In an election year, is it too idealistic to expect a Budget independent of political exigencies?

Travesty of tokenism

Business Standard

Sanjay Dutt and I inhabited the same milieu around the same time. Our parents had been friends and shared a mutual regard, predicated on nationalism,  Nehru-worship and a prevailing left-of-centre bias.Growing up as we did in the Mumbai of the '70s, there were opportunities for bumping into the gangly star-son: at the end of year, at the Mood Indigo rock concert held on the IIT  Bombay campus, where local rock bands belted out popular covers and the atmosphere was rife  with funny-smelling smoke; at the discotheque 'Cellar' located at the newly-built Oberoi hotel where the young and restless displayed the courage of their convulsions; and at film premieres and mahurats when he was on holiday from The Lawrence School,  Sanawar.Even the choice of his school was an instance of the milieu - one of the few co-ed institutions of its time, nestled in the hills of northern India, it was the first place where the reigning stars of Bollywood parked their progeny in the hope of better education.

A cautionary tale

What is the point of tracking the life of another being if not to learn from it and marvel at the wonder of life and the human sprit?

The saga of Screwvala

'A lovely boy with a heart of gold', 'a man who regrets his days as a drug addict', 'a boy gone astray' - Sanjay Dutt's friends swear by him. Malavika Sangghvi decodes the man who's in trouble, yet againWhen I first met Sanjay Dutt 17 years ago while researching Black Friday," says S Hussain Zaidi, noted crime reporter and author of Black Friday and Dongri to Dubai, books that lay bare the machinations of Mumbai's underworld, "I found the man was down to earth, humble and genuinely affectionate unlike so many filmy people. We met again recently when he had finished reading and re-reading Dongri to Dubai and wanted to serialise it on TV. I felt I was meeting a long-lost friend. One thing that I observed in him after several meetings is that he has no guile and cunning in him. It's unfortunate that his sufferings are not over yet."Jaya Bachchan recalls, "He wrote me a long letter after watching Koshish, full of school-boy ardour and admiration, from a boy unable to communicate what he re

Hero with a communication problem

Even as the Modi Express steamrolls its way to national prominence, fuelled by an evangelist's zeal, three other men made three high-profile and much discussed speeches in the past three weeks.Ajit Pawar, Rahul Gandhi and Bill Clinton. Could there be three men with such vastly different speaking styles, agendas and careers?And yet, as a consumer of popular culture and observers of public behaviour, one watched the three, culling from them what they tried to say, didn't say and the ultimate success of their effort.First things first. Pawar, deputy chief minister of Maharashtra, a man with an SSC degree and many allegations of corruption, in an attempt to endear himself to his audience while referring to Maharashtra's severe drought situation at a public function near Pune said, "If there is no water in the dam... should we urinate into it?"Setting aside the fact that Maharashtra is reeling under one of its severest and most ruinous drought situations and that Pawar has faced a slew of c

The men and their message

Often, it appears as if there are various forms of entitlement constantly rubbing against each other in a silent dance of brute force

That right to entitlement

Rape is one half of the population's way of teaching the other half a lesson for daring to attempt to empower itself

One Nirbhaya at a time

Shortly after Cyrus Mistry took over at Tata Group, a funny thing happened at the stately lunchroom at Bombay House, where the legendary satraps of India's most respected business empire sit.According to an insider, the usual high minded banter which emanated from the lofty perch where senior Tata executives reviewed the rest of the country,  gave way to a subject wholly unheard of in those hallowed corridors: babies, summer camps and PTA meets!No, this was not an innovative delve into the business opportunities presented by India's unique demographic profile. Instead, for the first time in decades, one of the managers around that polished boardroom in Bombay House,  historically occupied by august grandfathers,  was a young dad of teenagers.What was the House of Tata coming to? And what on earth would the childless JRD or (in fact his successor Ratan) be thinking?This scene replayed itself in my mind when I read about the affable Mistry's first big organisational upheaval after his in

A generational change

Social media or number game, what will drive the 2014 election?

