Jinhe Naaz Hai

Bilquis (Jinhein Naaz Hai) is an awesome song from Rabbi Shergill's album, Avengi Ja Nahin. Part of the lyrics are based on a song with the same name from Guru Dutt's Pyaasa (1957)

Shergill's song speaks about the atrocities committed against people who raised their voice against corrupt practices in the system. It asks the obvious question, "jinhe naaz hai hind par woh kahan the, jinhe naaz hai hind par woh kahan hai." 3 of the 4 people mentioned in this song were murdered.

Translation of 'jinhe naaz...'
"Where were all those people who were proud of India (when this happened), where are the people who are proud of India?"

People mentioned in the song

[0:54] Bilkis Yaqoob Rasool aka Bilkis Bano
During the Gujarat riots of 2002, Bilkis Bano was raped and left for dead alongside 14 members of her family. In January 2008, 13 of the 20 accused in the case were convicted. Supreme Court lawyer Vrinda Grover pointed out, “For the first time in post-independence India, a communal riot-related rape case has seen conviction.

Read more on Tehelka

[1:32] Satyendra Dubey
Dubey was Project director at the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). He was murdered while fighting corruption in the Golden Quadrilateral highway construction project.

Read more on Wikipedia

[2:20] Shanmugham Manjunath
Manjunath was murdered  for sealing a petrol station in Lakhimpur Kheri, Uttar Pradesh. The station was sealed for selling adulterated fuel.

Read more on Wikipedia

[3:32] Navleen Kumar
Navleen Kumar was a human rights activist who was murdered in 2002 in her apartment in Mumbai. She had been working for more than a decade to protect and restore the lands of Adivasis (indigenous people) in the Thane district through legal interventions at different courts.

Read more on Wikipedia


So, jinhe naaz hai Hind par woh kahan hai?

"Everyone just stood there and watched."

November 19, 2011. In a city bus in Pune. The young girl standing beside me in the bus starts yelling at a guy next to her. It was time the girl's patience had gone over board due to inappropriate advances the guy was making towards her, intruding her personal space. My friend & I had noticed the pranks of this guy from the time we had boarded the bus, which he had been doing since he was in the bus stop. Meanwhile, the guy tried to defend himself by blaming the girl for what was happening. She created commotion out of it and called out for the conductor to chuck this guy out of the bus. But like everyone else in the bus, the conductor just stood there and watched the tamasha. The bus and the commuters continued their journey as if nothing had happened.

What the girl told me, during the conversation later, is what this article is about. “I cannot tolerate such things” she said “Unfortunately, no one in the bus came to my help. Everyone just stood there and watched.”

“Everyone just stood there and watched.”

This is exactly the same thing what Priyanka Fernandes said a week back, “When my friends Keenan and Reuben were being stabbed repeatedly, mercilessly, I could see at least 50 eyewitnesses, who stood like stone, unmoving and unmoved, as we screamed for help. Not one came forward to join the fray, to help us fight against a reprehensible crime.” [Keenan & Reuben case: NDTV, Wikipedia ]

Not that I expected a mob justice for this girl, but I was hoping that, at least, the bus conductor would give a warning to the guy. The last time I witnessed something similar was in Chennai, when a guy was thrown out of the bus for making lewd remarks to a girl.

But unfortunately, people need a more empathetic factor to raise a voice against something bad happening to a person standing next to them. They don't care because it is not someone they know. And while we stand there watching indifferently, the number of Keenans & Reubens will only continue to increase in our country.

Thankfully, this time, I wasn't one of those who stood there and just watched.

[The above image is not an image from the scene]

A celebration of slavery

A recent campaign by Arindam Chaudhuri (of IIPM) about his latest article on the Common Wealth Games interested me and took me to his blog. The article is about Indians creating hype around the CWG and that we should stop participating in such lavish games.

In a country like India where we cannot provide the basic necessities of life to lakhs of people across the country - is there a need of spending Rs. 70, 000 Cr on a 11-day event? I am sure many would have been happy, at least, if the money was genuinely spent on the games, but we know what has happened to it, which is a different story in itself. Even the central government did not show much interest though it involved so much money.

