The hanging of Saddam Hussain January 1, 2007
Posted by Rahul Razdan in Politics, Zeitgeist.31 comments
Today morning on YouTube — 18 of the 20 most viewed videos were about of the hanging of Saddam Hussain.
My stance on this is still a work-in-progress.
However I do have a couple of thoughts.
It is a poor-poor defence when Americans say, “It was their (incumbent Iraqis’) decision to hang him. We had nothing to do with it.” Yeah sure buddy, we believe you as much now as when you told the world that Iraq was sitting on a tranche-load of Weapons of Mass Destructions! And if going against the grain of incredulity, I were to believe you on WMDs — idiots you killed the only man who could have told you where they were hidden!!
This is the third such political execution I have seen.
The first was that of former Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed by a shooting squad after a hasty trial in 1989. That was the Christmas on 1989. BBC says:
Two days after the death of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, video pictures of their summary trial and execution were shown on television in Romania and around the world.
The images of their dead bodies, riddled with bullets, were broadcast and much of the unrest which continued after their deaths subsided.
The second was that of former Afghanistan President Dr. Najibullah who was publicly hanged by the Taliban in 1996 and whose body was left hanging in the open for a few days. The newspaper pictures of those hanging bodies are graphically imprinted on my mind. Especially since in India we were used to seeing him as guest of the State. In fact the rest of his family had taken shelter in India after the Taliban captured power in Afghanistan in 1996.
Somehow this time around I feel a sense of apathy seeing the visuals. Perhaps the earlier pictures where a fugitive Saddam was shown being pulled out of his hideout, had somehow prepared me for the things to come.
This gruesome link on BBC throws some light on this issue:
Releasing the normally gruesome pictures of dead leaders is a powerful gesture. It has often been used in the past to mark the end of an era.
Hmm…
Lalu sets up railway chair @ IIM Ahmedabad September 20, 2006
Posted by Rahul Razdan in Education, Humour, IIM, Politics.2 comments
Continuing with the newly-fangled romance between Lalu Yadav and IIM Ahmedabad, the Railway Minister announced the setting up of a ‘railways chair’ at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad for studying the “infrastructure of the Indian Railways” and its economy. (read press report)
Swadeshe Joke:
After the IIM Ahmedabad Director, Bakul Dholakia gets Lalu Yadav to set up a ‘railway chair’ at IIM-A, the Director of IIM Lucknow, Devi Singh feels the way to go one up would be to get Lalu to set up a railway sleeper at IIM-L and that too air conditioned! But being the media & entertainment loving Institute that IIM Indore is, the IIM-I Director, SP Parashar feels the best would be to get a complete railway bogie and make a case-study out of Mani Ratnam shooting ‘Chhaiyya chhaiyya…’ on the rooftop of a railway bogie!
:-D
Made in Pakistan September 4, 2006
Posted by Rahul Razdan in Politics.19 comments
Some months ago, while shopping in Dubai I picked up a bath-robe, which I felt was coming real cheap. Back home in India, I discovered that it was Made in Pakistan! Normally that would, at worst, have affected my perceived value of the product — like what happens when you discover that the electronic gadget you bought says ‘Assembled in Bangladesh’ or ‘Made in Taiwan’ when you expect it to say ‘Made in Japan’.
However, this time it affected me at another level. Was I contributing to the economy of a country which at various points of time has been hostile to India?
Considering, that at the height of the Danish cartoons controversy, one of the saner and potent means of protest was the boycott of Danish products worldwide — I was contemplating if I could register my protest against all the bad things Pakistan has done to India, if I explicitly rejected this bath-robe and abstained from using it.
Per se, I am not dogmatically opposed to Pakistan. I had been a great fan of Imran Khan and continue to be a great fan of Wasim Akram. (Hope you noticed the difference between ‘had been’ and ‘continue to be’ — that’s the subject of a post someday) I remember openly cheering, much to the amazement of my mother, for the Pakistani team in the 1992 cricket World Cup final. I was also touched by gestures of Pakistani hospitality towards visiting Indian spectators for the 2001 cricket series.
Their merit notwithstanding, I liked movies like Randhir Kapoor’s ‘Henna’, Yash Chopra’s ‘Veer Zara’, Chandra Prakash Dwivedi’s ‘Pinjar’ for touching upon the (subsequently over-used) ‘people to people’ contact emotion!
But giving away some of my hard-earned money towards Pakistan’s export earnings… umm… somehow I wasn’t so sure. Back then, my dad settled it for me: “Forget the Pakistan bit. If you don’t use this bath-robe, you aren’t helping India’s economy either!”
Soon after this, my cousin, who had come down from Srinagar, gifted me a T-shirt — which I later discovered, was made in Pakistan as well! Oh no! Not again! And this time around it my cousin’s gesture which I couldn’t belittle! So I started using that as well. And the burden of that thought weighing on me everytime I wore it.
