Respecting the requests of friends, I am starting my blog. The ghosts of the past that have been haunting me for a long time can rest now.
Fifteen minutes of fame
There is a serious communication gap between the intellectuals and the guys who rise from nowhere, ask for an arrest or a ban and then return to obscurity after enjoying 15 minutes of fame and gaining their pounds of flesh.
Often, this is deliberate!
They are invisible and inaudible when a priest from their milieu is arrested for rape or sodomy.
Ashish Nandy has either been deliberately misunderstood or his analysis has gone above the head of those who have taken upon the mantle of dalit leaders. I suspect the former.
Nandy seems to speak for the dalit and even endorse the corruption among them as a short cut to rise to the level of the rest. He has talked of the subtle quid pro quo among the elite (though I see another sinister aspect in his analysis: why has he ignored the rampant, open, shameless and massive corruption in this class unless he has already shrugged it off like he is now doing to the corruption among the SC, ST and Dalits?) and the open corruption (read: Mayavati) among the Dalits.
He has landed himself in the hot soup partly because he is unfamiliar with the very milieu. He should have known that his off-beat analysis, which might have got him some awards and recognition from the intelligentia which believes in 69, was not limited to academic circles. What was limited to the privileged few who attended these ‘boring’ seminars have been converted into tamaashas that are being covered by the byte-hungry media.
This kind of attention would be 15 minutes of fame for Nandy too. One usually read about him in occasional articles, knew him as a sociologist but didn’t see him figuring on page one.
Dilip Kumar Spy Story
(There will be a reference to this story in my in the pipeline novel ‘The Outsiders’ but I find myself compelled to make this one of the first stories in my blog thanks to a scribe who wrote about Dilip Kumar Spy scandal today.
Her words in Midday (30th Jan 2013):
As we recall it the state was casting aspersions about his patriotism on the grounds that a suspected Pakistani Spy had been found to possess an address book with his phone number (along with that of many others, mind you.) On this slight evidence, the star’s house was raided and he was on the verge of being arrested.
The correct version is a little different.
This happened in 1965, at the peak of Indo-Pak war. As happens, India would claim on All India Radio ke dushman ke itne vimaan giraaye gaye and Pakistan Radio would spout similar lies. Listening to the Radio Pakistan was banned during this period. You couldn’t hear their propaganda on regular transistors. Muslims who were sympathetic to Pakistan or had relatives there would stealthily listen to Radio Pakistan. CBI raided Dilip (Yusuf Khan) Kumar’s Bungalow after getting a tip-off that he had organized a transmitter in his bungalow.
The newspapers (including the Times of India) faithfully reported that a transmitter was indeed found in his house.
There were also stories about people with dubious connections staying in his house. In fact, his popularity nose-dived after this incident. People rejected films with him in the lead.
The inquiry went on for decades and Dilip Kumar used all his contacts to hush up the scandal.
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