Will it Mean a Transformed Arab

I used to see the Arab world as a swathe of wealthy nations whose people are so content with their wealth that it didn’t matter to them that they were denied even most basic forms of freedom by their governments. No doubt I was ignorant, but many would share my views – until few weeks back.


First, Tunisia went up in flames and then the fire spread to other countries. What was most funny to see was how once the people took to streets, the dictators, who seldom showed any sign of weakness, started quaking. Following Ben Ali’s fleeing from Tunisia, the governments who would have otherwise considered it beneath them to give into people’s demands are ready to agree to anything to quell the fire of protests.

Media reports are attributing the eruption of protests mainly to two things: spike in food prices and absence of political freedom.

A strange part of the protests is that they are not anti-US despite the fact that the dictators are mostly US-backed. The US has many interests in Arab and it should make sure the popular uprising results in political freedom for the people; instead of one set of dictators replaced by another. The US’s fondness for dictators is one reason why democracy couldn’t flourish in Pakistan.

Will the outcome of the protests be a politically transformed Arab? I’m not sure but in the meantime, the protests will give China something to worry about unless they have already blocked the flow of news about the protests into the country.

Landlord on the Run

Earlier I had written at length about my landlord in this blog. He is acting stranger than before. Every month I meet him at a place to give my rent. When I went to the place last time, he appeared almost an hour late and said he had shifted to another place, quite afar, hence the delay. He looked distraught and from what he told me, he sounded like a man on the run.

I asked him why he wasn’t taking my calls and he said his phone was tapped. I was scared. Your phone can be tapped only by government investigating agencies. I asked him why and he said some people were “playing games” with him. “What kind of games and which people?” I asked. He has some real estate properties in Koramangla (Bangalore) and they were trying get them sold, he said. I couldn’t catch what was so wrong with it and how it justified his phone being tapped, but I remained silent.

He accused Jugrajji, who owns a jewelry shop under our building, of being behind everything. It was strange that Jugraj would try to trouble him; only couple of weeks back I had seen the two talk heartily. They were friends.

Jugraj and his friendship had always looked weird to me. They came from completely different backgrounds; Jugraj from a village in Rajasthan who wants to make it in Bangalore; the landlord from a wealthy family with a brother who is a doctor established in England with a Dutch wife.

On my way back home, I summed up what the landlord said and reached my conclusions. The phone-tapping thing was rubbish. I don't think he would be involved in something so serious that his phone would be tapped. But who he was trying to avoid by shifting to another place?

Today (31st Jan), when I met him to give my rent, it became clear who he was trying to avoid.

Having waited for an hour last time, this time I wanted to make sure that I didn’t find myself waiting again. I called him up and asked him to reach the spot and call me; it would not take me too long to walk to the location.

He called me and asked me to come to another place, not where we used to met for rent until last time. When I reached the place, he wasn’t there. I called him; he didn’t take the call. Fed up, when I started walking back home, my phone rang: it was the landlord.

He wanted me to come to another place to meet him. I wanted to snap but held myself back; after all it’s only once in a month, I thought.

When I reached the new spot, I didn’t find him. I called him but he refused to take the call. When I angrily started walking away, my phone buzzed. “I’m here,” he said. I turned back and found him bending and seeing me avoiding a low-hanging branch.

I walked to him and asked, “Why don’t you take your calls?” “If I take calls it becomes easy to spot where I am,” he replied. “Easy for whom,” I pursued; I deserved an answer, I thought. “That guy – Jugraj,” came the reply.

I was correct that no one was tapping his phone. The landlord has a Blackberry and so does Jugraj (at least he carries something that resembles a Blackberry) and there is an app (could someone tell the name, please?) which helps you detect the location of another person having a Blackberry. A shred of doubt lingers. I don’t think Jugraj, who is scantily literate, is tech smart enough to use the app.

Why the landlord is running away from Jugraj as if the latter has contracted a communicable disease? Probably the months to come will reveal.

Last time, when I had written about how Jugraj was pilfering power from me causing my electricity bill to shoot up, Elen had commented that I should find myself another accommodation. While coming back home today, I thought the same.

Masque of Africa - A difficult Act to Pull Off

Have you heard of a travelogue about old beliefs, myths and rituals of a place? That’s what Masque of Africa by VS Naipaul is all about. The book excludes (or includes very briefly) everything that a reader interested in Africa would like to know, like its current economic prosperity, its effects and politics. The Masque of Africa is about how the continent’s medieval beliefs and practices have survived the wave of modernity in Africa.

Naipaul focuses on economic development in Africa only to the extent of pointing out the lack of it, eloquently describing impoverished children devoid, as he argues, of any future, lack of hygiene, bad roads etc.

