Feasts

How old are feasts? Probably as old as the oldest of the civilizations. We have proofs of feasts being held in Egyptian civilization. We all know about the lavish feasts in the roman empire and the famous last supper was also a feast.

I read through numerous definitions of feasts, banquets etc but for simplicity let’s call any elaborate food arrangement as feast. I will try to list down the famous “feasts” that sort of etched into my memory.

Let’s start with the recent one, the White House State dinner. The menu was hilarious and I am sure, if this menu was served in any Bengali wedding, even the poorest of the poor weddings, the results would have been even more catastrophic than Tata Nano going out of Singur. Potato and Eggplant Salad, Potato Dumplings, Lentil Soup, Chickpeas and Okra and Green Shrimp curry. Probably the food tasted exquisite, but the menu is so disturbing. I am sure the Indian delegate would have gone back and had some Tangdi kabab and palak paneer.

The menu at Windsor Castle Banquet for Pratibha Patil was much better which included halibut, salted saddle of lamb and stuffed courgettes with mango ice cream, washed down by Chateau Cos d'Estournel, St Estephe 1988.

Another one I remember was for its fantastic menu. It was the Global Bunts Convention held in Mangalore in 2002 or 2003. Aishwarya Rai was the chief guest and the menu was all possible seafood delicacies cooked in traditional Udupi Style. It involved Mackerel, pomfrets and Bangdas. I am not able to recollect the entire menu but it was available in the Hindu and Times of India of that day.

One more was Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s holiday in Goa in December 2002. Here is the link. The menu included: “Choice dishes were on offer for dinner: traditional Goan Hindu, Catholic and Portuguese specialities will be offered. The array of seafood includes lobster piri piri, mudoshi (a type of fish) fry, sungtyache kodi (prawn curry), kulliamchem mass (crab meat) in addition to popular preparations like balchao, xacutti, vindaloo and cafrael. Vegetables typical of the region — tambdi bhaji and ambadyache udda methi and nir phanas (bread fruit) — will be served. Chinese and Mediterranean cuisine will also be offered. “

These are the ones that I will remember for a long long time.

Kalkatta

This quote of Bachi Karkaria provoked me to write this blog:

"In different applications it is ‘o’ or ‘aw’. ‘Kolkata’ is subjected to such verbal mutilation that it should Black Hole those who ordered the change. Or perhaps the Brahmins of Writers Building did it deliberately so as to perpetuate the cultural caste system which separates those who can ‘o’ correctly, and those who can only gape in awe."

Full text here.

Well, there are people who liked the name Calcutta and it was always called "Kolkata" (pronounced as Coal-Kata) for the Bengalis just like Bombay was always Mumbai and Poona was Pune. But my favorite has been "Kalkatta" (pronounced as Kul-cutta)", the hindi version. It is so sweet, just like the staple food of the people of this city.

Every year, after summer vacation when I come back, teachers would ask, Kahan gaye the (Where did you go)? And I would reply "Kalkatta". One of the first hindi rhymes I learned was:

Aao Bhai Khele Khel, Chalti hai ab apni rail,
Hum Engine hai bhak bhak karte, hum dibbe hai chak chak karte...
.. and somewhere in the middle...
Jhatpat Kalkatta ho aaye.....

Imagining saying "Jhatpat Kolkata ho aaye" gives me shivers even now.
Another instance is the iconic song Chamma Chamma. Starring my one of the favorite Bollywood actresses, it has a stanza -

Hila doon UP, hila doon MP
Jo maaroon main thumka
Tere thumke pe haan Mumbai Patna
Main haaroon Kalkatta

Again replacing it with "Kolkata" will take the whole fun out of the song. It is like replacing Urmila with Raima Sen.

