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Beri, Beri juvenile
For a book priced at an astronomical Rs 1 lakh (that would be $2,250 or thereabouts), it ought to be your unfettered right to know what on earth lies between the blazing covers. But Ritu Beri isn't telling you. You need to buy the book to find out as much, that has been her repartee all this while. What the blazes!
Anyway, don't you tax your brain too much about the issue, having read those eulogising agency news items; this blog will actually vindicate your ill-founded fears. The book is not going to tax your brain much either. Yes, it is a no-brainer. The tome only proves that Ritu Beri's 28 inch waist matches her two-digit IQ. No, that's not a nasty one – there are nastier ones to come. Read on, pray.
To save these people, you need to keep them out of our sight
The most recurring, quoted number in India today is 1,411 – the mean count of tigers ostensibly remaining in the wild in the country. Everyone knows and everyone seems pretty upset. The number, of course, can be disputed and refuted too if needed; but that can be the topic for another discussion. What is evident is that given the rate of decline, it might be just another 20, or maybe 50, years by when tigers would vanish from our landscape. This number, till the other day, remained in the knowledge domain of wildlifers – conservationists, activists, enthusiasts. Thanks to the biggest ad campaign of the year, most people now know that 1,411 is too small a number in itself. Alarming, is how most ordinary people have been describing the number as.
The poverty of myths
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When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) launched its India Shining campaign, it had a fertile ground on which to sow the seeds of its electoral sloganeering. Newspaper editorials were going dizzy with India’s forever rising gross domestic product (GDP). Pundits were engaged in animated discussions over India being the economic superpower of the new century, nay millennium. Headlines every day would hysterically tell us that the Sensex had scaled a new high. Everyone was happy. Everyone was richer today than the day before. If what you saw or read in the media was anything to go by, India was indeed shining. Quite brightly at that. What the BJP-NDA only did was prop up an effort to capitalise on the apocryphal myth of resplendence that was already being perpetuated by the news media.
The mills and our loss
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A disaster becomes a farce when the underlying tragedy gets buried, for whatever be the reason. That is just what has happened with the Supreme Court order paving the way for more malls and luxury apartments in the congested metropolis of Mumbai that should translate into billions of rupees for mill owners.
It is not just the court ruling which will be environmentally calamitous for Mumbai. The real tragedy lies in the fact that all voices of reason have been drowned in the Babel of eulogies that have been flooding the newspapers and the news channels. Trust the media to slut themselves for the shortsighted interests of the real estate mafia.