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July 31, 2005
this house is on fire~
so sang natalie merchant in her album motherland~ and she very well could have addressed bombayaites especially this week with the rains, crumbling infrastructure and angry people!
where are the city administrative officials ?
where's the disaster management crew?
where is the prediction from the met office?
why dont hospitals have generators?
last week showed the incompetence, negligence, indifference, lack of vision, lack of planning and sheer 'stupidism' of the state and city administration. makde us feel like we were living in the 18th century. just about everything broke down..after all how will some of them know about common mans problems?..dont they live in cushy neighbourhoods of colaba and marine drive...where they got one tenth of the water in comparision...
hundred year old drains, sewage system built for 1/100th of the population and no emergency management to speak of. open drains that suck unsuspecting walkers. a met office that could have very well seen the potential with all the damage caused in madgaon, goa by this very storm and its potential path. useless television people...and very specifically out of town news reporting channels that have no clue...churchgate to thane trains restored..pah!..do you even know central and western routes ? no coverage on chembur or suburbs where they still have to get power or water!
it was left to the citizens to fend for themselves and each others..the stories coming out speak about the basic bombayite nature in such times...strangers distributing food, opening their homes and hearts.
..when will we get a govt that cares? when? will we ever? borrow a damn helicopter for aerial help if the roads are jammed.....where are the private companies?...little did they do. dont test the patience of the population..i should add!..it could get very ugly and will..just building flyovers is not the solution and goes nowhere to solve the infrastructure problem! the fatcats and lazyasses in delhi arent any better!..when the city that makes them, feeds them but gets pittiance in return; it aint right.
absolutely atrocious~..an F for the government!
' you go passing wrong for right and right for wrong
people only stand for that just so long '
- this house is on fire, motherland, natalie merchant
Posted by ananth at 08:10 AM | Comments (0)
July 30, 2005
population musings~
people everywhere!...anywhere you go. on a recent trip across the country..in kerala, in the coastal city of the calicut, on a wide beach promenade on the shore; i couldn't see the beach sand, there were only feet and shoes....if calicut is this bad, i dread to think about uttar pradesh and bihar where about 200 million live..or mega cities like dhaka...
pah! queue up for anything and everything you need..ticket windows, doctor visits, check outs, school admissions, concerts or cinema tickets! shortages and rationing abound! water fights and electric power thefts. not enough roads, everyone wants cars...there is no space to walk much less green spaces... mass rapid transportation ah!, its downright human rights violations for the beings that commute on the local suburban trains in bombay; capacity of which; is for one tenth of the users; that it struggles to support!
where do we start with population control? education, birth control (damn the pope)? do we look at what china does, is that enforcement even possible in a democracy? do we step aside and just hope that the environment/planet or some external entity/force will automatically bring it to equilibrium either through diseases or wars? or can we sterilize forcibly?. or better yet, put something in the air or water (as one of my buddies suggested) to make humans sterile..buy a pill to 'progenise' eh!
as i sit and debate here with dad....(yeah with the rains being heavy...indoors we are bound. what else to do eh :) ..we run into four contentious issues that are sort of related to this issue of population control....abortion, euthanasia, death penalty and embryonic stem cell research..issues that the western world (specifically america) is preoccupied quite a bit...pro-life, pro-choice, pro-death penalty..the citizens debate on and on..we vote our leaders ..we get them to nominate supreme court judges or we support charities, all on our positions. neo-liberal! conservative! we slap labels, brandish jargons and bucket folks on this.
as our discussions weave around trimester terminations, bone marrow stem cells, sustainable living spaces, calcutta street orphans, rape related pregnancies, european and middle-east fertility rates, unplanned parenthoods, life-imprisonment, non vegetarians (and animal killing), tax payer dollars and wrongful convictions..i layout ;imho; my practical and pragmatical reasons for my pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia and pro-death penalty stance....
why bring the kid to the world if you CAN’T provide for it? stop the mistake (if it was that.) or if it was rape...adopt if you can since there are so many already present. i accept that a fetus has a soul...and yes killing is defined as taking the soul out...(though i have to extend this to animals as well being a strict vegetarian but thats another discussion)...but if thats what is necessary to prevent unwanted, unplanned or unsupported kids..so be it. yeah..my couple of good friends would not have been there..its sad but its okay. we just can't sustain anymore in this planet. with the death penalty, too bad for you man if you didn’t do it. wrong place and wrong time; you just fell into the wrong side of the probability statistic. have million other innocents to worry about; a more useful use of tax payer money than pay for your life-imprisonment, i say.
i am however presented with a slightly different perspective. leading the reasoning against a strict pro-choice stance that present ugly side-results like gender-selections with a pre-disposition to a male progeny...really a serious problem in some socieites..dad presents a pro-life position with a pro-choice twist and a judicious pro-death penalty stance...a foetus gets a soul during conception! so abortion when performed is killing it. you are killing a soul for no mistake of it when you do it. now exceptions are made for certain circumstances..and according to this perspective; its the mothers right to choose! situations when there is rape, situations when the baby is deformed, or the baby is blind or not capable of surviving on its own post-birth....give the parents/mother the choice whether they want to keep it whenever and even after birth..(and this morphs into a pro-euthanasia stance) ~ death penalty is ok well as well but must be used sparingly and judiciously!...it is killing but you are preserving the dharma in doing this...the person is guilty...of killing others...so its allright!..
both perspectives agree on research investment and promotion of birth control measures....so the question of choice becomes minimum....
and mull i do on these issues as i sit on the swing later.......while i listen to tunes from alanis morissette unplugged....