The word "Kalkatta" has this sweet raw crassness which is totally missing in Kolkata and especially the way rest of India attempts to say it : Call-katta. "Kalkatta" brings back the lost charm of the city. Kalkatta brings back the time when the Hindi Heartland (Delhi-UP-Bihar-MP-WB) was "The India" and this so called new IT cities like Bangalore, Hydra-bad, Pune though always good cities were never the talk of the country. Dilli - Lakhnau - Kanpur- Ilahabaad - Kalkatta were the the places where things of any consequence "happened".

The cosmopolitan Calcutta was never due to foreign countries or even southern/western India. It was always a place of confluence for the North, East and North-east India. For them it was always "Kalkatta". Making it Kolkata robs out the cosmopolitan part of the city.

For "probashi"'s like me, Kalkatta was the way we described the city to our friends all these years. Mentioning it as Kolkata or even worse, letting them pronounce it as "Call-Katta" is I believe a big Black Hole.

A "sort of" confession

I have a small confession to make here, though it will come with a lot of justification. First of all, I am very honored by my name appearing in my school website honor roll. Have a look here: http://kvambajhari.org/results.htm. Search for keyword “Mitra”.

My name appears in the list of toppers for 12th standard, though it appears as Saneepan with a missing D. The confession is, I was not the topper. It was my classmate Chandrashekhar Munjewar. But my confession ends here. As of my present mindset, I am not going to write to my school to change my name and the justification is as follows:

Though official records say that I did not get the highest marks, the thing that was always important in Maharashtra was the PCM or Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics marks. I did get the highest there. So there were a lot of people who consider me as the topper and I would like to believe the same too.

The other reason is: I believe the appearance of the name in the webpage is partly accounted for by my school teachers themselves who like me a lot. The reason for this belief is how my name is spelt. My dad, like most of the Bengalis, misspelled my name to Sandipan instead of Sandeepan. The teachers over the 10 years had themselves corrected the name only to change it back to Sandipan in 10th standard because they wanted it to be inline with what my dad wrote 10 years back. So when my name appears as Saneepan in the website, I feel it’s some teacher who said lets put Sandeepan’s name there and not some advanced database query to find out who was first.

The third reason is more selfish. I have been in the school for 12 years and had a consistent academic performance, a teachers pet etc etc. Not as an allrounder, but I was always regarded as the “smart” (the US smart, not the Indian smart) guy. So, I deserve my name there.

Bottom line is I wrote this blog as I feel I am cheating myself if I don’t let people know the truth and now that I have published it on my blog, I will feel less guilty conscious . Whoever is reading this please let me know if you think I did the right thing or not. I know I am not popular enough like Amitabh Bachchan to have a poll in my blog, but comments would be really helpful.

Durga Puja memories, yet again

I think this probably happens to every Bengali during the puja, how much ever probashi he or she is: some nostalgia creeps in. I really haven't been to any durga puja for quite some years now, with some years on and off. Last year and this year too I will go to a puja, which has been reduced to 3 hours for me from a 5 day extravaganza.

Barring 2 years in the trance undergrad phase, I really missed the puja every year. It's those memories which come back year after year. The Ambajhari Bangiya Samsad durga puja memories.

My durga pujas at ambajhari can be straightaway divided into two parts: Pre Rinki Transfer and post rinki transfer. The pre-rinki transfer durga pujas are still etched fresh into the memory but just 2 days back chatting with a friend, i was reminded of those post transfer days.

The poem recitation competition was a must for me as it was a proof of how bengali you are. How good are your pronunciations. The drawing competition was quite generic and nothing bengali about it. Most of my school bengali batch mates and friends did not participate in the poem recitation. It was just me, Esha and Shashwati from our year. So there you are, all of us did get some rank, either first or 2nd or third. I would like to believe that i was 1st most of the time but Esha and Shashwati may differ.

Another thing was treating friends. We probably had a budget of around 50Rs a day. You have to treat around 15 friends with that money. We pooled some and after very complicated math we all did manage to treat one another on every day of the puja.

