In praise of our motormouth RJs

Raju Korti
With due apologies to all the radio jockeys and digital jockeys floating on air waves these days, each time the words are uttered, I am reminded of a popular brand of underwear. Apologies because for a garrulous and chatterbox RJ it is anything but an "aaram ka maamla." To hold forth for a long time with witless humour, inadequate information and puerile mimicry without any pause is no mean task. I am saying this at the risk of being panned by the huge fan clubs RJs have, especially among the younger generation. But then that is only fair given that anything before 1990 is old and archaic for today's youngsters.

Sketch from the net for only illustration purpose

The radio jockey has been an institution since the early 1930s in the West but in India, they became febrile only after the advent and proliferation of private radio stations. The temptation to use the word febrile was just irresistible with one of the FM channel called as 98.4 which we all know from our childhood is the normal body temperature.
I personally know a few RJs. What really strikes me about them generally is the supreme confidence and demeanour with which they handle their mikes. This is one section of the media where the radio anchors know they have said something wrong and believe people have not heard it. But to be fair to this clan, they more than make up with pun, spontaneity, fluency and a soothing voice. The job becomes that much more tricky given that RJs also have to raise topics of concern, design subjects for discussion and interact with callers and listeners via phone, email, social media and SMSs. Even a moment's monotony can break the spell. So talk, talk and talk till they themselves drop dead.
For someone who has never been able to summon the gumption to talk furiously, hardly breathing between the words, I have adulterated admiration for most RJs. If only they could do some home work before they launched into their verbal fusillade.
This morning I switched on my antique radio which stirred to life with an RJ on some FM channel (some because most are known by their frequencies) waxing eloquent on the country's most deified and somewhat vilified songstress Lata Mangeshkar, today being her birthday. The song selection meandered from the 1970s to 2010 making me feel I was older than the singer. You have to understand and feel the plight of senior citizens like me when one knows that the first song that she sung was almost a decade before I started walking in this mortal world.
That begs a question. Who does the ground work for programmes that call for deep research? Or is it that there is little or no research because the RJs can keep letting off their steam while we hapless listeners snort through the programme? But then, who wants (to) research when it is more important to run through the programme than be bothered with its content?
Today's programme on Lata was not without its humour -- inadvertent though. After every two songs, the RJ kept playing the lines from a Rafi song "Baar baar din ye aaye, tu jiye hazaaro saal, happy birthday to you." I am still trying to figure out who should be more mortified -- poor me or poor Rafi or poor Lata Mangeshkar. That calls for a vintage Lata song from Parichay (1954) "Jal ke dil khaak hua, aankh se roya na gaya."
I don't know if RJs are paid royalty but what is royal should get royalty. Simple logic.
    

Hook and crook of Trump-Clinton debate

Raju Korti
The sparring between presidential aspirants, Republican Donald Trump and Democratic Hillary Clinton, during the presidential debate yesterday reminds me of a James Hadley Chase thriller. The stronger boxer loses the fight because he does not remember the cardinal principle of boxing: When you hook with your right, make sure your left side is protected.
I doubt whether any presidential election has defied conventional wisdom in recent times as this one. For one, it pit a political neophyte and reality TV star against the better half of a former president and two, no other debate was perhaps as hotly anticipated for reasons more than one. Both didn't let down as acidic barbs flew thick and fast as expected since the Twitter was already an excited host to their fireworks.
In a preview of the combat on the small screen, both needled each other. Electoral planks and issues figured at the centre of what both claimed as outright lies. There has been enough evidence in the past that the first debate is compelling enough to make or mar a candidate. In majority campaigns in the television age, the opening debate has shaped the trajectory of the elections -- John Kennedy in 1960 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 being the prime examples. They typically have had the most impact when an incumbent president isn't running and when the candidates come in with something to prove and when the contest is close and fluid. I am not sure if there ever was a contest as close and as fluid as this one.
During the entire campaign, we saw Trump in two different avatars. The debate before the debate was about which Donald Trump would show up -- a provocative and outrageous Trump who unexpectedly claimed Republican nomination when there were at least a dozen others with stronger political resumes or the one who toned down his grandiloquent rhetoric in the run up to the debate. In the rough and tumble of such a mutated scenario, it is tricky to answer what made Trump pull even with Hillary on the national battleground. As is his wont, the original Trump showed up.
It was no surprise that the debate degenerating into a slang match,headed overtime with both the rivals socking each other in a fierce exchange. It was Trump as promised as he portrayed his foe as a political hack and describing her as all words and soundbites. The number of times he interrupted when she spoke would have given our own Arnabs, Rajdeeps and Barkhas a run for their money. The only difference was the moderator of the debate tried with only limited success to keep control.
Hillary's demeanour showed her as a counter-puncher. But she was bang on target when she painted Trump as a questionable businessman with no plans in his head and a limited grasp of facts. She too repeated jabs at Trump's "Trumped-up trickle down" economic policies and accused him of racist for questioning Obama's birthplace. But her best salvo was asking him what was he trying to hide by refusing to reveal his tax returns while they were being audited.
By far the most amusing spectacle was the two blaming each other for almost everything including except why they were born. Sample this:

