Here’s an interesting piece of news that is worth sharing. I don’t think I need to say anything more.
Of mice and men
November 24, 2009 at 5:00 am (Mumbai)
This post was written last year, but is being published now in the context of this news.
If there is any blog post, that I really hate to write from the bottom of my heart, this one it is. This is not the time nor the occasion to get into this debate, but when I find the mainstream media and the blogosphere indulging in bashing Maharashtrians over the recent terror attacks, I’m sorry but no Maharashtrian can take it lying down.
It started with this article, We are all Bombayites today, wherein Vir Sanghvi lanched a tirade against Raj Thackeray. Agreed that Raj Thackeray is not exactly a shining star, but why are you rubbing ordinary Maharashtrians the wrong way by incessantly referring to Mumbai as ‘Bombay’, especially when you know that this is a very emotive issue? Is this your idea of uniting people in this moment of grave danger, when no one knows how the present circumstances might unfold, when the nation stands on the brink of a potential war?
Then there is this news article on ToI about peace marches in south Mumbai, which quotes a Dodo (and a real one at that) saying, “I feel angry. Angry with the system. Angry with myself…This is not the Bombay I knew, not the Bombay I love. This is Mumbai.”
Equally interesting was Manjit Kripalani’s article on Business Week, where he was complaining how no big business honcho from South Mumbai, that he tried to contact using his thick rolodex, was willing to come to the Gateway of India to attend a TV program on the fallout of this massacre. (BW seems to have removed this particular article now, but it was definitely a good read.)
To those who ask, where is Marathi Manoos to save Mumbaikars, who do you think were the cops who took bullets for us? Is this how you are grateful to the sacrifices of Karkare, Kamthe, Salaskar, Shinde, More, Durgade, Omble, Bhosale, Chitte, Jaywant & Yogesh Patil, Pawar, Khandekar, Chowdhari, Rahul Shinde and Jadhav? I don’t want to belittle the contribution of the NSG and Navy commando’s, but it was a woefully ill-equipped Mumbai police force that managed to capture a terrorist alive, who is now parroting to glory and whose investigation should help nail the epitaph on the Pakistani terrorist organizations. If it was not for the bravery of Omble, who snatched the AK-47 from the hands of Ajmal Kasab, while being pumped with bullets, the Indian government would be running around in circles trying to pin this incident on Pakistan.
While the inadequacies of arms, ammunition and protection gear for Mumbai police and in particular the ATS is very well documented, what is not so commonly known is the fact that a posting in the ATS is actually the least desired within the Mumbai police. This is primarily because there is a lot of pressure to deliver, to do your job to perfection (those cops that do a body search on you before you board flights at Mumbai airports belong to the ATS — next time thank them for their service and sacrifice), but there is no payoff. The previous ATS chief Dr. KP Raghuvanshi, held the ATS charge along with the Railways (what else?). Hemant Karkare, on the other hand, jumped on it when RR Patil offered it to him. Meanwhile, Maharashtra DGP, AN Roy is busy fighting in the Central Administrative Tribunal with his sub-ordinates for promotion. Is this the kind of leadership that commands the respect and loyalty of your foot soldiers?
No Mercy!
November 27, 2008 at 3:56 am (Maharashtra)
Tags: Mumbai
Show no mercy to these terrorists.
Emirati Manoos
November 12, 2008 at 1:59 am (Maharashtra)
Tags: Dubai, Emirates, Marathi Manoos, Raj Thackeray
Apparently, cultural identity is not a concern of Maharashtrians alone. I came across this news article on the New York Times, which discusses the concerns of the citizens of the United Arab Emirates, in particular Dubai. The only difference is their affluence and government subsidies prevent them from “going out to the street with a stick and chase people out”.
Some people (probably with some acute form of learning disabilities) claim that migration is not an economic issue. Here’s what the Dubai government does to keep the Emirati’s happy …
1. free tuition and expenses for their university studies in Britain, including a monthly stipend of $1,258 while abroad.
