On a bright and sunny Saturday, in fact on our nation’s Republic Day, we head to the EWS quarters at Ejipura which’ve been recently demolished. From the main road, we see walls of rubble and not knowing where to go, we call one of the volunteers there.

“Come to the church next to the big tree,” she tells us as we tip-toe around garbage mounds and broken footpath slabs.

As we enter past the yellow barricades, we see flattened land all around us. What was once a teeming slum with hundreds of homes was now just a level ground of mud, bricks and an occasional forgotten belonging. There were small children playing with plastic bags and empty water bottles.
The big tree was easy to spot – it was the only standing structure apart from the small church that cowered under it.

On our left were new concrete pipes a few feet in length and large enough to have a man standing inside them. Some of the families had made these pipes their new home – shelter was redefined.

We reach the tree and the volunteer turn out was meagre. One of the coordinators hands out a form to us and asks us to collect information about the remaining families in the premises. This information would then be used to better mobilise resources and to figure out an action plan for the families. While we are going through this form and understanding the work involved, the children have gathered around us. They are eager to show what they’ve been learning at the local school nearby. A school they no longer go to. They sing nursery rhymes – Johnny Johnny Yes Papa evokes much laughter.

A van with the caption “Jesus in Ministry of Lord” on its windscreen comes right opposite the church and stops. Furtively, a man, who represented Maverick Holdings (owners of Garuda malls), packs off a family from one of the pipes into the van. The van quickly starts moving towards the exit.
We rush towards the van to prevent this forced eviction. The compensation of Rs. 5000 per family was reduced to Rs. 2000 by this man. When questioned, he refused to give more. We blocked the van’s exit by sitting in front of it. This got the cops riled up and within minutes many more police personnel reach the venue.

“I will have you arrested in contempt of court,” the police head tells us, caressing his walkie-talkie as he spoke. He then looks at the German volunteer who was protesting with us and says, “We will confiscate your passport.” The German makes a gesture with his hands and this makes the cop go ballistic. He looks at me and screams that he will confiscate my passport too and that he would file cases against all of us. He then gets his mobile phone out, peers into it under the blazing sun, calls up his superiors and arranges for an arrest to happen.

The family who was seated in the van suddenly steps out and pleads with us to let them go. They were grateful for the Rs. 2000 and feared that they would lose even that. We lost our case to poverty and thuggery. We let the van go. The police smirked.

The head cop turned to me and said “Why are you people preventing our work?”
“We are not. We want these families to get compensation,” I tell him.
“See, it is really the goodness of Maverick Holdings’ owner that he is giving at least this much to these people. You people should go thank him,” he says this with clear conviction. Obviously the police had no compassion for the poor. They sang praises of the builder who was doing all this.

The children under the tree had now started singing the national anthem with gusto. They sang with pride, they beamed with joy. They were singing a song about a nation that was killing them slowly right there. A nation that had turned its back on them, a nation that was walking away from them quite nimbly – and the children slapped their foreheads in salute and in unison as the words Jai Hind came out and echoed into the air.

The van had, by now, managed to evict 4 more families. This time they were given Rs. 5000 each thanks to the volunteers checking the money and ensuring that the families did not sign any receipt until they got this money from the builder’s representative. The evicted families would either resettle in some other slums or just be thrown on footpaths. The children were excited about a van ride, not quite knowing that this was pretty much the end of any hope that there might’ve been about their future.

There was one boy, around 3 years old, who hung around and played with all of us. A naughty kid with a lot of energy. There was a 6 year old girl who loved the sketch pens that some of us were carrying and she asked for “fresh paper” to do some colouring on her own. Suddenly the children were having a nice time. Sitting there under the church, I made paper planes with the printed material of the planned freedom march. The kids wanted many more of these “rockets”. For some halting moments we forgot that we were amidst tragedy as these paper rockets left small hands, jumped up in the air and hurtled down.

Late evening as the moon appeared on the horizon, all the pipes were empty. Most families were evicted. There were some more families on the other parts of the land and we distributed clothes to them.

“Dinner is coming,” was a phrase we chanted regularly as the people came up to us asking for food of any kind. The kids were still hanging around and scattered families were in talks trying to figure out what to do, where to go.