Smiles before the scowls.

Trump: Mrs Clinton lacks presidential look and doesn't have the stamina.
Hillary: He can talk to me about stamina when he accomplishes as much. He has called women pigs, slobs and dogs.
Trump: I had planned to say something extremely rough to you and your family but decided against it.

Mercifully, Hillary didn't call Trump the son of a bitch and Trump didn't question her husband's stamina that was so much in evidence when he was having a fling with a 21-year-old White House intern. But while Trump huffed and puffed his way through, Hillary's responses were marked by more amusement than anger. Yet it was a debate between arrogance and experience if you know who should be the rightful claimant for those labels. In the complicated maze of truth, exaggeration and old falsehoods, it makes tactical sense for Hillary to let Trump caricature himself because no one else can do it better.
It is said that half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes the other half uses discretion.

Some thoughts about Pakistan and its nuclear threat

Raju Korti
Look at the picture, photo-shopped or not, accompanying this piece below. It makes light of Pakistan's military capability against India should there be a war. To me, it is a telling commentary on the economy of Pakistan -- a country clueless and /or impassive about tackling its own burgeoning domestic problems but never losing an opportunity to throw on India's face its readiness to press the nuclear button at the slightest provocation.
So what is it that makes this rather failed State, where non-State actors have been calling the shots for over two decades now, rely so furiously on the nuclear threat? Why does even something as routine as cancellation of talks for normalisation of bilateral relationship, makes it step on the gas and indulge in fulminations of a nuclear war?
Each nation has a doctrine to deal with possible nuclear threats. For Pakistan, it is majorly India. For India it is Pakistan and China. For the US it is Russia, China, North Korea and many more where it often pitches in as world policeman. On the brink given the problems that surround its neighbourhood and helpless because of an intransigent and crazy military establishment, this doctrine stares India in the face with alarming regularity. The number of Indians who believe that it is time for India to call Pakistan's bluff and get into a fight-to-finish war increases each time Pakistan perpetrates an outrage against Indian civilians and army. The threat of a full scale military offensive was never as pronounced as it is now after the attacks in Pathankot and Uri but the Indian response continues to remain calibrated and somewhat frustrated. Pakistan has nothing to lose. India far too much. The dynamics of what accrues between the two countries in the wake of their tumultuous division and subsequent deep-rooted hatred has gone far beyond the realms of conventional diplomacy.
There is still a faint glimmer of hope to believe that the Pakistani military establishment realises it would be a blunder to provoke an attack that would spell end to its country's existence on the world map. But it will not need much for the country's army -- which has thrown all civilian and democratic norms to the wind -- to acerbate a war having lost three wars in 1965, 1971 and 1994. What began as a bluster from then President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto about staging a "thousand-year war with India" has now assumed a grotesque obsession to acquire nuclear weapons on the perceived threat from India. It seems to have gone unnoticed that there seems to be a perceptible change in the way Pakistan is seeking to harm India. The strategy now seems to be attack military installations rather than civilians.
If, after another terrorist attack on India, Indian army penetrates into Pakistan, inflicts heavy damages and occupies its territory, there is a lurking chance that Pakistan's army would use the nuclear deterrent to stop it. That is what prompts the general belief in India that defeating Pakistan below the threshold would perhaps avoid an escalation. But with Pakistan there are no guarantees. There is also a school of thought that isolating Pakistan as state sponsor of terrorism, slapping sanctions, economic embargoes, abrogation of the water treaty and withdrawal of Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status would be the best option. On the face of it, that sounds sensible since it supposedly reduces the risks of a major conflict but it does little to stop the elements that Pakistan has been shrugging off as non-State players. Diplomacy and terrorism pose challenges poles apart.
I am sold out on the theory that Pakistan should be allowed to die under its own weight. A debilitated economy and the ferment in Baluchistan, Karachi, Punjab are proof enough of its dysfunctional politics. Pakistanis are themselves not very optimistic about the country's future as a secure, developing and modern country. There is a talk that Pakistan relies on the US but they know that this economic and military aid is not without its pound of flesh. The Americans have always been prompted by their Geo-political interests that seek to serve their expedient politics. Delhi and Rawalpindi know this very well. As far as China is concerned, it is obvious that there has been some buttressing of Pakistan at State level but on other fronts there is scope for lot of justified scepticism. There is little social or cultural or emotional attachment between the peoples of the two countries. The Chinese don't have to be intelligent to know that Pakistan is a convenient shoulder to fire at India. They are known to pursue single-minded their own narrow interests. They do not contribute funding for health, education and other forms of development in Pakistan. In past crises with India, China is not known to have done even much of what Pakistani leaders wished. My gut feeling is China will not do anything to underwrite or protect Pakistan if it comes to a full fledged war. They know that the best weapon against any enemy is another enemy.
Crippled with inherent problems of militancy, unemployment and low growth rate, Pakistan lags behind India on almost all parameters of national growth. Raising the nuclear war bogey frequently is an attempt to show that its power emerges from its weaknesses within.
Pakistan can administer to itself a lethal injection and does not need any external threat to use it.      

