The saffron terror

Its been quite sometime that this term has been loosely used by politicians in India (specifically the so called ‘secularists’). Every time the grand old party of India is need of few caste votes or need to polarize people they use this word. What I do not understand is that in a country where about 80% population is hindu, speaking in favour of or talking of their plight is termed as communal whereas doing the same in the favour other 20% is called secularism. I absolutely have nothing against my fellow countrymen but I do have certainly a lot against these divisive tactics of Ms. Italy and her chamchas. Though its not new to them as this petty politics runs in their blood with their forefathers doing the same thing for the sake of power decades ago for which the whole country (except them) have been paying dearly till now.

Well to be honest for a party whose founders believed that Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Chandrashekhar Azad and hundreds of others were terrorists just because they could have polarized opinions in country and might have affected the power equation, its not a new thing for them to brand anybody as terrorist if it suits them. I always wonder that why the grand old party always shy away from hanging Afazal who has confessed to his role in Red Fort case and has been given death penalty by the highest court in the country but are really eager to hang Pragya and other accused. All acts of terror should be condemned and must be treated equally irrespective of the colour, you can never paint them green, saffron or red. They always talk about Ajmer blasts but never about shooting in Akshardham temple, they talk about Godhra riots but never about Sabarmati express, they talk about stone pelters in Kashmir but never about Kashmiri pandits. All these and many more are acts of terrorism and should be talked about simultaneously and not in isolation.

As per the news reports there are about 5-6 accused in so called acts of “Hindu terrorism” although none of them have been convicted by any court yet and couple of them are related to RSS. So if we agree with the Rajkumar of the country and equate RSS with SIMI on this yardstick then I think we should ban both RSS and Congress, RSS for acts of terror on muslims and Congress for acts of terror on sikhs in 1984. The problem is that most of the politicians in our country suffer from foot in mouth syndrome. I would advise the rajkumar to use some grey cells or at least something else apart from his surname, and clean up his house before pointing his fingers at others.

No matter who triggers the bomb but when a person dies he is no longer a hindu or a muslim, his family doesn’t care if the culprit was a hindu or a muslim so why does the political class of our country has to give a colour to this. When a muslim dies in a bomb triggered by a muslim his family won’t forgive him just because he is of the same religion and same goes for hindus. When people of the county do not differentiate on colour of terrorism then is it right to do so just for the sake of few votes? For me there is only type of terrorism in India and it encompasses everything from communal terrorism to regional terrorism and the new emerging political terrorism.

The curious case of Indian Pride

Since yesterday I have seen numerous updates on Facebook from my friends, most of them feeling proud, or happy that India kept our pride. The same pride which was lost in CWG mess till last week. News channels have been running stories since past 2 months on this dwindling state of Indian pride which gets lost every second day and gets restored every now and then. What I do not understand that how can pride of our country be related to this 12 day event, what does successfully hosting or not hosting an event has to do with Indian pride. I do not think that Indian pride is that shallow that we need to organize a sporting event by spending thousands of crores of our taxpayers money abysmally (that too when 42% of its population is below international poverty line) for proving it to the world.

Since there are already numerous arguments, evidences against this extravaganza so I will list my points later for the same, I would like to counter the arguments in favour of organizing these games first. The first and foremost reason has been cited as the national pride, which I do not buy to. If they really wanted to showcase Indian pride, they should resolve the issues of terrorism that are coming up in every corner of the country(as per latest reports 232 of India’s 608 districts are affected by some form of terrorism and as per number of deaths in last 4 years we are second only to Iraq) if the political aspirations of our leaders are preventing them from doing so they can work on other areas such as lowering the poverty, lowering the infant mortality and malnutrition rate in India I think these issues are much more valuable to our national pride than these silly games.

Secondly so called advantage is that this will attract foreign destination, can somebody please tell me how is that possible as the inefficiency of this great Indian bureaucracy which was under the wraps (or assumed to be so) till now is out in the open. A place where a roll of toilet paper costs 3 grand, a place where spending 70,000 crore for a 20,000 crore event can’t even ensure its success, a place where of all people prime minister has to call in to get few condos cleaned up, a place where hygiene standard is as good as dog shit on bed and a country which is marred by terrorism needs to call army to build a bridge for which the contractor took seven years and 5 crore rupees (though army built it in 4 days and at a fraction of original cost) do we really expect foreign companies to come for business here?

