Just the other day, I heard news ‘break’ on the idiot box. A certain Mr. Khan had been detained at Newark airport for security reasons for over an hour. And trust the Indian media to blow things out of proportion! It’s like second nature to us! I mean, what’s the big deal? Just so you guys know, I don’t really feel sympathetic or anything towards him. But news channels just kept showing the damned thing on television the whole day. It was Independence Day for godsakes! Poor Manmohan Singh and his speech were relegated to the sidelines. No patriotic ‘specials’ or visuals of the flag-hoisting or ‘walks’ down memory lanes.. not even those depressing (and repetitive) stories on swine-flu…It was all ‘King Khan’ on Saturday.
Actually, that’s exactly the problem with us Indians. We carve out gods from mortals! (as if we had any less gods to pray to already!). We worship them and elevate them to the grandest of pedestals. That's when they begin to believe they are above the rest and don’t deserve to be subjected to mundane stuff like this. They detest being packaged with the common man and being treated like any other ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’. So what if Shah Rukh had to undergo an hour-long grilling at the hands of American authorities? So what if the Americans are paranoid about their national security? Isn't that precisely the reason why they haven’t let another 9/11 happen again? If that’s the cost a few must pay in order to keep an entire country safe.. well, so be it! In fact, I would suggest that India learn something from this, start taking its security seriously and implement such kind of practices at its airports as well(Plus, we’ll get a chance to hit back at those Americans!). After-all, we’re at a much larger threat from terror strikes.
And, by the way did anyone even notice what transpired in the news in July. Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam was apparently frisked on 24th April this year by the ground staff of Continental Airlines at IGI airport(in dilli). This was clearly a violation of protocol and they apologized later. But the point to be noted is that Mr. Kalam(for whom, by the way, I have immense respect) didn’t make any fuss about it. He quietly let them frisk him just like an ordinary passenger. Did the media give this case even a fraction of the importance it gave to Shah Rukh? Wasn’t this a bigger shame to the country? SRK, on the other hand seemed all upset and disturbed and angry. Come on, SRK grow up! You know as well as we do, there’s no VIP culture in the US. Nobody is exempt from security checks! No use taking the support of Islam and getting too philosophical. Thousands are detained at international airports for being muslims. You didn’t exactly raise your voice then, did you? For all the love, praise and adulation that people shower upon you the world over, you really better be prepared to take such things in your stride! And hey, what are you cryin’ for anyways man.. Al Gore, Edward Kennedy and scores of other senators and sport-stars are frisked and detained day in and day out at American airports.. That’s a pretty illustrious company to be in, ain’t it ‘King’?!
PS:Scroll down to the end and voice your opinion in a poll related to the article you just read!
Monday, August 17, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
India's tryst with pigs
Hey guys.. I’m back! Tonnes of work and a busy schedule kept me from blogging. My sincere apologies! But now I feel compelled to write, more than anything else. Recent goings on have drawn me to the ever-reliable MS Word. Times are churning out unbelievable events…hitherto unseen, unheard of!
One of them, which I’m sure is on everybody’s minds (hopefully not on their throats!) is…yes, you got it right.. swine flu! Pigs have suddenly caught the imagination of one and all. If you discount the Chinese, nobody ever gave them so much importance apart from eating them of course! (The Chinese have some strange astrological methods wherein they denote years by animals and to them a ‘pig’ is a sign of fertility and virility!) Never before has the word ‘swine’, (popularly perceived to mean ‘dirty’, ’lowly’, ’disgusting’) been used so frequently! It has rudely gate-crashed into the modern, urban lexicon. The flu, on the other hand has made people do things they would never have imagined were even ‘do-able’.I was, at what many would like to call the epicenter of it all-Pune when pigs burst upon the national scene. And I have never witnessed such mass hysteria in a very long time. Imagine a whole city covered in masks! The Taliban guys would have been jumping in joy had they seen it! All the ‘wallahs’ including rickshaw-wallahs, tapri-wallahs, udupi-wallahs and pav-wallahs were donning masks! Even our house-maid, armed with a mask, who I’m sure had never known what even ‘flu’ meant was buzzing with information and statistics about swine-flu. Initially there was apprehension, shyness coupled with misinformation. “Yikes!!, you crazy ??!!, how can you wear masks in the classroom in front of the teacher?” , ignorant people would remark. My friends outside Pune would laugh at me when I told them I wore a mask for a whole day in college. However, a couple of deaths laid such reactions to rest! May all of them rest in peace! Some others turned vegetarians overnight (??) while others stopped going to the gym!
