Because, when we were in school, textbooks contained — you could not have guessed this — just texts. Occasionally, there used to be some illustrations. But in the smudged-ink-printing of those days, looking at the picture of B R Ambedkar many of us couldn’t but conclude that the man, who was one of the architects of the Indian Constitution, used his spare time to turn up on screen as actor S V Ranga Rao.

Also, I must point out here that in those days history classes are where we — why not? — honed our drawing skills. The caricatures that we attempted on those pictures/illustrations would amount to serious criminal offences these days.  My long-time bench-mate Ravikumar acquired the status of a legend in our circles principally for what he did to the image of Mumtaz in our 7^th standard history book.

Coming back to the controversy at hand, looking at the cartoon of Nehru-Ambedkar-snail, the most logical question that begs to be asked is: Is snail not an animal?

I mean if it indeed were, PETA and other animal rights groups would have by now created such a ruckus that the unwary might be forced to think that the cartoon actually depicts Nehru and Ambedkar committing the cruelty of stopping the snail from writing the Indian Constitution. Maybe, PETA has so far not asked for any ban on the cartoon because its people are still researching whether the cartoonist (Shankar Pillai) had used an artificial brush or one that had the fur of the endangered panda or platypus.

But before we get all het up or sound snarky on bans, is it not a fact that you yourself wanted to have a few things banned? I will confess I did, and do.  In fact, I have always wanted the guys who use their fingers (as if scratching the air) to denote the “double quote” while speaking be shot without any question.

The point is, in a liberalised world we should not wait for the government to do all the work for us. We must start chipping in, by banning a few things ourselves:

Straight off the bat, we should ban inflation.  By which I mean we should forthwith stop compiling inflation figures. This may not exactly lead to reduction in the prices of household items. But without inflation figures to report about, our newspapers will at least be less boring to read. As a journalist I can also confirm that two of the main reasons for falling readership are: Inflation reports and editorials. But we blame TV and internet.

While we are at it, we should also consider banning billiards and snooker. In general, snooker and billiards can be played in an atmosphere that is technically available only at funerals. But how can you consider it as a sport at all, when its players have to turn up in outfits more formal than the ones people wear for their own wedding reception?

I know what you are trying to tell me. You are asking me why is there no law banning RJs at pubs and discotheques? Exactly. I am there with you. When people are inebriated or chatting/dancing with the other sex, the last thing they notice is the song being played in the background. At any rate, RJs don’t pull off anything that cannot be managed by a multi-disc CD changer. (Plus, what people know as RJ these days was mike settukaran back in our times).

This list is, as you can see, is only partial. You can add many more things  — the Republic Day parade, Suhel Seth, the Union Budget, the scenes where Sivaji Ganesan plays the mridangam in Mridanga Chakravarthy, sandwiches that they offer in commercial flights, Suhel Seth (you can never afford to take any chance with him. And, banning him once may not be enough), buy-one-get-two offers (morons, even your grandfather will not be so generous to you), all discussions and debates on who is better, Ilayaraja or A R Rahman, that girl in the beauty pageant who claims that she wants to emulate Mother Teresa and PowerPoint presentations on totally unsuspecting participants at meetings and seminars.

In general, we must keep banning things and reach the stage where we have nothing more left to ban. I think that is the only logical way to end bans in this democracy of ours.

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.

Athens:  Faced with a mounting debt crisis, Greece has been advised by the global management consulting firm McKinsey to monetise the biggest sporting brand that it (Greece) has given to the world: Olympics.

‘Make no mistake about it, Olympics is a humungous brand. And it, without any doubt, belongs to Greece. We think it is only fair that it gets to monetise that,’ said Roberto Rastapopoulos of McKinsey, which was appointed by the new caretaker government to suggest ways and means to shore up the floundering Grecian economy.

‘I am surprised that Greece has not done it so far. But I am also happy that Greece has not done it so far. If it had, we couldn’t have recommended it now and charged a bomb for it,’ Rastapopoulos chuckled.

According to the plan mapped out by the management whiz kids of McKinsey, Greece should, forthwith, initiate steps to help Olympics embrace the private franchisee model, which has delivered billions and billions in the case of sporting leagues like the NBA and the IPL.

The McKinsey design envisages converting each participating nation in the Olympics into the equivalent of a franchise/club. ‘They have to pay money to be part of the Olympics, which is the brainchild of Greece,’ Rastapopoulos pointed out.

