Machinegun Turrets, Garbage-free-ness...

It has been raining non-stop here for the past many days and I experienced driving through flooded streets for the first time. I wanted to explain to my son the actual thrill I felt when doing something, which previously I had seen only James Bond do. That is, your car turning into a boat and you zooming around in it in turbulent waters chasing the bad guys (or with the bad guys chasing you). Though there were many bad guys around I was not chasing any of them and I was not exactly zooming, but I enjoyed it. The waves lapping against my vehicle door; the fear of imminent death if the vehicle sank in one of the larger potholes (I don't know swimming); the lightning and thunder; the stupid auto-rickshaw trying to make an u-turn in front of me to escape the swirling waters. It was fascinating. If only my vehicle had few of those machine-gun turrets like Bond's to shoot at those rickshaw idiots and other assorted bad guys.

The flooding thing is not new. There are some areas in the city that flood even before the rain actually falls, and in some cases even before the water vapour from the Arabian Sea begins condensing to form rain clouds. This is a carefully planned event and is attributed to a very ancient urban planning technique* perfected by us over the centuries, wherein we flood the city to cleanse it of the untreated sewage and garbage littering the whole place. The idea, I think, must have come from some intellectual who had heard how Hercules cleaned up the Aegean stables by rerouting rivers through it. Our luck or what?

Now, for some old news, which I had kept aside as rant-worthy topics for some time now but didn't get around to doing it.

One was a survey where our CEOs and MBA students ranked their favourite role models. It seems Bill Gates came in first, ahead of Daddy (of the Nation) and Mummy (Teresa), which many newspapers didn't like. I, however, don't see any problem with Mr. Gates coming in first. These are business guys after all, and their goal should be to make as much money as possible and Bill Gates is the big daddy in that respect. But, what are Gandhi and Mother T doing in that list? When you say role model, you mean somebody you'd like to emulate. Are these guys going to walk around in langotis with their arms around young girls, experimenting with truths, instead of running their businesses? Or is it that they want to perform some dubious miracles and get in line for sainthood from the Pope?

The second news is about the youth wing of the main ruling party. I'm treading on very dangerous waters here. One has to be careful even when praising these guys. These are organizations that can not only issue fatwas but also carry it out, unlike the Iranian mullahs who failed to get Rushdie killed. This is about the cola ban (hope you have not forgotten about it), and how the court told the state government to knock it off. Our youths, however, don't care about courts and they went to the cola company's warehouse and destroyed cola bottles. I kind of liked it. For one, it must have been fun. It's something we all had done or always wanted to do (at least I wanted to do). That is, shake bottles with fizzy material in it and open it into someone else's face. Another thing is that it keeps our youth away from other stupid stuff like, for instance, participating in pointless sanitation drives. My only hope is that our youth took proper rest in between and had a couple of colas, if not beer, to quench their thirst.

* Among the many such super technologies we possess, one of my favourite is the hi-tech tarring system we use. This is a special technique where the trenches in the road are tarred on the eve of a VIP (President or PM) visit. The trick is in the tar, methinks. This particular type, patented by our guys, is pre-programmed to peel off automatically the day after the VIP goes back. The idea is to leave the trench in its original form so that the people won't suddenly start missing their good old life in the trenches. (Our PM, the sardar, is here today (Nov 1) and the roads suddenly are motorable in some parts of the city. He'll be leaving tomorrow and I expect to see the tar gone the day after.)

P.S. Sanitation drive reminded me of the fact that ... we're into our third week of garbage-free-ness! It turned out to be very simple. Trusted sources have revealed that the government has secretly decided to rename garbage as "urban eco system" that needs to be preserved for the survival of the national bird "mosquee-chan".