But time is the best healer…
In what speaks volumes about the quality of these ‘Made in Pakistan’ products — neither of them lasted beyond a few months!
Phew!
What would you do in a similar situation?
The Miracles of India August 20, 2006
Posted by Rahul Razdan in Media & Entertainment, Politics, Zeitgeist.7 comments
Yessir! It’s happening once again!
If Ganesh idols were drinking milk then, it is sea water turning sweet in Mumbai now! (In between we had the ‘monkey man’ in India’s capital city!)
The ‘milk drinking’ is due to the phenomenon of ’surface tension’ where the milk sticks in a very thin layer — practically invisible to the naked eye — to the edge of the spoon and travels from there to the lips of the idols, to the chin and all the way to the floor. If need be, please pick up a high-school physics book, and you would understand it very easily!
The sweetness of the sea water is being explained as post-monsoon dilution of salinity.
Even though I believe the scientific explanations completely, for me that is just one aspect of this issue.
The other aspect is — WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL?
So what if the idols were drinking milk, huh?
So what if the sea water is less salty than usual, huh?
What does this do for you? Makes your life less miserable, huh?
Yet we have people (urban, educated and economically better-off) in this day and age falling for, and willing to swallow this crap (literally too**), in double-quick haste and not waiting/wanting to seek a logical/rational explanation for that.
And that’s the miracle for me, sadly!
Even as I close this post, I see news on India TV that the idols drinking milk scam is back, and I can very clearly see this time around it’s not about injecting the opium into the masses in an innovative way, but in a competitive way.
** Mahim creek, the site for this sweet water ‘miracle’, is otherwise better known as the point where passengers on Mumbai’s western train line generally get up from their sleep due to an overpowering foul sewage smell, while passing by!
The hottest case-study topic August 4, 2006
Posted by Rahul Razdan in Education, IIM, Media & Entertainment, Politics.12 comments
On February 24, 2006, he said:
Mere zunu ka natija zaroor niklega,
isee siaah samandar se noor niklega.Hum bhi dariya hai, apnaa hunar hame maloom hai,
jis taraph bhi chal padenge, rastaa ban jayega.Ek kadam hum badhe, ek kadam tum,
aao milkar naap de, phasle chand tak.Hum na haare par wo jeete, aisa hai prayas,
musafir ho rail ka raja, hum sabki ye aas.Mun me bhav seva ka, hotho par muskan,
Behtar seva wazib daam, rail ki hogi yeh pehchan.Kaamgaaro ki lagan se, hai tarakki sabki,
hausla inka badhao, ki yeh kuchh aur baddhe.Aam admi hee hamara devta hai,
vah jeetega toh hum bhi jeet payenge,
tabhi toh yeh tay karke baithey hain,
faisle ab usi ke hak mein jaayenge.Maine dekhe hain saare khwab naye,
likh raha hoon main inqilab naye.Yeh inaayat nahin, mera vishwas hai,
daurey mehengai mein rail sasti rahe,
apnaa inaam humko to mill jayega,
rail par aapki sarparasti rahe.
And last month, students at one of the most hallowed institutes of management education in the world, Harvard, were introduced to the working of the newly annointed miracle man of India Inc. — Union Minister for Railways, Lalu Prasad Yadav (who in 2002 mysteriously changed the spelling of his name from Laloo)!
The verses above were from his Railway Budget speech in Parliament.
Last week, Professor G Raghuraman of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, was delighting the media all over, with the disclosure of his management-academician’s equivalent of a muse. That’s all you would need to make a wonderfully punchy (but surprisingly short-lived) story — Lalu Prasad Yadav, media’s favourite politician-entertainer, being endorsed by arguably the best management institute in India.
The flavour of the month is IIMs making case-studies on objects of popular interest. If it was Krrish @ IIM Indore then, it is Lalu @ IIM Ahmedabad now. The pace and direction seem to suggest that Sachin Tendulkar, Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh bachchan are just waiting to be studied. And why not! Between them, they account for a few hundred crores of business.
On Lalu, the turn around in perception has been remarkable. For someone long identified with nepotism, corruption and mismanagement in his home state, Bihar — being seen as the messiah for one of the largest public sector organizations is nothing short of a miracle.
“I think he must have taken the present task as an opportunity to prove his abilities and improve his image,” mused the professor.
Either I have become too cynical, or this is the height of naivete…
Jaswant Singh revisits Kandahar… July 21, 2006
Posted by Rahul Razdan in Open-letter, Politics.4 comments
…in his book, A Call to Honour to be released shortly.
He refers to the notes that he made during the journey from Delhi to Lahore and what went through his mind. ‘It is impossible not to jot down impressions on board this special flight. I do not really know what to term my mission — a rescue mission; an appeasement exercise; a flight to compromise or a flight to the future,’ he writes.
