Running commentaries and Media Coverage on Rush for Cash

I remember the first running commentary I heard of India - West Indies Test series in 1966. Those days it was not just a novelty, but pure magic to be able to follow live, an event taking place thousands of miles away. But these commentaries, then,  were reserved mainly for sports events. Today every event or even a non-event is telecast live with tadka or embellishments.

Anyone who is a regular spectator of football, tennis or cricket matches would vouch that watching an event live is so different from watching it on TV. What is a cricket match without the crowd hollering for 'fours' and 'sixes' in unison or what is a tennis match that doesn't give you a neck pain following the ball from side to side. There is something very unreal in lying on a couch with a packet of chips watching the players sweat it out.

 I remember the high altitude posts like Siachin where satellite TV had just made its appearance. MTV Grind used to be a popular show among soldiers and officers alike. What can be more unreal than  men clad in layers and layers of warm clothing gawking at the almost naked men and women basking in the sun. These soldiers would not have seen any female form clothed or otherwise and exposed parts of their own bodies for months.

Seeing the media coverage on the current issues that is how I feel, far removed , disconnected and disoriented. We are subjected to day long tale-commentary on #rushforcash. If some rabble rouser goes hysterical, media personnel are not far behind. Once in a while I go out to the town, to see for myself, the situation on ground. Being from a semi rural town, I can hardly connect the real life situation I see, to the TV news running all day.

I think the best coverage from Ground Zero , on the subject was done by Rajdeep Sardesai on India Today. His coverage from various banks followed by his coverage of the Parliament is nicely summed up in his tweet .(hail twitter for the word restriction)

     Whichever way you throw a fat cat , it always lands on its feet, sometimes crushing some hardworking ants under its feet , further softening the landing. Yeh Hai India. Yeh hai Dunia.

Cartoon : Courtesy: https://twitter.com/hashtag/StraightLines?src=hash

Online Woes

These days major load of the postal department has been taken over by Courier services and E-Commerce and net banking. P & T has become just P . Telegram had gone redundant years back , but only recently has the Govt  admitted to the fact and has closed down the service officially. Yet there are times one needs to visit these dinosaur departments once in a while.

(We actually have these ancient style post boxes at Mhow till date. This is no snap from the History Book !!) 

Having filed the ITR , I had to send it by Speed post (or just drop it into the Dinosaur's mouth)

The Post office was virtually deserted, with one or no customer at any counter. The Queue at my counter with all of one customer just would not move for over 15 minutes. There was an old man at the post, peering into  his screen with a frozen look of concern and concentration. I woke him up from his reverie to learn that the server was not working and that he was 'trying'. I also learnt that there was no manual way to book the post. It was windows trouble shooting at its best with the slogan "Re-start ; Re-install; and Re-format". Of these an operator of a client station could resort only to the first option and that's what  he had been doing for over half an hour. I went to the post master and She for her part upgraded the trouble shooting effort. She restarted the Server !

I decided to move over to the next counter to update my PPF account and to make a deposit. Again it was a similar scene with a lady staring  at a monitor screen. It was a different server. 

I asked her if I could access the account online. She gave a frustrated look, "server  ki wajah se to delay ho raha hai" (She was working on the server and that's why it was taking more time) . 

Later I came too know that the problem was not with the server but with the 'served' . She just couldn't decipher the contents of the page she had been served. After what seemed a long long time, an all knowing youngster came to help her. He said, that a transaction has to be done to see the statement! I was asked to deposit Rs 2000. It was OK with me as that's what I had gone there for. Challan filled, money collected and data feeding started and then came the long wait again. For some reason, the lady started calling for the 'expert' again  . The way she repeatedly invoked the name of "Ghanshyam ", even Krishna Parmatma would have come down from his heavenly abode, but there was no sign of this Ghanshyam. There was that tone of urgency in her voice , since a 'time out ' would mean refilling all the details.  The pleading tone did have some effect and the help arrived. 

"Submit " button daba doon (Shall I press the submit button) Oh, it was for this confirmation that she needed an "expert" ? 

Permission obtained, data submitted , both were looking keenly at the response on the monitor. How I wish I had access to the screen they were staring at! Finally, Ghanshyam informed me with an absolutely sorry look ," Minimum amount, the system would accept would be Rs 5400, as you have not deposited for over 3 years" . Fortunately , there was an ATM of a private bank nearby,and the correct amount was deposited and the transaction was committed on the server. I am sure that was the only transaction done by that lady for the day.  

