By Ashish Mehta
The new mantra of austerity is spreading fast. And it is not restricted to the government and the ruling party. Count on our celebrities – cricketers and film stars, fashionistas and socialites – to do their bit to express solidarity with the common man in these trying times.

Eighteen18 Championship Trophy

Given the huge budgets of Twenty20 tournaments, a 10 percent cut can
lead to a whopping savings on expenditure – for franchisees, telecast
firms, advertisers and of course the common-man viewer (think of your
electricity bill). So, the next T20 is going to be actually E18 –
Eighteen18, with 18 overs a side.

No dancing around foreign trees

Bollywood studios, as everybody knows, spend a great deal of their
billion-rupee budgets on picturising song sequences abroad. In tune
with the nation’s austerity drive, producers’ associations have
decided not to do so for a year. Moreover, to connect with the common
man, teams have been sent out to find appropriate locales in
Bundelkhand, Vidarbha and similar places.

Message from the ramp

When austerity is in fashion, can the fashion world afford to lag
behind? Leading fashion designers have come forward to spread the good
word. At the next season of fashion weeks in metros, expect shorter
dresses with hemlines rising by 10 percent on average compared to the
same events the previous year.

News 22×6.5

Medium, as they say rightly, is the message. Leading news TV channels,
always eager to further the national causes, have decided to implement
the 10 percent cut — on their broadcast time. Thus, there will be a
two-hour break a day and a half-day break a week. (Think of the carbon
footprint.) NDTV is thus considering changing the brand of one of its
channels accordingly.

Similarly, other sections of society are planning in their own ways to
send out a message of solidarity to the suffering masses. Bookies and
spiritual leaders, power brokers and talk-show hosts, they are all
into this, shoulder to shoulder, though we may not have all their
plans on record.

Mayawati, for example, is considering scaling down the size of stone
elephants at memorial parks to save taxpayers’ money and Mamata
Banerjee is mulling 22-hour shutdown calls — 10 pm and shutters will
be allowed to go up. Amar Singh and Vijay Mallya are taking a serious,
hard look to find out if any of their expenses are wasteful and can be
done away with.

We all can find creative ways to join the national effort. Did you
hear about Vikram Seth? He is revising his work-under-progress, has
thrown out most adjectives and thus the manuscript has come down to
about 8,00 pages from 1,200-odd ones.