The awakening of Simba and other stories

It has been such an eventful  week  for the media.  Eventful enough to keep them running around in circles and make  ‘Jack of all trades’ like me feel complete enough to pen a ‘Middle’. Just that the ‘Middle’ has moved on in the scheme of the way newspapers are turned out.  We have now more pages residing  in the vast expanse of cyberspace than perched in the middle of the editorial page.  They say that the pen is mightier than a sword, its that much more lethal in the hands of know it all’s like me. But then its a free world  so I though why not key in my frustration.  So lets have a round-up of the key happenings of this week.

To begin with a little homage to the lives lost, Suchitra Sen,  whose Hindi hit,  ‘Tere bina zinda gi mei’ remains my all time favourite, I never tire of watching Áandhi’ for the nth  time.  Sunanda  the tragedy of Page 3 proportions, the 18 people who lost their lives in Mumbai while paying homage to their religious leader. May these souls rest in peace.

Coming to the high profile UN designate.  When one is confused whether one is in polity on the way to  page 3 or on page 3 because they are in polity, it makes for strange bed fellows. What happened to Shashi was maybe something similar.  To be fair to him he was one of the first to start the trend of ‘Tweeting’ in India. It looks like the Tweets finally ended up drowning all other sane voices in his life. God help him in these difficult times.

  Just a few kilometres away a similar voice made its mark. Finally the Baba spoke, no I do not refer to any god-man. The reference was more towards our own RG baba.  After years of breaking bread with dalits, the king-in-making has woken up and is trying to roar, and what a roar it was.  Reminds me of the lion kink,  oops !  I mean ‘The Lion King’.  Resembling little Simba, on a self realisation mode. A tentative cough followed by a full throated roar. Will it end  waking up the Scars(or should I say comb sellers) of the world is yet to be seen.

On comb sellers and lesser haired people, the little king, did not seem to realise that he himself seems to be fast loosing hair at quite a fast pace and I would not be surprised if he himself finds himself in the custody of one comb too many, before he realises,  that he has no use for one. But right now he has more to worry than about losing his hair, perhaps saving his shirt in the next elections should be a focus. He did paint quite a pretty picture of himself , up there on the podium. 

Not often do you see, a prime-ministerial candidate flaunting a pair of dimples. So what if his face seemed  more paler than a Icelander gone pale. Grimaces, don’t go well with the chocolate faced  and it was showing that he was trying hard to put on one. By the way our prince would be one of few candidates for the PM post to have been blessed with dimples,  the closest someone would have come to competing with the prince on this front  was the venerated PV Naramsimha Rao. Except that PV’s dimples were more like cheeks that  had sunk in to make way for his extended pout.

On dimples, there is no doubt that it would have been more entertaining to have the other king, the King Khan, flaunting his dimples,  up there on the stage instead of RG, and  there is no doubt that the original Khan could have  displayed a  far better IQ that our very own prince

Quite a week I must say,  our own Mani (Shankar Iyer ) put his foot once again where it always finds its place,  right up there in his mouth, when he took a dig at a tea vendor trying to becoming a PM. Whether this quote will keep him in a soup for some more time is yet to be seen. Unfortunately he is one person who seems to do very little introspection on his own behaviour and actions. He behaves neither like a Mani nor a Iyer.    

When these events were  making news, some blocks away there was a mob led by a over zealous minister trying to put an end to robust African women from earning their livelihood. The women did not realise that when wizards come riding their broom-stick,  a la Harry Potter, all hell breaks loose. More so when these guys seems to think that any thing which is commercial or corporate in nature must stink, similar to how electricity must be distributed free, and grocery stores are more convenient than Super Marts, and that Auto rickshaw Unions deserve more sympathy than the general public which remain at the mercy of these drivers.  Its another matter that with the speed with which these first timers are tying themselves in knots on policy matters, it may not be long before the public quite rightly wield  the broom once again to show them their rightful place.

Finally there was this little piece of medical research published in one of the latter pages of the newspaper,  a research proved as to how comedians and satirist are Psychos who are mentally deranged and about to go bonkers. Did not seem too far fetched a idea, given that many friends had already labelled me raving mad, after reading the stuff that I write around in face book and elsewhere.