Traitors, and then traitors...

Rajesh Ramachandran writes in Mail Today, that the only reason the Travancore Rajas could salt away such a huge amount of wealth in the Padmanabha Swamy temple is because they were traitors. When other Rajas in the Malabar rose in revolt against the British in the 19th century, they remained loyal. The other Kingdoms were annexed by the Brits, while the traitor flourished, and waxes eloquent today.
So with the case of Sir Sobha Singh, father to Khushwant Singh. He testified against Bhagat Singh, and while Bhagat Singh was hanged, Sobha Singh not only got prized contracts from the Brits to build Lutyens Delhi, he got a Knighthood to boot.
But the point is: are these the only traitors?
What about those who wrest land from farmers for  a few hundred bucks a square metre, using 100 year old legislations, and hand it over to private buccaneers, in return for fat bribes?
Is he not a traitor who forges examination marksheets for money?
Is he not a traitor who buys MPs to tide over a no-confidence vote?
Is he not a traitor who denies the poor their PDS grain and sells it in the black market?
Is he not a  traitor who puts a red light on his car, and shields himself with hundreds of commandos, in a country created by a man who did not allow the police to frisk those who came to his prayer meetings?
Yes, these are traitors, and they flourish in our midst, and they are more lethal, because they are a clear and present danger to our country, and are to be found, more than any other place, in New Delhi.....

The Murder of the Boat Club Lawns

Time used to be, when on cool evenings, Delhiites would stream down to Rajpath, and park their cars, bikes and scooters, unpack their dinners, and have picnics. Balloon sellers would roam through the families picknicking on the lawns, chaatwalaahs would weave through the crowds, and ice-cream carts would be parked on the corners. For Delhiites, traumatized by the heat and dust, the green lawns, the water in the shallow pools, all would be a welcome relief...
No longer. The Sultan, or  in this case, the present Police Commissioner of Delhi, in his Majestic Wisdom, has decreed that parking cars or bikes on Rajpath obscures the view. So no cars shall be parked.  So, can they be parked elsewhere? No, thunders the Sultan. No, no, there is no space for parking them elsewhere, because this is a high-security area, and we will tow away any vehicle that is parked any where off Rajpath.
So, the last refuge of the heat-shocked Delhiite is now gone.
Yesterday, I crossed Rajpath.
Heavy yellow iron police barricades bar anyone from driving down rajpath. The lawns are dark and deserted.
The balloon sellers have gone away, chased away by the police. The ice-cream carts have been confiscated, and rust away outside police-stations...
Will spring come again? Yes, when the present Sultan either retires, or is transferred to another dusty town, or is caught with his hands in the till or his pants down..
Till then, the Commissioner hath decreed there shall be no life on Rajpath, and laughter on the lawns, and so shall it be....

Is this a persian cat, or what?

I went to the petfood store in Khan Market yesterday, to buy catfood for my cat, and i found this kitten playing around there. The shop owner claimed that it was a Persian cat  imported from Thailand, and he was willing to sell it to me for twenty thousand bucks. I clicked its picture on my cell, and emailed it to my brother in USA (who is crazy about cats, and who raises 7 cats), who simply wrote back, "If that's Persian, then I'm mickey mouse!). Well, I looked at the images of Persian cats on google images, and it seems to have some Persian features, like the snub nose...wonder it its a half-Persian
How does it matter anyway, since its one hell of a captivating kitten....

A look at the sports facilities, six months after the Commonwealth Games

When there was criticism of the amount of money being spent on the Commonwealth Games, one of the things that Kalmadi and gang used to tout was that these were sports facilities which the average citizen would get to enjoy, once the games were over.
Well, the games got over over 8 months ago, and Sports Authority of India has moved slowly, reluctantly to open those facilities to the people of  Delhi.
Finally, they put out an ad in the newspapers, for the "come and play" scheme, where you would have to pay only nominal amounts to use the swimming pools, the courts, the tracks etc.
Yesterday, after a long-drawn out process for getting a membership to swim at the Talkatora pool, I was finally called for a trial,  to see if I could swim well enough to be in a professional pool.
I got through the trial, but I also got to see what had happened to the facilities.
The pool was clean enough, but the showers were stinking, and all over the place, there was enough dust to choke anybody. The floor of the showers, despite the expensive granite, was slippery and greasy. Things seem to be broken, and deserted.
Everything seemed to have been built at a grandiose scale - "international standards"- but everything seemed to falling to pieces...
I also went to the Siri Fort Sport Club, which was also one of the venues for swimming.
The shower cubicles had become airconditioned, and there was a canvas roof over the pool. It looked posher, but the crux of modernization was missing: the pool was not a heated one, so when winter comes, it will close.
How so typical of the way the Kalmadi gang functioned......a veneer of sophistication, and below, loot and grab, like the Thugs...

Of Delhi, and its weather...

