Nitin Gadkari and Raju Korti, Warriors of '57

Raju Korti
As a professional journalist with 42 years of experience behind me, I have always and scrupulously avoided making friendship with politicians. I have always kept them at arm's length as very early on in my career I had seen some of my ilk using them as piggybacks and turning wheeler-dealers. Without sounding too pompous or holier than though, vested interests was never my cup of tea. The only exception to this professional credo of mine was Nitin Gadkari who is now a serving minister in the Narendra Modi-led government. Notice the past tense.

Nitin and I are almost same age, he being barely three months older. He opted for Commerce and Law  before becoming a political leader while I chose Engineering, Science, Management, Law and Mass Communication to finally end up being a professional mediaperson. He was sharp, witty, incisive and interactive. One of his features, which is still in evidence, is the perpetual sardonic smile creasing his face. From my experience with him, I know what exactly goes into the making of that smile.

When I started as a journalist, he was just finding his moorings in Politics as student leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad and later the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha. We used to cross paths often, me on my Honda motor-cycle and he on his Vespa. There was this rickety 'chai tapri' where we would cross and he would invariably beckon me with a wave of his hand. Our meeting would last around 15 minutes, sipping chai and sharing small talk and pleasantries.

Knowing, I would never entertain any political discussion that smacked of vested interests, he respected my bearing and I reciprocated by never asking for any favours. There was always a touch of humour to his talk punctuated with a grin and over a period of time I started understanding when it was sarcastic and when benign. 

What was absolutely genuine, however, was his love for food, especially snacks like Samosa, Aaloo Bonda, Kachori, Chakli and Chivda which he would freak out on any time of the day. I didn't have to be a dietitian to realize that this fond fascination for junk food had contributed largely to his portly structure. (Purely as pun) I never saw him throwing his weight around as is the won't of the modern-day leaders. Later, during a chance meeting in Mantralaya, he told me how he had to exercise restraint to shed those extra kilos and belly fat. Knowing his cravings, I knew it must have been too tough on him but diabetes and cholesterol don't exempt politicians.

Nitin matched this gluttony with an equal appetite for figures. All those who wonder how he reels out complicated financial and other figures of the projects that his ministry executes, ask me. He was remarkably good at those, a healthy commentary on his memory. You could/can never catch him on the wrong foot there. I suspect a lot of his rivals grudgingly respect his penchant to throw figures with an articulation that sometimes sounds a little glib.

When he sent me a personal invitation for his son's thread ceremony, I chose not to go for the reason I have already mentioned. Instead, I called him up and wished him formally. At Mantralaya, I avoided mingling with him too much. The conversation never went beyond formalities and we both knew we could have (had) much more deeper exchanges than the shallow ones. A couple of times I jokingly referred to him as "Sattawancha Senani" (Warrior of 1957, the title of a famous Marathi  book by Vasant Varkhedkar on Tatya Tope, the General of the 1857 mutiny) although we both were born almost a century later. He would respond with his trade-mark smile.

I am not surprised he has traveled thus far. I had seen the traits of a seasoned leader much before he had made it to the national consciousness. For the record, this piece has nothing to do with my political proclivities. This is as I have seen him as a person from close quarters. As he completes 65 years today, I extend my birthday greetings to him through this blog because I know if I call him, he will respond with "Ye bhetayla" (Come and meet).

And that is one thing I will not do. One, he is now busy up to his neck as union minister, and two, politicians do not have the same priorities as other mortals. Once a politician, always a politician. Maybe if and when he hangs his boots and to relive some nostalgia.

Ye kambakht Covid North Korea pahuncha kaise?

Raju Korti
By far the most bizarre thing about North Korea is its people who are actually oppressed don't even know they are oppressed. Irony has the dubious reputation of killing itself often in a country that pompously calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. It has only accentuated after its dilly dallying state media finally admitted the presence of Covid outbreak on its sealed soils. And it has entrusted the job of controlling the outbreak to its Army after declaring  "Severe National Emergency"; whatever that means in that country. 

For many countries, Covid as news has taken a backseat but anything that happens in North Korea is news at all times. If reports are to be believed the Iron Curtain country which shares its borders with Russia and China to the north, hasn't been able to stop the onset of Covid-19 what with tens of thousands of people infected by the virus. True to its character, Pyongyang conceded the outbreak after being in denial mode with this new isolationism forced on its already isolated populace. Bizarre can't get more bizarre than this. How does a country define a lockdown that is internationally locked down?

