Stubborn Man on a Stubborn Balloon

There are so many interesting anecdotes about Vijaypat Singhania's record breaking hot air ballooning feat that media space has fallen short to report all of them.

Singhania did not refrain from adding his personal touch to parts of the flight. For instance during the descent, Singhania's flight technician Colin Prescot had announced in Mumbai that weather conditions and misbehaving burners would make landing an ardous task spread over several hours. Minutes after the prediction, Singhania took matters in his own hands and landed anyway. Brute force works best in times of crises. That he landed in the same area in Sinnar near Nasik where he had performed practice flights earlier must have helped.

Soon after he hit the ground, Singhania cut the balloon off from the capsule. The balloon after detachment dragged away some of the burners with it, charring the grass for some distance. Funnily enough, the balloon then took off on its own again, and was still floating in the sky when Singhania boarded a chopper back to Mumbai. The balloon continued floating all over the place till late evening, giving some really nasty moments to the Singhania's ground team. Imagine their plight, as they had to keep chasing the balloon around in their SUVs all day in order to catch it the moment it touched down again!

It would be wholly amusing to find out where the balloon finally ended its love affair with the air... if it fell on top of some unsuspecting villager having a bidi or on farmland, damaging lakhs worth of produce. In the olden days, hot air ballooners carried a bottle of champagne along with them in the flight. Because you cannot predict where your balloon will land, the champagne came handy as a gift for cooling down tempers of the people whose property you landed on. Over time, property owners realized that a balloon carrying people in a basket dropping all of a sudden from the sky is not really God's curse. So the champagne was instead shared by the ballooners in a party after returning to the launch site. The ritual champagne party was thrown by the Singhanias after the flight too.

Anyhow, reporting the hot air balloon record was a wholly exciting experience. I watched the takeoff in-the-flesh, and then later followed the balloon all through its flight in a chopper. We veered above Mumbai, Trombay, Alibagh and the highway to Nasik for hours, catching both beautiful and ugly overhead glimpses of India's most complicated city before taking an exclusive return flight with the Man of the Day himself. These are the experiences that make me feel very convinced about having made the right decision about my career!

Dilemma

The coaster sticks to the bottom of the cup when I pick it up to sip tea. I don't know what to do about it.

BS-chools!

Education in Indian bschools seems to be about a lot of pointless BS which attracts a section of people who after joining it only gravitate more towards that kind of BS.

At a certain top b-school that I visited recently, I had the chance to interview a few profs from whom I was expecting a good mature conversation about the general management education scenario in the country. I was appalled to hear them talk utter nonsense disguised under jargon. Being the impatient one, I cut the interview short bluntly with a couple of them after they gave me horrifying goobledoock like "augmenting competencies which seem profound at the conceptual level but are immensely essential variables in terms of personal value addition."

All I had asked them was, "Why does a b-school need a festival?"

Hello!! Why couldn't they state their thoughts in simple words? Are the profs in our best b-school such pathetic communicators? To make things worse, this disease is contracted by perfectly normal students. It renders them into brainless duds who begin to talk like one of those text-to-speech conversion software programs. Do these guys even listen to themselves talk? Who will have the time to talk to such people in the corporate world?

There was this extempore competition happening during the visit with participants from top b-schools contesting. It was so depressing to see that none of them was having fun. With grim faces, they were talking total nonsense like "Lord Buddha said this, Vivekanand said that, Gandhi said so-and-so" for commonplace topics like 'Some people are alive because it is illegal to kill them.' It is okay if you deliver such a speech in class VIII in school. But at 23?? Excuse me! Doesn't anybody in the system realise how pretentious it all is?

Whatever happened to common sense?

20 random rants

Zarine has nothing better to do in life :p so she has tagged me. Since I have nothing better to do in life either, I pick up the tag to write 20 random things about me :D

1- Music is the epicentre of my existence. I wish I had more time and money to invest in all the music I haven't heard.

