Merry Christmas, Cribs

Kareena Kapoor: One mouth, many things
It was a great year, wasn’t it? Your career-graph was looking up. Those who were comparing your looks to that of a four-footed animal had their animal instincts rebelling as you turned your feline grace full on.

You turned the traditional six-yard wrap into something sexier than the Levi’s latest range of "dangerously low-rising" jeans. Social butterflies in Delhi were setting up Chameli nights. Then at the fag end of the year, photos of you kissing your beau were splashed in newspapers.

And you went berserk. Hey, millions of us have seen you kissing men on screen, that us public enough. You created so much hungama that now some stupid, hazy cellphone camera video is a bigger hit than your films. You already had his tongue in your mouth, what was the need to put your foot in?

Mahima Choudhry: Avenging Angel
OK so he dumped you. Everybody gets dumped as life and love catch up with each other in this fast-Paes-ed world. And you dumped life for love. You dumped your career. You accumulated fat. You were always there beside him.

You were the ultimate woman; making sacrifices for the little boy you had found love in. And the little boy was growing impatient like all little boys. He had seen it all, even done it all.

He wasn’t looking for that ultimate woman. So he went looking for a woman. He has reportedly found one.

And you? You began suffering from loose emotions (an affliction that beats loose motions pants… err... hands down). Loose motions cost a lot of tissue paper. Loose emotions cost a lot of newspaper.

Be happy because he is Rheally happy!

Uma Bharti: Vexy Sanyasin
Even alliteration-addicted hacks have been rightly avoiding that prefix before your sanyasin description. You parked the Bharatiya Janata Party’s creaking pollmobile right into the heart of Bhopal.

You, who was supposed to renounce all that is worldly and material, announced lofty ideals from the seat of power. But the wanderer in you sat uneasy. So off you hopped on to the seat of the familiar rath and romped into Karnataka and then a guesthouse jail.

You were back to your basic saffron-clad sanyasin self and then you flipped. And then flopped and now you have flipped again. You hit the party hard and flapped away to the Himalayas, the abode of true sanyasins. Can you decide, once and for all, what you want to be?


John Kerry: Flip Art
Where have you gone after fascinating the world for nearly six months? You were the only hope for rich, fashionable, and celebrity, Americans. You were the last straw for people being swept away in this neo-con deluge. You were the promised saviour who would salvage America’s pride and the place in the hearts of the people of the world.

You were right there, saying everything right, doing everything right. You were saying what the world wanted to hear. You were saying what the Americans wanted to hear. You heard the war was bad, so you said the war was indeed bad. You heard that many Americans wanted same sex marriage, so you backed it.

Americans kept saying things they like. And you kept saying yes. You began following the people of America. And then a majority discovered they were voting for a leader, not a follower. They chose a leader. And you disappeared.

That’s what ails the great American democracy. A man fights the President once in four years. We have Manmohan Singh in the hot seat, and we have Advanis, Surjeets, Georges and Laloos to make sure the seat remains hot.

Why not be after Bush for full four years? Come back. Speak out. The world will forgive your flip-flops.

Laloo o Laloo!

"Thank god, I have been shown giving money by the electronic media and not taking money."

So said Laloo Prasad Yadav, Union Railway Minister, after he was shown distributing currency notes in a village near Patna in Bihar, the state his wife rules as chief minister.

And that he did after the Election Commission's notification of elections in Bihar. The Election Commission has ordered an FIR be filed against Yadav for violating election code.

Laloo is unperturbed: "I am used to giving money to poor dalits, not only during election time, for receiving blessings from the aged dalit women."

Well those who have seen the video can clearly see that he is the one who is sitting on a high pedestal while women supplicate before him after taking the money. Mr Yadav has mastered the art of garnering votes. If not by muscle, then by money.


The sharp politician may well deserve the unofficial title "Messiah of the downtrodden in Bihar". It works for him. The lack of development in the state has kept the masses within the definition of downtrodden.

It's easy to buy a downtrodden because she gets to see a 100-rupee note once in a couple of years. And Rs 100 will be a blessing they wouldn't forget in a couple of months. Cheap votes, anyone?

Kiski Baazee kiske haath

“New Delhi: Police in the Indian capital have arrested India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and charged him with aiding a porn racket.
Mr Singh’s arrest followed that of one Mr Billu Arora from whom a police team seized 3,000 pornographic video discs. Mr Arora ran a small shop in the underground Palika Bazaar, part of the New Delhi Municipal Council.

The council directly functions under the Union Ministry for Urban Development of the Central government. According to the police, the Prime Minister, head of the government, had failed to do his job as pornographic videos were freely sold at one of his ministry’s ventures.

Since the Municipal Council earned a profit from the rentals paid by the porn trader, the government indirectly benefited from the sale and hence the charge brought against him may not allow him bail.”

Thank God, the above news item is not true. But the way the Delhi Police arrested the chief operating officer of a e-commerce portal, even the Prime Minister can't be sure about the future.

In a brazen act of sensationalism, Delhi Police decided to put baazee.com CEO Avnish Bajaj behind bars. He had flown to Delhi to help the police in fixing those who sold an explicit video featuring a schoolgirl, shot by her class boy, on the ecommerce portal.

The police also betrayed its lack of knowledge about the Internet and the loopholes in the Information Technology Act, which if left to the police may be grossly misinterpreted. Legal eagles question Baazee CEO's arrest- The Times of India.

This man, Avnish Bajaj, happens to be one of the stars of the dotcom business in India. He runs a portal that allows people to set up online shops. It was recently bought over by the world’s largest auction house ebay.

His site, baazee.com, spawned an entirely new set of entrepreneurs in India as it allowed people to set up online shops. Thousands of young entrepreneurs have set up shops on baazee and have become small and medium size businesses. I know some people who have turned this website into a wealth-creation tool.

And like all societies, this large society of sellers and buyers too has some bad eggs. Some people selling substandard products, some selling pornographic videos. But the bad eggs are too small in number and significance to burn down the whole hatchery.

The Delhi police, in a frighteningly stupid demand, sought permission to close the site. What next? Close Palika Bazaar, Nehru Place, the whole damn city, because some greedy moron is found selling porn in a shop or two. Should we abandon Delhi and shift our capital to Chandausi just because we have 10 black traffic spots where accidents take place regularly?

Police and our law need to walk with the times, if not ahead. Technology is changing the face of the world and we Indians too are very ambitious when it comes to developing and adapting to new technologies.

So let us first accept the fact that user licence agreements signed over the Internet are not physical files with actual signatures. Hang him if he deserves it. But at the moment, Avnish Bajaj deserves some respect.