Conspiracy Morning

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/science-sense-and-sensation/662362/

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/medical-malpractice/662368/

List of possible conspiracy theories.

1)The piece was paid for by the government. (The Public Health Foundation of India is also represented by government officials)

2)The superbug was invented by these firangs who are threatened by the potential of medical tourism in India- no takers for Western specialty health care by 2020. Stuff of their nightmares but given the rat population in our average hospital, I can hardly imagine Sweden coming down to get their eyes largened or their bum cut and replaced.

3)Devi Shetty in article two is alarmed by the potential loss of revenue this could mean and is doing all that he can to say that he "sees a change in the way some companies perceive research."They use it as a means to "maximize profits."He thinks it should be about "alleviating suffering."

I most positively believe that the Swine Flu was over marketed and almost made up. Compare H1N1 global death tolls to number of people who die of hunger each day. 

These pharma companies should find something else to do . Sell Teddy Bears maybe. 

The point of this post actually was to illustrate my bad doubting mind. 

Vedanta

is a single principle, Capitalism, and teaches that the believer's goal is to transcend the limitations of human rights norms and realize capitalism's superiority over humanity.

What makes Vedanta symptomatic of mining and bigcorporate malpractices?
Vedanta is one of the worst companies I have come across but what's most shocking is that it's happening in the 21st century. This company is misleading the world with its incredible PR campaign. It is making people believe it wants to do good for the people, that it will build a university etc, but this is all fiction. Here's just one example of the kind of things they have been doing. In Bandhaguda, a place very close to their [alumina] refinery, in 2002, the company told the village that they would build a factory, give employment to everyone, displacing only one village. They have already displaced four, and I have been told that they promised one lakh rupees to those who had land titles (as you know, very few have land deeds, especially tribals) and Rs 50,000 per acre to those who had no titles in exchange for their rights, and worse, Rs 1,000 to those willing to give up their houses. One thousand rupees! That's just over $20! It's shocking. And of course they haven't given them jobs. I think there are some 57 foreigners who are running this refinery. So, in 2003, when the people in this village saw that the company had started cutting down the forests way beyond the declared area, and that all the promises made were false, they decided to demonstrate outside the construction site. About 400 people gathered — men, women and children. The police jailed all the men for seven days. When they were released, they were told they had become outcaste and needed to go to Puri to pray and redeem themselves at Lord Jagannath's temple. The state police were used alongside Vedanta company goons to forcibly take them to Puri, while they built the refinery wall. In violation of customary law, their ancestral graveyard was destroyed and the area illegally enclosed in the Vedanta compound. This meant the people could no longer go to pray. This is a serious human rights violation, and it is extraordinary that all this was done in collusion with the police and the Orissa state. All the documents I have show the collusion between the state and Vedanta. When I arrived at the Biju Patnaik airport in Bhubaneswar, I was struck by a billboard that said "Mining happiness for the people of Orissa". What a cruel irony. The aluminium refinery has brought nothing but misery, disease and impoverishment to the communities in the area, and if Vedanta's bauxite project is allowed to go ahead, it will endanger the very survival of the Kondhs.

More here.
I must link my friend's excellent piece on Vedanta here.

You might also like this.

Delhi Free

We went for an animal rights protest where Delhi of a certain kind turned up in Fab India pyjamas to protest the killing of stray dogs for Delhi's beloved Commonwealth games.

The goal apparently is to make dog free.(Dust free, pollution free , germ free , hunger free, DOG FREE?BEGGAR FREE?who does Sheila think she is- Jesus Christ?)

 

 

While a lot of the protest was taking indirect jibes at the commonwealth by alluding to how animals are our common wealth and talking about how all our (Hindu) Gods have

animals for transportation.Thankfully , Vinod Mehta came and stated the clear goal of the protest- against killing of strays.I am an animal fanatic who can tolerate leather, meat etc but the needless inhumane killing of sweet , lovely stray dogs? Don't give me arguments about how they are a menace.We are just sharing the world with them and have no right to kill them. Period..

 

Jaya Jaitley came and made some sense - she spoke about how we want to break perfectly okay pavements to build new ones to impress goras who will probably never

walk on it in the two week duration of the commonwealth games.India is not a sanitized country and it will never be , she said and asked why we should try to impress our colonizers and prove to them we are just like them after which she apologized for being political.