Third and the most widely cited reason is the development that is associated with this. Well it surely can’t be development of the country or common man for that matter but yes if they are referring to those involved in this, those lucky goons who got thousands of crores in their pockets along with sufficient time to clean up their traces then I will surely agree on this. The games in Manchester in 2002 is what we were promised, where whole of east Manchester(which was in depression due to unemployment caused by pull out of numerous industries) was developed and it resulted in employment and development of that area. But what we got was a village which was build in an already developed area (and a congested one too) and which is not ecologically sound as well, so much so that the proposal was out rightly rejected by the environment ministry but eventually they had to give in to the whims and fantasies of those organizing the event.

And finally as far as development in sports is concerned we organized Asian games in 1982 and spent huge amount of money on building stadia, but it had no impact on our medal tally in any event till now. So behind all this glamour and lights there is a lot of mess that needs to be cleaned up, a lot of questions that needs to be asked but the problem is who is going to do so, as the citizens of this country are soaked in pride and waiting for India to bid for Olympics.

Acccepted!!!

After 2 years of hard work, 70 mocks, 11 exams, 6 interviews and a score of unquantifiable things finally I can say that I have been accepted. This is first of its kind journey in my life, I always wanted to get an admit and now that I have got one I wish I could have got it after another year, there is something that I am missing. It seems that I have left something behind, some unfinished business or something but the problem is I do not know the exact reason for this.

Its been a week now since I have moved to hostel but still I wake up everyday with a feeling of emptiness, as if there is an unanswered question that I need to answer. Well until I find an answer to this I can assume it to be coz of fear. Fear of expectations that I have from myself, I do not know whether I can live upto them or not. But all I can do is to try and live these 2 years so that I remember them as a lifetime.

Well, enough of this fear, expectation blah blah. Lets start with the proceedings, the campus is really huge and I still haven't seen the whole place. There is a golf course, football ground, basketball court, tennis court, gym, pool table etc etc though I haven't used any one of these yet but will surely put them to good use in coming weeks. Hostel is nice but we have been out casted from the campus. Our shantys are about 6 kms from the campus and we get stuffed into a bus twice a day to travel to and fro from the campus.

Academic is really rigorous, had a a surprise quiz for Accounting on the very first day of the session. I already have couple of assignments and a load full of pre session study under my belt that I would do as soon as I get over with this post. I will try to post more details once my Live Writer gets fixed as it would allow me to write in tits and bits.

Before I end this is the song that's coming to my mind right now:

"Subah ki kirno ko rokein jo salaakhein hai kahan
Jo khayalon pe pehre daale woh aankhein hai kahan
Par khulne ki deri hai parinde udh ke jhoomenge
Aasman aasman aasman"

Time for a reality check

We plan for so many things everyday and seldom they fit into god’s plan. My life has been an apt example of Butterfly Effect, even a small incident changes it drastically.

The most recent example of the same being this admission season, about a month back I was quite confident of making it to at least one college and 2 weeks later I finally geared up and lifted myself from a mourning period and paid the fees for yet another season of mocks and tests. But an update on MDI’s website switched me again to that hopeful mode and no matter how hard I try its really difficult for me to switch off these irritating mode changes, specially when I know that I will again have to go through that mourning period to get back to that mock mode.

I wish I had a button of rewind in life so that I could fix everythin, so that I could make everythin perfect startin from my kindergarten. I would like to fix the moment when I fell off the bicycle for the first time, when I failed in an exam for the first time, when I got rejected for the first time, when I lost someone I loved and first time of so many things. But I wonder even if I get to do it will I be able to live without any failure? I cannot imagine my life without all these memories. These are the moments that define who am I today.

So as Shakespeare puts it “What’s done can’t be undone”, I think its better for me try to work on my present rather than tryin to fix the past.

Dhoni caught trying to kill a tiger

Dhoni the brand ambassador who comes on our TV screen every now and then reminding us that there are only 1411 tigers left in India and he intends to save them was caught in TV while he was trying to kill one of the tiger.

The incident happened at the Eden Gardens at a recent IPL match where Knight Riders were playing against Chennai Super Kings. Dhoni tried to strike down one of the two tigers who were sitting on the boundary line when he fired a low six at a rocket speed towards them. Though nobody was hurt but the tigers were in complete state of shock as they thought Dhoni would be last man who would try to kill them after seeing all those ads. A team of commentators got a chance to speak with one of the tigers and he informed them that Dhoni did this intentionally as they were cheering for Knight Riders and he plans to go on an international trip chanting the line “I am a tiger but I am not a KKR supporter” as they maintain that they were doing job for some quick money and they are not yet insane enough to support KKR.