The state controlled media has chosen to speak the couched language of calling the  outbreak as "unspecified fever like never seen before". What happens to its 25 million population due to lack of vaccination programmes and next-to-nothing healthcare is a matter of speculation. The country has turned down offers from the international community to supply Covid vaccines including its closest ally China. There is no mistaking the inadvertent humour in the story that North Korea found it safer to seal its borders than to hazard the use of Chinese-made jabs. 

While the virus runs amuck, a lockdown would be disaster in a country that in its obsession believes it is more prudent to spend on nuclear weapons than public welfare. By conceding about the presence of Covid on its soil, the pariah state seems to have dropped subtle hints that it my be willing to accept "outside" help. But will it? Your hunches about what will happen in that country invariably turn out to be wrong when your sanity tells you they should be right.

I am not sure if China's expedient ties with North Korea will help. Their alliance has been nominal with a history of tension and antagonism for decades. That said, it has somehow managed to forestall any attempt by Pyongyang to stray from its orbit. Keeping North Korea on a tight leash is a tight-rope that China will perennially have on its hands.  

Forget China, even North Korea finds it tough to handle itself. Sample this weird piece of governance. South Korea had stopped sending fertilizers to North Korea when the latter was facing an acute shortage of fertilizers. So like everything else, a new law was enacted that made it mandatory for the citizens to collect their poop and hand it over to the authorities to sustain the country' agriculture. How they managed this can only be imagined.  

If the country fails to control the Covid surge, North Koreans may find it doing it again. For their own life!

Divided and lost in the maze of languages!

Raju Korti
One cliche that gets bandied about in India is about the beauty of unity in diversity. It is a red herring that is often tinctured with "inclusivity" as an additive and euphemism. My pointed reference is to the needless heart burning on the issue of languages. A war of words has erupted -- as it does every now and then -- over what is/should be  the country's national language. As actor Ajay Devgn tweeted that Hindi was and will remain the country's national language, people from the world of politics and entertainment started weighing in to muddy the waters further.

The divide over language is flogging a dead horse. It is a man-made issue that finds its genesis in politics. The country's map has been redrawn on linguist lines following the States Reorganization Act (1956). Among other things, it promoted unwarranted regionalism and misplaced pride. Worse, the twenty plus languages the country proudly boasts of, now come with an emotional quotient that we can do without. The North-South divide has been particularly notorious on this count with a dubious history of self-serving political leaders exploiting the regional ethos.

I fail to understand the self-aggrandizing that bloats this balloon. The narrow politics of language has only thrived on sentimental naivete and defeats the very concept of inclusivity. Language is and should only be a means of communication and expression. All languages are prosperous and expressive in their own way and learning more languages should be encouraged instead of confining and constricting people on which language serves the best.

As a journalist with The Hindu, I recall my visits to (then) Madras several times in the mid-eighties and how severely hamstrung I was as a non-Tamilian because of the animosity Tamilians nursed towards people speaking Hindi. To be fair to them, the simmering discontent in the state was a result of the severe backlash of how some political leaders in Maharashtra had stoked regional and linguistic passions. Whenever I tried to convey in Hindi, I invited murderous looks. Somewhere in the midst of this linguistic ferment -- evident in some measure in other states as well -- English gradually began to make strides as a link language.

As a visiting faculty across colleges in Mumbai, I am seeing how speaking English is becoming common among the younger generation. To them, the issue is not of language but of style. Looking down upon other languages finds a variety of excuses. I have heard any number of times how some languages lack finnesse, not able to understand what it means beyond phonetics. The unvarnished truth is language has become a highly divisive force. All this in a country which proudly proclaims Sanskrit as the Mother of all Languages but has consigned it to the pages of history -- and to the chagrin of some -- lost its expertise to foreigners. 

Let people speak and express in the language of their choice. Meanings don't change with languages. If you can't communicate in the language that other people don't understand, bloody well have the chivalry to learn theirs and encourage them to do so in turn. Don't fall for the emotional blackmail of those trying to drive a wedge for vested interests.

Each language contains countless unique words, phrases and grammar peculiar to it. If you don't learn it, you don't understand it. Language is a double-edged weapon. It has the terrifying power to divide, it also has the power to unite. We need to celebrate and accept language and the diversity it encourages. Above all, language should be just that. A medium of communication and cognitive expression. 

There is no such thing as a national language. There are only link languages. Inclusivity is inherent in a link. If you think this is sermonizing, go get a life!