Every trip home to India is bathed in revelation. Every TV channel shows someone crying, dying or being mourned which does wonders for your mood, since you wake up to this caterwauling and eat and sleep to the same ‘woe is me’ sentiment.

So it came as a refreshing change to read in the Hindustan Times an article edifying the creation of cakes for bachelor parties which are shaped like women’s body parts. Awesome. (Groom’s night out, HTCity. To go to the HTCity page pdf, scroll down the sidebar on the left).

The guy who wrote it even gave his byline and I wonder what he went home and said to his loved ones: whatastoryIwrotetodayallaboutbumsandtitsincreamandconfection?

You have to admit that a half page in a daily dedicated to such screaming stupidity is inspiring, especially when the piece is treated like some sort of cultural revolution. The hip and trendy are doing this, I read. This is ‘in’. People are thronging to buy the cakes, yes,yes, yes, they are selling like hot cakes(did I just say that?)

Hi Mom, can I have a woman’s body part for dessert. How about her buns with a tight red bikini, mmmmm, that will be tasty….why not, after all, that’s the illustration in the paper.

I believe it is the piece de resistance at the bachelor night thing before the wedding and in my uptight, old-fashioned mind I am thinking what would the bride say if the groom told her that he and the boys had a ball scoffing cake made of a female breast with nips and all.

Would she look at him and say, my hero, my Galahad, my knight in shining armour, what a man?

I have heard crude. And I have heard coarse. And I have seen pathetic. But this is so grotesque that it leaves me in a sort of speechless fugue. Imagine walking into this party and viewing the half crossed legs of a woman made from marzipan and coconut with a layer of chocolate. Does wonders for the appetite. And this is supposed to be fun?

This is like style or great living…wo, we certainly are advancing in the wrong direction. You talk about taking the cherry on the cake, this is a whole new meaning to gross bad taste…no pun intended. Who are these people? And what is the follow up article…girls night out with a p…. carved from a pineapple?

Imagine this scenario. It is not hard to do. A typical middle class Indian home in Delhi. Father walks into son’s room, sees apple of his eye glued to his studies and shouts, “You foolish boy, stop wasting your time, why aren’t you singing and dancing, the Sa Re Ga Ma Pa selection is on in one week.”

Across the country, in a small hamlet in Andhra, mother sews together some garish costume so little Usha can whirl about to the strains of Aaja Nachle and somewhere two hours away by air in Punjab, Pappu the poppet is feted by the neighbours because Javed Jaffery praised his ability to moonwalk and exulted over his convincing rendition of ‘Kabhi Kabhi.’

Love songs and largesse at seven years and four months.

With 60 hours of such mind numbing drivel on TV every day and the total dedication of millions of mothers and fathers fondly hoping for a bonanza, the Indian middle class and its traditionally ignored lower end are finally getting their seven minutes of fame. The point is what price are we paying for that limelight and when will it turn sour on a generation exponentially dedicating itself to gyrating in sync with the lyrics of l’amour before they have turned the hairpin bend of puberty?

It is not a global phenomenon. Let’s not kid ourselves. It is not even a welcome splash of colour in a grey life, which is the sort of air-conditioned tripe the rich and comfortable fling like mud clods at the not-so-affluent.

Such entertainment is fine as a diversion, a sort of also ran in the race to adulthood, but when it becomes a fetish, an obsession that is pathetic in its gluttony, its lack of any redeeming quality and is bedrocked in precocious tastelessness, then we need to worry. Pandemic mediocrity that will turn poisonous even as we cheerfully behave as if it is harmless fun.

I think of Marallus in Julius Caeser expressing despair; Run to your house and fall upon your knees, pray to the gods to intermit this plague that befalls thee. Greed is never harmless. The chase after fool’s gold always comes with a price. Greed at runaway speed is ugly. When adults use prime time insults to belittle children they are not hardening the kids for life’s stony path, they are mocking them for cheap laughs and ratings in a nation where humour has been doled in measly fashion and linked to ailment: stuttering, being fat or crippled.

The survey figures indicate that as many as 30 million children are watching a show of their peers engaged in song and dance routines at some time or the other in a given day while thousands bid for live presence and dry mouthed, anxious parents sit in suspense for cruelly over-rated assessments of nascent talent.

A study of the sociological implications of the crude and often tasteless remarks made by the judges, the precocious conversations masquerading as humour, the deep analysis of a love song would fall just short of statutory rape of minors because the invasion is so complete as to make the physical violation integral.

