Politicos are adept at materialising muck from thin air to be slung at their opponents. With Chennai’s garbage woes overflowing, not just metaphorically but literally too, the opposition here have their hands full without recourse to a magic wand.
Browsing: COLUMNS
‘He who is a just protector will be deemed the Lord’s deputy’, says Thiruvalluvar in verse 388. Now, I am not about to begin a Budget speech, a la, FM PC. Rather the discourse that follows is on an extremely ‘trivial’ issue, an issue that is fast becoming as commonplace as a greasy constable, a pot-holed road, dry taps, a local dada or a pompous politico, all legacies of a degenerate polity.
My thick skull is nuclear-resistant. Somehow, stuff like plutonium, uranium, curium, neptunium etc fail to make even a dent on my cranium. I guess it is so for many of you readers also with all this high voltage nit-picking on the the nitty-gritties of Indo-US nuclear deal passing way above our heads.
The human mind, rational or religious, has an uncanny passion for dates as milestones on the eternal highway of time. In fact, even when there is no diary entry of a noteworthy event, ‘Days’ pop up every day, so to say: Valentine’s Day, Friendship Day, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day etc. Of course, Independence Day is supposed to be intrinsically different.
The human mind, rational or religious, has an uncanny passion for dates as milestones on the eternal highway of time. In fact, even when there is no diary entry of a noteworthy event, ‘Days’ pop up every day, so to say: Valentine’s Day, Friendship Day, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day etc. Of course, Independence Day is supposed to be intrinsically different.
With Kalam back in Chennai, Haneef back home, Sanjay Dutt back in jail, Madhani back in Kerala, J and K back at each other’s throat after just a few hours respite, over Tata, Tata’s Titanium itself back in the shelves, the monsoon back a bit too soon and yes, Indian cricket coming back into limelight with a win
These are not the most courteous of times. With reputations of even national ‘heroes’, past and present, going for a toss and the credibility of public personalities and institutions constantly under test, disrespect looks like a natural national habit and a generational trait.
27 May, 1964 — Jawaharlal Nehru’s last day on earth happened to be my first. My father, TRR, a great admirer of ‘Panditji’ or an admirer of the ‘great’ Panditji, as he would prefer it, promptly named me after the just-dead PM. So, I was among the first to be born into an India minus Nehru, the earliest possible member of the post-Nehru generation.
At the height of the stock scam in 1992, FM Manmohan Singh declared that he ‘will not lose much sleep over it’. With terror topping the charts a decade and a half later, the sleeping habits of the former FM, now PM, have apparently changed drastically and diametrically.