Dear Mr. Jaswant Singh,
Congratulations on your book, and thank you for giving me perhaps the worst New Year of my life in December 1999. (Even the Tsunami ravaged December 2004 was bad — but that was a natural disaster that left us humble, unlike Kandahar 1999, where a bunch of rowdies had us humbled).
But going by your quote above, I wonder who/what were you jotting your impressions for? Isn’t it obvious you were penning down notes for your book? And on the quote itself: Mr. Singh, you rescued the three terrorists; appeased a generation of them; compromised the honour of India; and of course it was a flight to the future for those terrorists, who otherwise would have deservedly rotted in prison. So, you shouldn’t have worried about what to term your mission. I’ll give you two words that sum it up aptly: national shame.
Till that incident, I had been a BJP supporter. For at some point of time, the party displayed a certain common-sense perspective, and talked a lot of right (right as in correct, not right, the politically polarized position) things. But this surely was a turning point in my understanding of the party. And please, don’t you raise the bogey of ‘coalition compulsions’ for this one too.
You Mr. Singh, of the famous accent and articulation, showed an embarrassing deficiency of tact and bankruptcy of tactics in handling this. It is one thing to be striking compromises with various groups — perhaps that’s a part of governance, and I believe all governments do it — and an entirely different thing to be seen as capitulating completely.
Imagine this, a Union minister as the flight care-taker. Tell us, did they serve liquor in-flight. After all, this was an international flight! Right?
First, the whole idea of releasing terrorists was wrong. But even then, tact could have dictated two airplanes. One carrying the minister and his team. And the criminals with the security officials in another. Otherwise the whole idea is repulsive — a Union minister of the Indian state, spending a couple of hours in the same plane as some of the most wanted global criminals. Headed towards the same destination, but to a different end. A beheaded Daniel Pearl some time later. (One of the terrorists Jaswant Singh escorted, Omar Ahmed Sheikh, was involved in the killing of Daniel Pearl) (Update: Read here an account of an HBO documentary on the issue by GreatBong)
Second, you could have bloody paid them money! As it is, all terrorists have been paid for by different governments. Well, there are suggestions that you did hand over some bags to them, which contained either money or explosives. But releasing criminals who have already undermined your authority once lets them undermine it to perpetuity. We are still paying the price for that.
‘Before writing about this event, I reflected long on how I was to do it; how would I convey the enormity of the challenge that was we faced, as a nation and not simply as a government,’ he writes in the chapter titled ‘Troubled Neighbour, Turbulent Times: 1999′.
Mr. Singh, the nation died that day. Your government survived. (Thankfully, not for long, though!)
I had to write this to exorcise from my psyche that one image from December 1999 that still haunts me — that of the grinning Taliban terrorists disappearing into the sunset. The pride and self-esteem of a billion people ground to dust. And that dust being blown around by the station wagon they drove away in.
Regards,
Rahul Razdan
10 Years July 4, 2006
Posted by Rahul Razdan in Media & Entertainment, Politics, Sports, Zeitgeist.2 comments
I had received this emailer last year:
In 1995 Narasimha Rao was the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi was a reclusive figure
For Saurav Ganguly, playing test cricket seemed a pipe dream
Very few people in India had ever used email or logged onto the internet
We were not a nuclear-armed nation
India had 25 states. Kolkata was Calcutta. Mumbai was Bombay. Chennai was Madras.
Aishwarya Rai had acted in only film, in Telugu
There was only one life insurance company
There were no cellphones. No one had heard of call centres or Kargil
And till October 11, 1995, there was no Outlook
It has been along journey, these ten years. And an exciting journey, in a world transforming itself more rapidly than perhaps any other decade in human history.To celebrate this journey, Outlook presents a series of 10th Anniversary Special Issues, looking back over the last ten years and looking forward to the next ten. Because we know, and you know, that the next ten years will be even more exciting.
And come to think of it, even in the last one year, a lot has changed indeed.
- For Saurav Ganguly playing international cricket is yet again a pipe dream
- We are on the verge of climbing down on our nuclear status
- Aishwarya Rai hasn’t given a hit since Devadas (if you were to ignore Kajra re)
English football team & Dr. Karan Singh July 1, 2006
Posted by Rahul Razdan in Politics, Sports.add a comment
The first football World Cup I remember having followed was the 1982 Espana, which was won by Italy. This I followed through the colourful pages of Sportstar — arguably India’s finest sports magazine.
Fuelled by that and also the availability of matches on Doordarshan, I closely followed the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, which was won by Argentina who were led inspirationally by Diego Maradona.