 

Yesterday , Marie and I won one of our first battles ( we've had many in the past few weeks). So, we booked tickets to watch Date Night at Select Citywalk. Since it is close to where I live, I spend an unhealthy amount of time there - I confess despite the risk of being labelled a mall rat.

 

We prebooked tickets . (500 for both of us- 5 summery skirts at Sarojini Nagar) When we reached tlhere, the guard said the mall was shut because of an internal problem.

Not satisfied with his answer, I asked him five times if there is a bomb and finally he admitted there are four.

 

Predictably, it turned out to be a hoax. When we came later in the evening, they refused to refund our tickets saying that they hadn't got approval from the corporate office  and that they could only refund it the next day.I bet they were hoping that no one would turn up to refund their tickets the next day.

We talked to like ten people before finally convincing the manager to refund us. I acted jetsetty and lied that I have an early morning flight out of Delhi.

 

So, yeah , we won.

Happy Hours

I know that is impratical to be humane when India is shining and there is a spirit of progress in the air, in a pub at Khan Market that has Happy Hours till 10 PM on a Saturday Night.
It is a bit like being a spoil sport no? IT is as if your best friend had to choose to die of cancer just when you started dating a hot rich guy with a lamborghini.
Arundhati Roy has her bullshit moments but her writing breaks up our careful layers of pretensions for me so beautifully. I just finished reading the whole of her famous essay about the ''maoist infestation'' .
I will not be academic or even factual.That is not my strength right now.
I will just try and tell a story that I invented in my head. I will try to be helpless against the the state.
Because, the first time I realised that we ( of the blogspot class) can expect anything from the state was when a Sri Lankan friend told me their state schools were excellent and free unlike ours.
You and I probably live in a house in Bombay or Bangalore or any other citadel of flickering shimmer.Any city, in any case which has supermarkets that stock deodarants or where you can get Instant Sicilian pasta sauce.
Let us say that in our apartments, the electricity fails. The bill however arrives as predictably as being burnt on a summer afternoon spent shopping for cheap export rejects in Delhi.
You can choose to not pay the bill which didn’t light up your life, you say. Remember that the Collector Sahib , friend of Chief Justice will hack your head off .
Candle lit dinners are it then.
Supermarkets open on even months for three days. Corporate employees get preference over journalists and by the time it is your turn ,most of the products are sold and you go back home with a packet of haldi , an overpriced can of Chinese stir fry sauce and a bag of jowar which by the way you don’t know how to cook.
Your job as a newspaper reporter hasn’t paid you in three months because the Minister for purification is hunting down the intellectuals and he shut the newspaper offices down so that no body will know.
The plumbing system collapses and you use your toilet to store stolen food.
You are forced to shit on the streets, your bum bared to the collector’s daughters smooth stilletoed legs.
The stench is all pervasive, it piles on top of fresh piles , sashays around your dirty stinking laundry and returns to your morning jowar dosa (or something like it) with a smirk.
You tried to complain to the Plumbing Authorities but they said that when their CEO was having a heart attack and needed medical care, all you could think of was a toilet to crap in.
They raped your sister in anger.
You’d really just like some cheese toast. There is a block of mouldy non blue amul cheese in the fridge and the cows died of an epidemic. Your brother gets prefential treatment because he is older so he eats most of the cheese.You get to eat as much as the amount of ointment needed for your pinky finger.
Imagine that your mother , grandmother, great grandmother and her mother lived this way.
Multiply the hardships and the helplessness by the biggest number you know.Add random acts of injustice liberally like balsamic vinegar in your salad.Build walls where there are questions. Clog holes with bombs that go off at the smell of rebellion.
Kill thought. Recruit compliance. Impose cultures. Flush ancestral heritage and place a steel plant.

Are you going to ask me what the point of this was? Nothing. I just wanted to break your world
a little bit. Break my world. To imagine what it takes for the poorest of the poor to be lured by a violent war against a shining new foetal super power . That's all.