As we grew older, the various stage programs were no longer an attraction for us but instead we will make a large round circle and keep chatting (Bangali Adda). Wonder what did we talk in those times. Movies? Cricket? Local who is dating whom gossip? or just plain antakshari? But we did chat and even till 1-2 am in the night.

Another thing was our batch's specialty of managing juniors. As in the school, here too, we were a favorite with the younger batches of people and we would play, eat and have fun together. By younger I mean atleast 5-6 years younger so the play will be hide and seek, or balloon volleyball. My favorite was handling their complaints though. I remember once little girl mana came and complained that manabendra had thrown some water onto her new dress. She wanted me to take some actions. But what could I do? Run behind manabendra and throw some water back? Or what even more strict people will do, that is, catch and scold manabendra and then make mana throw water on him? The person that I am, i would have probably just got Mana another icecream whch she would have eaten much to the envy of Manabendra.

Anyways, there are so many memories of this kind. Am off to Boston Durga Puja now.

Picture index:
1) Top Left: Durga Puja 2008 at Ambajhari Bangiya Samsad, Courtesy Sayantan Ghatak
2) Bottom Right; Boston Prabasi Durga Puja 2008, Personal file archives

Diary Sept 19 09

Been long since I wrote anything random. It has always been issue based. Of course my life is not interesting as Amitabh Bachchan or Shilpa Shetty that I can simply blog about what I ate in the day or whom did I meet. Who will even remmotely find that interesting apart from who know me. Well, on the other hand it's only the people who know me generally read this blog.

After a long time I had a good Saturday. I neither worked nor go to any place and got myself unnecessarily tired. Most important thing for me on weekends is getting up early (but little later than regular days) to maximize the day. I am a person who gets lazy by night.

I finished my intersting pattern of browsing which starts with Gmail, then orkut, then rediff.com followed by ibnlive and timesofindia. At this point, fed up, I switch to news.google adn read up all the headlines of India, US, Boston and Indian Entertainment. I ofcourse get most interested in teh entertainment section. At this point, I will search Bipasha on google news. MOst of the time I am up to date and find the news being already late. Then if I will serach some other random names depending on mood which can vary from Aishwarya Rai to atal Behari Vajpayee. Some common search terms are Varun Gandhi, NITK, Surathkal, Kolkata etc.

After this I had to drop my friend to car mechanic shop and from there we went for a morning walk near a lake. It was hilarious to see an old couple paying 5$ parking fees inside the state park and simply parking their car next to the lake and reading newspaper inside.

Then we went to Starbucks or rather Starsucks (atleast in terms of regular coffee), barnes and nobles and back home by 9:30 am. at this point my calls started starting with bro and bhabhi and moving on to other friends from grad school etc.

Went to a nice place for lunch called Kabab Factory in Boston. Still in the "no meat" mode, I just ate grilled veggies, fruit chat and shrimp masala. Came back and saw Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire on DVD. I had just finished the book and though very different from the book, the movie was pretty engaging.

After this went to temple as navaratri starts today and came back, made a few more phone calls and little more Harry Potter revision. Now it's 10:42 and will go back to revising HP and sleeping off.

This blog can't be as boring as my attempt to fiction :P

Dilemmas regarding Baba Ramdev cleared

I have been wanting to write on this topic for a long time but many thoughts prevented me. I wanted to have a solid reasoning before I published my thoughts and finally I have found one.

So here is the dilemma. My mom wants me to do the yoga taught by Ramdev baba and frankly, my mom has been a direct beneficiary. But I always found the exercises too boring for my taste. Then comes Ramdev Baba with his statement that being gay is a disease which can be cured by yoga. Now this was a fact that like most of the "learned" people did not go well with me. So then I thought because I do not agree with his views, I am perfectly alright by not following his yoga techniques. But there was always this nagging thought which can infact broken down to three:

1) Ramdev baba did not invent yoga. So why stop something which is an established science just because of one person's personal views.
2) Every person has the right to have an opinion. What is wrong if Ramdev baba has one and he is voicing it.
3) What if being gay is really a disease and/or something which can be cured.

