Kusum Choppra

Kashmir is the latest flavor of the media. Everyone talks of the various political players in that field, India, Pakistan, China,Afghanistan, China, the hindus, muslims, buddhists, terrorists, mujahideens, seperatists, moderates, the Muftis, the Abullahs, the mullahs, the pandits, the Valley, Jammu, Ladakh etc etc etc. There is total silence over the key issue: not politics, not religion but economics. Kashmir does not allow non Kashmiris to own property there...a constitutional oxy moron. Just imagine the chaos if the same principle were to be made applicable in all the states of India or if Kashmiris were to be banned from purchase of property in the rest of the country! Bair haal, the issue of this piece is the economics of Kashmir. Its much vaunted handicrafts and tourist trades have yet to be resurrected after the terrorist/separatist imbroiglios. And agriculture remains nascent. For the aam aadmi, a good part of his rozi roti comes from providing goods and services to the Armed F...

How about a campaign to bring Laluji back into the Railways...is keeping a stormy petrel in absentia more important than a maverick ally who brings in trains on time and shows a profit from it too? After almost two years plus, I travelled in a train again.....it was a terrible experience for one who had gotten used to better. I remembered with more than some affection the young men who used to clean up the compartment, visible and adequate hygiene in the bathrooms and fresh bed clothes. This time, the Gujarat Mail was dirty, the Deccan Express tremendously and olfractorily unbearable. In its chair car, when the table was taken down for breakfast, the accumalated filth on the back of the chair in front destroyed breakfast appetite. Whatever happened to the routine baths given to trains at the end of each run. I wondered. Is defeating the Reds in Kolkatta's Writers' building more important than efficiency in the largest Railway network in the world?

It is indeed sad times for Indian democracy and its Fourth Estate that the electronic media is hardput to find a single positive story to report in its daily 24/7 news reports. News is full of scoundrels and scalywags, rapes, murders, scandals etc etc. Very often cricket and film stars take precedence over even the Prime Minister, while scandals dogging the stars, cricket and films and netas hog the headlines all day long. It makes one wonder: DOES NOTHING POSITIVE HAPPEN IN INDIA ANY MORE? Is no one doing anything to improve anything in this vast country of ours, touted to be the next Super Power in the world? Why is that kept under such close wraps that the media is unable to see it and report about it? Whatever happened to INDIA SHINING?

As the burkha controversy deepens with more and more European nations cracking down, it is perhaps time to stand back and take stock. There is no doubt, a security angle which cannot be ignored. A voluminous coverall with socks and sandals, gloves on the arms and only eyes visible, if the wearer has not worn goggles, it is impossible to differentiate between a male or a female, which is scary in these times of random terrorism, where weapons are whipped out and targets are often innocent civilians. On the integration front, the recent upsurge in burkha wearers had an equal impact. Take the example of Ahmedabad, replicated no doubt in dozens of other cities across India. Once upon a time, it was difficult to differentiate Hindu women from Muslim ones in Ahmedabad. If the latter were more prone to wearing flashy silver and gold in their garments, the same held true of many other communities such as the Marwaris and Punjabis, so one was never quite sure. All of a sudden, after the petr...

Educationists are facing a dire shortage of teachers of humanities subjects, leaving one wondering whether no one has actually studied in the arts stream in the recent past. WHY? This is not a very recent phenomenon. It started some decades ago when careers in medicine and engineering were considered the be–all of life; hence an emphasis on the sciences. Those who did not make it into medical or engineering colleges fell back on the B.Sc degree for physics and math, etc., for a teaching career; even law as a last resort. Such was the pull of the scientific world that there was this all out campaign to drag every possible stream of studies into the Science category, with the application of so-called scientific methods of chart-making, experimentation and statistical compilations etc . Those subjects not amenable to such tactics were ridiculed, labeled ‘out of fashion’. When the load of B.Sc graduates was found to be unemployable, at a time when the economy with surging forward with bank...

Ours is an economy based on recycling....has been since Time Immemorial perhaps. Can any of us not recall the friendly neighborhood pastiwalla taking away loads every month, the give aways to servants et all, the turning of leftovers into a paratha or a pulao? But now...the times, they are changing. Instead of handing down clothes to servants and putting the rest into a box for the annual collection drives for flood affected and disaster driven refugees, today's mems' response to the collection drives is to send driverji into the market to purchase a load of cheap clothes and bedsheets etc......"how will it look ( to my husband's boss' wife...or whoever) if I take my old bedsheets to the collection center?" Regular hand-me-downs of expensive outfits then spoil their own servants silly and cause frequent railings against servants getting bloated egos. The disaster affected have gotten so used to getting brand new stuffs, I am told, many reject used clothes, ...

Honor killings are the latest flavor of the season, just as once it was rape and earlier dowry death. Hardly does a young couple taste their married togetherness then the noses ("naak") of the male relatives gets longer and itchier and wham, bang, off with their heads, it goes. Why this extreme reaction to the most natural phenomena in the world? what are these gotras and castes after all? when did women become chattels to be used as bargaining counters by the male of the species? How did this spree of honor killing become part of our revered ancient culture? Chanakya's Arthshastra lists a bare handful of castes; few of them are original ones, the rest are the result of cross-castre marriages. From then on, through the writings of travelers like Huian Tsang, Alburni and others, plus our own venerable books and histories, down to British enumerators, the number of so-called castes has burgeoned into thousands of names of new castes created by intermarriage between ...