And in case I come out like some pulpit pounding neurotic, ask yourselves how this tsunami in gross bad taste is brainwashing our children and their parents who actually sit there like airheads and watch their children being lacerated by the so-called judges. Not for winning a debate or a spelling bee, not for coming out tops in a quiz or even displaying the skill for the arts and sciences, sport and the classics, but only for the imitation of commercial pap.

When I began this article I just wanted to moan and groan about falling standards until an advertising friend of mine (okay, we all have some weaknesses) sent me some figures. Three hundred million manhours down the drain watching this stuff. Every day. Almost 15 per cent of the budget by consumer companies dedicated to this genre, thereby making them accomplices in the charade that this is fun and games. It is not.

The corruption of pre-teens is nearly total if you look at the statistics. Except for live Twenty20 cricket and the one-dayers, these song and dance travesties account for maximum family viewing. What makes one sick to the stomach is that neither the channels nor the producers nor the participants and judges think they are contributing to the greater bad.

The poverty of intellect is astounding. Beating up on little children is a sport and the torturous patronizing of the defeated makes one search for a bucket. The biggest problem is to get enough people to listen to the beat of the pied piper and realize that his malevolent tune is stealing our children away from their childhood. You start tom tomming the mediocrity inherent in such shows and everyone has this ‘oh, come on, it is just kids’ look on their faces.

So come on, son, leave the books alone and put on your costume and your ghungroos.

The highway on my way to work was so unlike what it usually is on a Monday morning. All it took me to reach the office today was 30 minutes; obviously Mumbaikars have made the most of tomorrow’s holiday declared to enable them to cast their vote, combined it with the weekend, and have fled the city to cooler climes.

 I don’t think I have encountered any election more low-key than this one.

 How many of you know who your local candidate is? I was up and about the city this weekend and didn’t come across one single campaign anywhere. Possibly it was happening in the innards and not on the main road. That could be one reason I missed it.

 But why blame the people for their lack of interest when the politicians themselves are not exactly behaving like a stick of dynamite?

As a confirmed voter myself the reasons for the public’s apathy are not hard to fathom, and they are what I relate to too. Has anything changed in the city for the better in the last five years? In the last 10 years? In the last 15 years? I know one thing has changed for the better, and that is the assets list declared by the various candidates. Mind you, these lists are by no way comprehensive or final. In most cases, the candidates possess wealth over and above what they have declared, so you can understand the mad rush to contest elections.

Contesting elections is the new reality show for the unwashed masses, with a pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow. It is the new career option for our bright young graduates and others. If you are looking for service to the people, forget it. The politicians’ first aim is self-aggrandisement; if anything gets done for you and me as an offshoot, as something incidental, it’s fine.

Why do you think 35 per cent of Indians are still below the poverty line? It is not because India is poor, or that we don’t have enough resources. Trust me, there is plenty of money which, if it went to those it was meant for, would make poverty a thing of the past. But it is constantly being waylaid by vested interests who have spent crores on winning an election and who need to recoup their investment, siphoned off by politicians who have taken favours from various persons on election-eve and their IOUs need to be honoured.

Our elected representatives and those waiting to be elected are not merely dipping their hand into the till; they have run away with it. If poverty, illiteracy, backwardness were abolished in the country, what will our politicians promise in the elections? Why will we vote for them? Our backwardness maybe a millstone around the nation’s neck but for the politician it represents a Kamdhenu.

Just a day after Nobel Laureate spoke to our Suman Guha Mozumder about the lack of resources in India for supporting research, a situation which he is now changing, came reports of a corruption case registered against Jharkhand politico Madhu Koda. How much assets is he believed to possess? To the tune of Rs 400 crores. And remember, Jharkhand maybe rich in natural resources but it is still a backward state.

And we don’t have money for supporting research, abolishing poverty etc?

Our apathy is because we know the truth about the elections and politicians, but also realise that we cannot change anything. An Adolf D’Souza in the municipal corporation or a Hansel D’Souza in the assembly is hardly going to change things drastically. I always look back at the Rajiv Gandhi era, the promise and premise on which he came into office and how little time it took for the vested interests – against who he had mounted an offensive in 1985 in Mumbai – to co-opt him. Call me a cynic, but I don’t see change happening in my lifetime and yours. Make it widespread, positive change.

But I will still go out and cast my vote tomorrow. Not because I am a better citizen than the person who doesn’t vote; not because my vote is going to usher in positive change, or because of any such high-falutin‘ thought.

