I have accumulated little knowledge and less wisdom, but there is one useful piece of advice I can offer you with absolute certainty: Never deny a mango to a Maharashtrian. The Times of India has a report today of the terrible consequences of one such cruel denial:
The daughter of the Bhises was being married to the Botaljis’ son. Just before the ceremony, the Botaljis demanded that their relatives be served aam ras. The Bhises expressed their inability on grounds that the menu for the occasion was decided between the two parties a long time ago and it was not possible to arrange for aam ras at the last moment. This led to the cancellation of the marriage.
Needless to say, a police complaint was filed in this case—by the groom’s side. I’m sure feminists will complain and demand an Anti-Mango Law, but I don’t think they’ll get far in our patriarchal society—and, more to the point, in summer.
PS: I’m not even sure that Botaljis are Maharashtrian, but the report says they’re from Talegaon-Dabhade, so I’m assuming they are. Why spoil a good parable?
(Link via email from Saurabh.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 22 April, 2008 in
India |
News
In response to a Congress sycophant referring to Rahul Gandhi as “a ‘Yuvraj’ (prince) of the common man”, Balbir Punj of the BJP said in the Rajya Sabha:
Somebody being referred to as Yuvraj in a democratic country has to be a joke.
Perhaps Punj misunderstood, and it was a cricketing reference. After all, Gandhi has also been compared to MS Dhoni. Would Punj ever say:
Somebody being referred to as Dhoni in a democratic country has to be a joke.
No, but seriously, every minute of Rajya Sabha proceedings amounts to large amounts of taxpayers’ money, and it is disgraceful that so much money is wasted on such nonsense. BJP’s goons and Gandhi-Parivar asslickers are quite welcome to bicker on their own money and their own time. But when the Rajya Sabha convenes, it should discuss matters of governance and legislation, and nothing else. No?
"An Italian man was given a suspended jail sentence,” Reuters reports, “for staring too intensely at a woman sitting in front of him on a train.”
It seems that he’s appealing the ruling. ”Yer honour, I’m cock-eyed,” the chap should argue, ”I was really staring at the immensely dishy man next to her.”
The Times of India has a story today about how rapists and alleged rapists are treated especially badly in jail:
If one goes to jail on murder charges, he might gain respect from fellow inmates. But, if he is in the prison as an accused or a convict for rape, then from the time he enters the jail, his life is hell. Under the unwritten code he is subject to mental, physical and sexual assault. The first welcome comes from the jail staff which gives him a sound thrashing.
Then, in the barracks, the prisoners individually and in groups beat up the new inmate at random.
I have three questions here, the first one deliberately naive:
1. Do prisoners lose all their rights when they are imprisoned? Aren’t prison authorities supposed to protect them from other prisoners, or does anarchy reign in what should be the most secure places in our land?
2. My first reaction on reading the story was to think, Who cares about a convicted rapist? Fuck him. But the ToI story points out that even undertrials accused of rape face this treatment. If our legal system treats an accused as innocent until proven guilty, as it should, shouldn’t the prison system take that into account?
3. Isn’t it amazing that this is actually a revenue stream for cops? Consider how the ToI piece ends:
Even the rich are not spared under the prisoner’s code for rapists. An accused who was released recently from the Sabarmati Central Jail told TOI that even Sajal Jain, the prime accused in the Bijal Joshi gang rape case, had to go through punishment under this code. His family had to pay protection money to prevent further harassment.
Protection money?
Posted by Amit Varma on 21 April, 2008 in
India |
News |
WTF
One morning, when Jatinderbir Singh woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections.
An Army man has learnt the hard way that marriages are made in heaven and marital ties are difficult to sever, with the Supreme Court asking him to resume married life despite an estrangement of 17 years, 14 of them spent in litigation.
In other words, Jatinderbir Singh doesn’t want to live with his wife—indeed, they’ve been separated for the last 17 years. But the court knows what’s good for him better than he does. Gadzooks. Wake up, Franz, you got work to do!
HT has a report today on how there have been a series of robberies in Mumbai recently using “China-made toy guns”—in some cases, “a China-made cigarette lighter impersonating ... the United States of America-made .357 Magnum Cobra Colt revolver.” (Nationalists should be outraged at how neither the impersonator nor the impersonated are made in India.) The best line in the story is a quote from “an officer from the LT Marg police station”:
This (gun) toy does not invite the provisions of the stringent arms law.
