The best Gandhi commemoration E-V-E-R

Have you ever looked at your skewered history books, seen some obscure English words describe the freedom struggle and heard about a man called Gandhi?

If yes, then have you ever thought to yourself, that you should do something to celebrate his memory but have never found an appropriate forum/hallmark card?

Then you're in luck. Thanks to the wonderful people at Mont Blanc, now you can.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s iconic Dandi March in 1930 to protest against the British salt tax has inspired pen-makers Mont Blanc to come out with a limited-series pen on the Father of the Nation.

The high-end pen is priced around Rs.14 lakh, according to a watch retailer.

The pen comes with a gold wire entwined by hand around the middle, which “evokes the roughly wound yarn on the spindle with which Gandhi spun everyday.”

Inspired by the “241 mile” march, the white gold pen, of which only 241 pieces will be available worldwide, boasts of a hand-crafted rhodium plated 18-carat gold nib depicting Gandhiji holding his trademark lathi — all in gold.

You see ladies and gentlemen, nothing evokes the memory of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi then a pen which costs more than a million rupees.

Forget how many children you could feed with that money. Or how many medicines you could buy for people who cannot afford them. Hell, let's even forget how many cottage industries can be supported.

Gandhi never cared about shit like that.

Nope.

That dude was all about the bling-bling.

If you remember, all of Gandhi's clothes were custom made. He was a style icon for millions of people. He was busy spoofing Salman Khan's man boobs bare chest a few decades before Salman Khan was born.

Now go do your patriotic duty and buy this pen.

Because that's exactly what Gandhi would have done.

 

‘Mahatma’ pens from Mont Blanc [The Hindu]

Delhi Government to help city conserve power by not giving any to it's citizens

So people all over Delhi are spilling on to the streets because if they stay at home, they might dehydrate or die of a heat stroke or something. So what does the Chief Minister of the National Capital region do to help the masses? What does the third-term wonder, the woman who almost became Prime Minister back when there was a lot of speculation on which humanoid/robot/bat-like-creature would occupy the formerly august office? What wondrous solutions would the super-granny of Delhi come up with as per her pre-election promise of fixing the problems that she has not been able to fix in the past ten years, which includes everything.

Delhi Government is mulling a proposal to provide personal security officers to all the MLAs in the national capital.

Oh, goody! Go, Sheila, go! If this does not solve the problems of the people then I don't know what will. All the protestors who spend the night knocking the doors of an empty BSES office (saw this on teevee) and the day trying to earn some money to pay the government so that they can provide them with, err, water & electricity, can go home now. It always pays to keep it simple, stupid.

The problem with getting elected with a huge majority is that people actually expect you to fix things, attend to their problems, think of them for a minute or two during some fleeting moment when you are not trying to distance yourself from the problems that arise from the decisions you make or when you are not blaming someone else for your OWN failure.

Not that the rest of the legislature is any better.

A day after Vidhan Sabha speaker Yoganand Shastri directed all House members to be present during discussions pertaining to their respective departments, the Delhi Assembly had to be adjourned for 30 minutes as the dismal attendance of Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for the session failed to fulfill the quorum of the House.

While the session was scheduled to begin at 2 pm on Friday, only 17 members of the ruling party and three of the Opposition were present, falling short of three MLAs to complete the quorum of 23 members required to begin the proceedings of the House

So while most of them don't even bother to attend, at least those who are there have something important to discuss:

Several MLAs in Delhi assembly yesterday demanded amendments in the relevant law so that they are allowed to use red beacon lights on their vehicles.

Raising the issue in the House, BJP legislator Saheb Singh Chauhan said although an MLA was higher in status in comparison to the Chief Secretary of the state, they were still not allowed to use beacon lights on their vehicles.

Several MLAs cutting across party lines supported the demand and said government should made amendments in the Motor Vehicle Act to remove the hurdle for using the beacon lights by the elected representatives.

Beacon lights.

They want beacon lights.

 

For more info, click here, here and here.

It's not the swine flu which is going to kill us, it's irony-deficiency

Congratulations, everyone. Remember Poverty? Well, thanks to the new government, it's over now. 

There are no poor people in India anymore.

In fact, we did such a good job of removing poverty in our country that now we're exporting our knowledge of poverty-alleviation to China.

That's right.

For the first time, India has extended a helping hand to China by participating in its poverty-alleviation project by setting up a state-of-the-art training-cum-information centre for thousands of farmers in a relatively backward and mountainous northwestern region.

For all those people who doubted that this government will be all about reforms for rich people who eat out of plates made of gold, I bet you're eating your own words right now.

This government is all about the common man. So what if that common man is in China?

It's the thought that counts.

Our governments concern for the poor is priceless.

For everything else, there is Mastercard.

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In other good news, the Indian National Congress (Indira) has decided to do away with all feudal titles.

Yay! Get your parent's bell-bottom trousers out of mothballs, people, the 50's are here again.

More than six decades after Independence and over three decades after the government abolished privy purses and privileges, the Congress has decided to turn royalty into aam aadmi.

“The party has decided to strike off all feudal titles (against the name of Congressmen and women) from its records at all levels,” party leader Janardhan Dwivedi said.

Excuse me for a minute, sir. Shouldn't you have done this, uuuumm, I don't know, a few DECADES earlier? Wasn't it your party which did away with the privy purse and titles and other ancient shit all the while stressing that everyone's equal now?

So does this finally mean that you won't nominate your leaders and the seats won't directly pass on from parent to child as if a birthright? Does this mean that you would do away with actual feudalism?

Janardhan Dwivedi, however, admitted it was an “indirect suggestion” made to the leaders not to use such prefixes and suffixes, such as Rajkumar, Nizam, Nawab, Sadr-e-riyasaat or Mahant.

Oh cognitive dissonance, you can be such a motherfucker!

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Our national airline, the Maharaja of the skies, the kohinoor of our aviation industry . . .  Actually, it can't be the kohinoor because that would mean that the British would steal it from us again. Anyways, the non-kohinoor of our aviation sector is going bust. It asked it's workforce to keep doing the work but to wait a few weeks before cashing the salary cheque. Or, in some cases, not even getting the cheque at all.

So, the employees decided that since no one wants to pay them, they'll go on a strike. Hey, the best way to stop someone from bleeding is to take his heart out so that no blood is manufactured in the body in the first place.

Sounds like a great idea to me.

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Speaking of people with great ideas, last week I had lost my mind and was channel surfing the news channels. I happen to land on a ongoing debate about how having the IPL a few days before the world cup was against our national interest.

Huh?

What national interest?

Do we need our cricket players to defend us against an invasion of spin ballers? Have the Taliban suddenly started training it's henchmen on throwing grenades like a yorker? Is the police going to suddenly promote people on the basis of how many catches they take? Is our missile defence system going to be based on how many missiles Sachin Tendulkar can deflect while piloting around a bat-shaped plane?

Okay. Admittedly, the last one would be a cool thing to witness.

However, if anyone believes that people play professional cricket because they want to serve the country then (a) What are you smoking? and (b) If it is that good, please give me the number of your drug dealer because mine was just deported to Nigeria.

Thanks.

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So according to research done by someone who was supposed to write an advert to sell artificial sweetener, (a copywriter with a conscience. A rather rare breed these days.) it appears that artificial sweeteners kind of kill your brain and turn you psychotic.

I always thought how an artificial sweetener could describe itself as "natural".

And this does explain a a lot of things about me.

I know it's harmful, but I always tend to use an artificial sweetener for my coffee whenever I have it along with a vanilla-brownie combo which is extravagantly dipped in chocolate syrup.

It's all about achieving a balance.