News dudlines

Further investigation by Madison police resulted in the seizure of an additional $9,700 in counterfeit $100  bills, says an Associated Press news report in San Francisco Chronicle.

How do you put value to counterfeit currency ? One would think fake currency isn’t worth even the paper on which it is printed.  A  headline from Deccan Herald -  Counterfeit notess worth Rs.9 lakhs seized .   The news report read,  “The police seized Rs.9 lakh worth of counterfeit notes from a lodge in Srirngapatna, near Mysore.

A news item submitted by a correspondent is processed by atleast two others – sub-editor and the chief sub – on the  newsdesk before it gets into print in a newspaper. A friend and blogger Abraham Tharakan  forwarded a mail citing a newspaper headline -  Man Kills Self Before Shooting Wife and Daughter.   How could he ?  When a reader called the newspaper office to point this out, it took the editor  two readings to realise the snag . The newspaper published a correction the next day. I wonder how the editor phrased the  correction – man kills self, but not before shooting wife and daughter.

The mail Mr Tharakan sent included other bloomers such as: Panda mating fails; vetenarian takes over

War dims hope for peace

If strike isn’t settled quickly, it may last a while

Miners refuse to work after death

Juvenie court to try shooting defendant   This last bit ought to expedite pending cases and help clear the backlog in courts.

Kerala, their Kerala

Kerala, Kerala, Quite contrary,  whatever it means,  is a 225-page anthology comprising personal perspective on Kerala, by over a score of Keralites who write in varied forms  -  fiction, non-fiction, memoir and travelogue.  A Rupa publication,  the Rs.195-volume is edited by Shinie Antony,  born Keralite and brought up everywhere else in India;  she stays in touch with her home town on holidays-only basis.

Like Shinie,  most contributors to this anthology are non-resident Keralites who can look in on Kerala from outside.  As anthology editor says,  Keralites are all over.  And a Malayalee, no matter where he goes, takes a bit of Kerala with him. Speaking of her Malayalee-ness, Shinie observes that though she may not sound/smell/look one she would want others  - notably prospective landladies and small-talkers -  to know that she is a Malayalee from Kerala.

Other contibutors to the anthology include poet A J Thomas,  cricket writer Suresh Menon; student Nimz Dean who, at 13, is the youngest contributor; my London-based lawyer friend Vinod Joseph;  journalist and editor of an anthology on Bangalore Jayanth Kodkani, and erstwhile Travancore prince Rama Varma.

Nimz writes about a walk on the beach the morning  tsunami hit the world.  She learnt that ‘t’ is silent, and nothing else about tsunami is silent.  MP from Trivandrum and union minister Shashi Tharoor, who is the one Malayali who contested for the UN Secretary General post,  asks what it is that holds back Keralites from hard work, success and development in their home state. Could it be their poliitics?  Or policies, attitudes, or  resources? Or all of the above ?

Vinod Joseph fictionalises the reality of a Gulf Malayalee who slogs it out in Saudi,  so that his wife Mary can take care of an ailing mother and children back in Kerala. Mary’s brother and sister, employed in india and presumably, not so well paid,  can’t afford to  keep their mother in comfort.  Maybe, here is an explanation to Shashi Tharoor’s query as to why a Malayali’s  hard work is reserved for his Saudi employer.

I wouldn’t rate this  a ‘must-read’  for Malayalees,  but I guess few Keralites who happen by a volume at a book store or on your shelf would fail to buy it or borrow. And then this volume mayleave you somewhat unsatified, for there is scope for a sequeal to this work,  by another bunch of writers on their realities of Kerala.  In fact, an anthology of this sort can never be said to have been done, till we run out of writers and writings on Kerala.

To err is human…

My wife and I flew Emirates to the US this time; and didn’t find on board a single gent in flowing white robe and Arab head-gear. Presumably, these guys travel First Class. I wonder if they would put up with the kind of  experience we had in the Economy Class.

I would put it down to our tough luck that my wife and I were both allotted middle-seats, apart from each other, and in two different rows. It was a 15-hour non-stop flight; and, understandably, none of our co-passengers wanted to give up his aisle seat for us.  And the cabin crew didn’t appear particularly passenger-friendly. The hostess I approached  said the flight was full, and there wasn’t much she could do to help us.  She didn’t even go through the motion of bringing our plight to the notice her superior.