That’s a bit irrelevant, no? Prosecuting robbers for robbery should be enough, I’d imagine, you don’t need to use the arms law here.
And I know there is nothing amusing about theft and suchlike, but I somehow find the thought of people being held up by cigarette lighters rather amusing. If stretched a bit, it can also act as a metaphor—for what else does Prakash Karat hold to Manmohan Singh’s head?
Posted by Amit Varma on 17 April, 2008 in
India |
News
My friend Shivmeet Deol is appalled at a story that appeared today in Mail Today (PDFs: 1, 2), and has shot off a letter to them. It deserves to be read, and as she doesn’t have a blog, I’m publishing it here, with her permission:
Dear Sir,
I read your report of Sheeba Thomas’s murder in Mail Today this morning, and found the stance of the story infuriating. The opening line itself is misleading, with that unnecessarily emphasized detail about the live-in relationship.
The issue is this: a young woman has been murdered. She is a victim. The perpetrators are still out there. Those are the most important facts. That’s how a mature, objective crime report would deal with it.
But your report focuses on the other facts – chiefly that she isn’t the ‘good’ Indian woman – about her lifestyle and the rest of it, detracting from the real issue of the crime itself. It is judgmental and utterly preachy and in fact makes it sound like she brought it upon herself. Playing up all these stereotypes – ‘air-hostess’, living with a man she isn’t married to, out late at night, ‘unconventional’ lifestyle (which means what, simply that she was sexually active and wore what she liked?), that picture of her in the mini-skirt – is narrow-minded, and viciously so, of you and your paper. And in that, it is irresponsible journalism. It isn’t up to you or your paper to judge how she lived or who with and how many lovers she had or what time she came home. Or what she wore.
Plus, that picture of the poor woman lying there in her blood is unnecessary sensationalism, and undermines her dignity even further.
It was a distastefully done story and the publication ought to take some sort of responsibility for it, maybe by doing a follow-up story by someone who can examine this with more sense and less prejudice, and focuses on the crime and what it is being done to sort that out, and not by making young women sound like accessories in their own murders.
Shivmeet Deol
Sadly, this is not a problem with Mail Today alone, or with this story alone. Remember Scarlett Keeling and her mom?
Update: Elsewhere, in another context, more talk of “loose character.”
No doubt the Left can spout rhetoric about sports and politics being kept separate, but here’s my question: Would Sitaram Yechury, D Raja and their band of jokers take a similar stand if these Olympics were being held in the USA and not China?
What a bizarre way to abuse someone. I wish the pilot had turned around and called him a glorified domestic servant. Indeed, the pilot’s taxes go into paying the MP’s salary; the converse isn’t true. I know which of them I think is a parasite on society.
Of course, had the pilot actually said that, domestic servants across the country would have been justified in feeling offended.
A Brit woman who could not get out of her trousers to go to the loo dialled emergency and claimed to be locked in a chastity belt.
Robeena Cheema’s real belt buckle had jammed and she needed help. But because she knew that rescuers would not treat it as an emergency, she claimed that she was stuck in a chastity belt.
Twelve firefighters went to help after her call and opened the buckle despite the false claim.
If she was in India, you think she would have called the cops?
What would Shakespeare have done with Dwarika Prasad? Consider this man’s tragedy: first his wife leaves him, and he is alone in his old age; then his savings get wiped out because he kept his money in a bank locker and termites ate it all.
Prasad claims he had kept Rs 4.5 lakh in cash, FD papers, Kisan Vikas Patras and National Savings Certificates worth Rs 2.5 lakh apart from some gold and silver jewellery in the locker two years ago. He showed the perforated currencies and documents to the bank authorities, who in turn showed him a notice pasted on the wall near the locker room requesting customers to remove their important papers from lockers as termites were eating up the documents!
Needless to say the notice had escaped his attention, and now his money, a lifetime’s work, his Gogol’s overcoat, was gone. The bank in question was a government bank, of course, though I would hesitate to attribute any metaphorical significance to the termites.
