Another Turf.

Sabina Park, Kingston, Jamaica showed no one ‘likes’ facing a good fast bowler.

‘Ishant Sharma produced high speeds and awkward bounce from all the sweet spots on the pitch’ observed AR Hemant on Yahoo! Cricket. And he got 3 wickets to show for it. He is still not the same Ishant Sharma who bowled flat out in Australia a couple of seasons ago. He is capable of sustained pace as well as intelligent variation. Then came injury, lay off, and a fall in form. Straight away he turned into a line and length bowler. And the promising pace –bowler who could terrorise Ricky Ponting, was looking quite pedestrian. Thank God! that he rediscovered his pace.

Praveen Kumar could bowl faster than he has hitherto displayed. Swing-bowling got him three wickets, good. But what about speed?. Kapil Dev was once termed a ‘slippery’ bowler by the Aussies. He was clocking just around 81 miles per hour. He got plenty of wickets all right, including an 8 wicket-haul in one innings. It must be remembered that he was setting a trend for Indian pace bowlers at that time. Then followed a stream of bowlers who enjoyed bowling as quick as they could. Srinath, Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra, Munaf Patel, R.P.Singh, Sreesanth. But…

Injury-prone, and often ‘guided’ by defensive Captains, these bowlers slowed down perceptibly to a point where a legendary West Indies fast bowler quipped that Praveen Kumar has become a spinner!

Reality is, Indian cricket does not encourage pace bowlers. It waits for them to slow down, exhorts them to become line-and-length bowlers who may restrict batsmen, then let the spinners snare out the batsmen. Any wickets they get are a ‘bonus’.

There is ample proof of this tendency. Srinath never got the new ball till Kapil retired. Munaf did not get a place till he had slowed down.

Now, Varun Aaron, touching a healthy 88 mph or more did not get selected for the Windies tour. Too young, our Board will tell us. He has to learn to control the ball better. His time will come. Meanwhile ,he’ll slow down, learn a few variations, and to respect the opponent batsmen enough not to go too hard at them. And become another medium-pacer who’ll prise out wickets after much plotting. A Shoaib from across the border, a Malinga from a little island down south, a Thomson or a Shane Bond from farther South striking fear in the hearts of batsmen is not for us. A stump splintered in half at impact… a batsman bewildered and beaten for sheer pace…

When will the Indian Selectors pick a Varun Aaron and let him bowl at bruising pace? When will the Indian team have 3 FAST bowlers , all terrorizing the rival batsmen? If Ishant and Praveen can combine well, what may Ishant and Varun Aaron do?

Especially on another turf…

Chewing Gum

For children it is fun.

For teenagers and young adults, a sign of defiance; the jaw works nonchalantly and the eye slants cockily.

For someone in the Office of the Finance Minister and officials of the CBI, it is a sign of some sinister plot.

Sixteen spots where an adhesive, presumably used for surveillance bugging, were found in the FM’s office. Pranab da found it sufficiently significant to write to the PM. The CBI , as usual unequipped to deal with this, nevertheless swung into action. It soon came up with the opinion that the adhesive was just chewing gum.

Whoever chews so much gum and leaves it indiscriminately, and irresponsibly, in unlikely places of the Office of the FM must first be traced and trained in office-etiquette. His behavior was like that of a child whose toilet-training is inadequate if not incomplete.

And the conservancy staff in that North Block office must be given a wage-cut for failure in carrying out their duty.

Many of us in office have for years dusted our office-table and chair routinely. But what happened in the North Block is unpardonable.Pranab da can not be expected to clean his entire office. Indeed it is worth probing whether his predecessor, Chidambaram, looked carefully enough for bits of gum stuck under his table or a crevice in the wall. Did the staff clean up the place daily or were they guilty of dereliction of duty? What was the state of the office when Pranab took charge from Chidambaram? Was there much gum that went unnoticed ? Aren’t the two stalwarts , in some way responsible for the gummy state of the finance ministry?A whole lot of investigation from top to bottom must be undertaken.

The CBI, already having identified the adhesive as Chewing Gum, will not be keen about reopening the case. They need a Supreme Court intervention to reopen a case … they were about to close the Arushi case for lack of evidence. There is an alternative , though, in the making, and just exactly what mechanism was necessary.