Finally, it rained this morning, after weeks of heat and humidity.
After living in two coastal cities, Bombay and Madras, (yeah, not mumbai and chennai- I do not need dirty politicians telling me by what name i should call cities), I always see the difference in how it rains in Delhi: it is a kind of reluctant, forced rain, after the humidity builds up over days and weeks on end, not the kind of heavy, natural rain you get in Bombay or the swift rain in Chennai.
And the rain is generally very light, and stop immediately, and the heat and humidity continues here in Delhi even after the rain ends.
Not surprisingly, the electricity consumption has touched 4,900 MW.
That brings me to the core issue: why have the capital in Delhi at all?
For invaders to India, it made sense: it was an outpost on the frontier, giving them easy access to their homelands in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan and to the Khyber pass. So they settled down in Delhi, and made it the base of an empire.
For the modern republic of India, it would have made better sense to have the capital somewhere where the weather is pleasant, like Bangalore or Bhopal, and far away from Pakistan and China. The summers would have been moderate, and the winters less severe.
Instead, we now have the capital in a place which is very dusty (my car gets a film of dust within one hour of it being washed), has a history of blood, where the hot wind blows in from the Thar desert, and is just a few minutes away from  forward air bases in Tibet and Pakistan.
If the British could shift to Delhi from Calcutta, so can  we, and I guess we still have time to shift our capital. After, we are only 60 years old, a very young republic by historical standards (Aurangazeb or Akbar or Samudragupta ruled almost ruled the same length of time in a single reign), and what's more, thanks to modern construction equipment, you can have a brand new Capital in a decade...
But given the lack of vision which has characterised modern India, I doubt it will happen in my lifetime....

The Hindu Idea of Revenge...

Every morning, I cycle on a DDA park laid out over one of the medieval cities which shook India: Alaudin Khilji's Siri. The park is full of huge cyclopean dressed boulders, and the pathways go up and down, as they go over vast mounds and palaces and battlements.

It would be unbelievable in USA or Europe: the ruins of the empire which reached down all the way to Madurai being neglected, nay, being buried in a staid park over which bureaucrats and businessmen take their morning walks...
Peacock cry out loudly in the  park, and lizards slither amongst the ruins..
As I walk or cycle, I try to imagine, in my mind's eye, how the court must have been, 800 years back, which lies buried below. I try to imagine the hundreds of thousands of south Indian captives, who must have been enslaved and forced to walk all the way here, to die in the cold and the heat, after being worked to death in building Siri Fort.
The scene calls to mind Omar Khayyam's famous Quatrain:

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep

The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:
     And Bahram, that great Hunter -- the Wild Ass
Stamps o'er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep.

But herein lies the whole significance of Siri Fort: more than any other fort in India, it was besieged half a dozen times by the Mongols when Alauddin Khilji was ruling, and they found it impregnable.
In other words, this place, this fort stood between the Mongols and annihilation for the masses of India.
But we, unlike the Taliban, do not dynamite our history: we just benignly build parks over them, instead of excavating them. Guess this is the Hindu idea of revenge for the ending of Warangal and Devagiri and Dwarasumudra....
PS: Why Siri? Legend has it that 8,000 severed heads of Mongols make up the base of the "Siri" fort....

Of Jayalalitha and Karunanidhi

I remember seeing Jayalalitha in my Colony in Chennai somewhere in 1986 or 1987.
She was the "Proganda Secretary" of the AIADMK then, and MGR was the Chief Minister.
The post was entirely one created by MGR for her: there was no post of Propaganda Secretary before her, and none existed after her.
No-one, either in the AIADMK or outside quite knew what were the duties of such a post: I guess it would be safe to say that these onerous duties were entirely speculative in nature.
Jayalalitha would have have been in her early forties then, or maybe 40.
She had the beginnings of corpulence in her figure then, and she looked like a fairly fat, fair woman, with big eyes.
The party workers set up a dais at the end of the street where I lived, and it was a very hot summer day.
I do not remember now whether some kind of municipal or byelections were on then, but I remember that Jayalalitha came at around 3 pm in the afternoon, and gave her address.
She was dressed in a dazzling white sari with the AIADMK's party colours at the border, or pallu. The speech was very sedate, and delivered in a very slow, uninspiring way, as if by some person who was learning to speak publicly. The poor in the area, some two hundred of them listened to her, without much enthusiasm, and after half an hour, she was gone. The pandal was taken down within an hour of her departure, and that was that.
I also remember seeing Karunanidhi addressing an election meeting in T. Nagar, but this was when Jayalalitha was in power. It was late one night, and I was walking by the T. Nagar bus-stand, when I saw that a pandal had been set up in one of the bylanes. Karunanidhi was speaking, and I stopped by, to listen.
He was speaking of Jayalalitha's "sadism". Though the rest of what he said was in pure Tamil, he used the English word "sadism" to refer to the pleasure Jayalalitha derived from harassing him, his family and DMK party workers. He went on, slowly, but gripping the audience attention, as he built up his case: Jayalalitha's sadism, his party's tolerance and dedication to the Dravidian cause, his affection for MGR (who had passed away) and his hope that the Tamilian people would return to their senses. It was very different: here was a practised speaker, who knew how to sway people by his oratory.
Years later, as AIR's News Correspondent, when Karunanidhi was dragged out of bed and locked up in jail by Jayalalitha, I came to Chenni to report on the drama for radio. The DMK workers were furious that Jayalalitha had the guts to get their leader physically manhandled by the police, and in the protests, they were obscene and ribald about Jayalalitha. Gone was the pretence that they were gentlemen. In the slogans they raised, they referred to Karunanidhi's great virility ( as evidenced by his bigamous marriages, his various children with the various wives ) and what Kalaignar would do to her, and how Jayalalitha needed a good dose of just that from him.
On the whole, I felt pity for the Dravidian movement, to have splintered and be led by such a poor quality of leaders, and issues which were so personalised and trivial....