Meanwhile Shahrukh has written a tweet mentioning that he was deeply hurt by this attack and he thinks that Dhoni was afraid of losing the match so he attacked the tigers to lower the morale of Knight Riders though he added that he wasn’t sure if the morale was high enough to be lowered. Shahrukh’s old time friend and the only person who ever dared to think beyond IIMs has decided to give the bravery award to the tigers for putting a brave fight when Dhoni and Badrinath were firing rockets at them. Although the tigers are little apprehensive and worried that they might be forced to see “Rok Sako toh Rok lo” which could endanger the life of complete habitat and not only two of them.

PS: Knight Riders are back to normal after a blip of winning two matches, was so glad to see them back today. As its been the case for last two years while Knight Riders have been losing matches Sharukh has been minting money and getting sympathy from his fellow countrymen. Well those are the only two things that he always looks for so why force a bunch of uncles on wrong side of 30 to make some running for 3 long hrs.

A new low in Indian Politics

Although everyday our esteemed politicians do one thing or the other making a mockery of system, democracy and the country but this brazenly ridiculous activity by a self obsessed good for nothing lady has really touched a new low which no one could have even dreamt of.

Few months back she was in the news for unveiling her own statues(dun forget the handbag though) and then raising a special force to protect them using special laws, that too in one of the poorest state of the country, the state government didn’t had money to pay for the victims of stampede in an ashram in her state but they had money for everything else.

Although most of our political leaders are self obsessed(not this much though) that I can give that 2 crore garland and 200 crore party on her birthday a pass, even the fact that a Chief Minister who earns 50k/month have paid 14 crore in advance tax (don’t know which stocks she deals in). What bothered me was the order of a DIG level enquiry and the historic reason was “To check if there was a political conspiracy in recent attack of bees in her rally”.

While Bareilly is burning for past 2 weeks and there is no DIG level enquiry for it we have an esteemed person with 20 years of service who will be interrogating bees to find out who had sent them to ruin her speech. That’s utter wastage of resources and tax payers money to satisfy whims and fantasies of a lunatic. I wish the UP junta wakes up to this rude shock and vote sensibly next time.

Who is going to teach Management to IIMs?

IIMs the so called premier management institutes in India desperately need management lessons on how to conduct a CBT successfully. Since my opinion is subjected to change depending on my result therefore I decided to write this post before the results, and thankfully IIMs gave me ample time to get over with it.

First, they make blunders while conducting tests leaving thousands of students and many parents in dismay and then they take more than 50 days to conduct a retest for them. If that was not enough it seems like they are using my Grandpa’s computer to calculate the result. I could have calculated them a lot quickly with my laptop.

After the announcement of CAT going online most of the top CAT Coaching instis started conducting mock tests online and they all have a student base of about 20-30k. Now when they can compute results of 30k students in 7 days why can’t IIMs/Prometric can calculate the same in almost 80 days, and please don’t say that they were too busy in providing security to MNIK like Maharashtra police.

No matter what the result be but this its gonna go down as a blot on the legacy of IIMs in history books as “When managements guru’s couldn’t manage a simple test”.

48 weeks and counting…

Its been more than 48 weeks(week seems a longer period than month) since I last had Ethanol intake, although not technically as lot of medicines use alcohol as base, but we can discount that can’t we? Now that I stand almost at the anniversary of that historic decision(I know its an exaggeration, but then what's the purpose of a blog if its not exaggerated) I look back and see changes that it made to my usual life.

1. Easy on pocket. This is one of the major impact I have had. My salary last for couple of more days than it used to, of course the effect would be more severe on Royal Challengers Banglore as I helped Mallya in buying that team but with one of his regular customer gone I wonder if he can still keep that team.

2. Coffee tastes better. An year back or so I used to despise coffee, but since then I ve been more frequent to coffee shops than pubs which has in turn helped me in developing a taste for coffee. Plus you don’t have to worry about those breath analysers no matter how many cups of coffee you drink.

3. Girls aren’t the only thing to discuss. Well the fact remains that there are 2 topics that an average male discuss when he is drunk which are girls and football(or any other sport) well of course it may vary for bisexuals and likes of them. But coffee gives a whole new dimension to bakar. I never realized but there is a whole spectrum of things that can be discussed.

4. Weekends are not all about beer. Well no denying that fact that I always felt that my schedule was jam packed and I had no time for myself, but since I gave up drinking I realized that I have whole lot of time left with me to do things that I always wanted to. Guitar was number one on the list so kicked it off first hopefully rest will follow. My own Things to do before I die list(more on that later).

