Selling global warming down the river for 40 rupees....

I have a diesel car, for which I have not been able to get a Pollution Under Certificate for years, even though, when I bought it five years back, it was supposed to have the Bharat I norms (the latest norms then). After going to PUC kiosks all around Delhi (and finding it failed to pass the emission norms everywhere), I got the Catalytic Convertor cleaned, the engine tuned up..and yet it failed to get a Certificate.
For months i was puzzled: here was a new car, a privately owned, sparingly used one, with the manufacturer promising the latest emission norms, and yet it failed : its emissions were way above normal.
Well, having been a student of TERI, the guilt of contributing to global warming was only surpassed by my fear of being caught everytime I passed a traffic constable, for not having a valid PUC certificate.
Well, I thought, maybe the new emission standards were so stringent (Bharat IV or is it V now?) that my car could not pass...or maybe something was wrong with my engine...or maybe I was driving my car badly...??
The mechanic at the Workshop cleared up the mystery: "No car can pass those norms...give the man at the PUC kiosk a hundred-buck note, and ask him to issue the certificate...you people don't know how to get these things done..."
The legal cost of the PUC is 60 rupees.
This sunday, I went to a kiosk, and told him I wanted a PUC.
He said, "Okay, line up the car, and I'll charge you sixty bucks whether it passes or fails the test"
"Oh", I said, "It will fail the test. Just take a hundred bucks, and adjust something, and pass it"
The guy gave me a broad smile. "Okay. Line up the car".
I lined up the car in line with his computer, so that he could take a pic using his webcam. He took a pic, and asked, "Do you actually want to test it?"
"Not at all. I just want the certificate"
In two minutes, he put in my car number, and hey presto!, he printed out my certificate...
I remembered all those classes while I was doing my Master's Degree in Public Policy and Sustainable Development right under RK Pachauri's nose in TERI, the theory about "socially acceptable costs of pollution", the Kyoto Protocol, the "Cap and Trade Regime", cutting down on global warming, and most of all, the great incorruptible "Control and Command" model of environmental conservation...all to be sold down the river for a measly forty rupees....
How about the "Bribe and Barter" system of pollution control, folks?

The most ancient place in Delhi

The date: 23 centuries before.
Approximately 230 B.C.
A group of heavily armed soldiers come down the jungle path, from the East of the land, from Pataliputra. They come to a kind of intersection in that primeval dense forest, where the path from the East to the West meets the track from the South to the North. There is  a crag at this ancient crossroads, rising out of the green roof of the jungle, a tiny spur of the Aravallis. It is not much, but it will do :  with its cliff face inscribed, it will act as a billboard for travellers along the busy route to the south, the Daksina-patha, advertising the new faith of the Chakravarthi, King Ashoka.
The soldiers carry a palm leaf inscription with them, and in their party are stone-inscribers, experienced in etching on the hardest of granite, using little more than water and a few simple tools. They climb the crag, and inscribe the long message of Compassion and Purity that their Monarch had dictated to them, which they have recorded in the palm leaf manuscript. It takes them a few days, but the winter sun of Indraprastha is pleasant on their faces as they work, guarded by soldiers. Their work done, they depart, to inscribe the Edicts of their King in some other place...
The centuries pass, the jungle covers all, and the inscription, and its message is forgotten. Indraprastha falls, empires rise and fall. Finally the City of New Delhi arises around the place, the place which was the crossroads in the jungle.

The modern ugly locality called Kalkaji arises there, and the hillock is used as an open air toilet by the poor of the place. Yards away, is the busy Outer Ring Road. Finally, sometime in the 60s, serendipitously, someone stumbles on to the inscription, realises that this is one of the Minor Rock Edicts of Ashoka, and that the site is 23 centuries old, and the ASI, in desperation, builds an ugly iron cage around the Edict, and a concrete shed to shelter the inscription.. The photo above shows what the site looks like.

Of all the historical remains of Delhi, this is probably the most ancient, arising paradoxically out of the brashest and most modern part of Delhi.

The idea fascinated me: this juxtaposition of ancient crossroads with the modern flyover, this magical crossover place from our age to the Ashokan era. So one day a few months back, I went there.

I went to the ISKON temple, crossed it, and went past a huge garbage dump. Holding my nose, I crossed over the gate of the Park that had come over the hillock. Kids were playing cricket all over and around the hillock, and they guided me on the route to the top.

I went up and gazed at the highly weathered, and faded inscription through the iron bars. Despite the grim concrete of the shed, and the noise from the busy highway, I could picture the scene, 23 centuries back...the rat-a-tat of the chisel, the thunder of hooves in the forest, the sense of mission of the leader of the group, and the solemnity that comes with the act of creating a time-capsule, to be opened and read in a distant future, when the language itself and the King was forgotten

That act of deciphering the lost language and reading would be done by a young Brit, James Prinsep, twenty one centuries later...but that, ah, is another gripping story....

Emerging country blah blah blah...

As Obama was addressing Parliament, and flattering our MPs and citizens with arfully chosen words about how great we are, I was navigating the back lanes of Okhla in South Delhi, looking for a workshop for my car. There was no tar on the roads, once you got off the main road into Okhla. There was no tar on even a single road: further, the dirt track (for that was what it was) was full of deep potholes and gentle hillocks, and I was wishing I had a four wheel drive vehicle. The narrow dirt-tracks were full of shacks built right on them, on the "side-walks'. To complicate it further, huge trucks were parked right on them. As the crow flies, the place was just half a dozen kilometres from Parliament, where Obama was providing balm (zzzzzzzzandu balm?) to the Hon'ble MPs.There were hundreds of  young men sitting on their hauches on the roads, doing absolutely nothing, and little children playing in the dirt, right next to the roaring traffic.
Maybe they were from Bangladesh, or may be they were Indian.
But all the same, it was a shame, that while we were spending thousands of crores on the Commonwealth Games, we could not even provide tarred roads a few kilometres away....after all, everybody, just everybody pays taxes to the government, either directly, or through indirect taxes, don't they?

