When The Building Came Alive

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Kasturi Dhama Apartments — the play area where many evenings came alive. The lights would go out without warning. For a brief second, the entire building would fall silent. Then, from somewhere in Kasturi Dhama Apartments, a chorus would erupt. “Yayyy!” It is difficult to imagine children celebrating a power failure today. But in the Bangalore of the nineties and early 2000s, a power cut did not always feel like an inconvenience. Especially in the late evenings, it felt like permission. Permission to stop whatever we were doing, leave the darkness inside our homes, and step into the building outside. Before Kasturi Dhama became home, we had moved through a few different parts of Bangalore. My family had begun in Srirampuram and Vyalikaval before gradually cementing ourselves in Malleswaram for the next few decades. My earliest memory is of living in a vatara —a Kannada word loosely used for a building or a cluster of homes—on 15th Cross, near Karur Vy...
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NatWAR in(out of) Congress

It is disgusting to see that one of the cabinet ministers, Mr. Natwar Singh along with his son was involved in the Oil for food program in Iraq. The Congress party wanted to be absolved of all charges. It was surprising to see that the Congress was not getting behind Natwar in the whole issue. Obviously it is clear now. The Congress had to protect its leader and supremo, Ms. Sonia Gandhi as she was clearly at the receiving end. She had supposedly sent letters through Natwar to procure oil contracts in Iraq. Now, this looks like the plot has been lifted directly from a Bollywood flick right. Absolutely filmy! But, then when was politics in India without all the surpise elements. There are so many things going behind the scenes that it becomes virtually impossible to figure out what is happening. We just know of pre-poll alliances and post poll alliances coupled with totally flawed and broken vows, but we have absolutely no clue of the intricacies interwoven in complexities that goes on in the political areana.

Congress was looking at an appropriate opportunity to expel Natwar from the party. Natwar too was making things easy for Congress to come to this decision. He went ahead and moved a privilege motion against Dr. Manmohan Singh, our honourable Prime Minister on the issue of the leakage of Justice Pathak report on the Volcker Commision report. This issue has put Natwar in the limelight as far as other parties are concerned. BJP, JD(U) and Samajwadi Party have made it very clear that they are supporting Natwar and have already begun to portray him as a national hero who was made into a scapegoat. Politics show the true colour in people, but the sad part is people do not have a choice, as the same set of leaders have to come back to power.

This issue has blown up in such a way that it is really going to be interesting to see how this issue shapes up in the coming weeks.

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