In terms of expenditure, Rs. 70, 000 Cr is a whopping amount compared to the 1951 and 1982 Asian Games for which the expenditure was only Rs. 5cr and Rs. 55cr respectively. Yes, there has been inflation over the decades but this is mind boggling. The amount spent on the games is a lot more than the yearly food budget of the country.

Arindam says in his article (complete article here) that these games are a celebration of our slavery under and British Empire and of all the nations that were under the colonial rule. Frankly speaking, they are. Is there a need for any of the erstwhile colonies to celebrate their centuries of oppression?

Amazingly this year, the celebration of slavery started a day after Bapu’s birth anniversary.

 

Also read

Arindam’s article on CWG

Was IIPM offering an MBA degree that nobody would recognize? – By Vir Sanghvi

Food for thought: I hail from India…

 

 

I hail from India - the country which ranks at 66 among 88 in the Global Hunger Index. A nation whose child malnourishment record is worse than that of sub-Saharan Africa. A country now ranking 134 in the United Nations Human Development Index below Bhutan and Laos.

Here, issues of grave national concern get only a couple of stories spanning a modest few inches across three or four columns in newspapers but full pages are devoted to deaths of fashion models.

Here, 836 million Indians (77 per cent of the population) live on Rs. 20 a day or less. (Report by National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector)

Here, the authorities say that ‘there-is-no-money’ to feed the hungry while the country spends Rs. 10,000 crore on a new airport, more than Rs. 40,000 crore for the Commonwealth Games, Rs. 60,000 crore happily lost in the spectrum scam, Rs. 500,000 crore in write-offs under just three heads for the super-rich and the corporate sector in the current government budget. Here, funds for the hungry are hard to come by.

Economists estimate that if rice/wheat were made available to all Indians at Rs. 3 a kilo, it would add Rs.84,399 crore to the food subsidy in coming budgets. That's about one-sixth of the tax write-offs for the wealthy in this year's budget. (Other estimates place the added expenditure each year at no more than Rs. 45,000 crore).

It is the same country that has 49 dollar billionaires in the Forbes list.

I hail from India, the land of the Mahatma.

(Excerpted from (a must read article) Food security — of APL, BPL & IPL by P. Sainath of The Hindu)

The Indian Jawan

These are few stories told by the jawans in the Indian paramilitary forces.

Story 1

“I spent one third of my 20 years in the CRPF just travelling. Of these 20 years, I could spend only three years with my children. I took medical leave to get married. I could only reach my village five days after I received news of my father passing away. I am the eldest in my family but I couldn’t even perform the last rites. I couldn’t attend three of my four sisters’ marriages. I had to arrange a separate house for my wife and kids after my father’s death because my brother threw them out from the joint family house. But if you take any of these problems to your officers, they just shoo you away.”

Story 2

A jawan who has spent 16 years in the CRPF — six in Jammu and Kashmir, three in Assam, three in Tripura, and three in Manipur. Too scared to talk at the CRPF headquarters, he calls late at night to share his story. During a posting in Srinagar, he was charged with indiscipline and lost 15 days of pay for daring to complain about inedible food and cockroaches in his dal. When he fell sick in Tripura, he couldn’t get a car to get to hospital. “I had to hire a jeep,” says he. “Only if 15-20 constables fall sick and need a car together, there’s a chance of us getting it. Otherwise the cars are busy ferrying the officers’ children. This country got independence in 1947, but we still live like slaves. Our officers order us to do unauthorized things; we have no right to express ourselves. They tell us to barge into people’s homes and pick up bricks and cement and construct our quarters. They pocket lakhs of welfare money; they take commissions from ration shops.

We pay Rs 1,326 per month for food. The bills are for A-grade rations but we get C-grade food. The commander is like the king of a battalion. He runs it the way he wants. As a driver, I am sent all the time for unauthorized pick ups. All the risk of being caught is on me. You live under so much pressure, you either shoot yourself or shoot someone else. I am just waiting to complete 20 years so I can get a part of my pension and then I’ll quit."