It was only at my instance her senior showed up, heard me out, and expressed his helpessness.  He mentioned something about inablity of the airlines staff to satisfy passengers seeking change of seats; and the airline’s obligation to fulfill seat preferences of what he called club members who chose Emirates on a regular basis. I was a first-timer on Emirates, and presumably, had to take whatever seats I was lumbered with.

Conceding that it was a ‘check-in’ mistake made at Bangalore airport, the cabin crew suggested I could make a complaint and he offered to give me the relevant form to be filled up. I didn’t take him up on his offer. To err is human;it takes a computer to make a mess.  My wife and I had booked our seats at the same time. Our tickets bear consecutive numbers; so does the ’seq. No’ on our boarding passes.  And yet the Emirates online computer system managed to come up with seats,in the middle on two different rows.

Admittedly, it was my fault not to have brought this up at Bangalore check-in counter, where we got two sets of boarding passes -  one for the Bangalore-Dubai flight, and the other, for our connecting flight from Dubai. Amazingly, we got adjescent seats for the first leg of our journey ex-Bangalore. I had neglected to check our boarding passes for our onward flight from Dubai – EK 225.

A case of Nigerian con trick

The e-mail, I made out right away, was a con trick. What gave the game away was the sender’s name – Srihari Ramakrishna. It was an SOS for money, 1,750 pounds, to be sent to London, where my friend Srihari was supposedly stranded.

Srihari is a friend,  but we are not that close for him to e-mail me for money. Besides, the e-mail English was somewhat fractured;  not the language one associates with a newspaper editorial writer that the Srihari I know is.  As the e-mail read:

How are you today, I am in hurry writing this mail to you, I had traveled to London yesterday to visit a new Researchers’ Complex at Imperial College London…..all my money was stolen at the hotel where i lodged, I am so confused right now…didn’t bring my phone here and the hotel telephone line’s was burnt during the robbery incident…the police only asked me to write a statement…directed me to the embassy, but they are not responding to the matter effectively…

…can you send me 1,750 Pounds today so i can return home,  As soon as i get home i would refund it immediately…send it through western union outlet…to Srihari Ramakrishna, 53 FREEMASONS RD,  London E163NA…Please help me write out the reference number given to you by the western union official and the details you used in sending me the money,or help me scan the receipt and attached it for me…

Not the  construction  that Srihari would be proud of.  But then,  the e-mail message came as news to him. When I called him on his cell phone  Srihari said he was visiting Pune,  not London as the e-mail said. He suggested that if I had the cash and wanted to part with it, I could send it to him at his son-in-law’s address in Pune. Srihari said another friend from Mysore, Madhuri Tatachari, had also called him a short while ago, after geting a similar e-mail.

Apparently,  the message seeking 1,750 pounds had been bulk-mailed to all his e-mail contacts, after they had hacked into Srihari’s yahoo acccount. They call this the Nigerian con trick,  also known as the 419 fraud. Section 419 of the Nigerian penal code pertains to fraudulent schemes. One short of our 420 IPC.  The 419 scam  is said to be the third largest industry in Nigeria.

This kite didn’t fly

Politicians rely on an obliging media to fly their political kites. This past week,  the New Delhi sky over 10 Janpath was overcast with  kites. When the numbers in the Lok Sabha poll made it clear that the coalition this time was going to be Congress-driven, Deva Gowda’s JD(S) swiftly switched fronts to offer ‘unconditional’  support to the  Congress-led coalition, UPA. 

Coalition politics has a way of giving hopes to parties with zero-chance of capturing power to aspire for cabinet seats.  JD(S),  with a tally of three seats , was in the wrong alliance before poll .  The party  was hopeful (or was it wishful thought?) of a ministerial berth at centre,  according to a media report. The newspaper that reported this piece of poor-selling fiction said,  it is more or less certain that H D Kumaraswamy will get a berth in the Union cabinet. 

That newspaper reporters can at times be persuaded by politicians to publish  self-serving fib, in the name of ‘exclusive’ news, was evident from the media report that said Kumaraswamy, camping in New Delhi, was lobbying   ’to secure one of these portfolios,  namely Railways, Forest and Environment or surface Transport’.  This  appeared on May 18.