We walked away from the site with a sense of shame. The ground on which those kids threw paper planes will be decorated with a mall. A mall for us all. A mall built on the broken futures of our weaker children. Jai Hind.

The Aman ki Asha initiative by the Times of India and the Jang group has created a fabulous advertisement. I really loved this one:

If you are unable to see the embed above, click on this link to watch the advertisement.

The OPEN Magazine (to which I have taken quite a fancy owing to its insightful articles) carries this article by Hartosh Singh Bal titled Bhopal: The Other Story

On the forthcoming 25th anniversary of perhaps the biggest man-made tragedy of our country, Hartosh writes as to why the Bhopal victims are better off without the hordes of visitors who will fly in to commemorate this rather dark past.

An interesting excerpt:

If you want the truth, don’t pay attention to those who parachute in for a day or two or those who claim to understand Bhopal from London, don’t even take my word for any of this. Go to Bhopal armed with a knowledge of Hindi and see for yourself. Allow yourself a month or two in the city to see how the victims who cannot obtain the medicine they need are helped by a story on the front page of the New York Times or a book on the Booker shortlist.

Read the complete article here.

About a month ago, I had come across this interesting article about goddess Lakshmi, which gave a very different perspective on the concept of wealth creation and its associated morals. The article was so insightful that I made note of the author, Devdutt Pattanaik, and bought one of his books – Vishnu, an Introduction.

Hence, I was glad when I came to know (via @aditisi) that Devdutt Pattanaik was one of the speakers at the recently concluded TED Talks. I would highly recommend this talk which you can view below. If you are unable to view the player, click on this link.

Devdutt talks about how differences in beliefs of God, Life and Death influence culture. An important line that he states is “culture is man’s reaction to nature”.
Do check out the entire talk (it is about 18 minutes long and well worth your time).

As much as I respect the Tata group (and consider myself lucky to have seen Mr. Ratan Tata in person way back when I was in school), I think they have gone a bit off the mark here.

Tata Sons has reportedly filed a suit against the popular travel community website OkTataByeBye.com. Infact, a panelist of the World Intellectual Property Organization has declared that the ownership of this domain should be handed over to the Tata group!
Clearly, the usage of the phrase “Tata” in the website is more in line with the colloquial goodbye that we all use. I really don’t think this infringes any copyrights or trademark of the Tata Group.

Please read the appeal put out by OkTataByeBye.com here:
http://www.oktatabyebye.com/support-us/Appeal.aspx

And add your comment there if you think this is a bit overboard.

Tata for now, ladies and gentlemen. I meant the goodbye one, of course.

In this interesting article in The New York Times, Anand Giridharadas, talks about his feelings towards India, a country he only fleetingly knew as his parents had settled in the US of A.  After spending 6 years in India and now departing back to the States, Anand reflects back on how his attitude towards India has changed. Poignant, I say.
Early years:

My cousins in India would sometimes ask if I was Indian or American. I saw that their self-esteem depended on my answer. “American,” I would say, because it was the truth, and because I felt that to say otherwise would be to accept a lower berth in the world.

And now:

But the greatest change I have witnessed is elsewhere. It is in the mind: Indians now know that they don’t have to leave, as my parents left, to have their personal revolutions.

Read the complete article here.

Link submitted by Giri Giridhar at The Better India.

Forbes India carries this wonderful article on Dr. Devi Shetty and his Narayana Hrudyalaya Institute of Cardiac Sciences. While the world over cardiac surgeries are very expensive, Dr. Shetty has managed to bring down the costs significantly.
The article talks about his “Wal-mart approach to healthcare” which is essentially using scale to negotiate costs. The article says:

Scale helped Shetty shave off costs of medical tests too. Take blood gas analysis. At Rs. 350-400 per test, it forms the bulk of the cost for an ICU patient in India. At Narayana Hrudyalaya it costs merely Rs. 8.50 per test!

Read the complete article: The World’s Largest Heart Factory

“Are you ok?”

Many people have asked me that since yesterday. As I open my mouth to answer that once again, the next line slips in:
“Are you ok Annie?” and Michael Jackson croons with some great music in the background.

