Every few years someone betrays you. Either for the first time or as a running thread througha long relationship that finally reveals itself, bright red, dragging and unmistakable.

It isn’t always a good idea to share some kinds of personal space with people that might do that. I shared this space with someone in a misguided act of trust and now that I have to withdraw from the betrayer, I have to kill the blog and start anew where my space is free from intrusion.

What I am trying to say is that this is goodbye.

Giving thanks

Sometimes,  some beautiful times, one gives cynicism a rest and enjoys the beauty of democracy and the resilience of people, however deprived. I am in awe of the Indian masses. I know that this election was not won over facebook campaigns or fancy speeches in English. I also know that a lot of it had to do with which party was more cohesive. But I have learned that elections are not always won through hate speech (even if it seems to work in Gujarat, Karnataka and certain parts of U.P.). I have also learned that the joy of an financial package that helps the people is that regardless of how many politicians refer to it as vote-bank politics and how many money-grubbing capitalists call it populism, the people respond and vote for more. And hey, if vote bank politics means better lives for the poorest of the poor, I am all for it. 

This year, we have a promising party in charge. Not a perfect party but a secular party, and a party that acknowledges and talks of the large and invisible group below the poverty line. This time, they are in charge and out of reach of the highwaymen coalition partners that each try to force them in a different direction. This time, a man worthy of the title is still prime minister. And if not entirely pleased to return to a fundamentalist party run state, I will be delighted to return to an intelligently run country and I hope that reading the newspapers will stop being depressing for a little while.

Election run-up

Two days to go and I wonder who it will be. Most people say that it doesn’t make a difference and that one politician is worse than the other. I disagree. To my mind there is a vast difference between a party that functions on an acknowledgedly Nazi-style strategy and one that doesn’t.

Yes, the Congress has been accused of burying gigantic scams, but the BJP has been accused of burying genocide. The Congress has , decades ago, fanned the anti-Sikh riots, declared the infamous long stretch of Emergency rule and gone on terrifying forced sterilisation binges. But the momentum of those events does not drive the party anymore, and the particular fears and ideology that drove them is long gone.

The Sangh Parivar on the other hand, has created the infamous Mangalore Pub incident, and the related attacks on women in Bangalore, in its first stint running Karnataka. Members of the BJP are key suspects in terrorist bomb plots (calculated to instigate communal violence). Nuns are still raped and murdered in the North-East, and the party continues firmly in its Hindu fundamentalist ways. 

So do I think I want a Prime Minister who ”led the Ayodhya movement, the biggest mass movement in India since Independence, and initiated a powerful debate on cultural nationalism and the true meaning of secularism” *,  without any regard for the fact that this ‘mass movement’ consisted of an enormous mob of hooligans that stormed a place which had little to do with them and broke the Babri Masjid, sacred both for its religious and historical significance?  Do I think that a party that, in the name of security, announces that it will re-instate repressive laws which will take away most of our constitutional rights, and comes up with the utterly ludicrous idea of requiring everybody to have a ‘national identity card’ in a country where most people don’t have access to food, birth certificates, permanent addresses, bank balances or ration cards, is the same as a party that suppresses scams? I am afraid not.

Sadly, I am not in the country and was not able to vote this year. Other NRIs seem to be making a great big fuss about it. I won’t pretend to be pleased about not being able to vote, but I do think that it is a little self-absorbed to throw tantrums about fancy postal ballots when we know perfectly well that there are many more people within the country deprive of their right to vote than there are outside. Honestly, if one of us really really wanted to vote, there nothing stopping us from hopping on a plane back home to do it, as we do without a thought when our friends get married or our grand parents fall ill. If a migrant labourer wants to vote, odds are that she’s going to find it literally impossible. And perhaps it is just speculation but I imagine that the entire community of migrant labourers might need political power more than the hordes of NRIs scattered around the earth.

*from the BJP manifesto

Stephen Fry: Letter to himself

“I know the index-card waltz of (auto)biographies, poems and novels you are dancing: those same names are still so close to the surface of my mind nearly four decades later. Novels, poetry and the worlds of art and ideas are opening up in front of you almost incidentally. You spend all your time in the library yearning to be told that you are not alone, and an unlooked for side-effect of this just happens to be a real education achieved in a private school designed for philistine bumpkins. Being born queer has given you, by mistake, a fantastic advantage over the rugger-playing ordinaries who surround you.”

A lovely, funny, even heartbreaking letter to his younger self. I like this man more than ever. Read the whole letter here.

Vinod Mehta interview

The media is in our faces all the time. Some of us know the stories of the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch and suchlike, many know about Google but aside from general raving and ranting there seems little that takes a good cold look at the Indian media – what is ought to do, what it does and what it is compelled to do. 

I missed this interview when it was actually published two years ago but luckily, Tehelka has pulled its excellent interview with Vinod Mehta out again. For someone who read Outlook in its heyday, and wondered at the strange sex-obsessed issues that came out from time to time, and wondering why it suddenly hushed up, and wondered what it is like to sell news in our glitz-obsessed country, it was a revelation.

The woman who fights back

Politicians rarely move me. But a woman my age who marches for something she believes, endures what many might see as debilitating humiliation, refuses the jobs and money offered in compensation and runs instead for elected office so that she can push for the policy changes she believes in, is a woman that I admire from the bottom of my heart. 

I hope that Laxmi Orang wins – it might mean that one corner of the world will be a slightly better place.