But frankly, despite these deficiencies the book works. The book is well researched and presents a lot of information that, however repulsive, will hold the reader. We all know Africa is a land of strange practices but we didn’t know how strange they could be. Some eating habits – like cat and bat meat – and rituals are really strange. In South Africa, a cruel ritual performed in the streets takes Naipaul aback challenging his belief that liberation would have softened a people.

The book does not completely steer clear of worldly pursuits like politics and history. It documents the history of many places; one of them is the anti-apartheid movement. Naipaul also presents an interesting biographical piece on Gandhi.

This was my second Naipaul travel book. After reading his Million Mutinies Now, I had been looking forward to the arrival of this book. I’m not fully satisfied, nor does it compare favorably with his Million Mutinies Now. But to hold your reader with a topic as staid as African belief is a feat not many can achieve.

Calcutta Diary

This December I went to Calcutta after one and half years. To avoid traffic, the cab driver chose a different route from the airport to go to my home. On the way I encountered the changes that have taken place in the city.


I saw IT complexes, some already made and others under construction. I also saw swanky malls; nowadays you find them everywhere in Calcutta. But as the cab went past Salt Lake – a place which was developed later and remains unlike the rest of the city – the optimistic mood sank. I met old buildings awaiting repair for years, narrow by-lanes, traffic gridlocks, dust and grime and a sea of people.

This part of Calcutta introduced me to another change. Unlike few years ago, when where ever you went you saw red Left posters, now you mostly see green buntings and hoardings of Trinomool Congress (the opponent of Left in West Bengal).

The driver informed me that a political procession was out clogging all important roads of the city, hence the traffic jam.

After reaching home, I read in the newspaper that the strike was called by the Left parties. I thought in other cities ruling parties rarely call strikes that disrupt the normal city life.

After a few days of my stay in Calcutta, my niece got engaged. On the engagement day, I met many family members and friends I had not met in a long time. There were discussions on various topics but the one that got me involved was politics. State assembly elections are nearing in Bengal and I wanted to guage public mood.

There were various views on the decline of Left government in Bengal and while everyone was disappointed with Left, no one seemed to offer an alternative. They seemed upset with the Left but not happy with the prospect of Trinamool coming to power. “So would a coalition of Congress and Trinamool with a Congress CM work?” I asked. Some agreed with me. (But I read later that Congress has a very weak presence in Bengal and many of its leaders are moving to Trinamool Congress.) Later regreted sounding too political.

One of my cousins, who was once a card-holding member of the Left, said in Karnataka people are happy and prosperous in cities while farmers in villages are committing suicide. “Farmers are committing suicide in Andhra Pradesh and not Karnataka,” I retorted. My cousin was a little surprised to see my sharp reaction.

Winter is a season of book fairs in Calcutta. The one held at Maidan is a grand affair visited by noted Bengali writers. Budhadeb Bhattacherjee, the CM who is known for his literary inclinations, visits the fair every year. This time at the fair he said the end of Left in Bengal could be the end of everything. It sounded like the last flickering of a dying lamp.

Few days after the political debate at my niece’s engagement, I tried to figure out why I reacted so sharply to my cousin’s comment about urban Karnataka being happy while the rural Karnataka suffers – and identified the source of my anger: Traditional Leftists have a way of discrediting others’ success to underplay their own failures. But for this reluctance to learn from others, Calcutta could be a different story today.

On my way back to the airport, I saw those IT complexes again and left the city with optimism.

Nandi Hills - a Place with Underutilized Tourism Potential

Like one of those places that you don’t visit despite staying close to them, I had never paid much attention to Nandi Hills. My indifference to Nandi Hills is not witout its reason. Nandi Hills is neither far enough from Bangalore to be called a proper outing nor near enough for a quick visit. (It’s roughly two and a half hours’ drive from Bangalore.)

Nor is Nandi Hills a well promoted tourist spot. And this is not because the place doesn’t have any potential but because of government apathy. The place is controlled by Karnataka tourism (govt) which denies entry to private players. So, except a few privately-owned small shops, everything is owned and run by the Government.

The result is restaurants with very limited menu and average food (they don’t accept any card). There are no professional tourist guides despite the place’s history, leaving visitors to the mercy of a sentence or two in Kannada on stone slabs.

Nandi Hills occupies a huge area with the potential for intra-train and bus rides for visitors. There could also be rope ways connecting various hilltops (there are a few). But you get none of them.

As my friend Kram and I left the babble of the city behind us, Nandi Hills came into sight. There are only Panjabi dhabas, coconut water sellers and tea-cigarette shops with make-shift structures on the way to the Hills.

Nandi Hills was a summer retreat of Tipu Sultan, the staunchest southern adversary of the British, and later of British officers. It’s located on a hilltop with several things to see (some dating back to Tipu Sultan and some made by the British in later years) but the most visited are the temples and the suicide spot, a cliff with a stiff drop where offenders sentenced to death were brought and pushed down.