I will go out and vote, despite all the cynicism, despite the no-hope situation we are in, because this is the only time for the citizen to show that s/he cares for the country, state, city, locality, street, neighbourhood. If you care too, get your vote out.

This piece appeared on http://saisureshsivaswamy.rediffblogs.com

I asked a bunch of NRI youngsters if they knew anything about Mahatma Gandhi. I did it over the birthday week as a sort of exercise in curiosity. I was told he was the dude who got shot, right, like John Lennon. I was informed with great panache by another aspiring bank executive that he is the father of the nation cause he told the Brits to get lost. This saga in awareness was further accentuated by the pithy remark that he said, “Hey Ram” when he got shot.

And a third member of this group said Richard Attenborough made a cool film and Gandhi was a tough guy who wouldn’t get off the train in South Africa because he sat in in a whites only compartment and they wanted to boot him out.

A young lady studying Mass Communication was not sure whether he died on October 2 or was born on that day but she said she had been invited to a classical dance festival at the Embassy but she couldn’t go because her friend was having a bridal shower.

One reasonably erudite man asked me if he wasn’t the person who stayed in jail like Mandela and used to write letters to his daughter. I told him that was Nehru and he said, yeah, right, but they were friends, so I am pretty close. Pretty close, Sir.

I was hoping somebody would mention non-violence, the inspiration he gave to Mandela and Martin Luther King, among so many others. Pretty close.

Maybe we don’t need to know. Maybe our youngsters have more important stuff to Google, Facebook to read or is it that we have made Gandhi unreal on this pedestal that today’s 24/7 generation hasn’t got the capacity to figure it out as they whizz down the fast track of the information highway?

I did not indict any of these people. Nor their parents. Nor their schools. Not even the authorities. We have all become derelict about the heroes of the past. We trot out Gandhi on the right day, knock off a few Bapu oriented rewrites from the library files and have made him so inaccessible as a human being that we are in danger of losing him entirely.

I didn’t even say anything rude to the lady who said Gandhi was at a play when he was shot. Prayer, play, Lincoln, Gandhi, same difference.

Here’s one image that will haunt the country’s principal opposition party for a long time to come: BJP president Rajnath Singh turning out in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s trademark khaki shorts, sitting demurely in the presence of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat.

It is not uncommon to see BJP leaders in that attire, but it’s a big deal when a BJP president is preening in his Sangh colours in public.

It is a big deal because Rajnath’s dress code and demeanour suggested a sheepish capitulation of a person who is heading the country’s second biggest political party that runs governments in seven states.

BJP leaders have often shared the dais with the RSS leadership. As a student in Lucknow, I recall seeing AB Vajpayee at a meeting of Balasaheb Deoras at the Hazratmahal Park. Vajpayee turned out in his trademark attire, the only white dhoti in a see of khaki shorts. “Arre, if I had known that all of you were coming in khakis, I would have also come in “ganvesh” (traditional RSS dress code),” he told the audience which cheered him lustily.

Rubbish. It was an RSS meeting, there was no way Vajpayee thought the cadre would turn up in anything but the dress code. Vajpayee obviously sought to underline the thin, fine line separating the Sangh from the BJP while telling the audience, I’m one of you, but not exactly you. Vajpayee knew how to keep the RSS at a safe distance without severing the umbilical chord.

Many years later, I was reporting Vajpayee’s election campaign in Marathwada (1996). While doing dinner with him one evening in Aurangabad, a local RSS man enquired of Vajpayee’s assistant if the PM-candidate would attend the RSS shakha (morning drill) at dawn. Vajpayee’s answer was a firm no” “Tell him I have other things to do”. Never once in his entire tour did Vajpayee go to any RSS function. Vajpayee knew only too well the consequences of associating with the RSS in a maratha dominated region in poll time. It was a measure of his maturity and moral authority that he could keep his independence.

Like Vajpayee, LK Advani and Bhairon Singh Shekhawat never allowed the BJP’s identity to be merged irrevocably with the Sangh and its brand of politics. Till the time Advani drove to Keshavkunj last month to pay obeisance to Mohan Bhagwat, he was regarded as the main votary of upholding the BJP’s autonomy.

But this Rajnath-in-khakis image makes autonomy seem like a distant dream. It conveys an unambiguous message that the real power lies with the RSS. And the most dangerous aspect of this drama is that the RSS is accountable to none.