Every Vada Pav has its Day

The ubiquitous Vada Pav celebrates its own day today and the small piece of non-nutritious oily vada, full of trans-fat, crushed between two halves of a pav, coated with green chutney, accompanied by a fried green chilly and sometimes hot red chilly powder with a garlic flavour is in many ways emblematic of the city which has made it famous. All through my years in Mumbai and ever since, I have always wondered why Mumbaikars vouch by the not-so-special Vada Pav. The reasons I’ve got is that it is a poor man’s food (costs anywhere between three to five rupees), it symbolises the unity in diversity of Mumbai, that it is a wholesome (read stomach-filling) food etc. I do agree that it is a cheap snack but if Mumbaikars are filling their stomachs by eating Vada Pavs for lunch and dinner, we are looking at a catastrophical case of mass malnutrition.

The vada pav, though a tasty snack at times, never appealed to me in comparison with its “more affluent” cousins, the Missal Pav and the Pav Bhaji. Though they rate the same as the vada pav on the nutrition scale, if not worse, they make a more substantial meal and provide more pleasure to the taste-buds. Time and again, in Mumbai, I’ve heard how the Pav of Portuguese-origin is made mostly by Muslims in a Parsi or Irani bakery (and to think it is the Christians who are called Pav-wallas) to be consumed by a Hindu majority. Despite the fact that this makes for a nice analogy to the cultural divergence of the people who have made Mumbai what it is today, it still is a sad reminder of what Mumbai is today – a overblown population, most of them living in the hundreds of slums that dot the city, struggling to make ends meet in an unforgiving and an expensive city which is pretty much the same case in any major Indian city, but is more conspicuous in Mumbai.

Though the "Vada Pav Day" is just another marketing gimmick by some clever enterprising restaurant, it brings about memories of my days in Mumbai, when a Vada Pav was a daily indulgence along with a cutting chai either under an umbrella in the pouring monsoon rain or sweating in the october heat. I am happy that I've finally gotten out of Mumbai and I hope that I would never have anything to do with that despicable city anymore.

Sick of Spam & Sick Spammers

Nupur Upadhyay has invited me to Desktopdating. I don't know what Desktopdating is and for that matter who the heck is this female fiend, Nupur Upadhyay? It just gets worst - with strangers “Tagging” me, unsolicited mails offering me Viagra and similar sounding substitutes at a discount, mails informing me that my “application” for a loan has been processed or that I had won something in a contest that I swear I never took part in, a more recent trend of marriage portals of a particular community inviting me to join in the hunt, friends inviting me to join some obscure sites with names like “Jaxtr” and “Glitchcast” or the more notorious “Facebook” or “My Space” and the usual dose of pornographic link sites and penis enlargement offers – it has become quite a chore of putting my inbox through a sieve to look for meaningful mails.

The next level of nuisance is now on my mobile phone. In addition to the pesky tele-marketers, I now have spam messages promoting loans and redundant offers, most of them from my own service provider, Hutch, now called as Vodaphone. If changing my mobile number wasn't such a pain in the neck involving the tedious process of informing all my friends, relatives, superiors, relatives and countless other service providers like my bank, I would have given Hutch (Vodaphone) the boot long ago. A sizable chunk of the tele-marketing calls and most of the spam messages I receive come from Hutch. Not only do they pester their customers with unwanted offers, their network coverage must be one of the worst and most of my friends concur with me on this. Hutch probably has the most stupid people on the customer support (though I’ve never talked to the customer support staff of other mobile service providers). When the National Do Not Call registry or some such thing came about, I saw the report in the newspaper asking Hutch subscribers to send a message “DND” to “111”. I promptly did, only to receive a message back saying this service was not available presently. At about 2 a.m, I called up their customer service and got through to a male with an IQ of a dodo. I explained my predicament only to be reminded that I have to send the same darned message to the same darned number. I somehow managed to convince him that it was not working on my number and got an assurance that within 48 hours, the calls and messages would stop. Weeks later, I’m still waiting for redemption from this menace. Hutch (Vodaphone) still sends me messages promoting caller tunes and other services and the others still call me up and I have made myself a promise that Hutch (Vodaphone)will not have the pleasure of annoying me for long.