Three days later came this  headline,  in the same newspaper.  The Page One story read that Mr Kumaraswamy’s  ‘herculean efforts to get into the cabinet now appears a distant dream’.  And the question now was whether HDK would want to retain his Lok Sabha seat, at the expense of his seat in the Karnataka assembly.

Moral of the story:  The politically privileged can have it both ways.

Car crash on our way to airport

Viewing this image you would not hold out much hope for its passengers. I wouldn’t,  either, had I not survived the crash. This was the vehicle in which my wife and I were going to the Bangalore airport to catch an early morning Dubai-bound flight. It happened near Bididi, nearly two hours after we had left Mysore,  at the dead of night.  Our vehicle  brushed  against a bitumen laden truck,  taking a ‘U’turn on a high-speed highway.

We were at the rear-seat, asleep. I didn’t know what hit us, as I woke up to the crash; my wife had passed out on impact.  Stranded on a highway in pitch darkness, I felt futile and helpless. For a few agonised minutes I believed it was all over, as my wife wouldn’t respond to my frantic calls, and efforts to shake her awake.

It must have been minutes,  but seemed an eternity, before my wife  regained consciousness.  She was dazed, and kept asking what had happened, and why, and where we were heading , what for. Whatever I told her didn’t register, for she kept repeating the same questions, to a point when I lost patience. I found myself utterly at a loss as what to do next.

Our driver Mahadevan knew the drill. He informed his travel office in Mysore; called the police, and the ambulance service. Meanwhile a crowd gathered, even though it was past midnight.  Somewhat irritated at our becoming  a spectacle for curious passers-by, I gave vent to my frustration, asking the driver why he wouldn’t try to stop a passing vehicle to take my wife to hospital, instead of wasting time answering silly questions from inquisitive onookers.

I didn’t realise then that  Mahadevan, hurt and bleeding from his right ear, was doing his best, unmindful of his injury. I learnt later that he had a slashed ear. A few minutes later a policeman showed up on a bike,but there was no sign of ambulance.

Under stress I get clumsy at handling  things, even a cell phone. I managed to call co-brother Raghu in Mysore.  I had a credit card, but not much cash.  He called his co-brother Narsimhan in Bangalore, who was the first to turn up at the hospital at the crack of dawn. As it turned out, I didn’t need cash. The ambulance ride was free; and I used credit card at the hospital.  Incidentally, it came as a relief to learn that the Karnataka government has a free ambulance service in place on the Mysore-Bangalore highway. So dire was its need for me that I would have  readily paid a thousand rupees, if only I had the cash.

It was, I believe,  nearly half-hour ambulance ride to BGS Global hospital at Kengari. The approach road to an otherwise well-equipped hospital is bumpy, and bad for fracture cases. And the multi-speciality hospital,  located close to the highway receives mainly accident victims. I see repair of potholed  road to the hospital as a medical priority in critical care. 

Emergency service was prompt, and efficient. Dr Venkatesh who attended on my wife stitched up a nine-inch cut on her neck; had her right shoulder x-rayed for supected fracture; and kept up a conversation to calm our nerves.  At my request he agreed to take a call from my anxious daughter-in-law, a doctor in the US. I found Dr Venkatesh a multi-tasker with reassuring way with words in dealing with patients – the kind, I believe, would be an assset in any medical emergency room. I wonder why a hospital that has a well-functioning ER and claims to have world-class infrastructure, including helipad for air ambulance,  can’t fix its bumpy driveway.

On our way back to Mysore, after a day in hospital, I stopped by to see,  for the first time, our damaged vehicle. The scale of damage may spell death for others. But I associate life,  my reality of it,  with that mangled mess on wheels, if only because my wife and I are still alive to see it. The image of the wrecked Sumo  tells me that at times a split-second or sheer hair-breadth is all that is there  between life and a pointless death.

An envoy’s barber story

 Before he left India to take up his assignment as our envoy in Brazil Mr B S Prakash visited his mother in Shimoga.  As son of a locally prominent doctor Mr Prakash basks in reflected fame in his home town. His Shimoga visit made news in the local media. The newspaper report  prompted a visit by a frail elderly gent to his place.  He walked into ‘our small garden’, seeking to meet ‘the Doctor`s son, now a dodda sahebaru in Delhi. The visitor, Hanumantha, had been the family barber retained by Mr Prakash’s father. 