Story 3

One retired jawan remembers a tortuous journey in 2004 that stretched 8,000 kilometers over two months as the Home Ministry ordered his company like a pawn to move from Agartala to Gujarat via Bangladesh, Delhi, Kashmir and back to Agartala. Crowded trains, no reservations, no accommodations, no sense of why they were being deployed anywhere, and, most of all — no sense of respect. “I have fought insurgents for 20 years,” says the jawan bitterly, “but this one journey showed me my standing in my country’s eyes. How can you fool around with so many human beings on the pretext of an emergency situation?” Other jawans speak of being summoned to places for six months and being asked to stay for six years.

Read the full article here: Soldiers of Misfortune

Also read ‘My patriotism is dead’ & ‘We felt like pawns’ on the same page.

Life, as a normal Indian…

The road woes

 

+ I take my cycle to school. I approach a crossroad; a bus swerves from the right to the left extreme left of the road, close enough to flick me. Someone from inside the bus stretches his hand to take off my cap. I am glad my cap stays tight. No one says a word. They are all just like me, Indians. This is a common sight for us.

+ Another fateful Monday, I am in white school uniform, heading to school. Someone from the bus spits out his tobacco, randomly. And luck has it that the red spit of his lands on my shirt. No one says a word. No sympathy for me, this is a common occurrence, I was there at the wrong place. I will soon live with it.

+ I realize it is a bad idea to venture out on rainy days. One is sure to get mud all over the dress, thanks to the holes in the road and our dear artistic bus drivers.

+ I understand it is not safe on the road. There is nothing called a lane system here.

+ Sometimes I get so freaked, I know no one would blame me if they also saw a huge truck coming straight at me, on my ‘correct’ side of the road.

……………………………………………………………………………………………

+ I would think thrice before I take my girlfriend to the beach. For I am sure there would be some lolling tongue that would comment on her. I am just reconciled to the fact that there is no concept of solitude here!

……………………………………………………………………………………………

+ Every time I say goodbye to a friend who takes his/her bike, I offer a prayer that they reach safe. Never have I been sure that it would happen. I am not scared; I have just come to terms with lack of rules at the roads.

…………………………………………………………………………………………..

The Indian real-idiot-box

+ I switch on the TV, there are ads that I don’t like, especially the one where a guy gets a deodorant out and the servant women feels him all over. If there ever was a desperate woman, this would be one.

+ I change the channels and I see our super action hero taking his 150 cc bike, with no helmet, jumping red signals and speed limits at will. The heroin behind him removes her veil and lets if fly, not caring about it falling on the path of those behind her. What love indeed!!

+ I change channels again and there is an hour show on what is going on in the world of films. Who kissed who, and who slept with who are the hot topics here. Sportsmen are not spared either, every word they utter is scrutinized and each one of their gestures is interpreted a million bad ways.

+ I don’t watch Indian channels anymore.

………………………………………………………………………………………………

It is an open secret

+ I would gladly give a couple of hundreds for not wearing a helmet, five hundred for not wearing my seat belt, a thousand for crossing the red light and a thousand more to close a case, if I banged my car and killed someone. It is so easy here, in India.

+ I go to the police station, to report the loss of my bike, and I am treated like a criminal myself. I make a follow up trip a week later and I am reasoned out that people lose their cars and houses and a bike ain’t such a great loss.

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

We are used to all this now

+ I take up the newspapers, and the first item that catches my eyes is the picture of death, a burning van, a child – crying as his legs were severed from the explosion. I read of parliamentary bitching everywhere. I read of shameless ministers who jump from party to party, all of them with often conflicting ideologies. I read of deceitful men, who call themselves as saints on the outside and are sex addicts inside their so called hermitages.

+ I don’t read the papers anymore.

………………………………………………………………………………………………

+ I take my friends to a hotel. I order lunch and wait half an hour for it to arrive. I don’t complain about the extra salt or the lack of salt or how hot or cold the food is. What can I expect, if I complained a fly fell in my soup I would have to drink it with the knowledge that the waiter picked it out with his bare hands!