The Lokpal.

All Gum and no teeth.

The Authorised Version

What Friendship might Subsist between the Hammer and the Anvil? Asks TS Eliot in Murder in the Cathedral.

An elected parliament, with diverse members of diverse political parties; most members with access to money-making ways; and an electorate comprising people whose money goes into making the parliament members’ wealth at least moderately enviable—

What friendship might subsist between the hammer and the anvil?

As of last evening, irreconcilable differences continued to plague the Lokpal drafting committee.

Now is the time for MPs of all parties, whatever their ideologies, to demonstrate solidarity.

Keep out the MPs.

Keep out the PM.

Keep the powers to appoint and remove the Lokpal.

Keep jail term to the minimum.

Keep it simple, silly!

How can people and parliament be friends? People elect the members because it is statutory to do so. MPs will then rule people with an iron-hand. The relationship is inevitable So is the beating people must take. What is the noise that Anna, Kejriwal and the Bhushans are making? They must relearn the art of silent suffering and show the people they believe they represent how one must take a beating with dignity. When Bills are drafted and eventually enacted as laws, they are meant to be obeyed by the people.

Members of different political parties are but governments in waiting! How can they accept the people’s irrational demands which have the potential to curtail their possible power? Keep people out of this sacred law-making business.

But there is a problem all right. The current Prime Minister has long nurtured the reputation for transparent honesty and a disdain of power. . He has gone ahead and called a meeting of the UPA for this evening. Don’t know whether he took the blessings of the presiding deity; but he has called a meeting. What if… in an attempt to sustain his reputation he agrees with the Civil team instead of Team Sibal? What if he persuades the allies to go along with the brothers rather than the Keepers?

This is where the sagacity of Digvijay Singh comes in handy.

Baba Rahul has just celebrated his 41^st Birthday. Now he is definitely primed for the top job, opines Digvijay. If Manmohan does not sing the right tunes, The young Baba can always be promoted to the highest post. That would be consistent with the unexpressed wish of the party president, the unvoiced demand of the youth of India, and very importantly, the dynastic tradition of Indian Parliamentary Democracy.This young man, like his father , will make an ideal makhauta for the party.

Then we can have a nice authorised version of the Lokpal bill

The Lok Bal bill.

The Baba and the Bagula Bhagat:

Chetan Bhagat, the underaged optimist, wrote in today’s Times of India, that he was disappointed with the Baba’s tame surrender besides the mark of questionability of his yogic powers. He could have lasted longer; but he turned out to be an unequal soldier in the cause of the nation. Ramdev’s language, deportment, following and the cause he espoused suggested that he was a worthy opponent. Instead, he displayed uncommon weakness and gave in quickly, as the government hoped he would.

The Bhagat stood at a safe remove, observed the event, and made his comment.

On the weakness of the common man found everywhere in India.

After all, what is Ramdev, or Anna Hazare before the Majesty and Might of the Government of India? Unless the GOI permits,one may not even protest, much less fast or feast. Once the Home Ministry decides, enough is enough, and a Raj Bala becomes an unfortunate victim, regrettably, but ...there is no alternative, you see! That is what every right-thinking common man must be prepared for. He must know that his is not to question why, his is but to do and die. Given such knowledge, what protests, five point someone, observes the Bhagat.

The well-chosen members of the GOI and the spokespersons of the Ruling Party used the English Media, which was only too willing, to unleash vilification and cool-mockery at the common man, told him firmly that he had neither the power nor the sophistication to run a parallel government and confounded him with innumerable technical issues where he had taken up a single issue which he thought had a bearing on his routine life.

Cleverness and cunning two facets of the same coin.Like Amitabh’s coin in Sholay , the GOI had the advantage either way.A plain-speaking Anna and a bumbling Baba were no match to the Sibals and Pestles of the GOI.

What surprises is Bagula Bhagat’s disappointment at the petering off of Ramdev and the common man. Common men are not meant to be clever or cunning. Or to have great stamina. Before they have raised an issue, the prices of petrol and commodities rise enough to force them to look at issues of day-to-day living. That is why governments are put together in place, so that they can do most of the thinking leaving common men to mind their daily lives.