Finally I have found my answers to all these three nagging questions. Let me go bottom up.

Counterargument to point 3) Though studies prove it as well that it is not a disease, and it may very well be a habit which is cured, but who cares. According to Indian culture/ movies, we consider love as a disease (sardi, khasi na maleria hua, main gaya yaaron mujhko, love, love love loveria hua). Can love be cured? Probably yes, probably not but who cares. It has all the symptoms of a disease if taken in a different light. At young age, it may ruin your career. Loving a wrong person may ruin your finances, your trust, your very existence in this world. Being gay may have similar consequences. But as we do not mind love being a disease, this one should also not a big deal.

Counterargument to point 2) I have been reading a lot about this issue. A blog from my friend Lalit, Gay Ho, and subsequent comments on it helped me better regarding this. Finally I read an argument as a comment on this article which is as follows:

Ramdev baba has said that being gay is a disease and he has challenged Delhi high court's judgment which says that gay sex should be decriminalized. I add these two statements. What does this imply? That Baba Ramdev thinks that all diseased people should go to jail. Is it human to put say all AIDS patients, cancer patients and the numerous millions of people in the jail just because they have a disease? This is against humanity. You may find this argument ridiculous and may say that this is putting words in somebody's mouth but then a public person should think twice before what he speaks. Like in this case his own statements lead to the conclusion that he wants diseased people to be criminalized.

Counterargument to point 1) If not already, after reading this reasoning, you might think that Sandipan is losing it by putting baseless reasons but then counterargument to 1 is the one which really has motivated me the most. I will not follow Ramdev baba's yoga but Shilpa Shetty's yoga. Two main reasons for that. Firstly, biggest motivation to do yoga for me was to reduce tummy. Ramdev baba being such a proponent of yoga, still has a tinge of tummy which I see no chance of going. Shilpa on the other hand is on diametrically opposite side of the spectrum. She has got the best abs in India. I know, abs is probably the last thing that comes to somebody's mind when someone thinks of a beautiful girl, but I find Shilpa's abs to be her best asset. Second reason is that the most irritating part for me in Ramdev baba's yoga is Kapaalbhati. Apparently, you have to do minimum of 5 minutes (300 times) going up to 15 minutes. On the other hand Shilpa suggests begin with 1-5 with no more than 3x10. You should totally see Shilpa's yoga. Search these keywords "shilpa shetty yoga" on youtube and you will get many relevant results. Even the idea of breathing-in n Kerala and breathing-out in Himalayas as her videos suggest should be enough to motivate anyone.


So this is the final conclusion and end to my dilemmas. I will do yoga but not the Ramdev Baba way, but the Shilpa way.

[Picture courtesy Bollywoodnet.blogspot.com and Rediff]

Was detention of Shahrukh Khan right thing?

Ok, I am a big time Shahrukh fan. I got up at 3:30 am tonight after having a nightmare as aftereffects of the movie 'Kaminey'. I browse as usual and go through the news that Shahrukh was detained at Newark Airport. I was terribly upset and shaken. I could not sleep after that.

Now after almost 16 hours after the story, having read a few 'counter' stories, I am at peace. So here is what I would have done if I were the person in charge of taking Shahrukh Khan to the detention room. Ok let's generalize this. Because even Shahrukh says he does not feel bad because of just himself but the room full of people who were mostly from a particular community. Here we go: (My monologue, thoughts in brackets)

Hello Sir, we have to hold you off for additional checks. Please do not panic sir, we will make sure you will be able to get to your connecting flight if any. We would like you to enjoy your stay in this country and make it as comfortable as we can.

Let me be frank, yes sir, as you might be thinking right now, you are being held because of your name. As you know Sir, we are a bit panicky country (tell exact reasons why you are doing even if it shows you in a slightly weaker position. Nobody becomes small by bowing before others). We took strong actions an entire nation because they destroyed our own WTC. But there is a good side to it as well Sir, as you can see, nobody has even dared a second attack. (On the other hand, there are some countries which encounter repeated terrorism, still get used to it, have such nice culture of equality which an outsider doesn't even realize). This is because of our security system sir, I hope and I know, you will understand as you come from such an educated nation.

