Funnily Enough

Beggars May Be Billionaires

They make you feel miserable when they knock on your car window, cling to foreigners and in general give the city a bad name. I have made it a point not to give any money to the beggars. I don't know why, but I used to think that most of them are able bodied and wondered why they didn't work. Now there seems to be an answer.
A survey by Bombay-based NGO, Social Development Centre on the beggars in the city has thrown up the startling results. The survey says that on average beggars in Mumbai earn Rs 300 a day! Talk about poverty lines? Many journalists do not start their career at that salary. What's more startling is that there is one beggar family in Khar which earns Rs 1000 a day.
The survey even states that while money making is easiest on the roads between Juhu and Bandra, on Tuesdays the best sopt is the Siddhivinayak, Wednesdays are good at St Michael’s Church and Mahalaxmi and Thrusdays are cool at Haji Ali!
Apparently there are whole cartels, which fight to keep their territories! Make sure you do not donate money to any beggars, not even those that look the most miserable. Give them food, that's what I do. If you give them money, you are not just encouraging them not to work, but sustaining a menace.
PS: When a beggar once caught a friend of mine and said "bhagwan tera dua karega" (God will bless you), he had retorted, "He has blessed me enough, ask Him to bless you instead". That we thought was a smart aleck comment and we all enjoyed it. Now it seems that the joke was on him!



Method In Madness

Floods are good, they help poor people catch fish and eat it. Any comment like this seems not just ridiculous, to most of us its criminal. The fact that Bikar's de facto King Lalu Prasad Yadav made it, makes it even more outrageous. In fact anything that has come out from Lalu, starting from the introduction of kulhars (earthen pots) in railway canteens to his slapping of railway offcials in full glare of television cameras seems rediculous, if not pure madness.
So why does Lalu do it? More importantly, even after doing this, almost in a clearly planned way, how come does he get the people's mandate everytime. The fact is Lalu is the supreme God when it comes to making the medium the media. Consider this, in the ruarl hinterland of Bihar, where Lalu comes from and derives power from, flood is a perennial occurance. Most people take it on their stride, they have been facing it for generations. And the son of the soil, too must have faced similar situations and he knows for a fact that villagers actually find it the best time to catch fish. The luxury of eating fish in normal times is limited to the rich who own the ponds. Whatever the hardships, this may be the only boon admist the bad times.
Or for the matter, most poor Biharis are often harassed by railway officials while travelling, invariably without tickets. To see that their messiah can actually slap those railway officials is almost unbelievable and ego boosting for them. To his constituency, these are the things which make Lalu dear, or why else does he get elected every time?
It's a fact that we have arrived at a juncture where tow Indias seprately exist. One, the middle class urban and semi-urban, aspiring-to-be-developed India and the other, the rural hinterland, where farmers are untouched by saas-bahu serials, India Shining campaings and where they commit suicide because they cannot pay the debt. And it's not the lifestyle that differs, the value system, definations of good and bad, and the way opinion is formed are entirely different. For us to appreciate Lalu's antics is almost impossible, simply because we staying in cities can never appreciate the way he realtes to his rural constituency. It's not just a lesson for politicians, every media manager and communication expert should try and derive lessons from it.
This by no means justifies Lalu's statement or logic, but it is does show the reason behind such a statement and why it often makes sense, things that often eludes us. Talking of floods. The hostage crisis in Iraq which involves three Indians being held hostage seems to hog media attention. The fact that more that more than 1000 people have died in North and East India, including 641 in Bihar alone seems to have escaped our collective conscience. Is it becuase it's easier for the media to report on Iraq rather than cross the ravines in Bihar or across Bharmaputra? Shekhar Gupta has posed an interesting question of how this obsession with the Iraqi crisis can be damaging for the nation. Not just politicans should take note of this even journalists too should make note of it. In the IC 714 Khandahar hijack case, the media should be equally held responsible for the way the nation dealt with the crisis and the way we succumbed to the terrorists.



The Defending Game

This entire game of one "great leader" justifying another's stupid action took a new turn today. Bill Clinton, who is already hankering for any kind of publicity for his new book, defended British PM Tony Blair's decision to go forward with the Iraq war. Now it seems that atleast at one point Blair too made headlines justifying Bill Clinton on the decision to bomb Iraq (much before the Second Gulf War) amid allegations that Clinton is doing it to divert attention from the Lewinsky scandal... Time to pay back or some stupid gimmickry to fool the people?