So when a country pays the guarantee money, does it get the right to send its athletes and players to the Olympics? ‘No’, Rastapopoulos interjected, ‘when a country pays the royalty it becomes eligible to send any number of officials to the Olympics.

In my experience, he said, Olympics is a grand sporting event attended primarily by sports officials.

‘Once this part is streamlined, we hope to further enhance revenue generation by opening up for sponsorship the title (Olympics) and the various medals on offer,’ Rastapopoulos added. ‘I hear that in the IPL they have even branded the catches taken and the fours and sixers hit in the matches. In which case, branding gold, silver and bronze medals in the Olympics shouldn’t be all that difficult.’

Rastapopoulos conceded that the Olympic telecasts needed to improve if it were to become commercially more interesting. ‘At the core, Olympics is a spectacle. Of human ability and endurance. So, when we telecast the various events our main aim must be to showcase those who help make the Olympics the spectacle that it is’. The athletes? ‘No, I am talking of the corporates here’, Rastapopoulos explained.

Rastapopoulos, however, warned that the royalty amount and other money, even though in billions of Euros, will not be sufficient to fully bail Greece out of the financial crisis it finds itself in now. ‘A large percentage of those billions, I am afraid, will be good enough only to pay McKinsey’s consultancy charges,’ Rastapopoulos said.

‘In corporate circles, when struggling companies, looking for a turnaround, seek our advice, our first suggestion to them is: reduce your expenditure. And those companies, bless them, pay us top money, but sack some of their regular employees. This is the beauty of management consultancy,’ he said.

In the case of Greece, Rastapopoulos said, our suggestion to them would be to leverage more out of their many undoubted assets. Like charging royalty for Pythagoras Theorem. ‘Imagine the royalty that will accrue to Greece whenever some student somewhere uses it. I think we are sitting on a goldmine here,’ Rastapopoulos.

Depending on the success of this, McKinsey will think about levying royalty on shipping companies using the Archimedes principle to keep their fleet afloat.

Elsewhere, reacting to the possible charging of royalty for the use of Pythagoras Theorem by students, the Indian government has done the most logical thing in the circumstance: Ban Pythagoras Theorem from all school textbooks.

In a related development, a PIL has been filed in the Supreme Court by a group of former students seeking retrospective marks for the sums in the mathematics paper they did not attempt on the grounds that they involved usage of Pythagoras Theorem.

(Disclaimer: We think the rest of the world is entitled for damages from Greece for Archimedes Principle and Pythagoras Theorem. We know we have the support of all school students on this)

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.

Anyway, just imagine you to be hopelessly in love with some girl. And if you are of the naive kind, you will walk up to her and profess straight your romantic interest in her. And mostly, she will not be in a position to reciprocate your love because: One, she is already married. Two, she is also in an extra-marital relationship with her neighbour.

But if you belong to the practical breed, you will saunter up to her and convey your feelings through a beautiful and expensive greeting card with the deeply romantic lines that would not have occurred to your unimaginative mind: ‘I Love You’.

Usually this works like magic: girls, as a rule, fall for guys who spend on expensive cards, especially with a picture of rose or the mug of a dog. Women will pretty much buy anything that has a photo of roses or puppies on the container box. You can even sell industrial scrap to them using this technique.

Some people like to think warm  hugs work with women more effectively. But I would like to draw their attention to the major disaster involving Harbhajan Singh and Nita Ambani during the IPL a couple of years back. To jog your memory, Harbhajan Singh, who not only wears his passions on his sleeve but also brings them to the fore on his arms, bear-hugged Nita Ambani, who happened to be his boss’s wife, after the Mumbai Indians made it to the finals that year. Overcome with emotion, Harbhajan later pointed out that Nita was like a mother to him.

Any sane individual would by now have figured out that Nita would have been less annoyed by the hug, but more aggrieved by the fact that Harbhajan thought it fit to see her as a motherly figure. Now, all the trouble that she took with the botox injections had gone waste

The point is if Harbhajan had any sense, he would have given a card to congratulate Nita, just ensuring that it was not a Mother’s Day card.

Another important reason why greeting cards are so attractive to so many is that they contain what are generally believed to be as poems. Poetry has to be God’s way of speaking, especially since it does not make much meaning at a normal human level.  More importantly, poems are popular in greeting cards because they help convey deep, personal emotions in the most powerful manner possible, which is by occupying a lot of paper space.

