The Tamasha will go on....

With elections nearly half-way through, The Great Indian Tamasha gets even more interesting.

These days, with the way the heat is in Bombay, my sleep is quite disturbed. But just as dawn approaches, I doze off into a deep slumber, hoping to catch a few winks before the grind. And then - 5.30 AM, my mobile phone buzzes feverishly, waking me up, in an irritating mood - guess what? It's Raj Thackeray's MNS messaging me, imploring me to vote for them. It is amazing - I am not a manoos and still they feel I have something valuable for them - my god-damn vote! Till the elections are on, I guess, I don't need my alarm - I can certainly count on Raj to wake me up.

Now I feel these guys have got afflicted by some kind of amnesia - the selective type of amnesia. Weren't they the same guys who wanted us, the non-manoos people out of the city, a few months back?

Talking of amnesia, there is another kind of amnesia which has afflicted the politicians - Laloo, the joker of the pack gave amnesia a creative twist when he said that it was the Congress which actually demolished the Babri. He may be right - the cameras must have caught Congress partymen in fancy-dress - the saffron ones, they are the masters of deception after all, right?

Coming to the grand old man in a hurry, Mr. Advani, who till November 2008, vehemently opposed the nuclear deal with the United States, suddenly said that if voted to power, he would abide by the sovereign commitment Dr. Manmohan had made. Mr. Advani, didn't you want the deal all along? It is indeed surprising that you opposed it in the first place. That Mr. Advani, is what I call taking the politics of convenience to a new level.

And Mr. Munnabhai suddenly proclaims his love for the Behenji - a love replete with offers of jhappis and pappis. Is Manyata divorcing Sanjay Dutt that he had no option but to tell the world about his lovey-dovey feelings for the Behenji? I wonder what Amar Singh and Mulayam Singh would have thought of that, given that she is their sworn-enemy of sorts.

Who can forget Mr. Karunanidhi, when he says on air that the LTTE is not a terrorist organisation. With a clean "non-terrorist" certificate from Karunanidhi, shouldn't we welcome Prabhakaran into India? Going by that logic, Pakistan is doing just the right thing.

Amidst all this cacophony, we have the Behenji, who finds that she's going unnoticed, suddenly says she deserves to be the next Prime Minister, given her background, etc. etc. Perhaps she has concluded some horsetrading deals already, that could take her home.

And shoes continue to be in fashion. A village in Uttar Pradesh had a shoe hitting practice organised recently so that they don't miss their targets the next time around. Does any one need old shoes? Please contact me, I am thinking of discarding some old shoes very soon and surely before the polls are over. I would love to donate my shoes for this noble and worthy cause!

The TRPs of the Indian Premier League are not as great - this is being attributed to this Tamasha. But they have a lot to worry - their TRPs could fall further, as the we have a couple of more weeks of this Tamasha left and it will get better by the day, as results get announced and horse-trading begins!

Exile the SP to North Korea

What a shocker this is - the Samajwadi Party (SP) has announced in it poll manifesto that it wants to ban computers, English, mechanised farming and stock trading among other things. This has been covered prominently on news channels like NDTV as well as in the print media.

How ridiculous, horrifying and pathetic!

Does the SP do what it preaches? There are a lot of inherent contradictions in what these people are saying.

A few pointers:

1. 
   
   The SP has a jazzy website, in English, yes that's right - they are using computers and the net, that too in English.


2. 
   
   Mulayam's supporter, Big B, a net freak who passionately blogs every day, would perhaps have to revert to his father's passion - Hindi poetry. Arrey baba, no English, vinglish!


3. 
   
   Aishwarya, another SP supporter, would have to stop all movies in English, stop her jaunts to Cannes and above all no western clothes - that's a logical consequence of SP's policies, right?


4. 
   
   Anil Ambani, another Mulayam supporter, runs a clutch of companies that invest in the markets. If the SP comes to power, would all these companies go bankrupt?


5. 
   
   The son of a prominent SP candidate from Mumbai would have to shut down his upmarket eatery in Bandra, because it serves Italian khaana peena, corrupting Indian minds. And his wife, a Bollywood starlet, would have to stop wearing western dresses, and no make-up, shake-up!


6. 
   
   Last but the least, the ever grinning Amar Singh, would have to stop all his Page 3 party hopping - that's simply not Indian culture.

If the SP is serious about what it says, shouldn't their prominent supporters do all that I have suggested above?

It is indeed stupid, if I may so, for a national party to say all this. Computers and the net are now being used by farmers to find out new techniques of cultivation. Mobiles come in handy for them to get the best price in the markets. Even rickshaw wallahs and household maids use cellphones to optimise their operations! Every small town has computer and English institutes to coach youngsters, helping them get jobs in BPOs, etc.

And now the SP wants to take us back to the middle ages. Or is it mere vote-bank politics, where politicians are mere demagogues inciting people to get to power? Perhaps they have a vested interest in keeping people backward so that continue to hold positions of prominence in society.

Sometimes I feel that India might do well with a benign dictatorship like the way Turkey had in the early part of the 20th century, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk imposed a modernisation on the country - equality of women, separation of religion from the state, adoption of English script for the Turkish language, etc. That is something which is debatable.

For now, let's exile the SP leadership to North Korea, where they will feel at home with Kim Il Jong.