(Saying this, take him to a room which should put the Lake palace Udaipur's presidential suite to shame, escort him to a seat, serve him snacks and drinks). Sir, to make this check shorter, can you just name somebody whom you are coming to in US so that we can call them and confirm? Here, take this i-phone. (A person comes to any other country for 2 reasons, he knows someone and has some purpose of visit, in which case he should have a contact address, or he is a tourist, in which case one can show their whole itinerary of stay or atleast the initial hotel. If found suspicious, one can always spy him)( So, now Shahrukh/any person makes the call, connect me and that person and we do a basic check. )

Thank you sir, I really appreciate your patience personally and on the behalf of my country. I hope you enjoy your stay in this country. Also, here is a feedback form and if you have any concerns and how we can improve this process, please let us know.

(Note that this entire process should take a max of 10-15 minutes per person with a staff size big enough to handle each and every person separately so that no one has to wait more than 30 seconds. After all, this is also an opportunity for job creation.)

This day that year

Today is 11th of August 2009. I can really go back to any year, say 2005, when I first entered this country or 1975, I was not even born but mom and dad got married. But let’s just go by 10 years. I will recollect what a typical day would have been back then.


11th August 1999, I was in 12th Standard: very important year for anyone. By this time, as it was August, I assume all the tuition classes would have been over, except Chemistry which the teacher (Kakulididi) insisted that she would not rush through.

I was a fairly early riser. So I would have got up at 6 sharp. Morning 6-8 was School study time, as the other time, I would supposedly prepare for IIT entrance. Not sure now why I did that so much. I never liked cracking all those uselessly difficult problems, but still had to do it. So I found the non IIT morning time more enjoyable. I studied Physics or Chemistry for the first hour and probably Biology from 7 to 8. Next I will iron my school uniform, go for a bath and get ready for school. Then, switch on Sony TV from 8:30 to 9 and would have breakfast and watch one of those dubbed English kids serials like Different strokes or Dennis the Menace.

Though my house was hardly 50 yards away from the school, I would still reach school 5 minutes before start. As I was the captain of my house “Nirbhik”, I would have to go through the checklist for morning assembly if it’s my house on duty. Somebody is saying the pledge- check, news –check! Oops we forgot the “though for the day”. Hurriedly, we would find some nice thought in some newspaper, attribute it to either Gandhiji or Plato or Martin Luther King and give it to any random person to deliver. I liked being backstage.

Let’s skip to the classes. Period no. 2 teacher is absent, so both classes will be done by Radha madam for physics. As soon as she leaves after grueling 1 hour 10 minutes, we will swarm on tiffin boxes. First to be opened was always Anuradha’s tiffin box. She would always bring something with potato and thus getting the nickname Aaloo herself. Next would probably be mine, or Sumit’s or Aprajita’s tiffin. By the time we (here, we = 30+ people) reach 5th or 6th tiffin, Maths teacher Ajay Pandya sir will come over. It was always fun as it was a refresher to whatever we already learnt in the coaching class but Pandya sir always had something new to add to our knowledge. Like this, 2 more classes would go one after the other until it is lunch time. This was the time we did dadagiri on the entire school being the seniormost. We would roam around the entire school, listen to complaints like “Bhaiya bhaiya, they took our wickets away”, or the 1st and 2nd grade ones will say “ Bhaiya, he ate 3 pieces of apple from my tiffin box.” Soon after, we will resume classes or some lab. Labs were fun too.

By default, one of the classes would be off that day. This time was spent in variety of activities. Either go out and play, or play indoor round robin table tennis with a normal ball on teacher’s table or sometimes, just play Antakshari (Again 30 people divided into groups of 15). Finally classes will get over at 3:30, but it would be another 15-30 minutes to reach home as we would chat all the time.

