Girish's Blog

For the last five years or so we had Airtel cell towers installed on our building terrace. Our backyard is Ruparel College’s botanical garden, which is verdant green with mango, jam, jambul, jackfruit, coconut and various assorted fruit bearing and flower bearing trees. Before the installation of the cell towers one would wake up in the early mornings to the musical cacophony of sounds emitting from sparrows, mynas, pigeons, kites, bulbuls, aureoles etc. After about a year, I used to wonder where all the small birds disappeared to as the early morning sounds had stopped and all you heard was the raucous cry of the crow! It is now almost six months since we dismantled the cell towers and guess what? – the small variety of birds are back with all their noise. Just goes to show that cell phone tower’s emitting electro-magnetic radiation does affect the smaller variety of birds. Studies in Spain and Belgium have established the ill effects of electromagnetic radiation emitted by cell phone...

My May 19 post had talked about Mumbai’s roads crumbling and flooding at different points in the city due to the shoddy and lethargic work being carried out by the BMC through its gravy train contractors. Well, yesterday was the first day of continuous rains, from light to heavy and guess what we had to go through the agony of bad and terribly congested roads due to water logging and potholes. Potholes have already started developing on the western express highway from Bandra onwards, the paver blocks have sunk and in places have come out leaving gaping holes which when underwater could cause serious damage to two wheelers and their riders. The tragedy of all this is we know it is going to happen, but we have BMC officials mouthing age old platitudes while twiddling their thumbs. We have a Municipal Commissioner who is more keen on trying to control the media rather than controlling and putting in line a system which rewards performance rather than corruption – I mean the Rs. 1000 cror...

Two incidents in the recent past have re-confirmed my belief that most Indian Parliamentarians are Muscle showing Politicians (MP’s) rather than Members of Parliament who should be behaving with dignity given the august history of the Indian Parliament since independence. The first involved Justice Regupathi, who had stunned everyone on Monday by announcing in the open court that a Union minister had called him and tried to influence him to grant anticipatory bail to father-son duo, C Krishnamurthy and S Kiruba Shridhar, both of whom were booked by the CBI for allegedly using the services of a Pondicherry University official and a middle man to inflate the marks of the latter. The second involves M Jagannath representing Nagarkurnool constituency of Andhra Pradesh in the Lok Sabha, who was caught on camera slapping the manager of rural bank in Uppunu-tala in the limits of his constituency. Both the incidents show gross disregard for norms of decency - forget the norms of democracy. It ...

On 28th June, the Indian women’s hockey team became the first winners of the Women’s Champions Challenge II Cup when they beat Belgium 6-3 in the finals. With the kind of coverage given to the win, you know how high the national game played by women is in the Indian sports psyche. I did not read about it in the newspapers – I came to know about the fact in a negative display on one of the “entertainment news” channels – namely IndiaTV. The news was being portrayed in their typical loud style – stating that nobody was there to receive the winning Indian hockey team at the airport on their return! Such a tragedy, you have someone bring laurels to the nation and the visual and print media is going gaga over what Dhoni said after India LOST to West Indies in the second cricket one day international! The women’s hockey team has won in spite of the shoddy treatment throughout – which began even before leaving Indian shores for Kazan in Russia. The Indian women's hockey team was unable to...

Can you imagine a green house gas guzzler proposing to tax “carbon-rich” Indian goods – just proves that recession has not only hit the US economy but also the brains of the US House of Representatives! The US ranks 10th in the per capita carbon dioxide emission stakes with 22.2 metric tons per person per year whereas India ranks low down at 133 with just 1.2 metric tons per person per year. By putting in provisions to tax goods from countries that do not impose curbs on green house gas emissions, the intent of the US legislation is to target India and China whose economies do not seem to have been so badly hit by the recession. India is saying that there can be no linkage between trade and environment and that the US move smacks of protectionism which is true – as the US is trying to extract a dollar from developing countries for having over the years degraded the environment willfully. It is the classic US strategy to first take advantage and then cry foul once they realize that suc...

I have been consciously avoiding this topic as it has been milked dry by both the visual and written media due to the perpetrator being an upcoming movie star. With the DNA forensic results out in the open, it will be very difficult to get bail as the results have conclusively proved that Shiney Ahuja’s stars and a lot else are not shining any more. Kudos to his wife for standing up for him unflinchingly, showing faith in her “Man” – but a lot of introspection would probably be required on her part to realize for herself why her “Man” has done what he did. The bail petition which has been put up by Shiney’s lawyer talks of four grounds on which he should be granted bail – a) he has no criminal antecedents, b) hails from a good family, c) his career is at stake and he has two upcoming film shoots next month, d) consensual act cannot be termed rape. After the DNA test reports are out, there is no reason why he should be granted bail as the law should be equally applicable to all (I know ...

It is that time of the year when children are deciding and fretting over which college to join, which course to take up, which profession should they opt for and such career deciding choices. We have probably the worlds’ largest educated population which is the envy of the world as the population is young and considered to be productive, thus supposedly giving an edge to the country. One needs to go slightly deeper into the system to find out the quality of education which is being dumped on the masses. It is a fact that the country has undergone a change from agrarian economy to a State supported manufacturing economy to the current services economy – and we have reached that stage in a very short span of 62 years post independence. Our leaders have tinkered around with education without understanding the concept of good, productive education – rules are made and overturned time and again ad infinitum ad nauseum without having any regard to the effect of those decisions on the vast ma...