The Polyester girl

My sense of dressing is best described as Bohemian tramp chic. I have been dying to invest in the village belle look because of many reasons only one of them being Vidya Balan's ethearalising the polyester sari in Ishqiya.  Ishqiya by the way is  a movie I despise except for Vidya Balan's hotness and that song 'Dil to baccha hain ji'.  Maybe I am bitter because the Hindi was too complex.

This village is very much like the one portrayed in the film. Today I finally got around to buying some beautiful polyester(Georgette, crepe, it's all the same no)  material and getting my new friend Preeti to come with me to the tailor and prescribe the village belle look, polyester, semi Patiala et al.

Now the polyester Salwar Kameez is a loaded word among the average breed of bitchy big city women. In my distant youth, I took a French class. A girl in French class asked me what my mother tongue is. I told her that I am a Tamilian. She was like 'No , you don't look like a Tamilian.' 'Tamilians means bindi, oiled hair ....''. She made the worst face ever.

I have the most Tamil looks ever if there is something like that and I love all the stereotypes – jasmine flowers, vibrant Kancheepuram saris, three stone diamond nose studs, Chettinad cotton saris. The Polyester kurta  ( we are getting back to the point) has also somehow been associated with this stereotype.

 

Ok so I bought this cloth.

Deep down I am a true consumerist. I imagined a chic summery look, reinvention of the Patiala trousers – the artsy fartsy element can be added with my jhumkas and the corporate element with my watch. Gorgeous deep brown joothis will add some class to the whole outfit ...and a foxy babe hair cut  will make it very urban( I stole this appalling phrase from Shoba De's generalization of Bangalore girls..!!!) . And weren't floral patialas really in sometime back?

 

I 'modelled' (basically my friend works there and in his words, he needed a hanger for his clothes) for fab India once when they were launching the UK based brand 'East'. East is ajji/aunty/behenji polyesteresque long gowns, lose pants and shapeless potato sack tops.

 

At this event, all these socialite  women came  and admired these clothes garnishing the gentle Bangalore breeze with words like summery, refreshing, floral, smart etc.

 

Maybe that's also where I copied this from but I hope it doesn't die in the corner of my cupboard with all the other ''deviant'' clothes I bought including a Singapore Airlines air hostess costume from 2000. Would you rather I blogged about NREGA?

If

Vodafone can reach a forgotten corner of Uttar Pradesh , why can't development is a question I have had about development for a long time.

Buyology

Our real needs are raped by their association with buying something to satisfy them

In the depth of our hearts, where once hopefully, at the beginning of civilization there was a reservoir of stillness and connectedness, there has emerged a buzzing , gyrating train station.

Trains run in a blind metal ecstasy satisfying one manufactured want to another. And not once can we feel

the sacred silence .

If I was scatterbrained, organizing challenged, messy and careless, not even the fanciest wallet with Many categorized pockets would change my personality or make me organized. My true being of careless existence will win. Yet my credit card will shit the requisite amount paid for perceived change in the leather company's balance sheet.

The Bangalore Central happiness sale is on, a hoarding told me.  Happiness , I strongly suspect lives

in that huge reservoir now drained.

 

 

(I'd like to publicly apoologize to Matt Lowenstein for my Soviet style rant)

Post Man World

Business channel anchor transcript:

A story rolls about how online shopping for high end brands has just gotten easier in India.

The anchors, presumably are told by the producer to continue chatting as they still have time on the show.

A: I, for one would never shop online because I'd be scared the postman will steal my Dolce and Gabbana glasses .

B: Yeah, imagine what a sight that would be on the street - a postman with Dolce and Gabbana .

A: I wouldn't risk that- I'd prefer to buy things off the store.

The capitalist fashist genes

I am the sort of vulnerable person who gives in to conspiracy theories when the world seems to be more orderly than it should.

Is Bush really that dumb or did he put on a sweet Texan uncle act and pull down the twin towers, only to assure Americans that he will protect them from terror by declaring war against it.

If Americans can’t point out where Iraq is on a map, they aren’t going to ponder about where the tangible terrain of terror is on it, after all.

But before you, the gentle, fashionable reader loses interest, I will attempt writing about fashion.

Fashion ,like everything else is an industry meant to fuel all those words that financial dailies use and I am supposed to know-fuel domestic consumption make people buy things theyll never need .

