Miss Moral Beauty

AFP reports:
Riyadh (Saudi Arabia): Saudi beauty queen Aya Ali al-Mulla trounced 274 rivals to win a crown, jewellery, cash and a trip to Malaysia, and all without showing her face.

With her face and body completely covered by the black head-to-toe burqa mandatory in the conservative Muslim kingdom, 18-year-old Mulla was named "Miss Moral Beauty" on Friday.

Then how did they judge? Report says the contestants faced a battery of personal, cultural, social and psychological tests. Miss Moral Beauty won a 5,000-riyal ($1,333) prize, a pearl necklace, diamond watch, diamond necklace, and a free ticket to Malaysia.

Not bad! Though I prefer amoral beauties. Still.

Letter To KGB

To,

K G Balakrishnan,

Chief Justice Of India

Dear Sir,

You have said you are opposed to media getting its hands on the information about judges' assets. A bill is being discussed by the cabinet currently; but it provides for disclosure to the President. Not to the public. Your anxiety is that if it becomes public, it may be used to harass a judge.

With due respect: why an honest judge should fear harassment if his/her assets square with his/her legitimate sources of income? Besides, accusing a judge of corruption isn't easy. Accuser faces prosecution for contempt, and truth is no defence in such cases, as far as I know.

And you may ask the dishonest amongst your brothers: they won't mind their disclosures getting public. There are thousands of ways to hide ill-gotten wealth. Greed is a mother of resoursefull-ness.

Yours Sincerely.

Silence Of Samana

Last week, Bombay High Court set aside an order passed by Narayan Rane in 1997. Rane, by his order, had upheld Essel Group's
ownership of a big piece of land in Gorai. Despite the fact that a case regarding the land was pending in High Court. (It is still pending!) Government's case, all along, was that it was government's land. Till Rane decided otherwise. Land was worth Rs 139 crore, as per 1993 government estimate. High Court has said in the present order that Rane "misused" his powers as a revenue minister.

This story appeared in Maharashtra Times last Sunday. (I, being a court correspondent, and a Rane-baiter, missed it. It still hurts.)

S Balakrishnan rightly asks in today's TOI: how come Shiv Sena, and its mouthpiece Samana, are still quiet? High Court's judgement is available online. Samana wouldn't, ordinarily, waste an opportunity to screw Rane. But not a word on this issue.

Balakrishnan explains: The reason is not far to seek. Rane took the decision when the saffron combine (Shiv Sena-BJP) was in power in the mid-90's.

Self-Respect

The glossy supplement of Sunday Times Of India carries a front-pager on marriages and infidelity. Teeming with invaluable nuggets of info. Such as: Hrithik Roshan has allegedly taken to the bottle over his affair with co-star Barbara Mori. (No alleged-ness about the affair, please note.) Or even Shyam Benegal and his wife, considered to be the golden couple of Bollywood, had a "rough patch" once. Wow. You made my Sunday.

But two quotes are profound and stand out. (There are fifteen quotes in the story. I counted.)
One from Karan Johar ( The Karan Johar, mind you): "Around the time of making Kabhi Alvida Na Kahna, I lost my faith in marriage because of the affairs I saw around me."

Another from Sanjay Gupta, who, the TOI story tells us, "has been linked to actors Sameera Reddy and Dia Mirzha and assistant director Jasmit Dodhi, and who remarried his wife last month":
"The institution of marriage is sacred and spiritual. It's about finding your soulmate and then building and living your life together based on the foundation of love, trust, faith and hope."

Right. Not all bed-mates make the soul-mate.

And in the opening paragraphs, the writer of the story says: Saif Ali Khan's ex-wife Amrita Singh still bangs the phone down if you call to ask about Rosa. Why would any self-respecting woman tolerate an affair?

Why indeed? And why any self-respecting woman won't bang the phone down when journalists call up about the other woman in the marriage?

Pleasure Of Banging Head Against Wall

Gems from Vikram Seth's interview in Outlook:

Q: Do you deliberately aim to be readable?
A. I certainly aim to be readable because those are the kind (of books) I like to read... I do hope this distinction between the literary and the commercial is one that will be increasingly blurred. It never used to be like this in the 19th century. Writers like Dickens and Austen were read very widely. I don’t see why in the 20th century writers started writing in such an abstruse manner that unless you have a degree in English Literature—and perhaps not even then—you can’t read or enjoy their books.
Critics say that the so-called airport novel is a kind of shlocky, formulary fiction. But for all its shlockiness, at least it is a page-turner...

Q. The argument that’s usually made for literary writing is that it may be hard reading but it’s rewarding in the end precisely because of its density.
A. Well, it’s an argument, I suppose. But for me the pleasure of banging my head against a dense brick wall is in the stopping. That’s an exaggeration, of course—certain things can’t be written simply and it’s good they aren’t. But a novel that is deliberately abstruse is not what I enjoy reading. That’s why, for example, I much prefer the Joyce of Dubliners to the Joyce of Finnegan’s Wake. I’d go further and say I prefer Dubliners and Portrait of An Artist even to Ulysses.

Q. Will there be sex in your book?
A. Let me ask you this: is there sex in life?...

Habit

He said he was no longer furious with God. But pressed, he said: “I’m angry. And he may not even be there. But I love him, too. Because we have loved him for so many thousands of years.”

He being Samuel Pisar, a holocaust survivor.