Posted by ananth at 07:16 AM | Comments (0)
July 29, 2005
and it pours and pours and pours~
a cloud burst, or indra the rain god having bladder problems? 37 inches in 24 hours!
28 hours without power or television or phone. water almost to the doorstep and from inside the squat toilet~.. an all night candle vigil for the rising levels...one more hour and it would have been there...
Posted by ananth at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)
July 26, 2005
is any one out there?
'marooned in navi mumbai'..i borrow part of the cheesy title from a news channel but sadly its true..it feels like i am in an island cut off from the world..no power, no telephone..cell or land and the radio being absolutely aweful; have no idea whats happening out there...
see only the water logging outside my balcony and the rain coming down as if some was just emptying a bucket from the floor above! ..it does not look good....yeah..shanghai of 18th century..thats what we want to be!
Posted by ananth at 07:13 AM | Comments (0)
July 19, 2005
bullock cart driver paste
here's a recipe for vandikaran thohaa-yil (bullockcart driver paste in tamil)..a paste that goes really well with dosas or upmas!
1 tablespoon raw tamarind (not too black)
2 dried red chilles
1/4 teaspoon hing (asafoetida) powder
1/4 teaspoon salt (can add more later)
one branch of curry leaf
2 tablespoons of water
grind to paste all the above in small tabletop grinder/mixer
Posted by ananth at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)
July 10, 2005
navi mumbai swar utsav, vashi, new bombay
a classical music fest with big names, a kind; thats rarely seen in these parts of bombay suburbia..i wish i could have lasted till sunday evening but a bad vada-pav consumed during the morning concert break made me a slave to my stomachs rumblings and i had to miss the evening session on sunday! sigh!
i am grateful though for the two sessions, satish vyas, ajoy chakrabarthy, budhaditya mukerjee (in a package along with his son vijayaditya mukerjee) and veena sahasrabuddhe were absolutely entralling and mesmerizing. the crowd was sparse surprisingly and this perhaps let the artists be a bit more relaxed and the performances felt really intimate.
the raga selection by the artists was influenced by the rainy season and the time of performance as well. pandit satish vyas played a piece in gorakh kalyan in different taals and had to end quickly; to make way for pandit ajoy chakrabrathy! there was a bit of confusion cause he wasn't sure how much time he had left but he wrapped up anyway.
ajay chakrobarathy took a while to tune but boy was he on a high!...its not many times you see an artiste get into their element and it really showed..he gave it all..malhars..megh malhar to be specific (yes my favorite..)..you could smell the rain, the thunder, the cloud burst in his exploration of this raag; it was bliss is all i can say...and he went way way past midnight. schedule and the organizers be dammed! the crowd was very very vocal and receptive and the pandit used this energy to take him further. finally he admitted after singing a piece in bhairavi and a tukda, that he was was due for a early morning flight to kolkatta and he had to finish!
sunday morning, thirty minutes right before the morning session; vashi had its daily power cut and sure enough; the auditorium was also included in the list. aye..who cares for what happens..events, festivals..too bad organizer..you have no extra priviledge..oh yeah..we don't care..we won't inform you in advance...and we wont tell you when it will return as well... to use a generator or not, or wait for the power..we did start 30 minutes late on some official's promise; and after a couple of blips with the poor pandits plunged in darkness; the power did come on.
vijayaditya mukherjee, pandit budhaditya's son was a surprise addition and together with this father and Yogesh Samsi on tabla; played lights out (pun intented)..really high speed, switching high to low and encompassing all the possible combinations of the swaras in raag lalit, tell ya! ..it was heaven watching and hearing them.
veenatai as she is affectionately called also gave a standout performance with long elaborations in raag komal rishabh and then followed by one in miyan malhar and a bhajan. she sang the miyan malhar piece in drut taal while paying tributes to pandit balwant rai. the strength and the pitch of her voice was all there in this old age..and as i closed my eyes to focus on the vibrations, to see them produce emotions and see that transcend and permeate through all my cells; i felt a sense of calm and peace..a feeling that only music could produce..
Posted by ananth at 05:41 PM | Comments (0)
July 04, 2005
san jose, california
Posted by ananth at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)