Perhaps the oil slick in the US came at the wrong time. Or perhaps the wrong time was that of the final judgement in the Bhopal Gas Leak case which had malingered for 26 years. For it revived the spirits of the Bhopal Bleeding Hearts with a loud bang. The debate over the quantum of compensation has sparkled all over again, with an eye on the figures that the Obama administration is demanding from BP. No, I do not have anything against our own affected Indians getting some more money to pay for the woes that Union Carbide so callously struck into them. My plea is for those vociferous bleeding hearts to please do some sincere checking: amongst the lists of affected and beneficiaries are any number of persons who just happened to be out of Bhopal that fatal night, but are listed residents. To this day, pensions are drawn by some residents of the affected areas, perhaps, just perhaps depriving those who were actually affected....a situation akin to the names of big shots showing up in th...

This morning's papers splashed the news that the maker of the highly acclaimed RAJNEETI has decided to put together an international cast, led probably by Anjelina Jolie for a film on Draupadi, the long haired woman who is the pivot of the epic Mahabharat. When will we get over our fascination for the gori chamri of Western women? Correct me someone if I am wrong, but I do remember reading that Draupadi was of a wheatish complexion, more "sawli" than "gori-chitti". Perhaps the film could work better with a dusky Indian actress, and we have many acclaimed ones with such a skin tone, and let the international look be provided by some of the Hollywood hunks who may be made over to look like some of the Kauravas and Pandvas; they were of north Indian origin and in those days, closer to the supposedly Aryan, Caucasian look. But aha, the charms of the foreign actresses have overtaken Bollywood of late, haven't they?

I read the fast and furious headlines generated by the attempt to break the Israeli blockage of Gaza within days of finishing the re-reading of a book I had last read when in school, Leon Uris’s masterpiece “Exodus.” His descriptions of the heartbreaking Israeli attempts to break through the British blockade of the same region 60 years ago were yet vivid in my mind as I pondered over the irony of what seemed virtually a scene-by-scene action replay, this time with the Isrealis as the blockaders of a hemmed in Palestinian populace, caught between economic oppression of their own leaders and the reluctance of Isreal to accept them in jobs without security against terrorism. It was soon after the birth of Jesus Christ and the unrest following his preachings that the Jews were scattered throughout the then known world, awaiting a Messiah who would lead them back home. Unlike the peaceful assimilation they enjoyed in India, across Europe and Russia, Jews had, over the centuries been victi...

Amul is first off the block again. Barely had the finance minister made his announcements and Amul announced a price hike for milk and its other products, to give the farmer their dues in anticipation of price hikes in other inputs. Now there are many of us who want to include our rural countrymen in India's march forward, but at the cost of the daily cup of milk for our own kids? the way Amul has been raising prices at the drop of the hat, the cost has shot to almost double and finding place in monthly budgets of the ordinary, aam aadmi is difficult. It's either cutbacks on milk or other essentials. Or choices between who should have milk, kids, mothers or senior citizens? or back to the dudhwala and his watered down milk? Doesn't Amul, in any case, "take the shakti out of the milk?" A friend had sent me an email which I had flipped at that time. Now I wonder why I didn't pay more attention. In an internation survey of breast cancer, it was found that Ch...

For centuries, it was women who were trodden down by men; and how they reveled in it. in the past less than half a century, women have been moving forward faster than men and breaking glass ceilings by the dozen. And lo and behold, the guys have gotten such a complex they are demanding a 'level playing field'. Why separate awards for best actor and best actress, they ask? Why not just one Best Actor award? So threatened already? Why not make it just one Best Actress Award then? In the current trend of young actresses preferring to be known as Actor, my query is: Why do you fight shy of your feminity and the word Actress? Will the use of the word Actor in any way minimize gender discrimination or the predators of the casting couches?

Music and laughter have, down the centuries, been touted as "Food for the Soul". But our Indian reality TV in search of elusive TRPs have transmorfed them into evil of the worst order: Sangeet Ka Mahasangram, Laughter Challenges etc etc. Why must we wreck the food for the soul? Can no one think of more peaceable and sweeter sounding titles for such shows?

In the stand off over Mumbai taxis driver by Marathi Manoos and U P Bhaiyyas, one is left wondering how much of the row is actually a battle over a possible hike in hafta rates from the taxi wallahs!! No wonder every neta worth his name is pitching into the battle

After the Cold War, Cancer, Aids, Osama, one of the latest global Phenomena floating around, blowing vast amounts of hot and cold air is Environmentalism. Like all other earlier Global Phenomena, there is of course enormous amounts of money to be made from this Cause by various lobbies. India too is off the mark pretty quick, quite overlooking the fact that our so-called “Great Indian Heritage” has, for eons, propagated environmentalism in the form of innumerable rituals and festivals, apart from the fact that our economy has eternally been pegged on Recycling in any and every form, from the raddiwalla to age old customs of homemade ghee etc etc etc. All the hot air blowing over whether or not the Himalayan glaciers are melting or not and if they are, at what rate at they melting overlooks one key issue: that this is all perhaps part and parcel of the inevitable evolution of Planet Earth. Since early school years, we have been taught about evolution. Nowhere did the books mention t...