As I was leaving the Post office, I just happened to glance at the Speed Post Counter to see some activity on the printer. So, the 50th restart had worked ?!  I asked him if he could try now. he said in a sing song voice "Khosish karenge..... . Ho jaata .......to ...bahut achcha hoga" (I'll try and if it works, fine) . After four envelopes, when my turn came , the system hanged again. He looked at me, amused yet accusingly ,declaring that the system hanged as soon as he had fed the data pertaing to my letter! Mea Culpa !! But he was kind enough to restart again and this time it worked !

Everyone was so nice and wanting to be so helpful yet were so helpless . Now that all transactions are online , there is no looking back. So,  they have no other option but to look back and yell for "GhanShyam " or whosoever could coax a server into action  on that day .

 

A Bicycle Lamp and Bell

I am regular reader of Open page of The Hindu.  Here's an article by Ashokamitran .

The writer gives a humorous account of his tryst with the law on traffic violation. The violation happened to be 'not having a properly working bell on his Bicycle'.  The infringement takes him to the court , where he pays a fine and finally , armed with the receipt from the court, he retrieves his bicycle from the police station.

 Today, the story sounds so exaggerated and even fictitious , but I know it is very much true. In early seventies,  I have seen cyclists in the  twilight hour ,looking for a match box to light their  lamps. Then the introduction of the Dynamo light was a great improvement and convenience. 

Nothing tells more about an issue than the jokes it evokes in the weekly magazines,(like Kumudam and Vikatan) much like the whatsapp jokes today. The magazines those days had many cartoons on the plight of an erring cyclist and a policeman. I distinctly remember a  few lines from a play in our school days . It goes like this, 

Cyclist :why do I need light, the whole town is lit up? 

and the policeman deflates his tyres saying,"why do you need air in your tyre, the whole place is full of air ? Ha ha. 

Coming to the present, I still use a bicycle and at times I miss a simple bicycle lamp. I went to my favourite cycle shop at Mhow bazaar to correct the situation. As  is customary in Mhow, the shop was small enough to repair a punctured tube and big enough to sell and service a 15-gear Bicycle. But when I asked for a Cycle lamp, there was a look of disbelief and some smirking all around as if I had asked for the moon. I continued to keep a straight face indicating that it was a serious question and I was still waiting for a serious answer. Gradually the smirking stopped and one of the guys replied "Saab yahan chal jaata hai" (You can do without it here). 

How have we come to this state where it is perfectly OK to ride motorcycles without helmet, or for four adults to travel on a motorcycle and the number of people or stores on a bicycle is limited only by the pedaling  power of the cyclist? Lamps and bells are not even available leave alone being mandatory. Anyway, I scouted for one online and placed an order, and I intend using it however ridiculous it might look on the streets of Mhow.

Who Stole My MIlk ? - Facebook Style !

I am totally indebted to the face book philosophers for this post. The name of the game is "who stole my milk ?"

 To begin with , you pick up a photo of a hungry looking child like the one on the left. I picked up the first image answering to the search 'hungry child'; Just avoid African and Whites as the game involves some serious 'India bashing'.

The next step is to find  the villain who could have stolen the milk from the Child. If not stolen , you can always argue that 'so and so ' is so well off that it would be a sin if he /they do not provide milk to the Child.


The villain could be anyone who is involved in  expending some milk. It could also be symbolically expressed by just show of wealth. A lot depends on who is your target. If you think the govt is to blame ... then show a Govt partying... Add a caption ,

they have laddoos to celebrate but no milk for a hungry child



In case  you are anti-corporate , bring in Vijay Mallaya.

The banks have 9000 crores for Mallya and none for the hungry child

Peaceniks  can always go after the Hawks crying for a higher defence budget. They can  come up with “Cost of one Fighter aircraft can feed all the hungry children in the country !” Even The OROP bill for 8000 crores can be attacked !


Of course the easiest target is  religion . Get a picture of an idol being offered milk ... or cash being counted at a religious place. Imagine,   the amount of money  people spend on God; If only this money is spent on the poor , there would be no child going to bed hungry. (It's a different matter , that had there been no temples, this money would most likely be used to make Vijay Mallya and the like richer)

 You can even blame  the farmers . There was a news report from Odisha about three weeks back, that the farmers emptied a milk tanker letting 14000 litres of milk flowing on to  the street. No use crying over spilt milk; they were just protesting against a company not accepting the quality of milk they supplied.  news report

The scope is tremendous; you can do IPL bashing or F-1 Race bashing if you don't like sports. With some imagination you can make even children feel guilty. How ? throw some statistics like "70% of the milk produce is used for making Ice Cream and Confectionery " So any ice cream eating or chocolate eating child is literally eating into the minimum protein requirement of a poor , hungry child; isn't it ? One photo does it all; depends on where you place it.