The cliff has been surrounded by a wall with small openings. Beyond the cliff is a stiff fall leading to the bottom of the hill. With a little flight of imagination, you can imagine how the prisoners would have felt before being pushed to death.

A good point about the lack of commercialization is that there is lot of greenery. There are narrow pathways with trees on both sides. Some green assemblages are so thick that hardly any light gets in. There are flights of stairs, unobtrusively located inside grooves of trees, leading two, three floors down. The stairs are generally lonesome and sometimes it could be just you negotiating century-old pathways descending through dense foliage of trees.

For various people, Nandi Hills is various things. For some, it’s a good driving experience. The path that leads to the top of the hills spiraling all the way from the bottom – tests your driving skills when you are on the way up. My friend learnt driving few months back but negotiated the spiraling pathway with the assurance of a professional.

For some, it’s a picnic spot (you could see food cans inside their vehicles). For some, it’s just a casual holiday outing, which is not costly and yet refreshing. For me, it was all of them with a bit of history thrown in.

Wish you a happy new year.

What We Missed about Niira Radia

Since the outbreak of the 2G controversy and exposure of the Radia tapes, newspapers and TV channels are busy lambasting the journos, politicians and everybody else found involved in the controversy and heard in the tapes. But amidst this brouhaha, everyone seems to forget what made the scam possible bringing together people from diverse professions - media, politics and industries: Niira Radia's PR skills.


I heard some of the tapes on Youtube where Radia talks to cross sections of society – politicians, journalists and businessmen – and noticed that for each type of person she employs a distinct style of conversation. With media personalities, she is friendly and informal. She mainly speaks in English with occasional Hindi lines and phrases thrown in. She exchanges pleasantries but comes to point very quickly. Generally she is conversational and polite, but she knows when to change gear and be persuasive.

But while talking to Ratan Tata, her client, she follows a totally different style. Her style seems to be attuned to Tata’s personality, which is very reserved. Her tone is not friendly, but strictly formal. She doesn’t lapse into strings of Hindi sentences but sticks to English with polished accent. She explains her points very well and seems to have lot of grasp over the topic.

Any PR guy will tell you that Niira is a dream PR professional. Her networking skills (she seems to have journos at her beck and call), her strong sense of how to deal with whom, her understanding of her clients’ business (evident from her conversation with Tata) are assets for any PR person. No wonder she runs one of the most successful PR agencies in the country whose clientele isn’t just limited to Tata and Mukesh Ambani but includes state governments as well. It’s being said that when Tata was facing stiff resistance at Nandigram over the Nano factory, Radia put him in touch with Narendra Modi and Bengal’s loss became Gujrat’s gain with the factory being moved to the later.

Her network, which spans across multiple professions, would not have come easily and is not easy to maintain either. People with a flair for crudeness will attribute her success to exchange of unsavoury favors (you know what). And some will blame it on absence of integrity among the guys in her network. But painting the whole picture in a broad stroke will only help the essential escape – that there is considerable amount of professional skills involved in her success. Had the 2G scam not come into public glare, someday you would find an article hailing Radia’s success as PR personnel.

I am sure even as whole India heaps derision on Niira Radia, she is being talked about admiringly in the pantries of PR agencies over tea and coffee. No doubt Niira is a fixer but a skilled one. Both the government and media are reeling under her PR impact and I am sure there are many tapes we haven't heard. Sad but true!

Read Arundhati Roy But with a Pinch of Salt

I have been following Arundhati Roy’s writing for sometime. Among her latest offerings are Listening to Grasshoppers, Field notes on Democracy and the occasional columns she writes for Outlook. She also writes articles for foreign magazines but I haven’t got my hands on them as yet. Since her first and only novel, God of Small Things, she never authored another work of fiction, but she has continued to write on the causes she espouses as an activist. Now, she is more of an activist who also writes rather than a writer who is involved in activism.


There is little doubt that she writes really well, but I find her views to be gross exaggerations. She randomly lifts statements and half facts and uses them to support a larger point she is making. Based on remote statements, she reaches extreme conclusions. For example, in a ToI advertisement on TV, Amitabh Bachan says,” There are two Indias: One the assertive India which is on the rise, the “other” (poor India) India is straining at the leashes (trying to break free). The “other” India should come and join the assertive India.” In her essay, Roy interprets the coming and joining of the “other” India as meaning: if they can’t come and join, wipe them out by genocide.

Her criticism has bite, but it’s mostly repetitive. She sometimes borders on insane bitterness with no care for the other person’s point of view. Sometimes facts also become causalities of her rhetorical flourish.

Her views are mostly on these lines:

India is home to an indifferent middle class which doesn’t care a damn about the poor and suffering and are pursuing their conspicuous consumerism even as a section of the society continues to be pushed further and further to the margins. The rich are constantly growing richer at the expense of poor. The Indian government has become a promoter of corporate interests.