……………………………………………………………………………………………

+ I can apply for any certification that I want. Be it birth, death, educational degree, marriage, passport, voting id, ration card. All could all be done by spending extra money. There is no waiting period for those who choose to be smart and bribe. I am smart, I bribe.

+ I live in Gandhian land, where the man in white and white is the most respected. He is also the most powerful.

+ I need a job, no problem; I just gather up a few lack of rupees and land it into his hands, I get settled for life – a job in the government.

+ I need to enrol myself in some college; I gather up some money and give it to him.

+ I need to escape the law; I flash a photograph of myself with him, or show his visiting card. He would save me, as long as I would pay him his cut dutifully!

……………………………………………………………………………………………

+ I am an Indian I endure it all. I don’t comment when someone spits on the road. I act as if I don’t notice when I see them throw litter on every empty land available. I would keep silent even if someone killed my brother and threw him into one of those pits. I would bribe anyone for I have no other choice if I need my work to be done. I am not surprised when the leader of my clan cheats his followers. I don’t stop anyone when they are busy abusing my women folk.

+ I would not dare stop them, for I fear that if I did, It would be  me who gets thrown in the pit and one of my Indian brothers who would watch me silently from above.  

……………………………………………………………………………………………

I am an Indian, and I am not proud of it.

(The author does not like to disclose his identity. Content slightly edited.)

Who on earth is Shashank Manohar?

(A bot tweeted me about this article. An interesting read about Shashank Manohar. Have not verified the facts myself, though.)

The short answer is Shashank Manohar is a NEW President of the BCCI. But there is enough dirt on this clown and he is a perfect example why Indian cricket is in such perfect shambles.

To know Shashank Manohar better, one has to go back to 26th November 1995. It was an ODI played between India and New Zealand when the VCA stadium wall collapsed, killing 13 people and injuring over 70. And who were responsible? Shashank Manohar himself, along with his father V.R. Manohar, the bosses of the VCA stadium - allegedly these guys had contracted a close relative of theirs for the construction of the wall. It isn't a surprise that a man responsible for cricket's biggest on-field tragedy is the NEW president of the board. (Read here)

It's no secret that the betting cartel run from Karachi by Dawood Ibrahim's gang has the BCCI backing. So what's the nexus between the Dawood gang and BCCI? Well. the official link is Shashank Manohar. Manohar's family is quite close to the Dawood gang and defends their gang members in most high-profile cases. So the question arises if a man is so close to the betting cartel, should he be the BCCI New president?

Is he an honest man? Shashank Manohar claims to be one. His sycophant journalists include a certain Ajay Nayudu and Vinay Nayudu who claim that Shashank Manohar does not take a penny from the BCCI, even pays for his travel expenses. Facts state otherwise. Shashank Manohar took money from the VCA offers to sponsor a school-boy team's 3 month tour to England. Why? Just because his son was playing in the team. For the record, his son Adwait Manohar is a pathetic cricketer, with a first class average of 15.

So, he spent millions from the BCCI earnings to give his own good-for-nothing son. An honest douche bag indeed. (Read here)

He is also the guy making the most fuss about contracts, pay-for-performance and endorsement caps. Why? Simply because to cover up all his betting cartel links, he needs an honest image.

As a cricketer himself, he played just one first-class match - thanks to his father's influence, averaging 9. (Read here)

Read the original article here.

WTF News Part – 1

This is the first of my WTF News series. There will be more of these, probably once every week, or as I gather enough stuff for a post. These are screenshots of news from prominent news websites in the country.

And the reason why I consider these WTF News is:

i) I (or you) wouldn’t care to have first look at them. Forget about the second look anyway.

ii) Their being there or not being, anyone reading it or not reading does not make any difference to you, me or the common man walking on the road.

iii) Coz I love it when the news channels make a fun of themselves and those whom they are writing about, by posting this kind of news on their sites.

iv) They think we are jobless to read them. Yes, I am, jobless enough to read them and put them on my blog.

So, here we go. The first in the series.

More to come.

