Arthshastra

“BJP and Youth Congress activists clashed in Thane on Saturday morning over posters put up by the BJP protesting Bollywood actor Govinda’s alleged link with mafia don Dawood Ibrahim. The Naupada police registered complaints against 27 rioters”

This is the level of political discourse in the country - bravo!

This is one of the most regressive advertisements I’ve seen in print media. For those who are not fluent with Hindi and/or the background of this festival- this is an ad from the World Gold Council on the occasion of Karva Chauth - a downright demeaning tradition where women fast the entire day and then worship their husbands at the end of the day praying for their long life.

In this ad - woman is worshipping her husband. She’s already decked up in as much gold as possible and the caption asks the guy that how will he thank his wife for this worship?

The suggestion of course is that he ought to do it with gold!

YIKES!

So I was in sunny San Diego, California for a conference this past weekend. I met up with my old roomie from Chicago and his wife. We went to a good Mexican restaurant, had a Margarita and some good food and then we went to his apartment. Now my friend’s wife is a big news addict and they have some Indian channels coming in through satellite one of which is Aaj Tak and she has this compulsive need to switch it on whenever she’s home. So she puts it on and what follows is surreal. Imagine this, there is this seedy looking journalist who is reporting live from a town/village called Betul, MP about an astrologer who predicted that he will die between 3 and 4 PM that day.

The entire town has gathered around his home, and since it is also Karwa Chauth there is an additional dimension to the story (according to the reporter) and he interviews the wife asking her what has she asked from god on this day. Amidst promptings and verbal cues from other women surrounding her she says that she wants long life for her pati parmeshwar. This story gets almost 15 minutes of live time on the channel and at one time they break into a studio-reporter in the field format. Now you gotta be kidding me. Not only was it hilarious - it was actually pathetic that one of the leading news channels would cover such a story - live for quarter of an hour.

Of course, today I found out that the astrologer did not die after all. Reuters covered this story in its oddly enough section here.
The funniest thing in the Reuters report is this

“Malviya’s prediction is not the first of its type by an Indian astrologer. But in the past, crowds have beaten up astrologers when their predicted demise failed to occur.”

Haa haaa - imagine getting beaten up because your own prediction of your own death was untrue.

Now here’s something really interesting. Toyota Motor Corp has developed a derivative of the Cherry Sage shrub that is optimized for absorbing pollutants from the air. You can get more details here:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/10/toyota_engineer.html

Did something important happen in the world in the last two days? Something that might have long lasting repurcussions on our own peace and security? Looking at the front page of our leading dailies you couldn’t guess!

Maybe, we take democracy and elections so much for granted that it does not matter that one of the countries on our very own continent is voting for a constitution and both voting and having a constitution are something that are historic for that nation.

How can we think that what is happening in Iraq will have no effect on us? Don’t we know that Iraq is one of the leading sources of oil in the world and oil is increasingly important to India’s economy? Or is it that we do not realize that a democratic Iraq is fundamentally going to alter the middle eastern landscape and a peaceful, democractic middle east takes the wind out of terrorists’ sails?

If we do, then why none of our leading dailies have any dedicated reporters in Iraq and why are they content to publish agency reports only? All the major American and European papers have boots on the ground but not Indian papers. In fact, leave alone Iraq we don’t even have any intersting reportage coming out of Afghanistan.

You may say that why am I not content to just read the damned American newspapers then and shut up? I’ll tell you why. We have a history in that region that goes way back and Indian reporters could have brought a unique perspective to stories from both Iraq and Afghanistan that western reporters cannot. Moreover, because of our historical ties, perhaps people in those countries would be more comfortable talking to Indian reporters. After all, we look alike, our food is almost similar and we share so many stories ( remember Mullah Naseeruddin and Alibaba? ) And yet and yet our media is content with reports from AP or Reuters or just republish articles by western journalists….what a loss!