That the middle class in urban India is incorrigibly callous and insensitive about the sentiments and sensibilities of small town and rural Indians is a truth too well-known to bear reiteration. But inside urban India the people with the greatest insensitivity towards their less fortunate brethren, are the over-paid, over-hyped, over-sexed and regrettably over here (usually self-proclaimed) geniuses of the advertising world. This high-profile fraternity has no qualms about advertising pricey luxury products including fancy bathroom fittings, motor cars and diamond jewellery on popular television channels. A case in point is the wide variety of luxury products advertised on television during the current IPL-4 league cricket tournament watched by an estimated 8.3 million people per day.
Among the shorts plugging a wide variety of products and services, the ad campaign which deserves the Oscar for sheer insensitivity and bad taste is the hyper-patriotic ad of the US-based sports shoes, equipment and accessories manufacturer Nike. It glorifies half-clad urchins playing cricket in narrow streets, dangerous rooftops and other ill-suited forums and juxtaposes them with IPL cricket stars squaring off in immaculately manicured stadia. The unsubtle message is that tomorrow’s cricket stars are likely to emerge from the ranks of unfortunate urchins, who are determined to play and succeed regardless of conditions or dangers. Of course it can’t possibly occur to the five-star advertising fraternity or Nike to question why poor children have to play in such hazardous conditions.
Yet even if the country’s usually brain-dead ad men can’t show any compassion on this issue, India’s new player-millionaires, especially those who made it to the top despite abysmal playing conditions, could contribute a fraction of their obscene incomes towards purchasing/leasing play-grounds in their home constituencies for children to play and learn the game in half-decent conditions, as is the norm the world over.
One would have thought that would be natural for those who reach the top the hard way, to make the path easier for those who come after them. But that might be expecting too much from our neo-rich player-millionaires with experience of socialism Indian style, whose mantra is kiss-up, kick down.
Wasted life
When former Union human resource development (HRD) minister Arjun Singh passed on in March, your editor had made a mental note to comment on the life and unlamented death of this career politician who according to some knowledgeable insiders of the Delhi durbar had come within a whisker of being appointed prime minister after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and the general election of 1991.
During his long innings in Indian politics, this unapologetic loyalist of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty was given many opportunities to rise and shine, but he never quite rose to the occasion. In 1980 he was handpicked by Indira Gandhi and appointed the youngest ever chief minister of Madhya Pradesh where he blotted his record book by building himself the huge Kewar Dam palace outside Bhopal with money from unaccounted sources. Later in 1991 he was given charge of the important HRD portfolio in the Narasimha Rao government but resigned from the party because he was unable to stomach Rao’s watershed July 1991 initiative to liberalise and deregulate the Indian economy.
Nevertheless when the Congress party unexpectedly formed the UPA-I government in 2004, Sonia Gandhi reportedly personally ensured that this dynasty loyalist was rewarded with the HRD ministry. But Singh antagonised the great Indian middle class by unilaterally decreeing a new 22.5 percent quota in all Central government universities for OBC (other backward castes) students. In 2009 when the Congress-led UPA-II government was returned to power, he was dropped from the cabinet and died broken-hearted at age 84.
The purpose of reciting the history of Arjun Singh is to highlight how little concern Indian politicians have for a place of honour in history. Time and again Singh was given high office and great opportunities to leave his imprint on history. But all of them were wasted in petty politicking and fending off corruption charges (Churath lottery scandal, Kerwa Dam palace, Bhopal gas tragedy, reckless grant of deemed university status etc). A telling epitaph of a politician of whom much was expected but from whom little was received.
Police illiteracy
The rising incidence of crimes against women in Indian society are not acts of God or inevitable accidents as the great majority, and curiously the country’s 20 million police personnel including supposedly highly-trained and highly-paid IPS (Indian Police Service) officers seem to believe. They are the acts of anti-socials who need to be brought to book and locked up in institutions of corrective detention, aka prison. Yet it’s doubtful whether even top police officials are aware of simple crime detection techniques familiar to readers of pulp crime fiction.
Dismayed by daily news reports of kidnapping, molestation and worse of women by gangs of anti-socials in the garbage — sorry garden — city of Bangalore in recent times, on March 4, your editor addressed a query under the Right to Information Act, 2005 to Shankar Bidari, police commissioner of the city, enquiring whether he was aware of the policing technique of deploying shadowed policewomen as decoys to flush out and trap actual and potential sex crime offenders. If so, how many times was this technique used in the garden city during the period 2007-10?
In a classic instance of buck passing, the Rt. Hon. Commissioner has circulated my RTI letter to all police stations in the city directing them to answer the query directly. Thereafter following several reminders to this crime-prevention rather than crime-busting commissioner — whose response to the crime wave sweeping the city is to shut it down at 11 p.m causing huge revenue loss to the state government by way of lost excise, sales and entertainment taxes — a trickle of letters (all written in Kannada) arrive every week advising me of the number of crimes against women and the number of times they have used the decoy technique within their jurisdiction. Thus far 21 police stations of Bangalore’s 91 have furnished the above information. These 21 stations have registered 18 sex crimes against women between 2007-2010. None of them have ever employed the decoy entrapment technique. Draw your own conclusions.