Orderly Disorder

Connectivity between eastern and western suburbs is pathetic is Bombay. I remember having read somewhere that Santacruz Chembur Link Road was first mooted way back in 1967. I have no proof of this revelation though and one would need to dig into the Metropolitan Development files to corroborate this. Whether it was first mooted four decades ago or the construction started a decade ago, the truth of the matter is that Santacruz Chembur Link Road remains incomplete adding to the agonies of the Bombay commuter Traffic from Eastern and North Eastern Bombay headed for the western suburbs travels all the way to Sion and then has to pass the snail paced bottleneck of Dharavi to then join Bandra east. Once commissioned and, God only knows when, would save commuting time from the present 45 to 70 minutes to probably 15 minutes as projected the the authorities. The trouble is that there seems no one who can crack the whip nor is there someone who has a definite answer on the completion

Bull's Eye July 2009 I was at the movies yesterday.  The national anthem, now mandatorily shown in Mumbai, version with Siachen as the background is not only breathtaking but a hair raising experience for me every single time I see it. I can literally feel the chilled snowy breeze right in to my face when I stand in respect of the tricolour and one cannot help respect our brave soldiers and officers who fortify and defend the highest altitude war theatre anywhere in the world.  Siachen, which incidentally means Wild Rose or Black Rose, is acknowledged for its ferocious clime with extreme temperatures reaching - 40 deg Celsius and blizzard speeds reckoned to be at 300 km an hour - twice as fast as a Shoaib  Akhtar delivery, never mind that the soldier is perched on a slippery and unfriendly terrain glacier. It has been estimated that the Indian army spends in excess of Rs 5 crores per day in