The bad bad years of DTC monopoly

All the controversy over phasing out the Blueline buses (the private buses) on the Delhi roads, and allowing Delhi Transport Corporation to resume its monopoly reminds me of how Delhi, especially transport, used to be twenty years back, when there were no private buses.
I used to wait for a DTC bus for sometimes close to an hour, sometimes even longer: on some routes, there were very few buses. The buses, when they came, were inhumanly packed, and it used to be hell to be inside one, with the temperature at 45 degrees in the summer.
The conductors were rude, and the collective ordeal made everybody quarrelsome, and often hot words and fisticuffs used to be exchanged.
All that changed when the routes were opened to private operators.
Yes, they drove recklessly, and they killed people.
But suddenly, there were buses every few minutes, and you were being actually courted to get into a bus.
I wonder if we are going to go back to those dreaded days with the banning of the Bluelines, despite tall talk of the thousands of new buses which have been inducted.
Surely, it would have made more sense to train the Blueline drivers better, regulate them better, and have them competing with DTC, than outlawing their existence altogether. Any monopoly finally degenerates, and DTC will surely do so, with staff resorting to flash strikes when they know there is no alternative to them.
As a result of those bruising years with DTC, I have been using my own transport, a bike, and then cars, in a very dogged way for the last 18 years. If the government goes and implements its stupid policy, you will definitely not find me using the public transport in a long long time...
The Metro? Ah, the Metro is getting really crowded: the result of poor modeling of commuter growth rates, and how to expand. Though, geographically, the Metro has expanded, the expansion of train frequencies has not really kept pace with the number of people using the metro. The result: the same crush which used to be on DTC twenty years back. And the crowds, when there is a glitch on the line, are scary. Guess we need a stampede before we  pay attention to the problem.
The lessons to be learnt? Adminstrators need to apply policy prescriptions, such as the correct level of State interventions, the farsightedness of planning for future growth as much as technical solutions, to problems. Going to the USA, and studying how they do it there is of no use, unless they practice it out here!!

A Graduation Day to Remember....

So, at the ripe old age of 42, on 28th of October, I received my Master's Degree in Public Policy from TERI,

at a convocation...
His Royal Nibs, the Lt. Governor of Delhi, Tejendra Khanna was there, probably bribed by TERI's act of giving
him a Honorary Doctorate....
TERI gave a doctorate to some UAE Minister, some Sultan Royal Nibs, probably because he must have given them a contract..also some DG of UNIDO got one, probably because of the same reason...
Khanna and Pachauri gave crashingly boring speeches..
After talking about inclusive development, poverty blah blah, Pachouri got into a 70 lakh Toyota Prius and glided away...
Me? I felt depressed to graduate with kids half my age...guess there is a time for everything in my life....
Still, not a bad way of getting a degree, sleeping off every afternoon, and a trip to the US besides.....

TERI being TERI, guess everything is basically a selling opportunity...

Why Good did not triumph over Evil this year...

For the last twenty years, on Dussehra Day, I have gone to the neighbouring ground, to see the effigy of Ravan being burnt, symbolizing the victory of the forces of good over evil.
Not so this year. There were no effigies of Ravan or Kumbhakarna or Meghnath.
For, thanks to the Commonwealth Games, our local ground had been converted into a car park for the Siri Fort Sports Complex where some of the games were staged, and in any case, thanks to the tight security, crackers and materials for making the effigies could not make it to Delhi, with the result that neither the Ram Lila was held,
nor did Ravan burn this year.
I, like the hundreds of others in my locality trudged all the way to the ground, and came back home, disappointed.
We switched on TV, and watched the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi witnessing the burning of the effigies at the Ram Lila Grounds.
Indeed, all over Delhi, the there were virtually no Ram Lilas staged, nor the effigies burnt this year, because it coincided with the Games...
It was a fitting finale to the CWG : after all, Evil has triumphed over Good this year.
Sad : first you steal the people's money, then you snatch their freedom to celebrate their festivals....such docility, the people of Delhi have...no doubt, every invader worth his salt kicked us in the teeth.....
PS: Our Royals have to run Restaurants and Hotels to survive, and here we are, at the Games,  honouring Prince Charles, Prince Edward, the Duchess of Cornwall...bet Bahadur Shah Zafar will be turning in his grave....and ofcourse that butcher of Tamils, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse...

Meeting MF Hussain...

It was June 1991.
I walked down a deserted hospital corridor in Pune, at 11 pm in the night, heading for the lift at the end.
Just as I reached the lift, the doors opened: there stood a tall, fair man, with a white beard in the lift. He gave me a half-smile, and stepped out of the lift, and walked down the corridor. He seemed vaguely familiar.
I looked back, and he was barefoot. Recognition dawned. It was MF Hussain. His son was admitted into the hospital, and he was going up to see him.
My friend, too, was admitted in the hospital, for malaria.
Both MF Hussain's son, my friend and me were all, at that time, staying at the FTII campus in Pune. A two-month film appreciation course was going on, and Hussain's son, with a ponytail, was the dashing Knight of the place, with pretty girls fawning on him.
It was eerie, that meeting: just me and Hussain in an empty corridor in the middle of the night. Surrealistic.
The rest is history: Hussain is now the most recognized name in contemporary Indian art, and I continue to bravely soldier on with my amateur paintings....