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I had been contemplating leaving blogging for a while, or maybe for good. Maybe I should take a few days off and learn to get inspired again. I am not sure. What I am going to do is let it come to me by itself. As a blogger, I know, you can’t write unless you have to. Unless I have that strong urge again, I am going to let it be. and let me be. I have been having issues at work and there are more important things to concentrate on. In any case, my request to you readers would be to hang in there — do not delete your bookmarks or the rss feeds of this blog just as yet.

I have avoided tags in the past (responses to being tagged, etc) but I could not do that this time. So when Sneha from One Life tagged me, I felt amused but I clearly forgot about the tag — until now. This has been an entirely personal post and I continue the inroads to my personality with the 10 things you never knew about me (well, ok, it is - 10 things that you may or may not know):

1. When I was 20, in Pune, I fancied working for the intelligence services.
2. At almost the same time, I used to visit The Times Of India’s office at Fergusson college road to submit my articles to be considered for publication. They were crap.
3. I gave my first job interview for my third job.
4. I can’t stay away from the sea. I have traveled extensively on the Konkan coast and I have also seen the east coast in a bid to compare the two.
5. I specialize in (self-taught) Visual Aircraft Recognition.
6. I draw portraits.
7. I hate snakes. I can’t stand them.
8. Amitav Ghosh and Rohinton Mistry are my favorite writers.
9. Travel, for me, in many ways, is a time to retrospect. If I move away from my workplace, my mind works very differently and I feel I need to hear the voice within. So maybe, if things permit, I would like to move away from it all and travel.
10. I knew I would be in software back in 9th standard, though, the inner voice can be misleading at times.

Bonus 11: I am an accomplished minesweeper player (Yes, that Windows game no one understands). My best is 16 seconds at intermediate. I lost the screenshot! But an older best attempt is here.

So, who would I tag now? Shradha from Sleepy Conscience. I wish I could tag a few more people but I am not sure how much is my blog read. Can the silent readers please stand up?

No excuses for a month long hiatus but lots of things happening with Sports:

India’s Hockey team goes on a ’strike’ because they are not paid their dues by Hockey India. This is how we treat those who are the best players of our National game.

And then, India’s first individual Olympic Gold Medalist says he wants to quit the game because of, none other than, the National Shooting Federation.

Is this because of our obsession with Cricket? If you ask me, I don’t think so. You can’t blame Cricket for the mismanagement and apathy towards other sports shown by Government Sports bodies.

In tennis, Sania Mirza would be quitting tennis soon. No, she is not unhappy with All India Tennis Association, as you may be guessing by now but she thinks it would be the right thing to do after marriage.

Meanwhile, The Big daddy of Marathi Manoos Inc, has issued a latest threat — Australian cricketers won’t be allowed to play in Maharashtra. How can they be allowed to play here when in Australia, Indians are being stabbed on an almost daily basis? Very considerate about Indians. What happened to this nationalism when his party ‘workers’ thrashed non-marathis on a regular basis?

So much for the sports.

Update: An updated version of the last para above has appeared in today’s edition of DNA in Bangalore. It made its way as a “Letter to the Editor” and talks about Indian Politicians approving of Violence, among a few other related topics.

Yesterday evening, at Reliance Timeout, for launch of Dilip D’souza’s book, “Roadrunner”, there was a very insightful conversation that happened. We had the author along with India’s best historian, Ramachandra Guha and Rahul Dravid talking about India, America, about few of the the many dots that connect the two democracies and how this particular book tries to find answers while attempting to understand America from an Indian’s eyes.

But while at it, I picked up P.Sainath’s, “Everybody Loves A Good Drought”. Sainath is probably the only journalist who has worked extensively in India’s most rural districts and has, time and again, attempted to bring out the causes of the poorest of India’s citizens. I first heard about Sainath when Vidarbha was at boil over farmer suicides (I have written about Vidarbha here). The land is still at a boil and with Telangana’s formation imminent now, they might be justified in asking for a separate state as people at helm of affairs in Maharashtra and people in media have conveniently ignored Vidarbha’s problems. But all this, despite being fodder for thought is another topic altogether.

So Sainath, in the introduction of the book, emphasizes that while India’s hunger “would not make for the dramatic television footage that a Somalia and Ethiopia would do”, that is precisely the challenge before a journalist because, I quote here, “while malnourished kids may look normal, yet lack of food can impair their mental and physical growth in such a way that they suffer its debilitating impact all their lives”.

And then there is the case of the “Number of poor”. Back in 1993, the Government of India set up an expert group to estimate the people living below the poverty line. The group, after arriving at a figure of 39% (people living below the poverty line) also recommended changes in the way the Government used to estimate poverty. In a later survey, discrediting the recommendations and the figure arrived at by the expert group, the Indian Administration came at a figure of 19%. But the story does not end here. In the time that was between these two figures, a few months, the Government of India cried out aloud in the World Summit for Social Development at Copenhagen — they presented a figure of 39.9% of people below poverty line. Why? More poor, more Donors, more money. No rocket science, this.

The year this happened was 1994 but aren’t we dealing with the same problems, 15 years on?

Coming back to the conversation between these three great intellectuals that I witnessed yesterday, there was one question from the audience, regarding India still being a developing nation and not a superpower. As a part of the response to the question, the author questioned back — Why do we need to be a superpower? Ramachandra Guha seemed to agree with it and while reading Sainath’s commentary in the introduction to his book last night, I found the answer in the question — Why can’t we be a better democracy first?

We may be the world’s largest democracy and be proud of it but we are far off from being a good democracy. I think its an obligation to each and every well-wisher who is a citizen of this nation, be it you, me, an ordinary citizen or a politician, to make the world’s largest democracy a better democracy. When that happens, maybe I’ll be much more content drawing parallels between the world’s oldest democracy and the largest one.

