Paan-ed!

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You mean that's not a peek-dani? Oops! (Picture courtesy The BBC)

Firangs, calm down!

That wasn't shit all over the toilets, man. That was paan kee peek--saliva mixed with paan juice with maybe some phlegm--that's all. The expectoration of saliva by paan-chewers, I'll have you know, is a venerable Indian tradition (it's quite beautiful, you know, the way the glistening, ochre liquid arcs gracefully through the air to splatter across some unfortunate wall or, in your case, washbasin) and it is not the paan-chewer's fault if the CWG organisers could not be considerate enough to provide spittoons in the CWG village.

So there.

Government reveals that Commonwealth Games a practical joke; gag hoodwinks entire nation

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With a little more than a month to go for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, the Indian Government has revealed that there are no Games, and the event was nothing but a big practical joke on the Indian Public.

“Booyah, India,” shouted Manmohan Singh as he revealed this amidst peals of raucous laughter. “Now you know why we seemed to be so badly prepared for the Games. That’s cos there are no Games, duh! We just did it to show you guys up and boy did you fall hook, line and sinker,” said the PM as large numbers of press-types looked on sheepishly knowing very well that they had been mad fools of right and proper.

“You think we’d spend Rs. 28,000 crore on a sporting event that no one gives a shit about? This in a country where millions of children die of preventable diseases before they reach the age of 5? You must be kidding me man. You think we’re dumb?”

The 2010 Commonwealth Games logo. NOT!

The practical joke was apparently a very well constructed one with dummy detractors like Aiyer set up to “criticise” it in order to make it look a bit more realistic.

“Ha! Aiyer played it well didn’t he? Had you guys fooled to-ta-lly. We were a bit nervous about that; I mean how many people would believe it if a Congress MP went in himself and condemned his own government’s games. But it went off like a dream; nobody suspected a thing!” gloated Singh.

The bits about massive corruption in the games were also, as is evident, not real. As Suresh Kalmadi said, grinning from ear to ear: “How you guys fell for that story about Scheduled Caste fund being diverted to building stadium, I’ll never know!”

“I must admit the Government had me,“ says Delhi resident, Ravi Kumar, raising his hands in mock surrender. “I should have seen through it after that story about treadmills being hired for 10 lakhs hit the headlines. But hats off; this Commonwealth Games thing was an amazing gag. Nice sense of humour these government-walahs have.”

Why the 15th of August?

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And not the 16th of August or the 13th of September was the date that was decided upon for India’s (and Pakistan’s) independence.

Well, because British India’s last Viceroy (and independent India’s first Governor -General) was a bit full of himself.

The 15th of August, 1945 was the day on which Japan had surrendered—special for Mountbatten because he had been the Supreme Commander for South-East Asia during World War II. In Freedom at Midnight, a book which accords the same position to Mountbatten as the New Testament to Christ, he says:

“I thought it had to be about August or September and I then went out to the 15th August. Why? Because it was the second anniversary of Japan’s surrender.”

On its own, that India’s date of independence was decided such that it would soothe its Viceroy’s vanity might not seem so important. However, when put in context—the extreme haste, even panic in which Britain withdrew from India (transfer of power was originally fixed for June 1948) might have exacerbated the frenzied killings that accompanied Independence—it might have been, tragically so.

Yeh sheher nahi mehfil hai

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So I rode the new Gurgaon Metro the other day.

While exiting at a station saw this lovely sign, which read: "ASS CHARGED WITH 33KV KEEP DISTANCE". There was a skull and bones on the notice too, in case you were left with any doubts as to just how dangerous the ass in question was.

Blury mobile phone snap in case you don't believe me

While I'm sure there might be more "sensible" (pfft) explanations, knowing Delhi, I'd like to think that this was a subtle warning to the ubiquitous public transport groper.

Great White Hope

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Gulab is large-ish shop in Gurgaon which sells an assortment of Indian sweets, mithai and such. Also has a number of things to eat besides mithai—thali meals, dosas and even the odd pizza—all ‘pure vegetarian’, of course (one day, I’d like to get my hands of something which is vegetarian and impure).

What I found interesting is that to advertise themselves, they chose to photoshop a picture of a rosy-cheeked, plump White man holding a thali which contains roti, daal, chaval and subzi. Not that using White people in Indian ads is anything new; they’ve been used in ads for cosmetics, perfumes and electronics. But to use a White chap to sell a Punjabi thali?

Middle Class Muddle

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A Raja’s alleged crimes would make poor old Tharoor’s transgressions look like a church sermon. Yet Raja’s brazen refusal to resign, or for that matter even appear contrite, stands in sharp contrast to the way Tharoor was made to quit as a result of the IPL imbroglio. The reason, commentators tell us, is that Tharoor has no “political base”. However, this is only partly true. Tharoor had a very well defined base to target—the urban middle class. Tharoor’s credentials to play this role were impeccable: the man was an international diplomat, had been to the best schools, and pronounced the word ‘power’ as ‘par’, as in the golf term—a fact which endeared him to India’s anglophilic middle class. However, the ease with which Tharoor fell, as a result of a charge which, in Indian politics, was minor at best, points to how little explicit political power this demographic holds.