The Other Train Journey in SA

  

       Anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the life of mahatma Gandhi would be familiar with the story of Gandhiji being unceremoniously thrown out from a First Class Compartment in South Africa. 

To quote  Louis Fischer,

.............The incident occurred at At Maritzburg, the capital of Natal, in 1893.Gandhi could have returned to the train and found a place in the third class car. But he chose to remain in the station waiting room. It was cold in the mountains. His overcoat was in his luggage which the railway people were holding; afraid to be insulted again, he did not ask for it. All night long, he sat and shivered, and brooded. ..... That bitter night at Maritzburg the germ of social protest was born in Gandhi. ................

From an ordinary lawyer, the transformation to an extraordinary world leader had started.

    

What is lesser known is the other journey that transformed Gandhi's life and indirectly India's destiny was another rail journey Gandhiji undertook in 1904.

       During the period from 1893 to 1904, Gandhiji continued to practice as a lawyer at Johannesburg. He took up all kinds of issues affecting the Indian Community in South Africa , through every available forum,  for redressal, but he was essentially a successful Indian lawyer.

      In 1903, Gandhi had helped to start a weekly magazine called Indian Opinion. The paper was in difficulties, and to cope with them at first hand Gandhi took a trip to Durban where the magazine was published.  By then he had found a close friend in Henry S. L. Polak, a London born Jew who totally involved himself in the Indians' cause in Transvaal. Polak saw him off at the station and gave him a book to read for the long journey. It was John Ruskin's Unto This Last.

      As Gandhiji himself says in 'My Experiments with Truth" 

"It gripped me. Johannesburg to Durban was a twenty-four hours' journey. The train reached there in the evening. I could not get any sleep that night. I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book," Gandhi wrote.

    

"I believe that I discovered some of my deepest convictions in this great book," he wrote, adding the work "captured me and made me transform my life."

Again to quote Louis Fischer,

 ........Those books appealed to him most which were closest to his concept of life and, where they deviated, he brought them closer by interpreting them. 'It was a habit with me'. Gandhi once wrote, 'to forget what I did not like and to carry out in practice whatever I liked.'........

        At the end of the journey , he was fully convinced of the course of action he should take. He wrote a long letter to his elder brother  to be relieved of the financial commitments to his family. It was his brother who had sent him to London to study law. He bought a piece of land to establish an Ashram. It was called Phoenix farm. The rail journey took place in Oct 1904 and in Nov 1904, Phoenix farm was born.

 

      It took him another year to completely close down his establishment at Johannesburg , but thereafter , he never looked back. In South Africa it was Phoenix Farm and later Tolstoy Farm. Back in India it was  Sabarmati Ashram and later Warda Ashram that  became the hub of Indian freedom Struggle.

       Gandhiji had a wonderful faculty of translating into practice anything that appealed to his intellect. Some of the changes he had made in his life were as prompt as they were radical.

       He did not preach but just practiced what appealed to him . When asked by a someone as to what was his message to the world , he could simply say,          

                             My life is my message

A Town Called Mhow

    How often have I been asked ? A south Indian, how come you have settled down at Mhow? I have no clear answers . But every time  I hear such a question, it triggers a series of thoughts on the uniqueness of Mhow.

   As a fauji I have been through 23 different places of posting , generally referred to as a military station or a cantonment. Many fellow-rovers would  agree with me that most of the people , toy with the idea of settling down in their place of posting, some time or the other . It could be the Nilgiris,  a Punjabi might fall in love with or Pithoragarh (google map please!) that might entice a South Indian. But these places are known for the short tourist seasons , and the ideas for taking roots  at such places are also seasonal...  In Pithoragarh  if you go through one winter ,  the salubrious climate in Summer is spoilt with this thought “If summer is here , can winter be far behind ?, .. run before it sets in" . It would be John Keats reverse-quoted (a word I just coined) .

So it goes, one place good only for summer, another good only for winter, too far North or too far South, East or west , too much rain or too little rain, concrete jungle or too remote a place and it goes on... Now let us look at Mhow. It is like the story of Narasimhavatar of Vishnu.... neither too warm or too cold, neither too North or too South, neither urban nor rural, neither a cantonment nor a civil area...well , on which ever axis you consider, it falls right in the middle ! It Includes some dubious considerations; neither are people too law abiding nor too lawless !

