Ajith Nair

The Delhi rape is a shocker. Every rape is a shocker. Every rape is one rape too many. It’s an insult to our culture, our past, our nationhood and the defining values of our society. Yet, we cannot negate a rape because it wasn’t done by people like us or daresay it didn’t happen to us. Am sorry, that is a convenient sidestep that we the Indian middle class have perfected. We can’t afford to do so any longer or any more. I am not linking this to just the Delhi rape. I am linking this to all incidents in the recent past, that were supposed to shake the foundations of our morality, most of them did, yet we accepted and move on- EMIs to pay, promotions to earn, movies to watch. Some of us at least stood up and said “enough is enough”, held up candles, organized protests, sent texts in support, signed petitions. Well done. But not enough done. How is this inaction acting on all of us? Are we feeling guilty, many of us are! We wear the guilt strongly in words, justify lack of action...

Among many things that vie for our attention and sometimes do manage to get it is our breakfast and of course our kids. They really have to fight hard to win over the ipad or the handheld device that has kept us engrossed, across apps, tweets, FB messages and instagrams. This morning was no different, staring at the many green buttons that emerged on my FB chat window, some of who also were parts of the Gmail chat app as well. Each of those green buttons meant something, a need to connect a need to feel connected. Yet, none of them were possibly really connected to anyone. This is the biggest paradox of the times that we live in, we have more ‘friends’ than any past generation ever did, we have more means to talk, chat, scream, dialogue than any past generation, yet we are bereft of any emotional fulfillment that these should bring. For most of us, this is an addictive companion who you want to have by your side, but don’t want to engage too much with. The makers of social med...

The IPL is the biggest private party that anyone’s ever had in India. While we can debate who the host is, who’s serving drinks, who’s invited and gate crashing, the party is here to stay. It is a metaphor for the raunchiness that pervades a society’s mind that is coming to grips with its identity caught in the time warp between hallowed ideala and a materialistic identity. It’s about the collective subjecting itself to a sin, knowing in its conscience that this is wrong The layering makes the case very interesting. The nomenclature of the teams has an aggressive tone to it; battle cries adorn all their team songs. Every team has a either a glamorous owner or a ravishing ambassador, the late night parties being the story of legendary exploits of players off the field. There are skimpily clad cheerleaders, being treated as feminine objects, meant to prance about in a gladiatorial setting. Every inch of space, on the ground, in the mind has been sold, franchised commercialized labeled. R...

The ideology space in society is constantly shifting and changing. As we go global and create the Indian way of doing global things, the debate on what we are all about is hitting us, sometimes in a rather shallow manner. The idea that one can have multiple identities yet be an Indian, seems to put uncomfortable question marks on some faces, the numbers of these only increasing. Not to say that PLU (People like Us) have got it all right. Our ideology stems from conveniently shaping a world around us as we deem fit. So this might mean displacing farmers, getting rid of slums, marginalizing the poor and sanitizing the city. This might also mean thrusting upon society a model of progress that is marked by greater material gain, a wider global footprint and a more liberal outlook, as we see it. Our acceptance of alternate spaces, lifestyles, points of view is limited, and is paid lip service to in debate forums. Real data if measured might reveal that our understanding, empathy and drive t...

Three idiots was entertaining and thought provoking. It seemed easy to stand at the sidelines and label those who follow curriculum as boring. Conversely, it seemed fascinating that one day everyone would find their calling if they followed their hearts, and become inventors, artists, thinkers and geniuses. The world would become a great place to live in with everyone doing what they’re essentially good at. The problem with this chimera seems to be, how can one reliably know that this is it. How do we figure out that this is what we are made for and there isn’t anything better to do out there? The simple answer is one probably can't and this has its own perils. Look no further than Mumbai where a spate of suicides has taken place in the recent past by children who’ve been rejected by a system that suddenly seems to be thrusting children into all kinds of talent exploration. Some children have given up at not having won a talent contest or not having been selected for another. One c...

Mumbai has just released its ‘fines’ data. Most fines have been levied on people peeing on roads (65%) followed by those spitting. The fines have been levied by special beat marshals who’ve been recruited to reprimand and levy fines from citizens for various reasons. There are 120 odd marshals which essentially means one marshal for 1.5 lakh citizens! The equivalent cop ratio is one cop every 50000 citizens. These beat marshals have been assigned wards within which they’re supposed to operate. I head out every day to work but haven’t seen these Marshals ever, not surprising given the ratio above. If we try and analyse how the average Marshal might work, the truth is simple. There are certainly more number of people peeing than chewing paan and spitting. Everybody needs to pee but not everyone needs to chew paan and spit. If we did then we might have bigger industry players in the paan business than just the nukkad panwala. The fines for spitting and peeing are the same. Anyone who’s li...