It wasn’t always like this, though. At independence, political power passed largely to a highly educated, urban leadership. This class used its new found power to great effect, knocking out feudalism from India’s power matrix—an achievement which tends to be undervalued till one looks across our western border. A highly centralised power structure kept this arrangement going for 40 years till Mandal and Mandir changed India’s political landscape, drastically curtailing the middle class’ political influence.

However, at the same time, India’s newly liberalised economy helped the middle class not only to become a lot richer but also became a lot larger. And, though it had lost a lot of political power, the urban middle class still enjoyed a disproportionately large share of the pie—Delhi’s power cuts cause a lot more consternation than the lack of power in UP.

In a bid to win over this growing class, lost to the the BJP in the 90s, the Congress air-dropped Tharoor onto the political scene. This coupled with Manmohan Singh’s favourable image and the general disarray the BJP finds itself in helped the Congress significantly in winning over the urban middle class. Unfortunately, Tharoor’s style was too much of a break with the way Indian politics works. However, as this middle class grows, it’s only a matter of time before it gets its own political representation.

A Very Costly Bill

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India is a democracy or, at the very least, that’s what some of us have been led to believe. And one of the major reasons that you can claim that India is a democracy with a straight face is that the country has a Parliament that, in some form or the other, represents the people of India. What allows Parliament to claim that it represents the people of India? That’s because it’s composed of MPs, elected by their constituencies and it is assumed that the manner in which an MP conducts business in Parliament will, in some ways at least, correspond to the people of his constituency. After all, the system is built on a mutual back scratching basis—put simply, the MP tries to act in a way that would help his constituents; if his constituents think that he’s done a good job, they re-elect him.

Sadly, the woman’s reservation bill (and more importantly, the Anti-Defection law, but more on that later) does a fairly good job of blowing this concept out of the water. Maybe the bill is well intentioned and, God knows, women in India can do with all the help they can get, but the feature of the bill which necessitates the rotation of parliamentary seats such that two-thirds of all parliamentarians will be compulsorily unseated every five years pretty much ends any incentive for an MP to even put up an act of representing the people of his constituency. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta puts it:

“The rotation principle is a peculiar one in a democracy because it produces democracy without democratic accountability. You don’t, as an individual, now seek the verdict of those whom you claimed to serve. Even the rightly heralded reservations at panchayat level have generated this problem, producing both an accountability deficit and a weakening of an institution as a whole.”

Ironically, Subhashini Ali has even claimed this rotation principle is actually one of the redeeming features of this bill as it would “discourage personal fiefdoms” and the rise of pocket boroughs.

In order to prevent fiefdoms in some constituencies, to uproot legislators from 2/3ds of India’s constituencies regardless of whether they are fiefdoms or not is an extreme use of the broad brush. To try and present an analogy, it would be like a law which requires 2/3rds of all companies in the country, regardless of their size or market power, to be penalised as if they were monopolies.

From where I see it, the only faction this bill will benefit will be large, established political parties. You could bring in a class/caste angle too, I guess, but for most part that’s a red herring, although, the logic behind asking for sub-quotas is the same as what drives the original bill and it would be slightly hypocritical to support one without the other. However, by periodically culling 66% of all sitting legislators, MPs, on their own, will have little or no clout left in their constituencies; the Party will be his mai-baap if he wants a re-election, not the voters.

Of course, this bill can hardly be credited of being the first legislation which tries to actually make an MP and, by extension, Parliament, less accountable to the voter. The pioneer there would be the Anti Defection law which makes it mandatory for an MP to follow his party whip. Never mind the merits of the way he is voting or how it affects the people he represents—unless he agrees with his party, he will actually be stripped of his post as “representative” of his constituency.

By and large, though, middle-class India is grateful for the law. After all, it does bring a semblance of order to the dinner table—the unruly kids are rapped on their knuckles and ordered to keep their elbows off the table. However, the fact of the matter is that pelf and corruption go hand and hand with power—it has always been like that and will always be like that. The only antidote is to distribute the loaves and fishes to as many people as possible—so it’s better that 500-odd MPs are corrupt rather than just 5 party cabals, the ideal case scenario being when all of India partakes of those loaves and fishes.

Also, what makes this law doubly galling is that fact that parties in India, who control our democratically elected legislators, are highly undemocratic themselves. The Congress depends on one Family for its leadership, BJP presidents are appointed by funny people in khaki shorts and the last time I checked, politburos weren’t exactly paragons of democratic propriety.

Our political system started out by being modelled on Britain’s—I’m afraid that it might end up being more like China’s: our parliament will eventually end up being an ineffectual rubber stamp and all power will lie with opaque party machines.