2- Although I have been born and brought up in big cities, my sensibilities and beliefs are more small-town and semi-urban than cosmopolitan. I identify more with Bhopal or Dehradun than Delhi and Mumbai.

3- I love running and do it every morning. 2-3 days without it and I feel dizzy.

4- I don't like people or being too close to them much, but over the years I have worked hard towards becoming less shy and maybe developing an exterior that helps me get along with people.

5- I am a stickler for privacy and don't like it when people pry too much.

6- My best friendships have been with the unlikeliest of people. They have never said in as many words nor have I ever said to them that they and I were friends. I'd like to keep it that way.

7- I love riding in double-decker buses.

8- I enjoy having an orange bar especially when a little stub of it remains on the stick.

9- I can sleep standing on one leg for exactly two seconds. On both legs, it's 8 hours :D.

10- I like passionate people and doers not talkers. There is no point living a life where you do not follow your dreams.

11- I lack the extreme pessimism that is said to be essential to a journalist. It makes me a complete misfit in the profession and I have begun to hate it. Still, it has been working well for me and I don't know why it is so.

12- I hate Maggi noodles and its mere smell makes me uneasy.

13- I love jazz and would like to form my own jazz band someday.

14- My parents have never for once approved of my eccentric career choices yet they have stood by me all along.

15- I always believed that one could not make new friends after 21 but still made one of my closest ones at 24.

16- I have no time for people who lie because of personal insecurity and find it surprisingly easy to move on without getting affected by them.

17- I think cricket is overrated.

18- I think the idea that guys and girls can be just good friends is a load of BS.

19- I love Delhi for its trees, wide roads and eating places, Mumbai for its workaholic pace and Bhopal for its innocence. Also, I refuse to believe that there can be a city filthier than Mumbai.

20- Finding 20 things to write about me was easier than I thought :D

I tag... everybody in blogdom! In particular, I tag:

Rajat
Neeta (more so because she hates being tagged :D)
Bharathi
Siddharth
Aastha

Good Luck! :)

And then the children slept in peace...

Perhaps the most exciting development of this week is dacoit Nirbhay Singh Gujjar’s encounter yesterday in Etawah, UP. It means the end to 25 unrelenting years of fear in more than four districts of UP and MP.

The word ‘Fear’ has become too commonplace these days, especially in the contemporary context of terrorism, increasing rape cases in cities and old couples being looted and hacked in residential areas.

But none of us city dwellers have been anywhere near to living in true fear, of the kind evoked by Nirbhay among the villages of Etawah, Uraiya, Kanpur in UP and Bhind in MP. For over two decades, these people have spent every moment of their lives with the knowledge that there’s very a high likelihood they’ll be killed by Gujjar the next minute. Imagine the kind of fear which made thousands of people bolt their doors fast not even a second later after sundown and not come out until daybreak for each day of over 20 years.

Nirbhay’s reign of terror had made him a consummate folk anti-hero whose name was invoked by mothers in the state to put recalcitrant children to sleep.

To realise what fear means, one just has to take a walk in the town of Bhind. Every fourth shop in the town is a fully legal arms and ammunitions shop. There are more than 80 shops within an area of two sq kms that sell all kinds of rifles and country made revolvers. People need that kind of personal security in that region.

In many ways, Nirbhay’s end was coming. In the classic good-cop-bad-cop manner, for two years the MP police had been talking of getting him a graceful surrender while the UP police spoke of nothing but death in an encounter for Gujjar. In February 2005, Nirbhay’s relative Arvind Singh Gujjar surrendered respectably with his gang in Bhind to MP police. The same day, the UP police had seriously wounded several members of another gang headed by Rajjan Gujjar during an encounter in Etawah. Such totally opposite policies by the two states must have caused some serious confusion among dacoitydom. Somewhere, Gujjar’s tactical mistakes leading to his death must have roots in this confusion.

Mind you, the good-cop-bad-cop routine was only a coincidence, for the UP and MP police never cooperated with each other for ending their common menace of dacoity.