Saw a man who attempted flicking a woman’s cell phone get mercilessly bashed up by two otherwise shady looking characters who conveniently assumed a moral high ground. In Mumbai we have a term for this, it’s called “haath dhoke lena”. The other day in Surat, a mob lynched two rapists from under the nose of some cops. It didn’t help that the rapists were Muslims, good old Gujarati bias also came to the fore I guess. Shiney Ahuja and his hapless maid are both get a similar haath dhona treatment from the media and public at large. The media is peddling stories of morality, sleaze and virtue and has pronounced him guilty. It doesn’t help that his wife comes out in the open and makes some pretty obnoxious statements (“even a man can get raped”) accompanied by what looked like a kitty party jing-bang of neighbouring aunties. The poor maid of course is the butt of many an insensitive jokes doing the rounds on sms and newspapers. In Bengal, Maoists are openly challenging the Govt to fight them...

Mumbai has seen a lower turnout than last time. Blame it on 1. Long weekend, most have voted with their feet for vacation spots around the city 2. Summer heat- people rather chill out at home than sweat it out poring over largely uninspiring candidate lists 3. What's in it for me- no real immediate faayda for a city used to immediate gratification 4. Offices remain open- Inspite of govt orders, offices functioned. What would you rather do, propitiate your irate boss or vote for that candidate you never ever saw? 5. Redrawing of constituencies- Familiar candidates now might be contesting from other constituencies. Unfamiliarity breeds absence I did vote, in relative comfort. Most booths were empty.

The accessories of the Father of the Nation have been rescued by the Frother of the Nation. I wonder if the great man in Khadi would have approved, cared, laughed or just shrugged it away. In true jingoistic fashion, the nation is celebrating the return of the treasure that ‘truly belongs to us’. It helps that our Knight in shining armour also happens to be the most flamboyant face of emerging India. For some, the paradox of the event is not lost. Beer baron, sybarite, ladies man, uses lucre to buy the belongings of someone who was anything but all these. There is a bigger question that needs to be asked and I dare to. Why is it that the urge to reclaim something that is ‘rightfully ours’ emerges only when an outsider attempts to capture that space. Slumdog Millionaire with all its generalizations and fantasies, made India suddenly sit up and want to stake claim for its street kids and urchins. Otherwise shoo-ed away or summarily dismissed without rolling down car windows, these kids ...

These are tough times for the sub continent. Sri Lanka thought it had won the war against the LTTE but then realized that it’s not over until it’s over. The Bangladeshi rifles went berserk, India went through 26/11, Pakistan is under ever increasing threat of falling to the Taliban and now the Lankan cricketers have been targeted in Pakistan. The Govt of India is reviewing feasibility of IPL given elections in April, May. Rubbish. Terror wars are creeping to our doors and the ploy now seems to be around doing the unexpected, taking by surprise and making the unexpected happen. I sympathize with the average Pakistani and the average Lankan. They probably don’t have too much to do with the reasons why an LTTE was born or why Taliban entered their country. Yet they seem to have been unwillingly cast in the dramatic chapters of how the terror war will ensue. They are props who will play corpses, maimed strugglers and terrified by standers. Some might go beyond their ‘designate’ roles and ...

What promised to end as an obituary now is a fantastic story of rebirth and resurrection. As you might have guessed from the title the villain, the vanquished and the villain of this story is that four letter Govt telecom company. Yours truly is a side hero, one who's as dispensible as Amar Singh's wit. Four weeks ago, the MTNL Triband connection whimpered to a halt. The data transfer light on my modem made occasional blinked like a lighthouse far away. I promptly rang the Helpline. The Help part of helpline in my opinion, needs an exclamation mark after it if it has to aptly describe the state of poor souls who seek its umbrage. A Maharashtrian aunty who had just finished cutting vegetables for the next day picked up the phone and said "Kya problem hai" I restrained pouring my heart filled with problems and told her the facts. "Complaint no 4508. Thud". I felt deprived and consigned to a shit hole like in the movie Slumdog Millionaire After a few days of wa...

Before 26th Nov, the biggest congregations in Mumbai happened at Mumbai CST and Churchgate railway stations during peak hours. A million anonymous faces jostled with each other, garnered inches, all with the common purpose of getting that prize foothold in a suburban local. Strangers and even more strangers poured in and out of these stations like a giant assembly line. In between, strange circuits sparked conversations, cricket scores, what’s the time now, can you shift a bit, is this the Borivali Fast or the Andheri slow and so on. Such transactional pieces of conversation defined the crowded space that we all shared. Elsewhere, stock prices, prices of vegetables on the street, saale ****ve baaju hat na in traffic or a more paternal baap ka rasta hai kya. This is our lingo, defined by ourselves either as the ones who launched these or the ones who received these. This common code defined the language of transaction, transaction of every kind in Mumbai. Yes there were the show of emot...

