Sunday, September 11, 2016

Geet, Kali, and the ostrich


The monsoon session has begun and I am reminded of the lovely Geet of Star One’s Geet hui sabse parayee fame. You must be wondering what has the Parliament’s monsoon session to do with a run-of-the-mill TV soap. Plenty, I tell you. She is charming (I mean Geet) and popular unlike our politicos – not that the latter are ugly but they simply lack the glam quotient what with all those scams ‘n’ scandals pocking their images with warts and moles. Geet is constantly on the move trying to tackle the challenges that crop up at every turn in her life. Our politicos prefer the escape route – a sly trip to the less testing climes of the Americas or more reassuring embraces of the Swiss Bank honchos; when challenges become too overwhelming they simple morph into ostriches. But there the dissimilarities end.

There are simply too many similarities. Geet, who had become pregnant more than a year ago, has yet to deliver her baby. The pregnancy, as the soap addicts will recall, is the result of a sham marriage. Since she had stoutly refused to abort the pregnancy she was expected to do the natural thing within the naturally stipulated time. Unfortunately, presently she has forgotten all about the baby and is caught up in too many confrontations and scandalous situations – some of them hilarious. She vacillates between vanity and humility, defiance and demureness and, of course, love and hate. So does our political establishment.

More than forty years ago it was to deliver the Lokpal Bill unto the parliament. It should have done so within the ordinary course of parliamentary time – six months at the most. But it had forgotten all about it as it got busy with coping with scams and rip-offs bursting upon the body politic like pustules. The government fumes at the corrupt ways of various state and central government officials and ministers but is afraid to strike. It does send Raja, Kalmadi and Co. to the jail but under duress, even as it gets all aspen at possible political fallout. The nightmare of more skeletons tumbling out of all those vaults, especially of the Swiss variety, has turned the government into a cabinet of insomniacs. With media and the civil society baying for their blood they have preferred to bury their collective heads into the sands of an arid Lokpal Bill, hoping that the looming threat will somehow abate.

But corruption is like our mythology’s Raktbija – the demon that multiplied every time it was cut down, and threatened all that was divine. Corruption too is out to destroy all that is honest and decent. Will this monsoon session witness Kali (Parliament) giving birth to Skanda (Lokpal) and teaming up with him to slay the demon for all times to come? Or will the ostrich merely lay an egg?

Published in Daily Post dated 07 August, 2011



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