Only a month ago when MP CM Babulal Gaur visited UP’s Mulayam that talks of coordinated anti-dacoity operations first happened on a serious level. Yesterday’s encounter might be a result of only that.

Furious to Sleepy in 24 hours

Two of the greatest Himalayan rivers Alaknanda and Bhagirathi meet at Devprayag (pic) in Uttaranchal to form the holiest Indian river Ganga. If one stands at the confluence facing downstream, the Alaknanda on the left flows in calm and serene while the Bhagirathi on the right is a study in fury, a huge noisy angry mountain river. You may take a leisurely dip in the Alaknanda, but two metres away towards the right the Bhagirathi might consume you if you put both legs knee deep into the water.

Only till yesterday.

After the third diversion tunnel of the 2,400 MW Tehri Dam project was closed down earlier this week, the water flow on Bhagirathi upstream stopped, putting the furious river to sleep.

Devprayag now has the Alaknanda flowing ever as calmly on the left while on the right there’s only a small stream, the remnant of Bhagirathi. When the Bhagirathi water level began climbing down yesterday, there was however a backflow from the Alaknanda into the Bhagirathi first, where the Alaknanda water ran in to fill in the void in Bhagirathi. Things began to neutralize soon. It would have been an interesting spectacle to witness.

I have spent countless solitary days and nights in Devprayag in a one-room tenement that I visit every year. It's my yearly pilgrimage to nature. During these annual trips, I get up early at 6am, take walk down to the confluence, past the suspension bridge over Bhagirathi. That early in the morning, there’s daybreak on Alaknanda while a few yards on the right the Bhagirathi valley just kisses goodbye to the morning twilight.

After a breakfast of bread and goat-butter with very sweet tea I walk up along the Alaknanda to the higher part of Devprayag town and meet up with some locals that I have made friends there over the years. They tell me proudly that their sons travel 80 kms to and fro everyday ‘to learn computer course at NIIT Haridwar centre’.

When the sun is out and over above, I cross over the confluence from the bridge over Alaknanda to the little island with the abandoned clocktower. Nobody visits this clocktower yet it is always spotlessly clean and you don’t even have to brush the dust off the benches around it to sit. I don’t know how this happens.

After lunch at the bus stand, watching buses from Haridwar and Rishikesh travel diligently up the highway to their destinations at Gangotri, Kedarnath or Badrinath, it is back to my room for a quick nap or some reading.

At the first hint of sundown I trek up one of the many hills around the confluence. From the top of one of the hill, drinking very sweet tea made by a villager, the confluence looks like two small lines of termites coming together to join a single file.

At night, I have dinner with the 75-year-old owner of my tenement. As usual, I have thousand questions to ask about him about Uttaranchal, its culture, people, potential and development. I get my answers spoken in the hill dialect, interspersed with much lore, stories of ghosts and banshees, tigers and leopards, the woman who turned into a tree, et al.

All this will still be possible, but the deafening roar of the Bhagirathi’s fury in the background will be missing.

It is a small price to pay, for Tehri Dam brings with it electricity and economic benefits that will help this backward state greatly.

There has been much propaganda by the media and so-called-environmentalists against this dam, accompanied by claims of earthquake danger by ‘conservationists’ who know zilch about seismology or rock mechanics and everything about impassioned speeches and James Joyce type writing. The truth is that if you travel upstream along the Bhagirathi valley, the locals will tell you how eagerly they have been waiting for Tehri Dam.

Why Natwar Singh's resignation might mean General Elections

If the Paul Volcker Committee report names the Foreign Minister Natwar Singh as recipient of kickbacks from Saddam Hussein, the routine face saving measure is that the ruling party Congress gets the minister to resign.

But what if the ruling party too received kickbacks from Saddam? By the same logic, should the Congress also ‘resign’?

Surely, the BJP already has this gameplan in mind: if Natwar is somehow sent packing, the Union Government automatically follows suit.

Which is exactly why the Left has come out in support of Natwar Singh.

Brilliant game of Chess, this!