Kusum Choppra

Shreesanth may be a junior but is he really that ignorant about the realities of cricket, especially big time cricket, that he has taken pungas with the senior players? Every cricket novice knows that that even after “seniors” finally retire, they still carry enough clout to wreck any promising junior via their new avatars in the commentary boxes, the bak bak panels or the selection committees. Remember Shivaramakrishna, who has only recently started being seen again? Just because M S Dhoni got away with keeping the seniors out of his Twenty20 team, can every young player follow on against those holy cows? While the world and his wife is shouting from the roof top that corruption has to be eliminated from the bureaucracy, it is obvious that corruption is making new inroads. Witness the senior players carrying on despite injuries, bad health etc. Why? All because of the lolly obviously. The older they get, the heftier are their advertising contracts and the longer their obligations to...

The rape victim at Patan has been fully exposed - all except her name is public knowledge: the names of her parents, her siblings, the village they come from. What about the six rapists? The media has only revealed their names. Not a single fact beyond that. Are they married? Fathers? Brothers? Who are the parents who reared such evil rapists? Who are their neighbours, their school and college mates, their seniors at Gandhinagar who shielded them, right upto Anandiben Patel, the former education minister of Gujarat? Why is not media not camping on their respective doorsteps, asking questions of their neighbrs on what sort of boys were they? their teachers, the paan galla from where they bought their cigarettes and masala? their brothers, sisters, wives etc? Some shrug of media responsibility, saying that police has not revealed their details. Is it not the job of the media to track down the culprits? The female has been identified and crucified effectively already, hasn't she? N...

In the "good ole days" if a customer had a complaint, he went and talked it over with the businessmen or manufacturer. Nowadays, entrepreneurs and corporate types do not like to converse or meet with customers. Hence the emergence of a brand new management category "Customer Care Service". These employees are trained to stonewall the customers, rather bludgeon them into silent acceptance of whatever the corporate dishes out to them. Practical experience has shown that the customer care department is the first to be outsourced to the anonymity of call centers whose employees are almost totally ignorant of everything except a few standard unhelpful phrases and sentences the purpose of which is that the entire financial burden of the inefficiency of the company must be borne by the customer for having committed the fatal mistake of purchasing the company's wares. It would be interesting to read this translated into corporate managementese.

How many of you have seen the new HDFC Pension Plan ad; the one in which this gent comes home and hopes that his wife has not forgotten how to sweep and swab," get rid> of that house help"; and that he will happily eat what she makes, " just get rid of the cook ". And then comes the punch line: all this is in aid of a little trip to Singapore, which makes Wifey all dew-eyed. Now my guess is that only a Man could have written this advertisement. Tell me, how many plus 50 women (after all, if he is retiring, even she must be that much), staring arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes and/or BP in the face, would go dewy eyed at the prospect of a return to back ache and elbow grease? In the cause of a week in Singapore? Did this guy even ask his wife if she was willing to the exchange? A week in Singapore against two odd decades of sweeping, swabbing and kitchen chores? And what does HDFC pensions have to do with this little dirty deal? After all it is the wife who...

The book has undoubtedly made very much thicker by pages of compliments, but what about its rendering of the story of 1857 and the Last Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar? Of the 486 page story, how much is actually about Bahadur Shah Zafar and his environs? The bias would be obvious with a simple page count in each chapter which reveals that against 223 pages which tell the Indian story; almost 263 give the British viewpoint. There is an amazing amount of detail about life for the British in 1857, with elaborate flourishes of verbal embroidery; comparatively very little of the Indian overall picture. Yes, all the possible negatives of the Mughal court are lovingly delineated. But it is difficult to digest that amongst all those thousands of princelings, nawabs and adventurers etc who descended on Delhi in 1857, there was not one single person of any military or other type of leadership or vision? Was that actually so? What Research? Despite the loud claims of exhaustive research fr...

Remember the “Let a hundred roses bloom” of yore? Why not in India? The Lead India campaign is no doubt a welcome initiative. But why are we limiting ourselves to discover one leader for all of India? Is that possible, when our country is so huge with so many disparate elements, each of which presents problems which need solutions specially tailored for them. When we are saluting all these young people, each of whom has attained excellence in the effort they are making within their social ambit, why not endorse their efforts with concrete support. Imagine the India ten years down the road with not one but eight or ten energetic young leaders working in their respective arenas and coordinating with each other. Such efforts go out in concentric circles of development and we may just see such leaders emerge not just in eight or ten major cities, but also perhaps at each district level or even lower in a true spirit of Chak De India!

Woe to India: The day that the netas ambitions overshadow national interests. Sixty years ago, the Father of the Nation wanted to see his Jawaharlal become Prime Minister before he died. Lo and behold, India took birth as a truncated state, scoured by the ravages of mass murder in the Partition. We then had a prime minister, Vajpayee who aspired to a Nobel Peace Prize. Was that perhaps why we were maneuvered through a “war” and later a grandstand peace with Pakistan, which was aborted thanks to the machinations reputedly by his own team mate? Now we are witness to another desperate bid for prime ministership (before I die) attempt. The dramatic announcement of a prime ministerial candidate when no elections have been called, the self same candidate whose candidature was refuted the last time it was raised, by the “elder statesman and former prime minster” who has not yet accepted the candidature. Only been said to have done so, by sources! The same sources who have perhaps rele...