œThey say the world is spinning around; I say the world is upside down, sang the legendary Jimmy Cliff almost half century ago. The latest (December 26) issue of Forbes India features its third  ranking of 100 ˜celebrities™ dominated by Bollywood stars and the mind-boggling sums they have earned for provision of lowbrow services. Among them Salman Khan who earned Rs.244.5 crore in the period October 2013-September 2014 despite his producers and himself being unaware that assault, battery and grievous bodily harm are criminal offences; Amitabh Bachchan (Rs.196.75 crore); Shah Rukh Khan (Rs.202.4 crore); and Akshay Kumar (172 crore). These top earners apart, the Forbes Top 100 list is replete with Bollywood producers, directors, singers and sundry others associated with Indian cinema.
Yet the plain truth which should be self-evident to the editors of Forbes, if not to the lay public, is that because of their absurd storylines, logical inconsistences, and excessive histrionics, 90 percent of the estimated 1,300 movies produced annually by Indian cinema crash at the box office. The industry is kept alive only by the continuous flow of unaccounted money ” often from underworld sources ” and fantasy skin-show song-n-dance numbers lapped up by the sexually repressed middle and working classes. Business editors are surely also aware that for individuals of modestly above average intelligence, Bollywood films are a major embarrassment as they are for judges of international film festivals.
In the circumstances instead of the unquestioning adulation showered upon the stars of this stuck-in-a-time-warp industry, the editors of Forbes would have rendered a valuable public service and educated the badshahs of Bollywood by suggesting ways and means to upgrade their movies, management processes and perspectives to capture a meaningful slice of the global entertainment market. The world is indeed, upside down.
Grinch redux
While the great leader traverses the country mouthing the mantra of development, he seems unaware of the activities of his allies in the sangh parivar, cutting the ground from beneath his feet. Moreover they seem hell-bent upon taking all the joy out of life ” and in the style of latter-day Grinches ” out of Christmas in particular.
This perhaps explains why Union HRD minister Smriti Irani felt it incumbent upon herself to issue a decree to the principals of all 15,000 schools affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) ” the country™s largest pan-India school-leaving examinations board ” to transform Xmas day (December 25) into Good Governance Day, to be ˜celebrated™ by forcing children to write eulogies of  BJP leader A.B. Vajpayee, the party™s first ever prime minister (1999-2004). Quite clearly the intent of this latter-day Grinch was to steal the joy out of Xmas. But to her dismay, the birth anniversary of Jesus Christ was celebrated by all Indians with great gusto and merriment.
Likewise in garbage ” sorry, the garden ” city, for the first time in its history, the Bangalore Club (estb. 1868) was prohibited from serving a glass of good spirits to its upscale members for over a month from November 24 until Christmas eve when an abject last-minute apology and payment of a Rs.50,000 fine for a minor infraction of the Karnataka government™s grudging and complex laws relating to the serving of alcohol, saved the day. Yet as is public knowledge, the state™s powerful bureaucratic Grinches almost stole the club™s Christmas because R.P. Sharma, a railway police officer was reprimanded by the club™s committee for rude and unruly behaviour on November 23. Suddenly the city™s excise commissioner suspended the club™s liquor licence, with the commissioner of the (noise) pollution board and even the conservator of forest investigating the club for alleged breaches of numerous rules and regulations.
Only after the club™s supine committee withdrew Sharma™s suspension and rendered a cringing apology ” instead of getting a court order against the government ” was its liquor licence partially restored at the last minute. And it™s a measure of the power and influence of the state™s rampaging bureaucracy that even former Karnataka chief minister and Congress Party veteran, S.M. Krishna ” a longstanding member ” declined to intervene to show the state™s latter-day Grinches, who almost stole the club™s Xmas and New Year, their place.
Contrasting feminists
œHere is someone who is not just poorly educated and mal-educated ” she is just class 12th pass ” but she even lied in her affidavit about her qualifications¦ she said I have a Yale degree, from a five-day course. She actually thought it was a badge of honour, even I could not believe she was that dumb. That™s Madhu Kishwar, feminist activist and founder-editor of Manushi (˜Woman™), on Union HRD minister Smriti Irani, the youngest (38) minister in the new BJP-led NDA government at the Centre.
The latest of Kishwar™s diatribes (www.scroll.in ” December 11) against Irani, is increasingly being interpreted as the shrill protests of a woman scorned. One would have expected a feminist writer to celebrate the appointment of Irani who™s worked her way up from a waitress, and small-time model, to a popular television actress, national spokesperson of the BJP and finally to a Cabinet minister. Instead, she™s been banging on about Irani™s lack of formal education. Surely Kishwar is aware that some of the most successful people in industry, business and politics lack(ed) formal education qualifications. Richard Branson (Virgin), Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Narendra Modi himself. Could her tirades be rooted in plain old-fashioned jealousy?
However Irani has not done the cause of feminism much good. Instead of focusing on the big challenges confronting Indian education, she has lost a lot of goodwill by pandering to the RSS and sangh parivar throwbacks  hell-bent upon infiltrating regressive hindutva propaganda and mythology into school textbooks.