Eat food at home, do the tuition and school homework till 5. Oh yes, MTV will start from 4 with some show with VJ Nikhil Chinappa. Strange, Nikhil still is the VJ for MTV, and we thought MTV was always youth. At 5, I would just close all the books to watch “MTV most wanted” by VJ Shehnaz. This was my favorite time of the day. It will be the same usual songs –“My heart will go on”, “Am a Barbie girl” or “Show me the meaning of being lonely” or sometimes a bit different “Animal Song”. Anyway, 45 minutes to the show, I would leave for Chemistry Tuition. The class was long, 1 hr 45 minutes with a 10 minute break. But no doubt it was fun. Again, another half an hour gone after the tuition in chatting.

Come back at around 8:15, only to study for another continuous 2 hours. Dinner was usually served at 10:15. This time was reserved for the “IIT Exam” studies, hence most grueling and least attractive. At 10:15 sharp, me, mom and dad will have dinner together and it was always so nice. Little did I know then that in a year’s time I would stop eating mom cooked food? It was only in May 09 that she came here and I could again eat what she cooked.


Ok back to Dinner table of 99. Would finish the food in 10 minutes to go and start the TV again. This time, the Bengali channel DD7. It was movie time. Ideally I am supposed to resume my studies but then the movie would be one of the Bengali classics which mom and dad would not want me to miss and I would leave menial studies for better knowledge of my cultural roots.


Things have changed now. Probably for better. Wish I continue to blog even in 2019. And I will write about this day. A day spent in work, high school musical 1, iss jungle se mujhe bachao and writing a blog.

Deepika Padukone’s accent

I saw Love Aajkal yesterday. It is a good one time watch. But the thing I got hooked to is Deepika’s accent. It’s not rare for me to get hooked to some weird characteristics of leading ladies though. I like Bipasha’s slight squint, Rani’s husky voice, Katrina’s faulty hindi, Shilpa Shetty’s abs.

But Deepika’s accent is very mysterious. I still don’t understand which part is it from? My initial hunch and Nikhil confirms that it is the Hindi spoken in Marathi cities, but not Nagpur Pune or Mumbai. But then she was brought up in Bangalore and her origins are from Mangalore. She doesn’t have the typical south Indian accent also. The other strange thing is, it is such a slight accent as it cannot be categorized, it cannot be corrected or somebody can point out the mistakes. It is very subtle. I googled it and thought that it will lead me to something, but I found no such article. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. One cannot even copy and make fun of the accent. I wish I could.

Whatever is the case, Deepika is surely the kind who is horse of long race “lambi race ka ghoda”. She is here to stay and not vanish like the zillions of newcomers. Whenever I think of her, a funny incident comes to my mind:

Me, and my 19 year old cousin, 14 year old and 7 year old nephews were playing 20 questions or what is also known as Tom Dick and Harry where you have to identify the name of a person asking only 20 yes no questions. We all knew about the limited knowledge of the 7 year old. After all, you really do not expect much from him. So his turn was after me and hence he used to think in the same lines as I do. My first character was J.K Rowling. My little friends made to it after almost 25-30 questions but that is fine. Next, is this nephew’s turn. Now we all know he knows only 1 litterateur. So the first question we ask him is “Rabindranath Tagore”? And he says yes . Next I choose a bit less complicated and I choose Madhuri Dixit. So when it’s his turn, we directly tell him, “ Is it Deepika Padukone?” He just knows only one actress :D

Another proof is my friend’s quote: All kingfisher air hostesses are like Deepika Padukone. It’s like she has become the epitome of beauty. These just prove Deepika’s growing fan following. A sex symbol can never be the most popular actor; they do not become popular amongst kids. True popularity comes if someone is acceptable to all generations. So, Deepika! way to go.