Let me explain with a simple illustrative situation, wherein your mother-in-law has suffered a fracture and you want to express your heart-felt congratulations on her wonderful achievement.

If you are a prosaic prose person, you will have it as:

‘Hi Mother-in-Law (MiL): Hard words break no bones. That’s why I had to seek outside help. Thanks. Bye‘.

See, the words just don’t seem to carry any emotion, especially your inner pain at having had to spend for outside help to make the fracture happen.

Now, see what you would have come up with if you had the good sense to verse:

“The world rosy

Bones flimsy

Breaking them costly

But I don’t mind mostly

And don’t come back fastly

Your face I want to see lastly

You are my MiL dear

Pay the hospital bill dearer”

Poetry also can help address the most sensitive subject that mature adults are generally reluctant to bring up in polite gatherings, even while being deeply confused about it in private and wondering whether they are getting it right: Yes, we are talking about punctuation.

As a practsing mainstream journalist, who deals with the written word day-in and day-out, I can vouch for one thing: 99% of those who write don’t really know much about the punctuation rules. The remaining 1% don’t really care as they have become editors, which means they can blame their juniors for their mistakes.

Poetry does the signal service of not needing to use any of the punctuation, with the pause and the period in the lines left to the imagination of whoever is ready to imagine that.

Alert readers, who have strong memory, will remember that we were on the subject of greeting cards, which topic I brought up because, this Sunday happens to be the Mother’s Day.

Now that you know the trick behind greeting cards, you sure want to get one with a suitably heavy poem that conveys no real meaning. But just remember that you don’t end up sending it to Nita.

As far as I am concerned, I grew up in an era when mothers didn’t know that there was a specific day for them. They pretty much remained mothers every day of the year.

Anyway, for what it is worth, Mom, if you are reading this (I know you are because you happen to be in same room), Happy Mother’s Day. No Mother’s Day card for you.  Even though if I gave you one, you will think it to be a joke, which for a humour writer can be, well, the mother of all compliments.

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.

With the UPA unlikely to renominate her for the post of President, Pratibha Patil, in all likelihood, will demit her office in July, thereby becoming the ‘first woman in the country to be a former President.’

To put her epoch-making record in proper perspective, the first male President, Dr Rajendra Prasad, took 12 years to become the ex-President (sworn in 1950, he became a former President only in 1962), whereas the unassuming Pratibha Patil, who is the first woman President, has managed to accomplish the same in a snappy six years.

The President herself seems a bit overwhelmed by the staggering achievement staring her in the face. But in this moment of glory for her she chose to thank UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi ‘without whose backing I could not have pulled off this major achievement’.

‘If not for Sonia deciding not to renominate me for the post, I will not be on course to becoming the first Indian woman former President. I am duty bound to thank Sonia for this major achievement,’ a visibly emotional Pratibha Patil told newsmen aboard the flight from South Africa where she was on tour to enhance bilateral trade between the two countries by accumulating frequent flier points.

‘But still, nobody can take away Sonia’s record in letting me have the record of being the first woman former President of India,’ Pratibha explained astutely.

The President expressed the hope that this record of hers would shut the mouth of her critics who had accused that she had not achieved anything important during her tenure. ‘As a matter of fact, anybody can, technically, hope to become the President of the country. But it is not the case with becoming the ex-President,’ the soft-spoken Pratibha Patil pointed out. ‘Only a chosen few get to even hope for this,’ she said with unbeatable logic.

Pratibha Patil also said that this was just the beginning and she hoped to accomplish many more firsts and be a source of inspiration for all Indian women. Though she didn’t spell out what achievements she had in her mind, informed sources, however, revealed that Pratibha Patil, once she demits the office of the President, would join the Rotary Club of Rajasthan, thereby becoming the first former woman President of the country to be the present president of Rotary Club of Rajasthan. (As a record that can only get better because she can later become the first former woman President of the country turned first former president of Rotary Club of Rajasthan. As a matter of fact, the options before her are limitless. So are her chances to create history).

Asked what she planned to do after ceasing to hold the country’s top Constitutional job, Pratibha Patil said the beauty of President’s post was that it let one do officially what others would generally attempt post-retirement. Like travelling. There aren’t any more continents in the universe that Pratibha Patil hasn’t travelled to officially.

It is not clear whether Pratibha Patil intends taking up writing poetry after her retirement. But going by what happened to her predecessor Abdul Kalam she may not. For the record, Kalam’s candidature for renomination as the President this time around was scuttled based on the quality of the poems that he wrote after his retirement. ‘Anyone who writes verses of this nature is a Constitutional risk,’ was the general consensus.