I also followed the 1990 Italia World Cup which was won by Germany defeating Argentina in a reversal of the previous tournament’s final. I was rooting for Argentina and saw all their matches where their second-choice goalkeeper Goycochea (who had to play because first-choice goalkeeper Pumpido — who had blundered in an earlier match — broke his leg on the field) defended quite a few shots during penalty shoot-outs. For the final, while the teams were lining up, I dozed off in front of the television set, only to wake up just as they were showing visuals of distraught Argentinians and jubilant Germans at the end of the match!
The 1994 World Cup in USA was won by Brazil defeating Italy in the finals, with Roberto Baggio infamously missing his penalty shot! A moment I remember from one of the USA matches was their goatee-sporting player Alexi Lallas almost scoring a goal with a bicycle kick worthy of Pele!
The 1998 World Cup in France was my first experience of community football watching — in the hostel of IIM Indore — with Saurabh Prasad letting out the choicest of abuses every time Roberto Carlos delayed passing the ball onto the forwards! France led by Zinedine Zidane shocked the defending champions Brazil in the finals. Star player Ronaldo did not play in the finals reportedly suffering fits before the match. This undoubtedly gave birth toseveral conspiracy theories!
It was during the 2002 World Cup in Korea/Japan that I attained ‘nirvana’ of football watching by refusing to have any favourites, either expressed or supressed. Regardless of who won, it was football that I was watching and enjoying — all the more in the finals, where Brazil defeated Germany.
It is 2006-Germany, and the quarter-final between Brazil and France is going on even as I write this post. It doesn’t matter to me who wins eventually. (Update: France just won)
It was 1977 when the then President of India Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed died while in office. He was succeeded by Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy who was elected unopposed.
Sons and Loafers: A case of bad sons-kaar June 29, 2006
Posted by Rahul Razdan in Politics.9 comments
In their parents, children of doctors as well as people in the armed forces have natural role models at home. Wouldn’t the same then hold true for children of politicians as well? Yes. But what matters is the road walked by the progeny to step into their parents’ shoes.
The child of an army General still has to get through his Services Selection Board (SSB) interview to get into the National Defence Academy (NDA). Children of doctors have to slog through a minimum of five years of under-graduate studies (or more) — and this is true for even those who might have had the wherewithal to pay astronomical sums of money as capitation (or other creatively used nomenclature) fees.
The problem perhaps arises when the political scions get rewards too easily.
Leaving aside the Rahul Mahajan episode (where my only peeve is BJP president Rajnath Singh’s alleged announcement of planning to induct Rahul as an office-bearer in the party’s youth wing, when subsequent events have shown that his drug problems were common knowledge already), some other cases come to mind of sons of politicians who even when they had it all, lost it for themselves and for their fathers. And some who got away with it.
Here are some of them:
D MK IZ BCK May 20, 2006
Posted by Rahul Razdan in Politics.2 comments
Coming from a self-styled, self-proclaimed political commentator this is a little late in the day — two weeks after the polls. But here is my two bit post-mortem of the three main reasons for DMK's victory:
1. Colour TV sets: This one captured the people's imagination very effectively. Rice @ 2 Rs. per kilo is now a hygiene factor in most Indian elections — or at least in the areas where rice is the staple food — so no longer a differentiator. Liquor in any case is always an unannounced bounty. So for the sheer incredulity of coming up with a scheme, that was innovatively bizarre and yet reasonably above-board, you have to give it to M Karunanidhi (MK). Any other counter-scheme announced by the others was just a 'me-too' effort. Trust me the only scheme that could have topped this free TV scheme could have been two TV sets free!
2. Yellow shawl: No not for any astrological or super-natural reasons, but for the plain 'visual identity' factor. That's like the red of Coca Cola; the red and blue of Pepsi; the whatever colour of whatever brand you take. And the yellow of Kalaingar! So for every 100 pictures of J.Jayalalitha (JJ), and 100 pictures of Karunanidhi, the yellow visual cue makes a greater number of impressions on the audience cognition than the drabness of JJ's bullet-proof ponchos. In good old advertising jargon — reach and frequency being the same, the yellow shawl makes a bigger impact!
3. Sons and nephews: JJ was fighting a lonely battle. No sons, no nephews, no kith and no kin. For DMK on the other hand, while MK was the most accepted face, Stalin and Dayanidhi Maran were also becoming talking points. Perhaps not too many were convinced that this generation-next of DMK was good enough — but as long as these two were being discussed it was occupying top of mind space. The next best that JJ had was Vaiko — who made people remember and conclusively believe in that old and crude cliché — all fart, no shit!
In summation:
Caste is passé. Religion is passé. Regionalism is passé. Linguistic chauvinism is passé. Long live these peddlers of dreams!
Meanwhile the dynamics at the Centre could change a little, with the DMK now strong in the state as well.
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Watch a recent episode of double-take on NDTV