2. On returning, government jobs that pay $3,600 a month, which like all income here is tax free.
3. When they plan to marry, the government will give them each a piece of land free and about $200,000 to build a house, plus access to a 10- or 20-year interest-free loan.
The language of cosmopolitanism
November 9, 2008 at 7:38 pm (MNS, Maharashtra)
Tags: cosmopolitanism, Indian Railways, Marathi, MNS, Mumbai, Raj Thackeray
The constant din of the roof top revelers of cosmopolitanism against parochialism revolves around the language issue. These flag-bearers of cosmopolitanism claim that Mumbai’s cosmopolitan image is hurt by putting Marathi sign-boards or otherwise insisting on the usage of Marathi language.
Pardon me for being a mutt, but may be these cosmo’s can explain what any language has to do with a city being cosmopolitan? Is Paris any less cosmopolitan for expressing itself in French? What about Tokyo, Shanghai or Seoul? How are these clones, who somehow seem to think it is beneath them to speak the local language, any different from this boy who believes that he is a re-incarnation of some american professor?
Nobody is asking you to play Marathi songs in discotheques; at least not yet. (I do hope that my Marathi music-composer friends are reading this.) But if Bambaiyaa Hindi can be the linguistic Kamikaze on the chaste Hindi of the cow belt, won’t you return us the favor?
But, there is more to this debate than just what the cosmo’s feel about a language. Even bigger than the aspirations of these urbanites is the need to make available the fruits of a democracy to all its people. Take for instance the access to state governmental health care programs. How can a doctor address the needs of his or her patients if he/she can’t communicate with them? Should we wait for a crash course from MNS to impart crash courses to our doctors? This is true for Indian Railways as well. The vast majority of the people who tend to use the Indian Railways are not affluent English speaking, but the poor and illiterate kind, who only tend to speak in their native languages. If people from only a handful of states dominate Railway jobs, how does it benefit these passengers in making effective use of services that are meant for them? Are their rights not being infringed by the malfeasance of the Railway authorities?
Which brings me to the oft quoted counter argument of the pro-migrant lobby that ‘All Indians have a right to move to any part of India.’ Do these people realise how fragile their argument becomes if they have to fall back upon the constitution to defend their positions? Besides, what about my right to feel at home in my home state? Are only those rights that are enshrined in the constitution worth protecting?
Missing the forest for the trees
November 7, 2008 at 8:02 pm (Maharashtra)
Tags: caste based politics, Maharashtra, Raj Thackeray
I recently came across couple of interesting blogs, both written by non-Maharashtrians, which address the insider-outsider conflict in Mumbai. But, they differ in how one blog focusses on the visually obvious tree’s while the other pans over the bigger picture, the forest.
Atanu Dey in his blog characterizes Raj Thackeray, as an amateur politician. who fundamentally is not much different from the more seasoned politicians, who also tend to use divisive politics for their own empowerment and enrichment. The only difference would be that Raj Thackeray is playing gully cricket, while the other politicians are playing it in the stadium. On the eve of Barack Obama’s historic victory in the US presidential elections, CNN-IBN held a panel discussion, which was attended by Chandra Bhan an advisor to Mayawati (I suppose there are some parallels between Madam Chief Minister and the President-Elect, however suffocating the mere thought maybe.) The notable quote from Chandra Bhan was how casteist discrimination is a national problem that Mayawati is rightly poised to “address”. So, the question facing the people of India is whether they are going to divide themselves along the lines of caste or whether they are going to divide themselves along the boundaries of their language. In this context, let us not forget how the Babri Masjid against Ram Janma Bhoomi was essentially a cow-belt issue that got nationalized through the Rath Yatra.
Notwithstanding Raj Thackeray, the concern of every Maharashtrian then would rightly be to avoid the casteist divisions that are bound to follow as an influx of migrants from the Hindi belt brings that peculiar brand of politics to our state. While Raj Thackeray is addressing this on an insider-outsider platform, I’m aghast that the other politicians, national or from Maharashtra, seem to be doing absolutely nothing to unite people across their castes. In a post-Khairlanji Maharashtra, this is particularly required. Take for instance, that after 58 years of a republic, whose constitution was framed by a Dalit Dr. Ambedkar, Indian newspapers still continue to advertise classified ad’s for marriages, which explicitly spell out caste based preferences, if I may euphemestically refer it so. If there is any place to attack these divisions or any other, the matrimonial ad’s it is.