The excesses of the erstwhile Soviet Union and other Communist countries are acceptable if compared with what the big Indian political parties have done. India has become a militarized country with military occupations in various parts of the country, including Kashmir and North East.

The scourge of terrorism affecting Afghanistan and surrounding places and the Maoist problem troubling certain parts of India are one and the same: they are a tribal uprising. Maoists are fighting an oppressive corporate state and their only savoir is guns, and so they are justified in aiming to go all their way gunning to toppling the state and replacing it with a Maoist state. (Give me a break, Arundhati!)

Her views have merit but only partially. Here are the other halves.

a) It’s true that the middle class is largely indifferent and have a ‘for me it’s only me that matters’ mentality but there are exceptions. And then if a middle class guy enjoys his success which he has had to work hard for, what's wrong with it?

b) In it’s zeal for development, governments have sometimes overlooked the interest of the marginalized (Maoist) but the answer is not killing people to avenge marginalization becasue (a) violence won't allow the government to have talks with Maoists as a government can’t turn a blind eye to citizens being killed; it’s responsible for them; (b) there is no alternative to development. In fact, development can be used for the good of the marginalized through diversion of a part of the revenue generated by development for welfare of the people affected by it. You need transparency and proper laws.

c) Some Indian political parties are guilty of human rights excesses (through riots and anti-insurgency activities), but their excesses fade in comparison to what happened (s) in the Soviet Russia and current Communist states.

I guess many would share my views; they are purely commonsensical, if a little naive.

But, in all fairness, probably activism and balance don’t go together. It’s easy to give rounded views when you see problems through TV screens and newspapers, but difficult to be neutral when you are personally involved with people and their plight, as Roy is, being an activist. If you truly feel for an issue, you become lop-sided. I think that’s Roy’s problem. Or is she a publicity hound?

All I know is I will continue to read Roy but take her with a pinch of salt.

A Voice for Green

Environment is one of the most talked about issues today. You read about it in newspapers, magazines and hear it debated on television. You see National Geographic–type pictures showing how abuse of environment has left various forms of lives, including humans, affected. You also have people leap at you on road and say, 'Can I talk to you for two minutes – I am from Greenpeace?' Concern for environment has become fashionable. The old divide between the poor and rich is obsolete. Now it’s all about people who care about environment and the ones who expand their wealth at the expense of it. Environment has become a drawing room discussion. Political parties have made it part of their manifestos. Not surprisingly, it also made its way into a humble cyber café I had visited for printouts (I don’t have a printer at home).

While I was at computer, adjusting the configurations of a page to be sent out for a print, a girl stepped in and started a conversation with the shopkeeper. Initially, I dismissed her as a sales girl. But then I realized the conversion wasn’t about sales: it was about environment.

“So they finally had the tree felled?” questioned the girl.

“Yes, yesterday they had a few guys come and do that. I wanted to complain because a branch of the tree used to guard my shop from the sun, but I didn’t. Who will complain about these Reddys of Koramangla; they are very big people here. And I suggest you don’t investigate this case; otherwise, you will get identified,” warned the shop owner somewhat dropping his voice.

“What identified?! I am a journalist and I am doing my job. All I’m doing is creating awareness about trees being felled at will in various parts of Koramangla,” the girl answered indignantly.

“Which paper do you write for?” a boy asked looking away from his computer screen interrupting the conversation. “Hindu,” replied the girl with a trace of pride.

I also wanted to participate in the conversation, but kept quite.

I found the conversation interesting because to me it presented the two sides of the environment concern, the personal and the impersonal. To the shopkeeper, the concern is that the branch being cut has exposed his shop to the sun; to the girl the problem is larger; shrinking greenery. I felt all of us contribute to environmental degradation in our own way, like here I was doing my bit by taking paper printouts. Each time we don’t object to the shopkeeper packing our purchase in a polythene bag, instead of a paper bag, we are guilty of it. My colleagues who have fashionably included 'Print this mail only if you need it; contribute to a safe environment' in their office mail footer smugly walk in with a polythene bag returning from their occasional shopping spree from our office campus (nowadays every IT complex has one).

For next couple of days, I searched for the article on tree felling in Koramangla but didn’t get. Probably I missed the article because I am not a regular subscriber to Hindu  (I just go a grab copy from the stand sometimes). But I appreciated the initiative they have taken up and also how the girl was going about her job.

On a hot day, when I walk on familiar street and suddenly don’t feel the cooling shade of the tree I had felt last time and look up to find an open sky instead of my view obstructed by the foliage which protected me last time from the sun, I realise someone has to stand up so that trees don’t fall. Thankfully, many are doing so and at least they have been able to make us spare a thought for the environment.

It was time for me to leave the cyber café.