Skip to main content

Novel Protest?





This particular picture made the cover picture of the national tabloids.I am reasonably convinced that many of our 'breaking news' starved television journalists would have splashed this feature over and over on their channels.


I do not lay claims to be a political commentator and nor am I protecting our government at the centre. Am just a well informed citizen and happen to know that elections are due, in less than six months, in the state of this bicycle riding Chief Minister. He reckons this bicycle riding drama might just strike a chord with his naive voters - the same people who voted him and his ministers on the BSP ( Bijli Sadak Pani ) issue.Surely he must have pitched his voters to ride bicycles on the Sadak he had promised them earlier.


What am I aggrieved about? Look at the picture carefully, once again. It has been digitally mastered to electronically remove the bandobast and barricades facilitating the minister's entourage. It has also digitally erased the number of two wheelers, cars , buses and trucks waiting for the cavalcade to pass. A very elementary guess would place the idling fuel burnt by the waiting engines much larger than the fuel purportedly 'saved' by the minister. And we are not accounting for the fuel that some of the waiting on goers must have spent extra on the detour to avoid this ministerial mess.

What irks me is drama baazi. Instead of treating this as a political issue against the central government, this democratically elected and well educated minister should lead the way and rather ask his citizens to cycle for work and pleasure thus adopting not only environment friendly and economic ways of going around the global crisis of oil price surge and try help contain, if not reduce demand.


Cycling inevitably reminds me of the Netherlands. Holland is the cycling capital of the world and boasts of close to 20,000 kilometres of dedicated cycling paths. They say a Dutchman without a cycle is like a fish without water. Per last statistics made available, there are an average of 1.3 cycles per person in Holland. It is not uncommon to find senior executives riding on their bicycles to and fro work and such is the respect for cyclists that they have the right of way over automobiles. Not only is it mandatory to provide parking places for cycles in public and private places but there are multi storey cycle parking lot's adjoining most populous railway stations.


Our poor minister may not be noticed by scribes or journalists in Holland. Better let him be here or say, shall we send him to Holland?

Comments

Haddock said…
It has been digitally mastered to electronically remove the bandobast and barricades facilitating the minister's entourage........

Well observed.

Popular posts from this blog

Rookie Sailors at Lake Travis, Austin,TX

Within hours of touchdown at Austin,TX and a couple of Mexican Martini's down we headed straight to meet our sailing boat enthusiast and skipper - Kevin at the Lake Travis boating pier. Thank God there are no drinking and sailing laws - or at least we do not know about them or rather paid little heed. The weather was just right for sailing- gentle to strong breeze blowing and a benevolent sun casting it's radiant energy on this lovely Saturday afternoon. Kevin was the skipper for the evening with Poonam as his experienced and able sailing mate. Kim filled in with her half baked sailing expertise and Sarika and me being the rookie sailors for the evening.

Eating troubles

If you have eating troubles, I can assure you that have landed on the wrong page. All I have done is literally translated - Eating Locho - into plain speak english, ie Eating troubles. Being brought up in Bombay, I am fairly familiar with the Bombay street lingo, which has a fair sprinkling and huge influence from the native Marathi and Gujarati colloquial. Locha traces its etymology to Gujarati and means trouble and hence Locho , the plural of Locha means troubles. While locha was made popular by Raju Hirani when he had Munnabhai mouth an unusual combination of words - "Chemical locha" . And in yet another another Raju Hirani caper, he has Kareena describe Gujarati food - Dhokla Faafda Handva Thepla Khakra - as missiles. But our Surti's take the cake. They have redefined the traditional missile' khaman into a hugely popular variant called Locho .  I was in Surat last week and savoured this awesome variant of Surti food at the Gopal Locho ...

Airport Chaos

The airline industry in India is booming. Cannot even remember the names of the airlines and one is spoilt for choices when you are travelling say between Bombay and Delhi or Bombay to Goa.But the accompanying infrastructure required is pathetic.The airports do not have enough toilets, we will talk about cleanliness later, nor do they have adequate seating nor signage.For many sectors the flying time is probably shorter than the time required to check-in and clear security. With the advent of the low cost carriers , Europe reinvented and remodelled all it's IInd world war airstips and converted them in to efficient alternatives compared to the mammoth monstrosities of the modern day airports we use. India too has numerous air strips dotting the countryside, often used by politicians,bureaucrats and upcoming industrialists which with some appliction and initiative could be readily converted to alternate and ease the traffic and chaos on our over stressed airports.