The Times of India reports that the Central Information Commission, which is supposed to make sure that public authorities provide information about themselves to the public, lacks basic information about itself.
I know bureaucracies everywhere are the same, but isn’t it a pity that Kafka and Borges weren’t born in India? Such fun they would have had.
Posted by Amit Varma on 04 April, 2008 in
India |
News |
WTF
On 62 sandstone elephants in Lucknow. Their cost, according to CNN-IBN: Rs. 38 crore. They will be part of the Ambedkar Memorial, which, according to The Economic Times, is being built at “a whopping cost of Rs 7 billion.”
That’s Rs. 700 crore.
Yes, yes, I know that’s your money, and mine. But it’s not like we were planning to do anything useful with it. The nation needs an Ambedkar Memorial. And the memorial needs sandstone elephants. No?
(Link via email from Akshat Kaul. For more on how our government loots us, check out my Taxes Archive.)
The quote of the day comes from a lady named Ramulamma:
Its actions are worse than a human being.
Ramulamma, a resident of Cherukulapadu village in Kurnool district, is talking about a langur that “saw a couple indulging in sex in the fields recently and since then it is pouncing on women and trying to replicate the act.”
They honestly thought that because it appeared on the Internet it was true. It boggles the mind.
This is Robert Salisbury, an Oregon man whose house was stripped of its belongings after “[a] pair of hoax ads on Craigslist” that said that Salisbury “was forced to leave the area suddenly and his belongings, including a horse, were free for the taking.” Salisbury was traveling when he got a call regarding the horse, and rushed home. On the way “he stopped a truck loaded down with his work ladders, lawn mower and weed eater.”
“I informed them I was the owner, but they refused to give the stuff back,” Salisbury said. “They showed me the Craigslist printout and told me they had the right to do what they did.”
Any sense of deja vu you are now experiencing is not due to a glitch in the matrix—this has happened before. Expect more copycat postings.
Protesters mobbed Filmistan Studios in Mumbai seeking an apology from actress Tanushree Dutta for allegedly insulting actor Nana Patekar during the shoot of an item song.
On the sets of the film Horn Ok Please, Tanushree was to make some physical contact with Patekar during the item number, which she refused.
Her refusal was seen as an insult to the actor.
The protesters surrounded her car outside Filmistan Studios seeking an apology from her, but she refused to leave her car.
Mid Day, in a related story about how Dutta was “involved in the manhandling of a TV news channel,” reports that there was some fuss about a scene “in which Nana Patekar had to touch her cheeks.” Rediff tells us that it all started when “a unit member made a lewd remark” because of Tanushree’s “skimpy outfit.” ToI informs us that she’s been thrown out of the film, and Rakhi Sawant has taken her place.
One day when I’m rich and famous, I’ll also have goons who will go around defending my honour. They will stop random people on the street and ask, “How many cow posts are there on India Uncut?” Anyone who doesn’t know will be deemed to have insulted me, and Nana Patekar will touch their cheeks. Plausible?
I’ve been a bit preoccupied the last couple of days, and blogging has been light. So a few quick links:
Rahul Gandhi, who is travelling through Karnataka, wants journalists to leave him alone. “I want to interact with people freely,” he says, “because I like to say many things off-the-record.” In other words, he doesn’t want to be accountable for his public utterances. He’s lucky he’s inherited India and not the USA, where virtually anything a politician says can end up on YouTube.
Mid Day mistakes betting for match-fixing. The headline mentions match-fixing, the text only speaks of betting and satta. Do they really think there’s no difference?
Rediff reports: “Britney’s pregnant teen sister gets engaged”. That’s too much information for one headline, no? By the time Rediff’s readers process it, the baby will out and cutting records.
Abdul Ghaffar, accused of stealing “two cans of groundnut oil 14 years ago,”, has been acquitted. There is no mention in the report whether the people who actually took that oil have been apprehended. I consider it likely that they’ve consumed the evidence.
And finally, check out this superb piece by one of my favourite columnists, Stanley Fish, on denouncing and renouncing. An excerpt:
This denouncing and renouncing game is simply not serious. It is a media-staged theater, produced not in response to genuine concerns – no one thinks that Obama is unpatriotic or that Clinton is a racist or that McCain is a right-wing bigot – but in response to the needs of a news cycle. First you do the outrage (did you see what X said?), then you put the question to the candidate (do you hereby denounce and renounce?), then you have a debate on the answer (Did he go far enough? Has she shut her husband up?), and then you do endless polls that quickly become the basis of a new round.
