The travesty of a Member of Parliament, Babubhai Katara, being arrested for people-trafficking is a sore reminder of the depravation that has permeated our lawmakers. That Babubhai was naive enough to believe that he could lead a lady in ghunghat masquerading as his wife through immigration in India and Canada, shows the level of (or lack of) intelligence that has become a hallmark of his peers.

What is worse is the decision of the Parliament’s Ethics committee to not take action against him as “charges against him were unrelated to his work in Parliament”.

It is appalling that 135 members of parliament have criminal cases pending against them.

In India, we have a tradition of declaration of assets etc. by candidates when they file their nomination for election. What is missing is a similar declaration once they have been elected. What we need is an annual declaration by all elected members of parliament, of their assets as well as the police record against them. Let the public then judge them.

The problem is such a practice can only be made mandatory by a law. But will the lawmaker be ready to make such a law?

One alternative could be that of an independent agency/NGO taking up this work and of publishing it at the year-end in the newspapers. The Right to Information Act can be very useful for this activity.

The people of India cannot afford to dismiss such crime with cynicism. It is our duty to act.

So Manu Sharma has got life imprisonment. In passing the judgment the Delhi High Court noted that the trial court’s verdict, which had earlier acquitted Manu Sharma, was ‘perverse that made no sense and was illogical’. Following that verdict there was a national outcry. The media, sensing public outrage got into the act and newspapers swung into campaign mode. Talking heads appeared on TV and railed about miscarriage of justice and perversion of law. Ordinary middle class men and women held candle light vigils and screamed themselves hoarse that Manu Sharma had escaped because he was rich and influential. The national middle class outrage forced the powers that be to order a retrial which has led to the present conviction.

Why was the middle class up in arms over the Jessica lal case? After all, middle class militants in this country are a rarity. Thousands of women are molested, ill treated and raped throughout India every day. How come no one in the cities takes up cudgels on their behalf? Just 2 months ago two dalit women were paraded naked and raped in Khairlanji. What happened to middle class metropolitan rage then? Every year thousands of baby girls are killed? Why do the pretty faces not parade in front of the television then?

Was it because Jessica lal could have been any woman in any city in India. She was young, good looking, independent, modern, English speaking. Hell, she could have been my sister or girlfriend or neighbour. The way she lived and died could be the story of any woman living in big city India. A drunken lout, politically well connected though, shoots her point blank in a trendy bar because he is refused a drink. That could form part of the middle class nightmare. Its not very difficult to imagine because all of us like to go to trendy bars and be served by good looking women. So the middle class erupted in righteous rage because it was one of their own who was killed.

What happened to Jessica was heinous and Manu deserves the penalty he got. Its just that this case has held up a mirror to urban Indian society where we can see a reflection of ourselves, our values and what we hold dear.

Courage comes in many sizes. Sharmila Irom Chanu is a diminutive woman from Manipur, frail and meek looking. Looking at her one wouldn’t imagine that this woman has embarked upon a courageous mission to save her land and people. But what she has done over the last six years is nothing short of a display of courage of the rarest kind, a courage born out of empathy for the rape of her land.

Sharmila has been on a total hunger strike for the last six years for the cause of withdrawing the Armed Forces Special Provision Act (AFSPA) that has been clamped in Manipur and much of the north-east of India. This draconian act gives the Indian army power to detain and shoot people upon a mere suspicion. Further, army personnel cannot be prosecuted without prior permission from the ministry of home affairs.

The turning point for Sharmila was in November 2000 when a convoy of Assam Rifles was ambushed in a village outside Imphal. The enraged troops shot dead 10 people at a bus stop. That was when Sharmila decided to embark on her extraordinary measure. After all you have to fight fire with fire. In this case she decided to use a Gandhian form of non-violent protest and refused to eat or drink anything till AFSPA was repealed from Manipur.

What rights do a people, who have been dispossessed of their land for half a century and live in another country, have? This must be the question Tibetans must be asking themselves in the wake of Chinese premier Hu Jintao’s visit to India.

Ever since China’s brutal invasion and occupation of Tibet in 1959 India has hosted the largest community of Tibetan exiles including their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. They have lived here for three generations and the younger members have no living memory of Tibet, except for their parents tales of it, and a nostalgic yearning for a lost homeland. Every time a Chinese official visits India the Tibetans have organized protests demanding freedom for Tibet. This time too the Tibetans geared up to greet Hu with protests and sit ins. But the Indian government took no chances and muzzled their protests. Tibetans were placed under preventive custody and those who actually protested were arrested and whisked away.

The Tibetans have a right to protest and express their grievances in public spaces. Especially since China is still continuing with its brutal occupation of Tibet and has reduced the Tibetans to a minority in their own land by encouraging Han Chinese to migrate there. Tibetan culture has been brutally suppressed in the name of development and China has arrested thousands of Tibetans.

Another dream(s) crumbles to dust under the wheels of a spoilt brats car. Six labourers were mowed to death last night on Carter Road in Bandra by drunken louts driving a Toyota Corolla. That’s six innocent lives snuffed out by a reckless 20 year old who has daddy’s money to throw around. The dead include a pregnant woman and two children. So if you count the unborn child as a separate entity that’s seven people. As always (anyone remember the Salman Khan case?) the people at the receiving end were daily wage labourers who lived in tin sheds on the pavement on Carter Road and the killers were teenagers who had been partying at the Taj hotel till the wee hours before they embarked on their drive from hell.