That Hanumantha had walked  miles  to look him up touched Mr Prakash. “We gave him some kodubale and Kobbari mithai which he had, but without coming inside the house”, said Mr Prakash , adding that Hanumantha had never stepped into their house.  His father used to have his hair cut in the garage outside.  Before taking leave  Hanumantha  reminded Mr Prakash  of his dharma – Yenadaru baksheesh kodabeku,neevu.  The barber claimed his tip as an entitlement.

I had Mr Prakash reminiscing about his Shimoga barber  when I  sent  him the link to a fascinating piece by Mr M P V Shenoi on his Mysore barber, who played clarinet.  Mohalla barbers in Shenoi’s younger days (1940s) doubled up as street musicians,  hired to play musical instruments at weddings and other festivities.  Every upper caste household had a family barber, handed down to it from generation to generation.  He was paid a pittance as monthly retainer; given some sweets and clothes on festivals.

Mr Shenoi’s account, appearing in Dadinani.com,  triggered this mail from Mr Prakash:

In my Shimoga school years, early sixties,  my father,  a prominent doctor, used to have barber Hanumanta come to our home to cut his hair. He was too busy, perhaps, too successful a doctor to go to his saloon. My job was to go running to Hanumanta`s saloon and call him home. Like the barber in Mr. Shenoy`s story,  he too had a musical vocation: he and his brother were nagaswaram players at weddings and often were not available for haircutting.  I too used to get my haircut at home till my middle school, but thereafter shifted to more fancy saloons in Shimoga.

 Two years ago, I was in Shimoga visiting my mother. The local one-page newspaper did a feature on me to the effect that `this man, son of Doctor so and so, who had joined the IAS/IFS and is now the Ambassador to ….etc is visiting the town“. I guess there is still some local interest in me in Shimoga. 

The next evening, a frail, bent, elderly gent came in to our small garden…In a feeble voice,  he introduced himself as Hanumanta. “Do you remember coming running to me when you were young?”  he asked. Of course I did, though it was a memory from forty years back…  He said that he had come walking from a village nearly six miles away, after he had seen the local paper.  At his age and in his condition it had taken him hours.  This memory will certainly last a life time.  And he was not even my barber, but the recipient of my father`s summons.

Tree slaughter, with official sanction

This  milestone on Sathy Road says Chamarajanagar is just 10 km away. From here we drove past scores of slaughtered trees all the way to the town. Amputated tree trunks on the roadside bore mute witness to an officially sanctioned havoc to green cover.           

 This stretch of the road close to Chamarajanagar town has apparantly been left untouched.  Or could it be because the timber contractor, working his way towards the town from the sixth milestone,  has yet to make it here ?   Whatever the reason it was refreshing to see a stretch  of road so well shaded by the lofty spread of decades old roadside trees.

If axe-men have their way,  this shaded  stretch may  become a memory before long.  

We took this picture from inside  a car so  as not to  ‘distract’  workers of  the  timber contractor, who may not be appreciative  of  our amateur  camera   work.  Elsewhere, logs  from a freshly slaughtered tree  await transport to saw mills and carpentry shops. 

You could do a 1000 words on this picture.  But who needs words when the chopped trunks can speak.  Road-widening is cited as an obvious explanation. What is often not so obvious is that a minor fortune some people  stand to make by lobbying  for widening roads that are  rich with old avenue trees.

Telltale remains of a chopped tree on the left of the big one suggest that road-widening may well be a pretext for converting decades old trees into high value timber.  In many cases trees that got axed could have been saved, with marginal realignment of the stretch to be widened. But then saving trees fetch no money.  And these are sturdy old trees,  on which there is a fortune to be made  by bringing them under the axe.

Cross-posted from FORT-Mysore

Thoughts of a poll loser

Karnataka voters have ousted twiddledee only to bring back twiddledum.  So wrote Dr Bhamy Shenoy in 1995. He could as well write the same stuff in May next,  after the 2009 elections. Our voters do not care who wins and often do not even know whom they are voting for. So says Dr Shenoy, who contested the 1995 Karnataka assembly election as an Independent. And lost by a huge margin.