Meanwhile, with political consensus eluding on the choice of the President, the UPA increasingly looks like taking the decision that it usually takes when faced with a vacant post and a lack of choice: Outsource it to Kapil Sibal.

If there is no unanimity over the choice of the President we will stick to established procedures and ask Sibal to take the additional charge of the post, said a Congress spokesperson. ‘By now, even the Constitution probably recognises the fact that Sibal is the super-sub in the scheme of things,’ he said and added ‘all searches eventually end up with Sibal.’ This may also be due to the fact that Sibal sometimes attempts to control Google, too.

(Disclaimer: It’s only a rumour that Pratibha Patil is to be made the brand ambassador of cleartrip.com)

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.

‘This being cerebral Chennai,’ I began to think within myself, ‘they probably value a writer more than they do an actor.’

Just as I was wondering whether I should wave nonchalantly at the crowd and also blow kisses at them to come across as cool and hip, my daughter poked me sharply in the ribs, ‘appa, sit down. People are staring at you. They are trying to get a glimpse of Sharukh, but you are obstructing their view’.

Only then I realised that I was exactly in their line of vision. Only then I also realised that IPL matches are where people come to watch film stars watching cricketers in the middle.

As a spectator at the stadium during the IPL contests, your foremost task is to secure a seat with the best view —- of the giant screen, that is. If there is no giant screen, all the unmistakable joy of watching live cricket in total flesh and blood is completely lost.

The giant screen is a truly marvellous construct.  On it, the players view themselves playing, the spectators watch themselves spectating, the sponsors see themselves sponsoring. Only the umpires see themselves exposed. But never mind, the giant screen is centre to the IPL, especially since it brings to the stadium those without whom the IPL wouldn’t exist — the film stars, that is.

And that evening this week, during the IPL encounter between CSK and KKR, Sharukh wasn’t the only star around. Before him, there was the young Siddharth. There was also the newest hero Udhayanidhi Stalin. Looking at the handsome Siddharth and the smart Udhayanidhi, forgetting their exalted star status, sitting in the stands alongside common people, two important sporting truths instantly hit your mind:

1)   Cricket is a great sport

2)   Cricket is a great sport particularly for promoting films.

Seeing Udhayanidhi, whose film released just a week back, and Siddharth, who has a movie awaiting its release this month, toiling at the cricket stadium, you cannot but ask the important question: Why don’t the IPL administrators actually go the whole hog and offer slots in the playing XI of teams for heroes whose films have just released or about to hit the screens? It will make things easy for all concerned. I mean we can concentrate on the field of play while the stars need not strain themselves to catch the attention of the TV cameras. To me, it makes perfect marketing sense, not to speak of cricketing sense, as, at any rate, no young hero can possibly do any worse than Yousuf Pathan or Vinay Kumar have in this year’s IPL.

The only hitch on the horizon for this most sensible plan is when a Salman Khan movie releases. For, Salman being Salman, would want to throw away his team jersey and show up in his munda banian while batting or bowling. Not that it is against the IPL rules or anything, but it is just that with a munda banian the space for sponsor’s logo is limited. The general rule of cricket is: With the money-driven IPL, you don’t tamper with the sponsor’s space. In the history-filled Test cricket, you don’t cut into the lunch or tea breaks.

Talking of cricket at the M A Chidambaram stadium, it is also almost a rule that there will be at least a couple of wizened oldies, knowledgeable enough to recall every single detail of that epic G R Vishwanath innings against the vintage West Indies at the very same stadium in 1974-75, but equally stupid enough to superimpose that Vishwanath innings on anyone batting in the middle even today.

That night I ran into one such person. ‘Vishwanath would have late-cut that ball to four,’ the avuncular man sitting next to me said apropos of nothing when Suresh Raina let a ball past his off-stump. And that was just a beginning. When Albie Morkel hurled a snorter that Gautam Gambhir flailed at vainly, the old man piped up again: ‘Vishwanath hooked a similar bouncer for a fierce boundary in front of the square. Imagine that was against Andy Roberts’. He did not look like stopping the whole evening.

That night, upon my return to my house, wife asked who won and who was the top scorer. Even as I was hitting the bed, I replied: ‘Kolkata Knight Riders won, but Vishwanath was the top-scorer with 97 not out’.

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.