Dire Straits of Pakistan (From Facebook)

Nothing Right, nothing Left in West Bengal

Raju Korti
Unlike the Left, which has a distinct ideology of its own -- acceptable or unacceptable -- the Trinamool can at best be described as Congress weed. Both of them do not seem to have any agenda in the state they have flourished except engage themselves in a war of words that often degenerates into a physical clash. A quick look at the Trinamool Congress' website shows that its main discourse is Islamic fundamentalism, Populism and Democratic Socialism, not necessarily in the same order all the time. Do not bother to exercise your grey cells what those mean because Trinamool leaders themselves have no clue.

Syed Shah Geelani (file grab)

The long-standing rivalry between the TC and the Left, amusingly, often brings them on the same platform to take swipes at each other. The latest trigger comes in the wake of the leaders of both parties desperately wanting to seek an audience with Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani through an all-party delegation. Trinamool leader Saugata Roy hurriedly opted out of the delegation when he came to know that CPM leader Sitaram Yechury was also a part of the team.
The Trinamool has nothing to do in West Bengal despite being in power while the Left is gainfully unemployed in the state which was its bastion for decades. Having more or less a similar mindset and yet being political rivals, it would have been very amusing how the two parties would have taken their agendas further during the meet with Geelani.
For all their political wisdom, both did not realise that Geelani was fuming while he turned down J&K Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's invitation for talks on the Kashmir issue. The delegation was reduced to a comedy of sorts with four of its opposition MPs breaking away from the group and deciding to reach out Geelani separately. Separatists meeting a separatist leader?
Obviously the all-party delegation with assorted biscuits like CPM leader Yechury, CPI leader Raja, JD (U) leader Sharad Yadav and RJD leader Jay Prakash Narayan headed by -- of all the people -- Rajnath Singh -- did not have the common sense to understand that a hardened separatist leader placed under house arrest would be the last person to meet them.
Roy did not miss the chance to take potshots at Yechury. He said "Yechuri had to do all this because the CPM has nothing 'left' in West Bengal now. But the tug of war between the two reminds me of an archetypal story I read in children's magazine as a schoolboy.
A king on the deathbed tells his prince son to tour the country, see how administration functions and gain some experience before ascending the throne. The prince sets out for the tour and after a hard day's horse-ride decides to sleep under a tree. When he is fast asleep, two cobras emerge, happy that they had someone to bite after a long time. However, they start fighting, hissing loudly over who should bite him first. Hearing the commotion, the prince wakes up and kills both with his sword.
Moral of the story: Strange bedfellows never make for holy alliances. The end.