The math behind an election

On his birth centenary, Balraj Sahni's grandniece, the author, recounts the actor's extraordinary but sad life

Remembering Balraj-ji

For a sophisticated person it doesn't matter if a fellow diner isn't using a fork and knife to eat

A sophisticated mind

Are we seeing the return of political correctness?  There was a time, until quite recently, when you couldn't say the words without couching them in invisible inverted commas, to suggest how absurd and precious the whole approach to  marginalised sections of society had become.Ironically, the term had been introduced into public consciousness through the Communist Party when during its Leninist phase it began to crack the whip on what it perceived to be people who did not toe the 'party line'. (Following this party diktat here in India, some of the brightest and best members of the party began to be described as bourgeois and politically incorrect for acts as innocuous as listening to Western classical music and studying law!)Be that as it may, in the late twentieth century, the term had come to mean something quite different when conservatives in America used it  to ridicule those they regarded as subverting time-honoured Western traditions.Calling female actresses 'actors', short peo

Buddha and the art of PC

Companies spend millions on advertising and PR and lose all that money when they fail to sensitise their staff or train them to uphold their proclaimed values

Flying confessions

What kind of man would put his hands around his wife's throat, pinch her nose, use both his wrists to push her face back and on occasion reach across the table to clamp his hand across her mouth?What kind of man would do all this in public, in fact, seated at his favourite restaurant, an upmarket hub of media and entertainment celebrities, frequented by the paparazzi? Do all this to his wife who happens to be one of the most famous - if not beloved - women in the land?What kind of man would do all this when he himself is a very public figure, a contemporary icon, someone whose every move and sentence makes headlines?Could there be behaviour more inexplicable than that of Charles Saatchi, millionaire art collector, celebrated spin doctor, advisor to prime ministers and presidents, and columnist than what has been revealed recently?For those who were away from Planet Earth this past week, Saatchi's misdemeanours have to do with recent pictures published in the press of various assaults o

What was he thinking?

In the end it all boils down to: does the end justify the means? Three different situations prompted this musing. The first, Barack Obama's dramatic speech at Georgetown  University last week in which he declared that he would   bypass Congress and direct the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to limit the carbon pollution that comes from power plants in a bid to reduce global warming.This in the week that his image took one of its worst tumbles after it was revealed that his administration had allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) to violate US citizens' right to privacy in a secret programme till 2011.The second, Google's 'Legalise Love' campaign launched last year in which the tech giant announced its commitment to gay rights and to cultivating a work environment where Googlers can be themselves and thrive."We are proud to be recognised as a leader in LGBT inclusion efforts but there's still a long way to go," it had said. "Legalise Love is our drive to ensure that all of ou

Means and ends

From the time when a superstar called Yusuf Khan found it necessary to change his name to Dilip Kumar to gain acceptance in Bollywood to when megastar Shah Rukh Khan chooses to call his son AbRam - what else can one say but that we've come a long way baby!To be sure, Bollywood's heart has been more or less secular. Back in the first flush of Nehruvian idealism, there were couples like Nargis and Sunil Dutt who had tied the knot, though by and large their's was the exception rather than the rule.In the reigning triumvirate of Dilip Kumar,  Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor, no one had broken religious ranks. It took the next generation to do that: Shashi Kapoor married Jennifer Kendall, a British-Christian; Feroz Khan and his brother Sanjay both married outside their communities - a Sindhi and a Parsi, respectively; Javed Akhtar married Honey Irani, a Parsi; and his writing partner Salim Khan married a Hindu lady. Then there seemed to be a respite in this secular love fest. Except for Vinod Khan

Bollywood's secular heart

Starbucks has surpassed its rivals by creating the principle of success - lifestyle for its consumer

The lifestyle makers

When will we grow up and realise that most of these feuds are self-defeating and expend too much energy?

A nation of feuds

Without inclusivity and diversity civilisations die and cities are leached of their pizzazz. Which is why I do not agree with Shobhaa De's views about Mumbai being spun off into a city state of its own

Inclusivity and diversity

Dear Anonymous Leading Industrialist, You know who you are. I met you at a recent Mumbai party. You were three drinks down. You were tired and emotional. It was late.Politics is always a tricky subject to discuss under these circumstances. But what the hell, we were old friends who liked the same American TV shows.It began by us discussing the latest bit of news to emanate from the Narendra Modi camp. That he was hiring IIM grads to man his election campaign. You told me you'd lost two middle-level managers in the last week.So far so good. I trotted out my standard befuddlement about the limited choice people like us had in the coming elections. An inefficient and scam-ridden incumbent versus a regressive communal challenger.You jumped on the inefficient scam-ridden incumbent bit, of course. Your anger and frustration was palpable. The crumbling rupee, the international downgrades. The buttressing of personal Swiss accounts by politicians in power, they were all par for the course at p

Party politics

Jiah Khan's untimely death exposes the unmanageable levels of toxicity, competition, loneliness and emotional rejection that are pushing young Bollywood aspirants and models over the edge

Malavika Sangghvi

Malavika Sangghvi

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