Thanks to a huge fake industry and my ‘chinkyish’ figure, I can easily replicate looks suggested by the vogue magazine for really cheap with cheap Chinese clothes if I am not lazy.
Now , remember the time skinny jeans arrived in India. It was first worn by the rich, then the mid priced brands got it, then I went to new York to get my dream pair.
I even saw women at the Nepal – China border wrap many many skinny jeans around themselves and wear clothes over and smuggle jeans to the other side.

Now every girl worth her girlness on the local from churchgate to Andheri is in skinny jeans.

Some women have it from Guess, some have yellow sunflowers embroidered on the bottom,

Both pairs have an equal chance of costing above five thousand bucks irrespective of the class or aesthetic sensibility of the bum that owns the pair.
Time then to start another round of domestic consumption

Flares,Boyfriend jeans ,wide leg jeans are back.
Now, all the South Bombay/Delhi people (who else in India can afford that shit) buy the most expensive avatars of these jeans..till they get cheaper and millions of pairs are sold and these fashion capitalist fuckers think of introducing something else.
If fashion didn't keep changing, people would lose reason to buy new clothes so often.

Thank god I saved my pair from 2004.

Next:Did you KNOW/READ on supermarket shelves that CRICKET makes WOMEN beautiful?

White Tiger

At first thought, it is Chetan Bhagat that starts of in a rural setting with generous helpings of intellect and garnished with perspective. But Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger is more than that.
The tone is almost flippant but a tone like that is necessary for a story like this, Balram Halwai is a driver from a small village lakshmangarh, who follows his master in delhi , becomes a criminal and ends up an entrepreneur in Bangalore.

Bangalore of the new India.
In a narrative of the New India we haven’t read before told through the eyes of a man from the darkness writing to Chinese Premier Wen Jibao after becoming a successful entrepreneur in Bangalore.

We Indians have stopped seeing contrasts of what it means to work in the house of a lady whose handbag costs ten times the monthly salary she pays you. Adiga tells the story and its dark and touching at the same time.You don’t know whose side you are on, the man who was murdered or the man who murdered - the rich,the poor, the light , the dark.

‘’Who would have thought that the only person in the household to have a conscience will be the woman who wears short skirts’, Halwai asks, when a child gets hit by a family member who was driving drunk and halwai is made to take the blame for it..

Adiga rips apart the lives of India’s rich who live quite comfortably beyond the law for most part and he startles us into thinking about Balram as he passes from darkness into light and the world of Bangalore’s call centres, South Indian coffee and the mothers of murdered sons. ''See, sometimes i think that i will never get caught . ......I have switched sides. I am one of those who cannot be caught in India. ''

His masters laugh at him for being unable to say ‘’Pizza’’ and for saying ‘’pig’or ‘’maal ‘’ for ‘’mall’’.

The real success of this book lies in the fact that it tells you the contrasts without sounding journalisty or patronizing or unnecessarily intense. The tone then is not flippant, really but just matter of fact.
And being urban middle class Indians, it must have occurred to us, the mind of the darkness but we never dared to think it so articulately.


I have never appreciated firangs writings on India ..except William Darymple types.
But sometimes I think , that we are much more blinded to India’s contrasts being Indians and seeing hundreds people settle down to sleep on the pavements as we head back home from office.And there is this argument that Adiga himself has lived much of his life outside India.
But Halwai is as convincing as a potrait of a driver to a rich family can get.

I can imagine the grateful but dumb look on his face when he is told that he is free to not go to jail for a murder he hasn't commited.I can't feel the humiliation he feels when he can't pronounce worlds alien to his tongue and when his masters laugh , his anger , his opportunism and you know, his 'paaapaness''

The other day I saw a perfect shot .

We could start shooting you know, with marine drive, the way every other slick Hindi movie nowadays starts.

Accompanied with a romanticized voice over about Mumbai. The city of dreams.
We then come to NCPA apartments- the world’s second most ( or one of the ten most ok), residential complexes, tilt down and pan left.The road is quite and smooth and mercs pass by, there are women with expensive dresses and smooth legs passing by .

Passing by two three year old bare chested children sleeping on a piece of sack next to ncpa on the road at 9:30 PM one October evening.

‘What a’fucking joke!’’