He reckoned that our voters are easily swayed,  even those whom we expect would take informed decisions. A  retired Karnataka Administrative Services (KAS) official, who had promised his vote to Shenoy, changed his mind on way to the polling booth. Because someone supporting  a rival candidate came up to him and handed over his voter registration slip.  The official had  in his government day held responsible positions  that entailed taking decisions. 

Losing elections, twice in a row,I suppose,  makes Dr Shenoy an electoral veteren. Referring to the last time he lost, 1994, the IIT educated  Mysorean said his  assembly constituency, with a fair chunk of well-to-do residents, had eight slum areas,  where votes were controlled by petty landlords, usually small time politicians. Our candidate had reckoned on neutralising the slum area vote,  by appealing to the educated middle-class to 1) stop staying away from the polling booth; and 2)  think before voting.

Dr Shenoy first contested in 1989,  when he polled 550 votes.  His strategy to draw middle-class votes fetched him 2260 votes in 1994. The strategy worked,  but the candidate lost. His years between elections – 1989-94 –  were spent on proactive social activism and networking  retired professionals and officials to help him mobilise public opinion.

With their support Dr Shenoy reached out individually to 70,000 people and visited 30,000 households, spending time at each place discussing issues of common concern.  “If only half of those we met had kept their word,  I would have easily won,” says Dr Shenoy.

On reflection he felt many who promised Shenoy their vote had, presumably, associated his name with BJP.  The middle-class everywhere has a segment of party-committed voters, who went by the party symbol, rather than a condidate’s merit. So much for the power of informed voting.  Dr Shenoy’s home-visits and his efforts to educate them on democratic maturity simply fell on deaf ears.

Another discovery he made was that, like parties and their parties ,  voters too have an ‘unspoken agenda’.  Sharing his thoughts in the media, Dr Shenoy wrote in 1995:

A shopkeeper was frank enough to admit that if we really root out corruption he would not be able to earn his living!…many of us may talk against the present corrupt system. But  we   have learnt the art of managing the system….Traders ans business class  may  agitate for unification of taxes and show their protest against the political system that brings in irrational rules and regulations.  But in the final analysis, they prefer a system where they can bribe and manage rather than the one where the rule of law prevails.   

Dr Shenoy can be reached at bhamysuman@hotmail.com

BBC poll special

So BBC   is up to a new way to cover Lok Sabha elections;  and in the process gain promotional mileage for itself.  The British news channel has chartered a seven-coach train to carry their news team, drawn from several language services,   on a 18-day spin around India.  BBC election special that left New Delhi on Apl.25  would cover Ahmedabad,  Mumbai,  Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar,  Kolkata, Patna and Allahabad, before returning to New Delhi, May 13, the last day of voting.

Even before the train moved out of Delhi, over 130 publications in India carried their story. BBC’s marketing people thoughtfully invited the New Delhi press corps to a posh hotel for celebrating their election special.  BBC  brought out publicity T-shirts to mark the occasion. Apart from the BBC news service reporters  from  language services  such as  Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Bengali, Burmese, Swahili, and Arabic   the tain carries  a blogger on board . 

At Rewari, an unscheduled halt three hours into their journey,  wrote blogger  Soutik Biswas,  the fancy train, painted red and white , was mobbed by curious onlookers  at Rewari station. As they  surged towards their train,  BBC cameramen and sound recordists fanned out into the platform to record the event.

I am sure blogger Biswas would have much to write home about and his colleagues with the camera, plenty more of visuals to record over the next three weeks of the BBC train’s passage through India.  Elections would be over by mid-May,  but the BBC election special would be remembered long after,  by folks at Rewari and thousands of others who happen by the train through its journey.

Late last year BBC hit upon another promotional idea,  called  The Box.  It refers to a 40-ft shipping container,  painted with BBC logo and fitted with a transmitter device.  BBC News tells the story of international trade and globalisation by tracking its shipping container  on its journey around the world.   

At the time of posting  The Box  was tracked to  Hong Kong  en route to Japan.  From there they expect it to travel to Russia before its return to the UK in June/July. BBC brings television, radio and online reports from each location the container has touched.