Me Anna Too!!

Three score and six years ago almost to the day, an allegorical novel was written about how pigs took over a farm from humans to govern themselves and slowly they changed.  What George Orwell described is an essential truth of human life.  Humans need pain misery and everything else in that category to live their life, remember the extremely convoluted speech of the architect in Matrix revolutions, the one with words like ‘ergo’?  Exactly!! 

We elect a bunch of representatives periodically to manage the day to day operations of our country and our country’s founders established a constitution as a framework for sustaining our way of life.  Somewhere along the way the ‘pigs’ forgot the ‘for’, ‘of’ and ‘by’ the people logic of a democracy.  There have been debates if the Anna is holding the democracy hostage, the govt. claims that the present revolution’s expectation is in violation of the constitution.

While I am no constitutional or legal expert, I feel that constitution along with prevailing moral code are processes that the elected representatives need to abide by, while the owners (people) need to follow them too but in extraordinary the owners can come together to change them.  While Anna has the demonstrated support of at least a few million people the ‘(S)ingh parivaar’ has only 552 plus their associates as supporters; rest of the Indians by keeping quiet can be considered as fence sitters, by this logic Anna wins by a land slide.

Of course one can argue on technicalities like if the higher judiciary and PM came under the lokpal, the lokpal will be bigger than both!  But I feel that’s too simplistic a view, if a lokpal focuses only on corruption related aspects and if there are certain procedures implemented to manage how the higher judiciary and PM are handled when they are still in office then there is no need for them to be exempted.  In US both Nixon and Clinton came close to impeachment, Nixon even had to resign.  Why should our PM be exempt?

The best part about this outpouring of support is its truly genuine nature, unlike the usually mockery of justice that we see this time the fate sided with the common folk to prevent all attempts to malign it.  We had congress spokesperson helping the cause by trying to tarnish Anna’s character, his army record, etc. which backfired.  We had the illustrious yoga guru try to capture headlines which backfired faster than one kapalbhati cycle, he is now trying to protect his quarter of billion dollar yoga/ayurved empire! Sri Sri ended up having to justify that while he himself doesn’t own even a car his ashram had capability to host few hundred people and their 25^th anniversary was being celebrated in Berlin!  Its almost like the stars are aligned towards honesty and they won’t tolerate corruption or enven people trying to milk the situation.

To express solidarity to the cause and also see the mass outpouring, I went to freedom park in Bangalore, It was a unique site where people came of their own accord painted their face with the tricolor shared their thoughts and decried corruption by sloganeering.  People were pouring in groups and consisted majority of young people.  I hope it was only cause they were more enthusiastic rather than the older people not supporting the cause as they felt they could get their job done (either side) without corruption!  I will do my bit to bring down corruption by not giving bribes so while Anna fights to bring in an enforcement law for the same.  Anna all the way!!

Animal Farm

Every city bred person (well most) have this fascination for country life, running streams, vegetation, mountains, farms, clean air, you get the point. I had my visions rolling hills, coffee plantations, snaking pepper wines, great big trees and lots of greenery. So when the opportunity presented itself in form of a overnight trip to mudigere to a friend’s plantation deep south in Karnataka, I and another friend jumped at it.

We set off on a gorgeous Saturday after a hearty SLV breakfast, armed with a tooth brush and an excellent bottle of well Scottish Scotch! We rolled, we talked, and we rolled up and down the rolling Mangalore highway in the friend’s Scorpio. I guess all the rolling was the suspension of the SUV rather than real rolling, you get the point. Being with a nature loving friend has its advantages as we stopped on the way to pay homage to a unique tree that had been the nesting grounds of vultures being felled for widening the highway, who would have thought? We stopped for a chai and then for oota (that’s food in Kannada) before we got off the highway to head off into snaking small roads.

The ride was nothing short of test of all four the driver, the driven, driven in and driven upon; even with my height advantage, I was just shy of touching the roof quite a few times. Well one thing is for certain that my city car would not have survived this trip. So finally we reached, the outskirts of the village and stopped for ‘shopping’, I thought it was a bit odd since we already had the toothbrush but I soon realized we were buying food by the truckloads of biscuits, loaves of bread, buns, etc. I was too much in a happy state to question or think.

We reached the farm, a dirt track led to a gate, we passed though to arrive at this brightly painted farm house and as we opened the car door my friend was greeted by a bunch of paws and lot of whining, I stayed put in the car till the excitement died down a bit and then got out to see three diverse ones, one named camel (the brownish one) in Kannada, the other a bitch named rani (black) and third another bitch (just 3 months old) Mudhol hound called lightening (white) in Kannada, this motley crowd was totally enthralled by their master arriving all of a sudden. Soon the packets of biscuits started disappearing; the clean air of the farm seems to have been invigorating as the dogs just wouldn’t stop eating!

After taking stock of various things in and around the farm we sat down outside the house just resting and chatting, next thing to happen was lot of mooing and jingling bells and out came a couple of cows and calves, then the whole loaves of bread disappeared (that’s what they were for!). Did I tell you that there a 10 hens clucking around in arbitrary desperation? After all the animal husbandry our host got down to the serious art of cooking a dinner, he did a damn good job with it too. After a few drinks and the dinner we moved to more usual useless discussions around life, money and women (in that order) and as we are all aware they tend to go downhill pretty quickly. It’s odd that for something that actually triggers such pensive topics it hardly helps keep the cognition required in control. For example I had delusions that I could train the dogs to sit by offering them incentives of biscuits, for a while it did seem to work, but I am just thinking that the dogs figured out that if they touched their butts to the ground I would offer them a biscuit … hmmm stupid humans!

So we had a midnight stroll and finally crashed, got up to a splitting hangover of epic proportions, we took a stroll through the farm and around the paddy field hoping that at each step our foot came back with our footwear and nothing but the footwear! Host was gracious enough to make great upma for breakfast and after shutting down things we made a move back to Bangalore.

As we headed out the entire animal farm seemed to be saddened and was making all kinds of noises hopefully they were missing their master and not suffering from upset stomachs (with all the biscuits and bread). As we started driving back with a heavy heart and heavier head we wondered if all the bugs, clean air, fresh food, animal friends and jack fruit trees would make us move out of our cities and move back to the farms … de-evolve? … No way!