Admittedly, the Baba ,presiding over a few hundred crores is not as common as the common man. But he is very common compared to the scamsters in the UPA government who have set the country back thousands of crores of resource. Dayanidhi Maran still awaits a possible interrogation in July. Ramdev and his followers had just a few minutes at midnight before tear-gas guns volleyed and thundered.

Bhagat’s observation disheartened me, among other common men for the deceptive ease with which he joined ranks with the government spokesmen

Bhagat should have been disappointed strongly at the government’s exhibition of cunning.

The Bull and the Bill

An Ongole Bull kicked the Andhra Pradesh Speaker with its hind legs.

There is a lesson somewhere tucked away in this. Not the well enough known Aa baile mujhe maar one. In a fortnight’s time Sri Nadendla Manohar may well recall such a muhaavara , if Telangana based legislators, regardless of Party affiliations, do indeed submit valid resignations in pursuit of a separate State.But let us, for a moment, look at national, not local significance of the Bull’s Feat.

It is common wisdom that Bull’s tend to use their head to butt and horns to gore when frontally confronted. And that donkeys pack a powerful hind- kick. Are bulls behaving in unpredictable ways in response to the rapidly evolving societal changes?

It is an interesting riddle.

One basic inference may be that no one wants to take the bull by the horns. Even the best matadors will tell you this is potentially dangerous to life.Our own Jallikattu testifies to this, every year. Generally all this happens in the sport of men.

But an English bard pointed out once that we are like flies to wanton boys....they [Gods] kill them for their sport.

English educated legal minds that Chidambaram and Sibal are therefore wary of sport, especially the bull-by-the-horn variety.So they agree on a new strategy, attack the bullish from behind.

At the national political level, this is certainly gaining popularity across party lines.Only simple-minded Mamata will stick with the age-old strategy. Shrewd Sibal and Clever Chidambaram will use dumb Digvijay and macho ( no,don’t confuse with MC, BC swear-words) Manish to make moves up-front, while they themselves can manage the hind quarters.

That is how they tried to deal with Anna bhai.

The old man believes in the dictum: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Bullish. The old bull and the old bill is the sport-line. Will the Bill be drafted and will Team Anna stop its ‘uncivil’, bullish attempt to run of a parallel government?

This is where the AP Speaker and the Ongole Bull enter the picture.

Sibal and his team will find that this sport is Aa Bhai, mujhe maar!

No matter how you approach a bull, it will devise its mode of attack. If it is not a bull’s way, it will be a donkey’s... depending on what you deserve.

.

Lok Pall:

Lok Pall:

There is a pall over it all now.

Speakers on TV Channels want to know how the mantle of civil leadership fell on Team Anna.

Thiru Chidambaram wants to know whether Bills are drafted by Fasting anywhere in the world.

Maanyavar Sibal ji firmly believes that there are so many intricate issues that 10 members of the drafting committee, much less the 5 ‘civil’ members can not possibly arrive at a consensus but only discussible formulas.

There is the belief that the Bill must apply only to positions of Under-Secretaries andbelow.

There is a question about who ‘selects’ the Lokpal and members, on which criteria, and who is to oversee the Lokpal ?

God!

God won’t be too keen to be the oversight authority , I presume, given the pall of confusion so expertly woven by the intelligentsia of this wonderfully democratic country.

There will not be more than 2 points to be addressed, truth to tell. 1) Is the Lokpal desirable?; and 2) Should the Prime Minister of India and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court be within the ambit of the Lokpal? If there is no agreement on these 2 points, there can not be a meaningful Bill.The PM within its ambit would automatically draw the cabinet of ministers and all members of the parliament within its scope. The same holds good for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. One does not have to argue over the defence services, the administrative services etc. because they are directly under the executive power of the PM, and the legal scrutiny of the Courts of Law.

Only a clear NO to the inclusion of the 2 highest functionaries under the ambit of the proposed Lokpal gives rise to the nitty-gritty of who’s in, who’s out.

Who oversees the Lokpal? If a 7-member Constitutional Bench of the Supreme Court issues a majority verdict , the Lokpal shall have to accept that verdict in the case of political and civil men and matters. A three fourths majority vote of the Combined session of the parliament, in matters of justice, should hold good over the Lokpal—in case the Lokpal ‘s sentence is challenged at all. In both cases,the Lokpal must be given a mandatory hearing at either forum , as relevant. A media-trial, at all events be ruled out, but the scrutiny of the lokpal by either forum must be nationally televised.This will enable people to decide the course of the quinquinnial elections.