A daily dose of madness That rare moment to smile That breathless march of life Gasping once a while Life eludes me everyday I chase and cling to the rails Manage to hold my course somehow With wind against my sails Balance daily my burden Wife, home and kid And frustrated sometimes at work I wish I never did When the routine day ends and I wish I wouldn’t live again a terrorist shoots at me point blank Relieves me of my pain

Much has been said, written, blogged, messaged and shown about that remarkable man Barack Obama. A lot of us know more about him than say about our neighbours. There is a remarkable connect that he’s made from Fiji to Florida from Melbourne to Moscow. Everybody has a reason to like Barack Obama and there is almost a personal connect that each of us feels. Most politicians around the world would give an arm and a leg to achieve this kind of connects with their electorate. Yes We can might have worked in America, In Europe it was the alternative to Mr. Bush theory, In Africa it was the son of the soil reasons, in Indonesia he was seen like family, in the Arab world he was partly their own religion and so on. While the gene pool and demographics like African American played their role, I feel the connect with Obama had a deeper reason. The world that we live in has only got more fractured, more complex and more strife ridden. There are cross purposes to every action, there are unwarranted...

Networked World 1. Best prices for products 2. Access to markets 3. Cross cultural information 4. Greater tolerance 5. Global communities 6. Opportunities to develop 7. Million applications on Facebook 8. Lost friends on Orkut 9. Concerted efforts on environment 10. Point of view on everything Networked World 1. Terror on everyone’s mind 2. Spam in everyone’s Inbox 3. AIDS for all 4. Climate changes that kill 5. Helplessness and despondency 6. Point of view on everything 7. Financial Crisis 8. Rupee is cheap 9. “We love you Bush” (huh!!!) 10. Osama has more power than Obama

As I write this, Karnal Singh, JCP, Delhi Police has had his second round of press conference, detailing the complex web of SIMI and Indian Mujahideen, time and again to an inattentive, misbehaved, mike thrusting media. The core perpetrators of most recent blasts have been the same people. A good number of them have been accounted for, the rest are at large. Meanwhile opinion among the public and experts are rife about root causes of terrorism. Many have talked about the marginalization of the minority, the ineffective policing of states and the failure of our intelligence network. Some analyses have been commendable and state the truth, with ample support. Others have been emotional diatribes, scathing but hollow. On the solution side, it’s been a repeat of the most popular POTA equivalent which enables arrest without evidence and trial. As someone said, it might only lead to Idgahs in jails and nothing else. As with most other areas, India’s ability to analyze far surpasses its solut...

An unmarried woman stands firm in the path of an unmarried man finding his long cherished dream. That sounds sensational enough, come to think of it Singur can be described that way. Mamata, with her vitriolic vilification of the Tata Group is desperately trying to occupy the militant anti Capitalist space that the Left has left vacant, thanks to the Buddha effect. Land or not, she sure is trying to make this property her own and by the looks of it, is winning hands down. It took a lot of provocation for the well behaved Mr. Tata to come out and even make a statement that they ‘may move out of Bengal’. The battle is cultural, the militant, aggressive Bengali woman versus the stoic, cultured Parsi. At the risk of sounding controversial, Mamata’s fight against Nano is almost a feminist cry against a largely male bastion- the car, the CPI, the Tata Group (when was the last time that you saw a woman top exec in the Tata group) We have a ‘very married’ woman on the other side of the world,...

Babu Lingo Concerned Department - an illusion that you chase endlessly (hardly find any concern for your concerns here) Sahe b- Anyone from Lower Divisional Clerk to Chief Secretary. Depends entire on who uses it.Saheb is usually found behind closed doors (the ones that split down the middle and swing both ways, kinda explains their behaviour too)or a pile of files Chai Paani - The vital connect between expectation and outcome plan this to be a series, updated off and on. Suggestions welcome!

Rewind to July 2006. Until 10th July, it was just another monsoon month in Mumbai. On the 11th day it became the day the nerve of the city, the suburban rail, actually burst and oozed blood. The natural disaster that monsoon had caused the previous year, came back as a man made one to create panic, fear and chaos all over again. Everyone had a prayer on their lips that day, some for the departed, many for the untraced and everyone for the future. The next day, Mumbai came back to work. The media called it the Spirit of Mumbai, only the true Mumbaikar could sense that look on everyone’s face that day. The local trains were packed as usual but each of them had a new passenger, terror. In Mumbai Meri Jaan, Nishikant Kamat, extracts that terror out of Mumbaikar’s hearts and places it on the screen. He visits homes, hearts and minds of all kinds and tells the story sitting in there. In a city where feelings are kept at home as people head out to work, the vulnerability of the average Mumbai...

The innocuous transport of the aam aadmi has a tarnished image now. The mazdoor’s transport, a symbol of penury is now a weapon of terrorists. In fact its being exploited for its inherent characteristic, that of being Indian, hoi polloi and indistinguishable in any marketplace. The cyclist has always been a simple man, in films either the postman or a simpleton peon who carries the burden of a large family, struggling to do so. During the bad times, the cycle represents the vicious cycle that he is caught in, the good times the cycle represents wheels of progress. Mass produced and mass consumed, the cycle can even claim to be one of the biggest uniting symbols of the Indian mass, irrespective of culture and language. Even the names of the biggest cycle brands, Hero, Hercules, Atlas are quite a revelation about the burden that the cycle is meant to carry. Its earnestness is not lost to the aam aadmi, there is exponential relation of an ignition and acceleration. The equation is honest...