The Blue Devils

Once again, I have been on the verge of forgetting this little corner I like to scribble in. The last few months have been difficult – after whining for years about things that have been wrong with my life, I am trying to set them right…and it is taking some doing.

Do you live alone? Do you have days in which you hide under your blanket almost all day drinking cup after cup of Earl Grey until there are teacups over every clear surface in your room? Does your room look like a hurricane hit it a century ago and  no one has been inside ever since? These are just the small things…things that have been growing around me without my noticing them. It is strange how you can move past them so easily. One morning, you think that mushroom soup and a cosy blanket might be a better idea than a class on regional trade agreements, and the same evening you hear a song – a song that you have heard many, many times before but seen only this particular time that it smells of the rain. And suddenly the stale air of a little room suspended eleven storeys above a cold busy street in london blazes with the memory of an Indian thunderstorm, and you wake up. The teacups go back to the kitchen, the scattered papers sort themselves out and suddenly you remember where you were going before you went to sleep. 

I am back. I hope that I will stick around for bit. And if I don’t, I ask that you cross your fingers for me and hope that instead of diving back under a blanket…I am sorting out my room, my notes, my books and my life.

Pink Chaddis!

Can I just say that I am very very proud of Bangaloreans? Valentine’s day will be a riot apparently…shenanigans which have never been seen on the streets before are to be performed in public on the 14th. Plenty of love (in the form of pink panties) is to be sent to Grinch Muthalik. 

Anyone whose heart aches for this unfortunate kill-joy of a man, please do join the pink chaddi movement and send him a nice neon-bright token of your affection. Hats of to the Consotium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women for its Pink Chaddi movement.

Rant: Muthalik, Macaulay and monkeys

I am sure that most people have notice this utterly silly man by now what with all his charging about like some sort of lunatic crossed with Batman crossed with a mechanical doll that reels off fraud sadhu speeches. For those (who like me) are given to ignoring the news for significant stretches of time: Pramod Muthalik is a man that thinks he can change Karnataka into Maharashtra. He intends to crawl about Karnataka with “ a priest, a turmeric stub and a mangal sutra” so that he can pounce on “couples being together in public and expressing their love”, drag them off to the nearest temple and get them married to eachother. This confidence appears to be based on his recent moments of fame courtesy of this attack on a pub in Mangalore in which his goons apparently attacked women at the pub viciously to ’save them’ from western culture. 

This man is hilarious at so many levels. According to him what the girls were doing in the pub was not right according to Indian culture and tradition, and the attack was justified because the perpatrators first complained to the police about the pubbing but  no official action was taken. The Penal Code, Mr. Muthalik, you forgot the Indian Penal Code…the police enforce Macaulay’s law not Muthalik’s law, and they’re not going to prevent girls from drinking any more than they’re going to pull off your silly moustache if I file a complaint about its lack of aesthetic appeal. 

Comparable to dear Mr. Muthalik is NDTV (which is getting pretty good with the slapstick entertainment these days): NDTV promptly convened a self-righteous episode (yes episode – it is practically a drama series) of the Big Fight which was executed with what is becoming typical NDTV panache, meaning that a gang of partially educated school kids might easily come up with a more nuanced and well executed performance. Defending the fundamentalists, they had one chap from the Ram Sena, one lawyer and perhaps a couple of others. Arguing for the other side were a bunch of politicians and a social worker, and guess what…they were all female! They proceeded to have the silliest discussion I ever saw. All the conservatives unshamedly asserted that women oughtn’t drink – one chap even attempted to use the constitution in support of this position. The Ram Sena representative discussing Mangalore as ‘we’ spoke such a thick North Indian accent that it is tempting to conclude that he took a crash course in English simply to be able to supervise his guerilla operations in Karnataka. The liberals while insisting that they were pro-choice, defensively announced that they didn’t approve of drinking. One of those irritating self righteous girls who parrots everything Mama ever taught her popped out of the audience to announce that one person’s alchohol affects everybody else, as if everybody that has ever had a glass of wine promptly drove into a school bus straight after.

I’d have loved to go to that show  - to uncork a bottle of champagne on air in celebration of my freedom to drink it, and to offer it around. I’d expel anybody that didn’t take a sip from the show: anyone that hasn’t ever tried alchohol is hardly in a position to pontificate on its effects. I’d offer the host half the bottle of wine to cool his badly directed zeal for a perfectly good cause and give him a list of articulate people that he might have invited to his show.

So did the Muthalik calculate correctly? I wonder, I really wonder… 

As for the Ram Sena monkeys, people say that there’s no point in them trying all this in a state like Karnataka. People rage, people rant and in an increasingly disturbing trend towards random counterproductive reaction, people refuse to vote. I don’t know… any state foolish enough to get itself a BJP government may well be foolish enough to be bullied by morons. Mumbai has at least as many intellectuals and activists as Karnataka does but it lives in the thrall of the Shiv Sena.

A fundamentalist Octogenarian Obama

As I watch the young president prance about with that delightful fresh young energy about him and give speeches and orders that hold in them all the enlightened liberalism that this man brings to the office after his years as an academic, I am forced to recall another man far far away who hopes to convince people that he is India’s Obama. He is (virunlently) of the majority religion and is from one of the dominant castes. He is eighty and the last time he decided to emulate somebody, he apparently chose Hitler. 

This news article is old but I still giggle every time I think about it.