Passionate About India

I really had decided to not write about the Commonwealth Games at all – the reason is clear in the heading and I will elaborate soon enough! However, receiving too many mails and requests asking me write on the games, finally made me change my mind! But I do not plan to write about all the corruption related allegations, as too much has been said by senior journalists in the most hard hitting manner already. Also, for everything in India, we have a scam. How could one ever expect that the government will plan such a huge project without makingmoney? I will end my reference to the scam by sighting one of the many sms messages on CWG that I received a couple of days back. It stated, “What a lovely anagram (word play)... Unscramble ‘Sir, u made lakhs,’ and you get ‘Suresh Kalmadi’... !!!” Leaving the scam behind on that note, let me tell you why I detest the very idea of the Commonwealth Games. Of course, I agree with Manishankar Iyer wholeheartedly when he says that instead of spending s...

Manu Sharma is back in the news again, and like always, for all the wrong reasons! For me, Manu Sharma is a special case, as his case is a classic metaphor of the state of judiciary in our country, which is painfully slow and visibly discriminatory! It is no secret that Manu Sharma was finally convicted with life imprisonment in 2006, for a murder that he committed in 1999! It took our courts close to a decade to convict him for a heinous crime like cold blooded murder, wherein evidences were yelling against him. Not to forget that he almost managed his acquittal in 2003; and it was only after Sabrina Lal’s (Jessica’s sister) determined fight for justice, media’s persistent and systematic follow up and a huge public outcry that Sharma was finally convicted in 2006! And it has been just three years that he was found partying at a lounge bar in Delhi couple of days back. As is reported, he managed to do so as he was out on a parole, initially for a month and then further for another mon...

Many of the readers, especially those away from Delhi, might wonder what is the BRT in the first place? Well... BRT stands for Bus Rapid Transport system. It’s an effort by the Delhi government to have a separate bus transport corridor in Delhi. So what it has essentially done is that a divider has been constructed in between certain existing roads, wherein half or one third of that road has been reserved only for bus movement. Subsequently, at some places the roads have been widened a little; and at others, the roads have been simply divided into two undemarcated lanes. What has actually irritated the Delhi rich (because they are the ones driving cars – since Tata’s Nano is not yet on the roads) is that now they have less of wide roads to manipulate their cars in. Of course, there is a point here. Delhi was known for its freewheeling wide roads, and suddenly, narrower roads for cars do look irritating. Thus, but obviously, the BRT has come under heavy criticism with a lot of people ev...