Suddenly there were public announcements at malls, theatres, plays urging people to wear masks or to cover their mouths with something. It was as if everybody had been jolted out of their slumber. It was a like a different kind of ‘social-awakening’. Revolt against swine-flu! In a knee-jerk reaction people fled Pune. Loads of students from outside the state ran back to their home-towns. Swine flu had done what Raj Thackeray has been unsuccessfully striving to do. It had driven away the dilliwallahs and biharis back to where they came from! In fact, maybe swine flu can be used as a formidable deterrent by places like Mumbai and Pune against the ever-growing inrush of the ‘bhaiyyas’ from UP and the ‘babuas’ from Bihar. Imagine Raj Thackeray’s men brandishing vials full of H1N1 viruses at stations!
Anyways, gradually the situation is settling down. Panic is deflating. I discovered that all the talk of people shunning malls was bullshit. I couldn’t find a place to park my car in a mall which has a humongous parking space! Fear is giving way to humor. My gym instructor suggested this flu become a bi-annual affair in view of the unexpected ‘flu-break’(which is, by the way as long as an average Christmas break)! Just the other day I got an SMS ‘forward’ saying that the Americans have asked India to warn all the gujratis here to not line up outside American embassies……since H1N1 is not a type of visa!
One of them, which I’m sure is on everybody’s minds (hopefully not on their throats!) is…yes, you got it right.. swine flu! Pigs have suddenly caught the imagination of one and all. If you discount the Chinese, nobody ever gave them so much importance apart from eating them of course! (The Chinese have some strange astrological methods wherein they denote years by animals and to them a ‘pig’ is a sign of fertility and virility!) Never before has the word ‘swine’, (popularly perceived to mean ‘dirty’, ’lowly’, ’disgusting’) been used so frequently! It has rudely gate-crashed into the modern, urban lexicon. The flu, on the other hand has made people do things they would never have imagined were even ‘do-able’.I was, at what many would like to call the epicenter of it all-Pune when pigs burst upon the national scene. And I have never witnessed such mass hysteria in a very long time. Imagine a whole city covered in masks! The Taliban guys would have been jumping in joy had they seen it! All the ‘wallahs’ including rickshaw-wallahs, tapri-wallahs, udupi-wallahs and pav-wallahs were donning masks! Even our house-maid, armed with a mask, who I’m sure had never known what even ‘flu’ meant was buzzing with information and statistics about swine-flu. Initially there was apprehension, shyness coupled with misinformation. “Yikes!!, you crazy ??!!, how can you wear masks in the classroom in front of the teacher?” , ignorant people would remark. My friends outside Pune would laugh at me when I told them I wore a mask for a whole day in college. However, a couple of deaths laid such reactions to rest! May all of them rest in peace! Some others turned vegetarians overnight (??) while others stopped going to the gym!
Suddenly there were public announcements at malls, theatres, plays urging people to wear masks or to cover their mouths with something. It was as if everybody had been jolted out of their slumber. It was a like a different kind of ‘social-awakening’. Revolt against swine-flu! In a knee-jerk reaction people fled Pune. Loads of students from outside the state ran back to their home-towns. Swine flu had done what Raj Thackeray has been unsuccessfully striving to do. It had driven away the dilliwallahs and biharis back to where they came from! In fact, maybe swine flu can be used as a formidable deterrent by places like Mumbai and Pune against the ever-growing inrush of the ‘bhaiyyas’ from UP and the ‘babuas’ from Bihar. Imagine Raj Thackeray’s men brandishing vials full of H1N1 viruses at stations!
Anyways, gradually the situation is settling down. Panic is deflating. I discovered that all the talk of people shunning malls was bullshit. I couldn’t find a place to park my car in a mall which has a humongous parking space! Fear is giving way to humor. My gym instructor suggested this flu become a bi-annual affair in view of the unexpected ‘flu-break’(which is, by the way as long as an average Christmas break)! Just the other day I got an SMS ‘forward’ saying that the Americans have asked India to warn all the gujratis here to not line up outside American embassies……since H1N1 is not a type of visa!
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