Dharavi

Dharavi, the teeming slum of one million souls, where as many as 18,000 people crowd into a single acre. By nightfall, deep inside the maze of narrow lanes the slum is as still as a verdant glade. Once you get accustomed to sharing 300 sq. ft. of floor with 15 humans and an uncounted number of mice, a strange sense of relaxation sets in—ah, at last a moment to think straight. It is Asia's largest slum and lies on prime property right in the middle of India's financial capital, Mumbai.

Many here are second and third-generation residents, whose parents moved in years ago. Today's Dharavi bears no resemblance to the fishing village it once was. A city within a city, it is one unending stretch of narrow dirty lanes, open sewers and cramped huts. The residents - the Kumbhars came from Gujarat to establish a potters' colony. Tamils arrived from the south and opened tanneries. Thousands traveled from Uttar Pradesh to work in the booming textile industry. The result is the most diverse of slums, arguably the most diverse neighborhood in India's most diverse city. In a city where house rents are among the highest in the world, Dharavi provides a cheap and affordable option to those who move to Mumbai to earn their living. Rents here can be as low as Rs. 185 per month.

Dharavi also has a large number of thriving small-scale potteries and textile industries. In addition to these, there is an increasingly large recycling industry, processing waste from other parts of Mumbai. It has an estimated 15, 000 single-room factories, with an approximate annual turnover of more than Rs. 3000 crores a year.

But Dharavi lacks basic infrastructure facilities like sanitation and health. As of November 2006, there was only one toilet per 1,440 residents. Mahim Creek, a local river, is widely used by local residents for urination and defecation, leading to the spread of contagious disease. The area also suffers from problems with inadequate water supply.

An urban redevelopment plan is proposed for the Dharavi area. The plan involves the construction of 30,000,000 sq. ft. of housing, schools, parks and roads to serve the existing 57,000 families residing in the area, along with 40,000,000 sq. ft. of residential and commercial space for sale. There has been significant local opposition to the plans, largely because existing residents are due to receive only 225 sq. ft. of land each. Furthermore, only those families who lived in the area before the year 2000 are slated for resettlement. Concerns have also been raised by residents who fear that some of their small businesses in the "informal" sector may not be relocated under the redevelopment plan. The government has said that it will only legalize and relocate industries that are not "polluting."

It is now up to time to decide what will be the future of Dharavi and its millions of dependents.

(Article excerpted from articles by NGC, BBC & Wikipedia)

The monster in the mirror: Arundhati Roy

Published in guardian.co.uk, December 13, 2008

The Mumbai attacks have been dubbed 'India's 9/11', and there are calls for a 9/11-style response, including an attack on Pakistan. Instead, the country must fight terrorism with justice, or face civil war.

...We're told one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That's absolutely true. It's an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day. On a day when the newspapers were full of moving obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel rooms they had stayed in, the gourmet restaurants they loved (ironically one was called Kandahar), and the staff who served them, a small box on the top left-hand corner in the inner pages of a national newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company I think) said "Hungry, kya?" (Hungry eh?). It then, with the best of intentions I'm sure, informed its readers that on the international hunger index, India ranked below Sudan and Somalia. But of course this isn't that war. That one's still being fought in the Dalit bastis of our villages, on the banks of the Narmada and the Koel Karo rivers; in the rubber estate in Chengara; in the villages of Nandigram, Singur, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Lalgarh in West Bengal and the slums and shantytowns of our gigantic cities...

...In this nuclear subcontinent that context is partition. The Radcliffe Line, which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain's final, parting kick to us. Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people, Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs...

...Through the endless hours of analysis and the endless op-ed essays, in India at least there has been very little mention of the elephants in the room: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Instead we had retired diplomats and strategic experts debate the pros and cons of a war against Pakistan. We had the rich threatening not to pay their taxes unless their security was guaranteed (is it alright for the poor to remain unprotected?). We had people suggest that the government step down and each state in India be handed over to a separate corporation. We had the death of former prime minister VP Singh, the hero of Dalits and lower castes and villain of Upper caste Hindus pass without a mention...

...The only way to contain (it would be naïve to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We're standing at a fork in the road. One sign says Justice, the other Civil War. There's no third sign and there's no going back. Choose.

Read the complete article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/12/mumbai-arundhati-roy