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Die, you scum of the earth
Just gather the roses, you dunces
You incestuous assemblage can hardly think
And when you do, all that unimaginable
Which accidentally cross your tardy minds
And how to annihilate this
Life of an unfighting losing soul
Little less than roses you congregate now
The wreck from the belligerent stranger
Is to be the dogs of death.
• Collection:
Anger in Ashes
• Originally written on
June 12, 2002
[ First published: November 22, 2008
Last updated: November 22, 2008
]
Operation Blackout: Keeping Kashmir out of the news
In July I received a mail from a journalist who wanted to pitch me an interesting story idea from Kashmir. The mail was directed to an account I hardly check. Not that it would have made much difference since Newswatch carries only content that has something to do with the news media. I gather she pitched the story to many publications.
The story, let me tell you, never saw the light of day anywhere in this country where Kashmir is such an emotively jingoistic issue. Close to a month later, the story has appeared, but not in an Indian publication. I happened to stumble across it quite perchance in the New Internationalist.
Yet I am not surprised that no Indian publication wanted to carry the story despite the fact that the journalist, Dilnaz Boga, writes well. And more than anything else, it was a good story.
Read the blurb. If it doesn't make sense to you, you probably need to see a shrink:
Delhi rains: All talk of weather, no talk of climate
For the past one week, it has been the same story every day. It has been raining, pouring, making the city of Delhi a bigger mess than it was the previous day. The newspapers are full of photographs the following morning telling us the hell others have been going through too. Immediate problems beget immediate reactions. The civic bodies are to blame for the mess, we are told. And the blame game goes on.
Now, now, tell us something new, will you? While it is a fait accompli that the metropolitan disorder one has to wade through is only a clinical manifestation of the ineptitude of the Delhi government and its lethargic and corrupt civic agencies, it is a recorded fact that this has been the wettest August that the capital city has seen in 15 years.