Security at Indian Airports

The security at Indian airports is under a renewed limelight after the Kalam fiasco. We will come to that later, but here are a few facts that I have observed at Kolkata/Bangalore/Nagpur/ Bhubaneswar airports.

They do not let anybody other than passengers inside the airport gates. Thus the entire episode of seeing off somebody from the airport becomes a very nasty affair where you just park you car, with all your relatives in it, get off and go inside the airport with no chance of looking back. It’s inside an opaque glass building. (Another question, why make it glass if it is opaque). This is so not the Indian culture where this will be an entire one week worth of Soap opera material. On the other hand, you can really hold hands till the train leaves the platform, may be even run besides the tracks for a while at any Indian Railways platform. No wonder, movies never show "bidai" from an airport.

I don’t know who decides these policies and are probably happy that this is so strict. Apparently this action was taken keeping into view the security threats. But now read on to see how you have to go inside the airport. Show a stupid printout of any ticket with your name and date on it (even a standard 4 student can take an e-ticket, paste it in MS Word, replace the name and get a printout). With this, they watch your ID. Sounds good, but they even accept voters ID. Haha, even I cannot recognize my face in my Voters ID and I showed my voters ID which is in Kannada at Kolkata, Nagpur and Bhubaneswar airports. We have to agree that our airport security people are really smart.

Even if we assume that it was an ok check, listen to this. I had my friend with me. Seeing that she is a girl, and that she was with me and had some printout in her hand, they let her in without any check. "Naari ka samman karo" I guess.

Inside is even funnier. You do not remove anything from your body, not even the metallic belt or the wallet full of coins. The super intelligent gate is probably filtering this out from other metallic objects which you may carry. All you take out is your mobile. Looks like bombs can only be in mobiles. Then they do an embarrassing check with that detector like thing in their hand. (You keep your wallet out at this point, so effectively never checking it). And whoa you are secure.

Let’s concentrate on the women’s line. They do not even take of their handbags (and we all know that there is nothing in the world that is not there in the handbag of a woman) and calmly walk through a curtained alley with no checks. Doesn’t matter how much jewelleries one is wearing, it never beeps. Frisking a woman or asking her to take off her jewels is against the culture probably.

I sincerely hope that this is just the eyewash and may be unnoticeable to us, they are actually monitoring us, with x-ray cameras etc. Atleast I would like to believe so. Otherwise what this means is that our security guards are the smartest people on earth who can identify people from their faces and actions and take suitable action. I can even imagine a conversation amongst fellow security men:
“You know, that guy is a great security guard, he could look at that person from a distance and guess what kind of man he is. I once remember he caught a man randomly and got 4 kilos of marijuana from him. He should get Padmashri”

Come on, typecasting people has always been a practice in India, either it be w.r.t. the clothes they are wearing, the caste they belong and even the shade of brown they are (I practice the last one myself), but security should not be typecasting.

So now, coming to the issue of Kalam, with the above argument, it should follow that Frisking of Kalam should not be a big issue. If everybody has to do that, he can also do it. Moreover, if he really did not want it, he could have chosen national carrier rather than a US private company aircraft. May be Kalam does not even want this to be an issue. May be he finds this media hype unnecessary.

But there is another side. If there is a law of land, it has to be abided. You can protest against it in court, in peaceful marches but certainly not go against it. If it is a law that ex presidents should not be checked at airports, everybody should abide it. Even though this law includes a man called Robert Vadra whose only qualification is Husband of daughter of a dead ex-prime-minister. We can discuss about changing the law, but certainly not take it for granted that for greater good of humanity, we will let a corporation tamper with the law of land.

For the same reasons, I like the fact that internet will be banned (or rather some part) in China and corporations have to abide by it. It is a blatant violation of human rights. I will be the first in any procession against it, but if China has passed it as a law, corporations should adhere to it. Google or Continental can never be bigger than China or India or for that matter even the poorest country in the world.

Company taking on policies of a country is a dangerous trend and should be avoided at all costs.