The girl who thrashed a soldier for trying to molest her. Hai jawan!
The history of the Northeast is the history of romantic insurgencies and pyrrhic wars, devastating blasts and brutal carnages, internecine squabbles and ethnic clashes, political chicanery and myopic governance, and what have you. It is also the history of atrocities. By the agents of the State.
When Naga women were raped on church pulpits by the sacrosanct Indian forces, it was something that never coalesced into the form of news. But these days some news do trickle out.
Like that of a gutsy girl in Haflong who took on a group of Army jawans, sometime in the last week of July.
The poverty of myths
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.
Hits, runs, misses
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If you were to look at the world from the point of view of how people reacted to the conviction of Sanjeev Nanda in the BMW hit-and-run case, you will find there are just two kinds of people. Those who cannot contain their glee at the contention that the law indeed has a long arm, and those who are shedding copious tears over the poor young fella having to pay for being rich and famous.
Yes, the law has taken its own course. Nanda, few would disagree, was guilty as charged, and would certainly have to spend some of his youth behind bars. But the conviction is nothing to exult about. Someone was found guilty by a court of law and has been punished accordingly. That’s it. It’s time to move on. A man guilty of recklessness under the influence of alcohol deserves no media mileage. There are scores of others who need to be nailed as well.
The call of the wild
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They are notorious for raping, and even gangraping, their female passengers. They are a nuisance on roads and are as infamous for accidents as Delhi’s Blueline buses are. They frequently get into fights with other people on the roads, and more often than not bash them up black and blue. This they do, and have been doing so, with impunity. They are the illegitimate children of the spoilt-rotten BPO industry – the cab drivers.
Five people, including a 3-year-old girl, were injured on Tuesday night when a speeding call centre cab rammed into them while they were relaxing on a raised platform outside their residence in south-west Delhi. A call centre employee was killed in an accident in early August caused by a rash and negligent driver.
A race to its own finish
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This swanky joint in plush South Delhi keeps setting standards that only it can alone emulate. After all, it is rather difficult to maintain yourself as a lowlife.
In June, the Urban Pind joint denied entry to a young female photographer from Nagaland. The decision to do that was purely on racist grounds. When the incident degenerated into a news item, the joint's co-owner Kashif Farooq mumbled some feeble and incoherent excuses, and asserted that there would be no question of apologising. Some arrogant racism that.
As public opinion became mobilised, including a Boycott Urban Pind group on Facebook, and a case was filed over the incident, the owners probably thought its image was taking a beating somewhere. Late last month came an apology from Urban Pind.