Planet Chad

Check out this blog. The author is (presumably) a white journalist living in Chad, Africa. Many of us won't know that this country exists.

The blog tells us it's a typical African basket case: poor, lacking water, lacking capable leaders and strong institutions. Hot, sandy.

It seems like another planet. Yet, you also realise: India could be said to house hundreds of little Chads. Like the places in Maharashtra where power is off for sixteen hours a day. Like the places where insurgents live, and the local population pays the price for it. Even if they aren't complicit in harbouring them. Like the streets of Mumbai where children beg, or try to sell things, when they should be at the school.

SUV And Bachchan

Few days ago, Mid-Day pointed out that Mr Bachchan rides around in Lexus, which is an SUV. So do Abhishek and Ash.

SUVs consume much more fuel than other four-wheelers. US is thinking of banning them. And Bachchans, who have been heard and seen voicing concern about environment, possess three of them, Mid-Day said.

That's tabloid journalism at its good.

And this is how Pa Bachchan (or the ghost writer who writes his blog for him) reacted:

...I stand guilty of this most inconsiderate practice of ‘gas guzzling’. Because my riding an SUV within the precincts of my professional journeys in the city has caused damage to the environment through dangerous carbon emissions!! How dare we preach something we do not practice !!

But...Would it not be wonderful if the entire printing press community, stopped burning carbon print for their newspapers. I mean you guys buy the stuff in gallons. Imagine how many villages you would be able to light up if the entire print media stopped the use of this destructive chemical.

And.. I say… tell this chap Tushar to stop using his mobile. Have you any idea what the radio activity each call and sms sent, creates for the environment ?It all adds up deary !! Lets start at home first, no ? So this is fixed then.. no mobile phones ok ! (Tushar is the writer of that piece in Mid-Day.)

Read the complete post here.

This is how Bachchan's reactionary rant can be countered.

It's true that lot of other people drive SUVs. Bachchans alone couldn't have been faulted for their lexus. But when you talk about environment in front of TV camera, the situation changes. Then you've got to practise it.

The Deewar type rant (First get that fellow's signature who tattooed this on my hand...) about environmental sins of others misses the point in SUV issue. Producing a newspaper or using a a cell phone surely leads to destruction of environment; but these activities are intrinsic part of life in the industrialised world. Substitute technologies -- less damaging to environment -- are yet to be found.

In SUV's case, greener options are available. Normal cars consume less fuel, only they don't have SUV's macho look. SUVs are entirely avoidable otherwise.

But of course, the people who ghost-write, and the people who need them for blogging, aren't expected to get this.

Of Dare

NCP's D. Tripathi demanded yesterday that security provided to Bal Thackeray and Raj Thackeray be withdrawn.

Sanjay Raut -- Samana editor -- reacted by saying: We dare the government to do it. (Then see what we do.)

Aah. How Raut blissfully lacks sense of irony. What his dare implies? That Sena has manpower and gumption to create trouble if Thackeray's security is withdrawn. But it doesn't trust the same manpower -- its streetfighters -- to protect the old man. There you need police, eh?

Forgetting To Light Up

Elizabeth Kadetsky writes in NYT:

Alzheimer’s is about living in the present. To exist outside of memory is to occupy the moment wholly. For instance, my mother quit smoking around the time of her diagnosis. As she explained it, she’d have the urge to smoke, would forget to light up before she got her hands on the pack, and so broke a 50-year addiction. It seemed the craving no longer got stuck in her memory circuits, and so easily fell away.

HeartBreak

“I was so madly in love with him that I used to pray to God to change him. I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t love me the way I loved him..."

The story of how Celina Jaitley stumbled upon the world of homosexuals. Your heart goes out to that teenager her.

Food

"A guy would always end up mentioning my weight in some form or other," she says. "They knew they should not go there; it was too painful for me. But they always did. It seemed so simple for them: stop eating, win grand slams, be happy." But Seles knew it wasn't so simple, and that it wasn't just about food.

Read more...

Call From Minister

Apropos call from minister to HC judge scandal: what's stopping Justice Regupathy from revealing the minister's name? (Madame Jayalalitha says it was A. Raja.) Ringing a judge, and asking him/her to do something related to a pending case -- is it not interference in the administration of justice? Shouldn't Justice Regupathy, on his own, initiate action against the minister?

Conspiracy

TOI reports:

The state CID has been told to check whether Muslim boys are enticing Hindu girls as part of a larger ‘conspiracy’. Minister of state for home (rural) Nitin Raut announced this step in the legislative assembly on the last day of its session.

BJP MLAs Eknath Khadse and Devendra Fadnavis had alleged in the assembly that young Muslim boys in rural areas were wooing Hindu college girls and then marrying them. This, they claimed, was part of a ‘conspiracy’ to increase the strength of the community. Khadse had further alleged that some Hindu girls had also been sent to the Gulf.

In his reply, Raut had admitted that such incidents were taking place in the state. “I will initiate an inquiry into this,’’ the minister promised.

I dislike Islam, I admit. If a girl is forced to convert -- as a pre-condition for marrying Muslim boy -- that's infuriating. But larger conspiracy?

MJ's Lovers

I heard a full Michael Jackson song -- for the first time in my life -- the day he died. A colleague was talking about how she reacted when she heard about his death in the morning. So I got curious, and asked her if she had any MJ on her ipod.

This post articulates the MJ experience of millions of his fans, I think.