Any account of Mhow is not complete without a mention of Mhow-bazaar. The Main street is almost as if custom made for the fauji ladies ! Walking across just half a km, they can find   fancy gowns, dresses , suits, leather jackets, leather boots, or beautiful curtains , paintings, wood carvings and such stuff for their drawing room , ingredients to exercise all their culinary skills in Chinese and Continental dishes (poor husbands !). Mhow tailors , historically , have been catering for the Rajas and aristocrats during  British India and later to the army personnel posted all over the country in the Independent India. I for one have always got my uniforms made at Mhow, wherever I was posted; did I say 23 stations ?

Whats so great about a market and tailors? It is the ambiance that strikes. Whether it is the people moving about in the narrow streets and lanes of the town, or the shop keepers sitting at their desk on a summer afternoon, there is a sense of timelessness. Many shops actually shut down from two to four for the afternoon siesta. The bhoras are always smiling with the 'koi dikkat nahin' attitude. I bought  curtain rods for my house, my measurements turned out to be wrong and I went back for exchanging them , not with much hope. As it happened ,  fresh piecees were cut to the revised size with a 'Koi dikkat nahin' smile.

My wife had been lugging around an old Sumit mixer grinder , absolutely functional but one crucial knob missing. The machine was so obsolete no spares were  available anywhere. That was before we reached Mhow. A 10 ft by 12 ft shop with a know-all , do-all owner, with a 'koi dikkat nahin ' attitude  found the right solution in no time . It is not just the jugaad for repairing stuff , they can also produce such stuff found only in elite stores. I was looking for a 'quiche tray' and the same shop-keeper produced it seemingly out of nowhere. (I had only recently learnt the word 'quiche' but as a shop-keeper of Main street , Mhow he was fully aware of the the contraption as an essential need of a fauji mem-saab.)

An ancient defence service officers institute coupled with modern libraries, gymnasiums , tennis and squash courts, an olympic size  swimming pool, a sprawling golf course and most importantly the ambiance of Mhow-bazaar has made this place truly a haven for a retired fauji.

Quote Unquote

In the era of social media , it has become the trend to share 'Quotes' . Find out what you want to say, then check out who has said a similar thing, modify it a bit and it will carry more weight. I have done a subtle experiment on Facebook ,don't tell anyone, to embellish my sayings ,with some good background, fancy fonts and finally by appending the name of some celebrity . It definitely gets more 'likes', thank God there is no provision for 'dislike'. 

Actually there is no harm in these 'shares' as long as you just keep receiving and forwarding , focusing only on the number of 'likes' and 'shares' ;not really reading anything, or seriously considering the contents. 

Trouble starts when some one reads and may be follows it up with some study of his own and then he feels offended. 

I have been receiving some serious sounding stuff on parenting, attributed to Tamil saint Thiruvalluvar. . These sayings were everywhere except in the only book he is said to have written ! This is one work, I have been carrying even on LRPs (Long Range Patrols, for mycivilian friends)...

In some of the groups , I pointed it out, then I just got tired of pointing out, since few read them anyway. 

There was another quote attributed to Swami Vivekananda. This was particularly creative as it just mentioned one part of the paragraph and conveniently left the concluding remark , which was 180 degrees apart. I have always carried the complete works of Swami... wherever I have been . So, immediately I checked back and got so upset, seeing the out of context, mischievous 'quote' . I shouldn't have got upset really but somethings are beyond you . Got to be a little thick-skinned, if you want to surf the social media sites and also read. Who cares for the niceties of right and wrong and feelings of readers. Finally I wrote a blog post to assuage my hurt sentiments and it ended there. 

So, in any group, I think it is better to avoid 'quotes' on anything particularly subjective issues. Once you own responsibility for your words , it is very difficult to make sweeping statements like 'Christians are always good' or 'Jews are always bad' , though it is convenient to post the same as views expressed by Hitler or Pope. 

Secondly, If a quote has to be posted why not check out on the validity,  the time, place and the purpose of the quote , by consulting Prof Google for 5-10 minutes?

Note This does not apply to anecdotes which are best expressed by the narrator in his own style. 

Tailpiece : What is a rule if you cant break it. Having spoken at length about quotes, here's a quote by Chanakya "Rumour mongers should be given death penalty" . I quoted this to a fellow-officer at a lighter moment for spreading some silly rumour of some one having received his posting order to some place. (cant think beyond). He assumed a very serious posture and replied "Murali , I am not spreading any rumour, I just originated it. Others are spreading it; go and kill them".

Cheers !

murali