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.

Shivraj says People are God. One of the BJP’s core beliefs (there are many floating around these days) is that the Cow is also God. And Tharoor says People are Cattle. So look at the situation we have on our hands: People are God. Cow is God. But Cow is Cattle, too, and Cattle are People as well. By this simple equation People are Cattle too and everybody is God. (Childhood math: If X=Y and X=Z, then Y=Z)
So which God is insulting which God when Tharoor compares People to Cattle? The People God or the Cattle God?

If People Gods have a problem with comparisons to Cattle God, don’t we need to check how the Cattle Gods are feeling about their comparison to People Gods? I mean, just because one God can’t talk more than to moo and the other God just can’t stop talking to say nothing moo-ch either, should we assume that Cattle is less godly?

Ok, let’s not confuse a partyman brought up on ideology with science, considering that mathematics has never been a matter of priority in the RSS’s book of knowledge. But why can’t Shivraj understand English? Tharoor also said he is “in solidarity with the Holy Cows”.

How can the BJP have a problem with a Congressman calling the Cow Holy?
Unless he is suggesting that Tharoor’s rightful place is in the Cow-worshipping BJP, I don’t see why Shivraj wants him out of the government. Or does he think nobody else has the right to milk the Cow?
Just what is your problem Mr Shivraj?

(Of course, I might well ask the same question of Ms Jayanti Natarajan, too.)

If you were once aspiring to be Secretary General of the UN and lived on the inside track of the caviar and champagne circuit and almost touched the stars then remarks like these are not only part of your psyche but are echoed by all of us in our drawing rooms.

So, what is the big deal?

It is in the timing, mate. You made the remark about the same time as India’s leadership was poncing about setting austerity to music. Mrs Gandhi (Soniaji) was flying Y class and making a production of it, her son was sitting in a chair car while the top brass of the Railways was sweating bullets about what did he have to go do that for, now we will be all posted to Assam or something and having been plucked out gracelessly from his 5-star residence Mr Tharoor himself had been chastised to stay in the Kerala House, the atmosphere was not right.

So talk about great moments in bad timing.

The Congress is not upset about the cattle class observation. They are upset about his calling them holy cows and they believe he mocked them for these tawdry exercises designed for idiot media that cannot still see drivel for what it is…pure drivel.

If there is anything that goes up my nose it is watching an erudite, intelligent, extremely arrogant man like Tharoor having to kneel in the dust and eat crow followed by a dessert of humble pie. Hey man, stand up and walk tall, stop with the sniveling and the groveling, no job, even that of a junior minister, is worth sucking up these twits. You stand by what you said. All of India agrees that travelling on these flights in economy is pure cattle class.

Rahul and I have had a subliminal sharing experience. After I read about his trip by train I was so moved by guilt at travelling only by air that I promptly took a Business Class Air India flight to India (which is about a level less than a cattle car seat on a low budget airline) and then dropped my pretentious lifestyle by booking a train ticket to Dehra Dun.

I called Rail Bhavan but the Minister was busy (his PA to the PS to the OSD told me that) and so no delegation of high officials was able to coincidentally fetch up at the station to flag me off. Unfortunately, my message did not get through and there was some glitch (Jayanti Natrajan must have stopped it) but the sweeper brigade from the Municipality did not make it to give the platform a springcleaning and so I entered the Shatabdi after trekking several hundred yards of dirty concrete.

Expecting to see the security dispatch from the Home Ministry (which I had requisitioned) I was a trifle disappointed. Worse, no policemen pushed common unwashed folks aside for me to blaze a trail to my seat. I wonder if Rahul had to gallop past the throng from bogey to bogey to find his name on the flapping half -torn chart.

Twenty minutes of Treasure hunt went by before I discovered my seat and instead of six Black Cats my travelling companions were a lady with a baby, another lady with a child of six who was practising his debut on sa re ga ma, a man who belched, two paan-chewing lalaji types and a man on a mobile phone telling his staff how to run the office while he was away except he wasn’t away.

Reflecting casually whether Rahul and I had the same experience I realized we did. I also had my water from a paper cup.