60 years of Independence

We are celebrating 60 years of freedom; freedom from the British rule & I have finished my patriotic duty in the only ways I could, by wishing my friends through SMS and Orkut scraps and have even changed my display picture to a photo of NASDAQ draped in the Indian tri-colour. I have always regretted the fact that I was not born decades earlier when I could have contributed my mite for my country’s struggle for freedom, maybe by pulling down the Union Jack from the local government office and getting a few lathi blows in the bargain. I’ve grown up idolising the people who really fought for our freedom, not a Gandhi or a Nehru, but those nameless thousands of common people, a vast majority of them illiterate, who followed Gandhi as he walked for 23 days from Sabarmathi Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi to make salt leaving behind their daily routines, who selflessly picketed the local British government centres taking in the lathi blows, who gave up their present-days for India’s future, who spent years locked away in prisons so that we can call ourselves a free nation today and who, after India got a hard-fought freedom, rather gullibly but optimistically sided themselves with the Nehruvian class of socialism only to be cruelly betrayed.

Sixty years later on, Nehru’s mistakes have ensured that one tyrannical administration has been replaced by another that is also a highly dysfunctional one. Today, corruption and nepotism are the norms rather than the exceptions. A woman as India’s president, a woman as the leader of the country’s largest political party and a woman as the chief minister of India’s largest populous state have done nothing to further the cause of women’s rights when we have one of the worst rural health-care systems in the world and one of the highest rates of infant mortality. “Politics” today, is a dirty word, more obnoxious than any four-letter word and the “politician” is someone who ranks lower than a tapeworm in terms of people’s respect. Scams after scams have been unearthed and the guilty rich and powerful have exploited every existent and non-existent loophole in the law to avoid being prosecuted. But, today it is the same people, albeit a bit more literate, who are taking up the cudgels against another regime not much different from the one they fought sixty years ago. Whether it was a candle-light vigil to get justice in the Jessica Lal case, or the sting operations of a hyper-active media or the great efforts to get the right-to-information act passed in the parliament, I know that the persons who were my childhood heroes still live on in different avatars and as long as they live on, we still have the upper hand in this fresh freedom struggle and this time I can finally be a part of it.

He, who will not be named...

It was yet another classic case of media overkill, the media reporting that he was served four chapattis, brinjal sabzi, dal and rice on an aluminium plate, that he slept on a concrete bed without an air-conditioner, quilt or a mosquito repellent, obviously, since he was in jail, that he was first locked up in Barrack No. 10, but was later shifted to Barrack No. 1 for security reasons, that he was getting no special treatment from the authorities of the Arthur Road Jail except for his toiletry and cigarettes (how much of a 'treatment' were the jail authorities getting for allowing him the cigarettes?), that he has been finally moved to Pune’s Yerawada Jail, that he would be attending a course on Gandhian philosophy called ‘Gandhi Darshan’ in Yerawada Jail and would also write an exam or ‘Gandhi Vichar Pariksha’, which is scheduled for October 02. Meanwhile his sister, an MP, has met the Congress chief to discuss her brother’s case. The Information and Broadcasting minister, Priyaranjan Dasmunsi, has expressed “shock and surprise” on the six year jail term that was awarded to him… Well, I’m not doing a PhD on the real life persona of the much-loved Munnabhai nor am I joining the celebs faction in condemning his jail term. All I’m doing is expressing my anguish over the battery of news that is heaped on me. Every one of his sneezes and farts since he went to jail has been reported by the overzealous media and I’ve been subjected to so much news reports of his on every news channel, newspaper and the net that I’m almost in a transcendent state of Nirvana at the amount of knowledge I’ve gained about him in the last few days and that is the prime reason why I'm not naming him here.

A search on Google for news articles relating to his jail term gives out 338 articles from only the Times of India. Why is the media trying to make a martyr out of an oaf who has confessed to hobnobbing with the erstwhile kingpins of the Mumbai underworld? Justice P.D.Kode, probably a fan of his – his undeserving comparison to Gregory Peck establishing it - executed his duties quite impartially. But, is the over-the-top reaction reviling the six-year jail term justified? The justification of his crimes being the result of inanities of youth and a difficult childhood are as nonsensical as they can be. He had celebrated his 48th birthday a couple of days before he was sentenced and was about 34 when committed the misdemeanour. If 34 is youthful senselessness, then he must be in the record books for having the longest ever teenage life. As for his difficult childhood, it is no secret that he was a junkie right from his teens and if every criminal claimed reprieve due to a difficult childhood, our jails would be as empty as George Bush’s personal library. He is not a terrorist, say his supporters. I’m not saying he is. He is a dim-witted fool who couldn’t even properly pick his friends, who, after getting a reprieve due to his late father’s political connections, still continued his association with the same bunch of gangsters, glorifying them in his movies, trying to deify them as individuals who were wronged and later scorned by the society.

“Pray for me”, were the words the media ascribed as his last for some time to come. I just might; not for his release or his realization of his follies, for I know he is incapable of it, but for his continued incarceration and his exit from the media glare and spotlight so that I can get a much needed relief.