5. Backache. This is the one I didn’t anticipated. About an year back 2 days a week were not enough to complete my quota of alcohol intake for a week, so I used to spend almost every weekend night with friends, but since then I have been spendin most of those evenings at home nappin. So much so that at times I get backache due to this lethargy.

Well as they said there are no free lunches so I would take that point 5 for the 4 above it and this new found me, who is really enjoying it. Cheers

Pseudo vs self proclaimed Nationalists

Nobody could have ever imagined that a movie could get this much of airtime all over the country and that too for free. MNIK aka 'My name is Khan' has been in the news for all wrong reasons even before it has released. What really baffles me is while parties like Shiv Sena and Congress are playing politics over this trivial issue Shahrukh and the makers of the movie are minting money because of the hype created, none of them cares about an ordinary citizen or Marathi Manoos(The over hyped word).

Lets start with the so called caretakers of Maharshtra, I wonder how they call themselves nationalist while they thrive on the agenda of politics of hatred. Amitabh Bachhan, Sachin Tendulkar, Mukesh Ambani none of them is nationalist or a true Marathi, just because they said that Mumbai belongs to every Indian. First I don't really know of one good deed that Thackreys have done which has helped Mumbai in becoming a global city or anything that has helped any Mumbaikar/Indian in any way for that matter. But I am pretty confident that some of those personalities that they chose for bashing have done some real good deeds for the state as well as for the nation.

Now, as far as their political counterparts are concerned, they took it as an ego question and blew it out of proportion. I mean 30,000 men guarding Cinema halls, I wonder if they have even a quarter of this many cops patrolling regularly 26/11 could have been averted, and please don't fall prey for sentences like "they have prior information of Sena's Vandalism but had no idea about 26/11" as for one they had confirmed intelligence inputs and secondly if 30,000 cops can provide security cover to politicians and VIPs based on some vague intelligence reports a population of 1.3 crore certainly deserve atleast 7500 policeman for their safety. On the politics of division they are not any less divisive than Thackreys, the only difference is they are too shrewd to admit it. Their method of wooing voters is unique of its own kind for instance at one hand their state unit @ Andhra want to implement reservations for muslims on caste basis, the party leaders at center condemn it thereby wooing both the voters unlike Shiv Sena which are blunt when they admit that they are against a particular sect or cast. Similarly, one of their top leaders goes and visit families of slain terrorists of infamous Batla house encounter in Azamgarh and criticize the police while rest of the party distances itself from the act and give medals to those who died while fighting those terrorists. I remember that their government in Maharashtra came with a proposal to give taxi licenses to only those who are native of that state. If this isin't divisive then perhaps the definition of 'divisive politics' needs to be rewritten stating that 'Grand Old Party of India has to be excluded from this definition'.Period

As far as SRK(its as awfull as KRK but then it is easy to write) is concerned, to be frank its really difficult to believe that it is a coincidence that all the controversies had to be around this movie. Couple of months back he was made to wait @ a US Airport(that's what the news was) and incidentally the reason was his name "Khan" and I realized the bigger coincidence when I saw the trailer of the movie with him saying this line apparently on a US airport "My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist" you don't need to be a rocket scientist to read between the lines, all you need is a little commonsense and realization of the fact that politicians aren't the only persons who fool us. Even if I assume his tale to be true then what in the world changed the american mindset in a matter of 2 months that the same Khan was invited to ring the starting bell at NASDAQ. Then comes the IPL debate, what I couldn't figure out was a simple question that since he owned an IPL team, he had the money, Pakistani players were available for bidding, there was no pressure from anyone against selecting Pakistani players(that's what he claimed in an interview after bidding) and he had a slot as well in his team then why didn't he bought a Pakistani player, well lets assume that that he didn't wanted to as Knight Riders is his team and he made it very clear with his multiple captain theory last time, so then why the hell does he have to take a moral high ground and say that Pakistani players should have been selected. Well Mr. Khan you had an opportunity to change the world and you chose not to then just shut the f*** up, but you can't even do that as you are the self proclaimed righteous. This carefully planned ploy of yours worked like charm, you got a chance to get air on every news channel and promote your film, you got space on every newspaper around the world for free so what if an ordinary Mumbaikar suffered you were able to sell your tickets @ 1000 Euro each in Berlin while people here in India assume that you are the victim in this fiasco. I am glad we have only one SRK and he does not act in/produce more than 1 movie in a year.