Instead of spelling out the purpose, the committee has manipulated itself into a complication over the modalities.

The committee’s intention is obfuscation. Who but morons would ,otherwise, ask for the credentials of the ‘leaders’ of the civil society? Obviously, when the parliamentary democracy or an imperial administration, or a dictatorship falters again and again in delivering a reasonable life for the people of the country, a Tiananmen Square, or the demolition of the Berlin wall, or the Tahrir square happens.

Lok Nayaks do not represent by elections or nominations. Jai Prakash Narain happened. Anna Hazare happened.

One Mohandas Karamchand happened... and he drafted an entire script for independence by fasting, forget a mere parliamentary bill.

Know Your Place – Parliamentarians Uvacha

That’s the new pastime.

Civil Society trying to interfere with Parliamentary Democracy must be shown its place. One Mr.Muckerjee says they can not be allowed to hijack the Parliament’s role.

What is Civil Society? And what is Parliamentary Democracy?

As being used in India, Civil Society means the loosely organized group of people, small or large, which hopes to exercise moral power as different from the Government which is Constitutionally invested with legislative and executive power. In this sense, Civil Society, very strictly, has no locus standii vis-a vis the Government. At the best, it can expect to be heard, not even consulted.

Again ,in India, Parliamentary Democracy once put in place through periodic authorization via the electoral process, has virtually all power to wield without commensurate answerability to the people who put it together in the first place.

The term Democracy is of Greek origin-- Demos (Greek), people, and kratos (Greek) strength, are mediated through the parliament ( French – parlement from parler; to speak) ) in Parliamentary Democracy. In India it’s a travesty of the philosophic ideas underpinning the form of self-governance. Ironically, a monument where elected representatives may speak about, discuss, deliberate on ,issues relating to the people they represent-- and execute the will of the people for the greatest good of the greatest numbers-- has turned into a cocoon that shelters and protects a bunch of empowered representatives from the very people who have empowered them… to a point at which the symbolic monument and the discussants set themselves against the loosely organized group of people.

In so distancing themselves , the elected representatives have seen themselves as superior to the ‘civil society’ of people, virtually setting themselves above the legislation they enact for the people. They are beyond the pale of those laws and ‘civil society’ may not question the law nor the ‘immunity’ of the representatives from all forms of answerability. True, the Judiciary is , technically, a balancing power-structure, but in India , given the lengthy procedures and the general lack of time-frames, judicial review of parliamentary action is as prone to inordinate delays as all civilian litigation. Besides, “Judicial Activism” has been frowned upon for long, and the last has not yet been heard on questions of power-delimitation and supremacy. It is quite another matter that there is a necessary complementarity that has yet to be understood and practiced.

As such, it is not a wonder that the Parliamentary Democracy that Pranab da in his inimitabhle bhay, Chidambaram in his suave sermons, wish to protect is in fact no democracy at all, but an oligocracy with the representatives as the sole stake-holders. It excludes the people of the ‘civil society’ without any attempt at even polite deception.It is bare-faced aggression with which these parliamentary ‘leaders’ show the ‘civil society’ and its vanguard their place. The devolution of power, they say, places people at the bottom; and that’s the way to stay, anna .

Baba bleats and decides not to have fodder. Laalu , an expert in such matters, says ‘we will force-feed him’. That is sevice, like it or not.There are millions who don’t have a meal per day in this country. How dare you , with ample resource, don’t eat? Want to give Indian Parliamentary Democracy a bad name, aligning with a National Self-Serving Scheme group and their political masque, Indian Peoples’ Party? Go, go… BreakFast is ready.

Indeed there is more grain than our warehouses can store.Ditributing it through the PDS system , as directed by the Supreme Court, is not feasible said the country’s executive head. The grain may soon begin to rot. Under such circumstances, you refuse to eat! Go… BreakFast is ready. You, the civil society, the Supreme Court are all trying to hijack power.People have no roles to play in a Parliamentary Democracy except casting a vote when called upon . Mind your business.

Take the Service of the Parliamentary Democracy as is given to you. Like a Cow from a Bull.