What happened was this: I was walking on the footpath of a road. A path that is meant for pedestrians to walk on.
However, someone had kept a long wooden platform on that footpath, merely to deter bikers from parking their bikes on that section of the footpath.

I was oblivious of this fact of course, and keeping my head high, I trotted along the footpath, looking around for some missing clue about our life and this universe.


Suddenly, I notice that my right foot was no longer keeping up with the rest of my body. My brain wakes up and gets instantly into first gear, detecting a pending calamity. Electric signals from my brain’s few million neurons fire relentlessly trying to get the word to my right leg as soon as possible.
The right leg, in the meanwhile, has shut off incoming communication. My brain is still frantically trying to establish organic contact. No luck though.

In the meanwhile, my body’s upper half has lost the plot and starts yielding to the by now strong strains of gravity.


My right leg finally realises its mistake, wedges itself out of the platform and signals back to the brain, “All is Ok. Move on now.”
“A little too late,” signals my brain back as it now gets into the tried-and-tested damage saving mode. Both my hands, which were until now waiting for orders from the higher ups, spring into action. With the palms hoping to cut off gravity’s intense strength, my hands move faster than my falling body, past my upper torso and prevent the ground from taking my full impact. A slight jerk in the shoulder and my brain disengages from “panic mode” and switches to the “realization mode”.


However, all is still not well. The right leg, in its attempt to get out from underneath the wooden plank, and under immense pressure from the brain to react, had put in a little extra effort which had to be passed on to the upper parts of the body. All this meant that my face now came crashing down on the stony pavement, my hands looking sideways at each other not quite knowing where this face landed from.


I now have a couple of bruises on the right side of my face, quite close to the eye. And my shoulder aches occasionally. Yet, here I am, writing this blog post and still keeping an eye out for that missing clue about our life and this universe.


Bouquets and get-well soon cards accepted for free. Just leave a comment here indicating so and you will get a reply with delivery instructions.

A good friend of mine (and a former classmate as well) left a comment on the Facebook Wall asking me why I hadn’t posted here for a long time now. Well, here I am and I would like to thank BV for getting me back on track on this blog. I must mention here that he runs an excellent blog on movies – Srini at the Movies

There have been many things to update, but just not enough motivation or time to write them down here. However, off-late, I have been more into micro-blogging (twitter etc) than blogging. Some of my recent updates on Twitter are:

Bhadmanus – A play in Hindi at Rangashankara on Tue, 31st March. Telebooking on 9739803104 , 9739096270 | Onlinebooking: www.indianstage.in

Just finished reading book 1 (Kapilavastu) of the series Buddha by Osamu Tezuka. Its a beautiful graphic novel. Recommended read.

Watched Majid Majidi’s highly acclaimed film – The Song of Sparrows. Visual metaphors abound and make you think – http://tinyurl.com/d9ye9w

Coming back to more interesting details, the media frenzy over the upcoming elections has been fun to watch. Every news channel worth its hosts is selling the election fever. One such piece of news was that of the emergence of a professionals’ political party – which aims to get into politics on the strength of the proverbial educated class of the society. The television campaigns urging people to vote has worked well on me and I am ready and armed to go to the polling booth. Bring the candidates on the inspection stage. The only problem, however, is that I am not quite sure whom to vote for. All the parties currently contesting have dubious track records and not-so-morally-correct candidates. I am aware that there is a vote to “not vote” , but I hope I don’t end up doing that. Because in that case, I would have had no say in the government that will be formed post these elections.

The emergence of the Third Front has been a welcome addition to the already full newspaper columns. It wasn’t enough to have the Left and the Right. We needed a third direction, which will perhaps not take us anywhere, but at least it is an option. Then there are the inflammatory speeches by certain candidates and retaliation from the others.

At one point in time, don’t you feel really disgusted at this whole song and dance show? At this mad craving for power at no matter what cost?
And we running to the poll booths to satisfy the hunger of these authority-seeking supposed servants of the public? I don’t know about you, but I do feel disgusted on seeing this crazy circus during pre-elections.

Yet, I shall go vote. Because I also believe that only by voting can we bring about a change. It might be a slow, very slow process. But it will be worth the effort. And, lest you forget, it will give the news channels something to talk about.

Enjoy.