Dilli badnam hui...

That is what the CNN-IBN is happily saying:
Dilli badnam hui darling tere liye.

I thought the height of absurd statements was Lalit Bhanot's sage pronouncement:
"The standards of our hygiene is different from theirs."

One of the most enduring memories of my hostel days is the dark and dank and smelly toilet. I simply do not know how I managed the two years at Baroda but it was terrible.  Toilets, for me, have to be clean and airy and light.  But Indian toilets are generally afterthought...something we need but prefer to push it out of sight.  Of course cleaning toilets is anathema to us. Forget what Gandhi said or did, it is simply not done because we, you see, do not clean toilets. There  are special people to do so. One of my acquaintances once said to me that he does not clean toilets and he did not see what was big deal for Infosys Chief and his wife to highlight this aspect of their life. I was little stunned. I was about to ask as to who cleans up the toilets in his house but I bit my tongue in time.

When I moved into my current residence, which by the way is currently dripping water thanks to the incessant rains and 150 years of excellent work by CPWD, the toilet was a sight to be seen. The first thing I did was to get a bottle of Harpic and scrub the toilet till it was usable.  Why do we do such things?

The toilets in our School are no better.  I finally had to post a stinker of a note before the girls started behaving themselves. Even now we keep the Western toilet locked up because we figured that many girls do not know how to use it.

There is no question of their hygiene and our hygiene. Simply put-toilets have to be clean. It is good sanitation and key to prevent health problems. The sooner Lalit Bhanot understands this point the better.

Meantime, Dilli badnaam hui darling tere liye.

I think I am going to enjoy the CWG.

A tale of two songs.

Two songs have been composed for the Commonwealth Games. One is by Palash Sen who has a group called Euphoria.  The other is by A.R. Rahman.  Therein lies the tale.

The song by Palash Sen is fantastic. The lyrics evoke the old time Delhi- you know the sepia tinted photographs of an era long gone by. Of course Palash Sen is very much a Delhite. He grew up in Delhi and he lives in Delhi and the passion for his city is reflected in the song. We can argue endlessly whether Delhi as a city is worth being passionate about but as someone who grew up in Delhi I remember a Delhi that is every different from the one it is today.  Listening to the Delhi theme song, it is that old time Delhi, the laid-back city, the one with wide tree-lined avenues, the one of lazy winter afternoons flashes through the mind.

I listened to A.R.Rahman's song too and I think the major problem is the language. Palash Sen has very wisely stuck to Hindi.  It is different matter whether Hindi is the language of our country or not. But the fact is that the ethos, the passion is usually reflected only one's native tongue.  A. R. Rahman's song is a kichdi. It is a wannabe and unfortunately it remains a wannabe. The music content of many of Rahman's song takes multiple listening before it grows on to you. So I am keeping an open mind. Maybe I will like the music after multiple listenings.   But what do we do with the lyric. Nonsense lyrics like Take it Easy policy is okay for a movie. However, when you expand it to something like Commonwealth Games it is stupid. 

A.R. Rahman had said that he would do one better than Waka Waka, the theme song of World Cup. We will leave it for history to judge it.  Personally, I prefer Waka Waka.

In today's Delhi Times Geeta Chandran has aptly summed up the problem with the theme music. And she concludes by reminding the readers of the Asiad theme song which was set to music by Ravi Shankar and sung by Amitabh Bacchan. The point to remember is that the music as well as lyric were so simple that all of us hummed.  

As a last point I do not know how much Palash Sen was paid but definitely Rs 5 crore that was paid to Rahman for a theme song is obscene especially when there was flash flood in Ladakh and parts of Bihar are reeling under drought.