From ‘Hindi mein Bolo’ to ‘Hindi mein Ro Lo’
November 4, 2008 at 4:47 am (Bihar, MNS, Maharashtra)
Tags: Hindi, Marathi, Mumbaikar, Raj Thackeray
I came across this very eloquent blog from a fellow Maharashtrian that gives vent to the travails of Maharashtrians in Mumbai. When I read these instances of Maharashtrians being put down with ethnic slurs, to being treated like a cheap criminal in your home state and city for speaking in your mother tongue, I wonder if the backlash against these wolves in sheep’s clothing for signage and communication in Marathi was not to be expected.
What started in suburban Mumbai as the roadside vegetable vendor from north India saying ‘Hamaari Bitiya Indira Gandhi’, eventually morphed in to a self-righteous demand of ‘Hindi mein bolo’. Funny how, what we believed was our national language just turned out to be ‘an official language of the central government‘ just like English. (Interestingly our textbooks in Maharashtra never bothered to clarify that, nor did they ever mention the Samyukta Maharashtra movement.) Equally interesting was the violent campaign against English medium schools in UP/Bihar during the 80’s and 90’s — apparently linguistic ‘Asmita’ is not a Maharashtrian monopoly.
But, our attempts at a more inclusive campaign of ‘Mee Mumbaikar’ only fetched us an in our face ‘Jiska number Mumbai ka, woh Mumbai ka’. So, if Raj Thackeray and his men are paying back ‘Hindi mein Bolo’ with ‘Hindi mein Ro Lo’, who is to be blamed?
The sad part is that the price of spurning the hand of friendship is being paid by soft targets and not the senile bourgeois like Bachi Karkaria, who extol the virtues of multi-generational serfs from Bihar, and who probably never travel in the BEST buses but find angels among gun-toting machos shooting at innocent passengers.
Would you like some biscuits with that?
November 3, 2008 at 8:30 am (Uncategorized)
Tags: Dadar, migrants, Mumbai, Raj Thackeray, Tea and Biscuits
A testament to Mumbai’s infra-structure woes. Hawkers make tea in toilets.
Send us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses; we don’t have enough of ours.
How to have your cake and eat it too …
November 1, 2008 at 6:33 am (Bihar, Maharashtra)
Tags: Bihar, DharamDev Rai, Hadap, Khopoli, Raigad, Raj Thackeray, SEZ, UP
The unfortunate death of DharamDev Rai has grabbed the national headlines as well as eyeballs and clicks on the electronic and digital media. Nothing can justify the death of an innocent individual, no matter how accidental it is. I’m sure many people are aggrieved, as they rightly should be. But, if and when we are past this grief, can some one please pay some attention to the other side of this story from the Mumbai Mirror?
It has been very well publicized that DharamDev and his friends were workers at Khopoli, but what has not yet received the same attention is the fact some of the men (and a minor boy) who were involved in the assault were also from Khopoli. In fact these Maharashtrian villagers had given up/sold their lands to the steel plant back in 2003/04 in hopes of securing jobs for their families. Instead once the steel plant was built, a majority of the jobs were given to workers from out of the state, many of them north Indians. This was followed by an agitation by the villagers which involved morchas, hunger strikes and eventually fisticups with north Indian workers. The north Indian workers also organized their morchas which resulted in some of the villagers being arrested and externed.
So, now I’m left wondering who is smarter, UP/Bihar or Maharashtra? The way I see it … the farmers of UP/Bihar are keeping their farmlands and sending their excess labor to states like Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat and Andhra. Meanwhile, these other states are asking their farmers to give up their fertile lands to develop SEZs in hopes of attracting jobs. There are 131 SEZs in Maharashtra which are slated to attract an investment of Rs. 1.35 lakh crores and generate 60 lakh jobs. For Whom?