I am beginning to believe that the main purpose of elections is not to enable democracy but to provide newspapers with material to write about. And blogs, of course.
Blogging will continue to be infrequent for the next couple of days. I wish you happiness.
After the Ireland fiasco, I thought Clinton would have the sense to shut up. But no, on and on she boasts, as if a claim, by the virtue of being made by her, becomes fact. It’s like the old God proof: God says He exists; therefore He must.
As Dan Kennedy writes, “it’s possible that by the time this ends she’ll claim to have walked on water.” And if you ask for proof of that, you’re Ken Starr.
A Polish worker has come up with an unusual excuse after being caught in the act with a vacuum cleaner.
The building contractor claimed he was cleaning his underpants with Henry Hoover when he was found naked and on his knees in a hospital’s staff canteen.
A stunned security guard stumbled onto the man in the middle of a compromising act with the cleaner, which has a large smiley face painted on its front and a hose protruding from its “nose”.
If I were you, I would pay no attention to the rumour that Bill Clinton has a vacuum cleaner named Monica. None at all.
Former BCCI President Jagmohan Dalmiya has been found to have misappropriated over Rs 2.90 crore of the cricket body’s funds during his tenure, police said on Monday.
Acting on a case filed by the BCCI in March 2006 after Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar took over as head of the game’s governing body, the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) has found that Dalmiya diverted funds meant for legal fees towards other expenses including paying for personal phone bills.
[...]
The crime branch will be filing a chargesheet against Dalmiya, Gautam Dutta and KM Choudhary in the matter on Wednesday in a local court, he said.
I don’t get it. The chargesheet hasn’t been filed yet, and the newspapers report that Dalmiya ”has been found to have [blah-blah]”. It’s as if the cops and investigative agencies in the country pass judgement on crimes, not the courts. Surely an “allegedly” in there wouldn’t have harmed the story too much.
I’m not supporting Dalmiya here, who may well be guilty for all I know. But a judgement on that should come from the courts, not from the cops investigating him or the press, seeking a story but unconcerned about what the truth may be.
In a slip-up barely hours after the Shamshabad airport opened for business, a KLM flight from Amsterdam, which was supposed to land at Hyderabad, skipped the airport and flew across the country — first to Delhi, and then to Mumbai.
Apparently, the pilot knew nothing about the new airport and was flying towards Begumpet only to be told that the facility had been shut. He was directed to Shamshabad, to which the pilot asked the air traffic control: “Shamshabad? What’s that?” The pilot then flew to Delhi, from where, after being refused permission to land, he took the plane to Mumbai.
I can imagine the pilot as a child asking for peanut-butter toast and being given toast with jam on it instead. “Jam? What’s that?” he says. “I want my peanut butter.”
(Link via email from Anand Gadiyar.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 25 March, 2008 in
News |
WTF
Well, here, in microcosm, is a state of the nation report:
Hearing the case of a missing 13-year-old girl, a senior judge on the Bench [of the Delhi High Court] was “shocked” on hearing the girl’s name—“Nirasha” (disappointment). The judge went on to express his reservations about her parents’ choice and was keen to know the reason behind it. As expected, the lawyer for the parents had an answer ready: “My Lord, she was their fifth daughter.”
I bet this girl will be looking after her parents in their old age. But it will be too late then to change her name.
Men treating walls as public toilets is a common problem across this country, but Ghaziabad administration has come up with a unique solution.
Fed up with the men treating city walls as public toilets, the city administration has installed mirrors on the walls with the slogan “What you do, the world sees” inscribed alongside.
The move is aimed at all those who see a dry wall and feel it’s their duty to wet it. The idea is to let people reflect on their wrong doings and broadcast their acts live to passersbys. [sic all along.]
See how modernity is destroying our traditions? If our young men cannot pee in front of walls, where will they pee? They might as well install treadmills in front of these mirrors next and play hip-hop on the streets. Pah.
Posted by Amit Varma on 09 May, 2008 in
India |
News |
Politics