Sunday morning, walking from Bangalore’s Garuda Mall to LifeStyle Mall, we pass by The Bangalore Football stadium. A game going on inside, tickets priced at Rs.20, no takers for it. I am tempted to think — In this nation of cricket worshippers, for all we know they could make the entry here free and yet there would be no takers for a local game of football. Everything the usual here but for one announcement that has been printed on A4 sized papers and pasted all over the gates —

“Parking not allowed here. If you still park here the Tiger will take away your vehicle.”

All the previous thoughts notwithstanding, I stop and stare. Read it again and stare more. The Tiger taking away the vehicle. Hey, I want to try that. Or maybe not.

And as I later found out, the source of the stadium’s authoritative stand, as I had suspected, has been mentioned here. Mind you, these Tigers are far from extinct.

One year since the November 26 2008 carnage that happened in Mumbai and we have already found more important things to talk about.

We have, for example, witnessed a “furore in the House” (as promised) when one MLA chose to take his oath in another language but Marathi. We witnessed how a few elected to the office by the people can transform into goondas as and when convenient.

If only all the promises were kept and taken in the same vain by them who were making them, our country would have been a much better place to live in.

We have also witnessed a national hero proclaiming that He is proud to be a Maharashtrian but reinstated that Mumbai is of whole India. As always, he got his priorities right but then we also witnessed the grand old man, the self-proclaimed big daddy of the Marathi Manoos, telling the former that his comments had hurt, no prizes for guessing who, the Marathi Manoos.

Never has the “Proud to be an Indian” comment raised so much controversy.

Then, of course, we also know that calling the city “Bombay” (and not “Mumbai”) can get you thrown out of the city limits.

This is November 26, a year after. Of prime importance, these things.

Postscript: Coming in just now, the political party that owns the goondas who fulfilled the promise mentioned above has put up a hoarding in Mahim paying homage to the martyrs of 26/11. But only the Marathi Manoos among those heroes find a space there. Bangalore’s Major Unnikrishnan and Dehra Dun’s Hawaldar Bisht have been conveniently forgotten — their sins being that they were not the Marathi Manoos. Look at the picture here and you will notice, the political heroes who have put this hoarding up have their own faces enlarged on the poster — larger than the faces of the people they are supposedly paying homage to.

Times of India’s website, timesofindia.com carries a report on how the late Andhra CM, YSR Reddy met a sudden death on his Bell chopper. The report also carries a picture of the body of the CM, that was found by the search party after more than 24 hours of the chopper’s disappearance.

The picture is probably the most horrifying picture I have ever seen of the deceased, put on a leading newspaper’s website — charred remains of the body of a man beyond visual recognition. A link below the picture takes the reader to another two photos, one of them of the diseased pilot. Its gory enough to make the average human feel sick.

As I write this, the story has about 37 comments posted by people like you and me. Out of these 37, at least 26 people have condemned or requested (or both) the TOI editors to remove the picture of the corpse as it defies sensitivities and sensibilities. The comments section is moderated by someone at TOI, surely not someone like you and me — for moderation means that the comments are read. And since the picture is still there after about 48 hours of the story, it probably means that someone at TOI does not give a damn.

But yes, the story features in the “Most commented” section of the website.

I think responsible media organizations draw their own lines in reporting and journalism. Ideally, I think every single word and picture that goes into the website should pass through the same filtering that is applied to its counterpart in the print media. I raise up this point because the same article in print, in yesterday’s TOI’s copy does not carry this gory picture. Clearly, the filtering mechanism, if it ever existed for Times Of India’s website, failed here. And since the forum below the article at the website is moderated, it would be a safe assumption that the comments of the readers were read but those guys at the TOI chose to discard them. It is dangerous — a newspaper is supposed to be the people. Is this newspaper run by insensitive incompetents?

But among all things, it baffles me what TOI has achieved by letting this picture be a part of their online article. Does a degree of real life horror and vulgarity help them getting more hits? And more comments? Even if the comments are nothing but a collective condemnation of the report?

PS: Some people say that this is what people want. This horror sells, just like sex. But I am not buying that. I do not think that this is permissible. I think what TOI did was an exploitation of lack of the laws which could have censored those pictures. That is exactly what I meant when I said that media has to draw its own lines. One cannot keep ignoring this because TOI has always done “things like this” before. Well, I don’t think so — I don’t this has ever happened before, I think this was a new low. Do you think there will be people who will suddenly switch to TOI, the newspaper, after they see this picture on their website? How will it help TOI, I wonder, apart from getting those few more clicks?

A story that I think is needed to be told is at Dilip’s blog. I won’t give a summary of what lies there but let me ask you this — In a religious place and one of the country’s most beautiful monuments and a tourist attraction — a place that is frequented by millions, why is it considered OK to call the assassins of the Country’s Prime Minister, martyrs? Published in The Hindustan Times, the story, from Dilip’s blog here.

Fellow blogger Dilip D’Souza’s third book is coming out in a few weeks from now. It is called, “Roadrunner: An Indian Quest in America”. Dilip blogs about it, here.

The book is a result of his road trips in America. Some of his writing from those trips made way to his blog and I have read most of them, over the years. I always felt that he sees America the same way as U2’s Bono does — You know, not the kind of America that bombs Iraq but the kind of America that says, “Hey, that moon is a beautiful thing — lets go there, take a walk on it”.

Because America is amusing and at times, even misunderstood. Because America is much more than Bush, Obama, CNN and Hollywood. It is in those posts that Dilip’s insight unveils a face of America that needs to be discovered more. Suddenly, America is fascinating.

And it is exactly the reason I am looking forward to this book.