So apart form the hue and cry in today’s papers (it has made front page news in ToI and IE) who will spare a thought for those killed? Life will go on as usual; People will rush about with their daily grind, People will jostle for space on the Churchgate fast local and A few anguished souls will vent their angst in the blogosphere.

Where is the humanity in this? Is this the very land where apparently tolerance is ingrained in our very blood? Is this happening in the same country where the government is bending over backwards to build nuclear bombs and lobby for a permanent seat in the Security Council when the police cannot be depended upon to protect those who need it the most? This is human nature at its darkest.

To read that the whole village, including women, stood by and watched as Surekha (45 yrs old) and her daughter Priyanka (17 years old) were beaten, mutilated, disfigured, tortured and gang-raped to death. To read that her two sons, Roshan (23 years old and blind) and Sudhir (21 years old), were beaten to death and their genitals mutilated makes me frightened to think about what is happening in the ‘other’ India. An India, where being born into a lower caste is like being cursed for life, where justice and human rights are words without any meaning, and where police and other public officials are puppets in the hands of a powerful few. This is not the ‘news’ the rest of India is fed. This is not the ‘democracy’ the high and mighty of the political elite want the world to see. This is not the ‘equality under law’ the politicians preach.

So speak out my dear friends. Talk about this on/in your blogs, phones, drawing rooms, offices, street corners, restaurants, pubs, clubs, discos, coffee joints and spread the word. Tell everyone you know about how the dreams of three youngsters and their mother were brutally erased. Talk about how the police even now ignore basic procedures and protect the perpetrators. Talk about how justice is only the preserve of a select few in today’s India. For even talking is better than being silent. For perhaps someone somewhere in the corridors of power will listen and take action.

Its finally happened. Bangalore has become Bengalooru. The Karnataka government has officially nativised the names of the capital and 10 other cities in the state. Mysore is now Mysooru, Belgaum is Bellagavi, Gulbarga is Kalburgi, Hubli is Hubbali…you get the drift. The move came on November 1, the 50th anniversary of the formation of the state of Karnataka. This means that the cities will be written the new way even in English, though this was the way they were written in Kannada.

The Kannada chauvinists have had their way, led by the Kannada Rakshana Vedike and a pack of other equally Kannada chauvinist organizations. At the root of this idiocy lies a fear that “Kannada culture” is dying. Even heavyweights like UR Anantamurthy have weighed in on the issue. I heard him the other night on NDTV saying that Bangalore has lost its Kannada moorings and there are way too many outsiders in the city. I mean, this is the guy who won a Sahitya Academy award for his book Samskara and is considered a major literary figure. I hope he sleeps easy tonight knowing that his beloved city has now regained some of its Kannada flavour.

These are the findings of the Sachar committee report which was constituted by the UPA government to find the true socio-economic condition of India’s largest minority. Muslims are at the bottom of virtually most socio-economic indicators like government jobs, education, health care. In some cases their condition is even worse than that of the scheduled castes and tribes.

For instance, Muslims are severely underrepresented in government jobs. Their numbers are well below their share as a percentage of the population. In Assam where they constitute 30 %, they have only 11.2% of govt jobs; West Bengal (25%) 4.2% [This in a bastion of the supposedly secular CPI(M)]; Kerala (24%) 10.4%; UP (18.5%) 5.1%. Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka are states with more proportionate representation.

Even in the judiciary its the same story. Muslims share of jobs here is less than their population share overall. When it comes to education Muslims are worse off than OBCs, SCs and STs.

Reading this made me realize how deep-seated the belief is, especially in India, that homosexuality is an “undesirable, unhealthy, unnatural and abnormal behaviour increasing without control” to quote the words of the author of the above article. An article in which he rails against the open letter written by many eminent writers, artists, human rights activists and others calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality in India by overturning Article 377 of the Indian constitution. What I find even more disquieting is that the writer is apparently a qualified paramedical professional. Here we have a person connected to the medical field who argues that homosexuality should not be decriminalized because, and I quote here,

“…it is an altogether socially, ethically and medically unacceptable idea to treat them as normal. There are no homosexuals among any species of animals. Such practice is fundamentally against nature. With all our sympathy, we have to treat them as abnormal.”

In closing, he wants this to be “a wake-up call for the guardians of traditional morality and ethics”. I utterly disagree with this oft-argued but blinkered view of homosexuality, especially from a scientific point of view. To counter the major argument that it is unnatural here is a link to a seminal book available on Amazon.

India is heading for a job supply deficit says the International Herald Tribune (article here). The paper quotes a NASSCOM survey to show that only one in four engineering graduates is considered employable. The reasons have been open secrets for the past decade: lack of depth in technical knowledge, lack of English speaking skills, lack of team skills. Over the past few years, I’ve had the occasion to stand in on and conduct several interviews for engineers in India’s IT capitals, Hyderabad and Bangalore. What I noticed first hand was that they could be broken up into categories based on types of ignorance:

1. Ignorance of technological basics (such as a software engineer who fails to differentiate between an OS and a programming language. Or who doesn’t know what is a Software Development Lifecycle).

2. Ignorance of latest developments in their specific technical arena (While those in this category are sound on the basics, they are not aware of the latest versions of the very development platforms on which they work and earn their living, or of any of the technological changes in the field. Inexcusable in the Information age).

3. Ignorance of Business applications of technology: These are those young engineers who cant tell what is the role of the software they’re developing in the client’s business, or even what is the very business function that it addresses.