Paradise lost

The news of a young German girl having been raped by a minister's son in Goa came last week. In quick succession to the Scarlett Keeling murder case a year ago, this just confirms that rot from the rest of India has finally caught up with the hitherto insulated paradise.

So far, mention of the word "Goa" instantly engendered visions of unending white sandy beaches, palm-fringed shores, narrow, winding roads, pristine white, European-styled churches and the laid-back but friendly Goanese.

I had first visited Goa in 1994. Watching the entire state from the window of a descending aircraft (one circle of the plane covered whole of the tiny state), it looked like God's imagination and man's dreams had converged to create this paradise. Picture-postcard was too trite to describe the place when you actually travelled around the state, from its secluded, blissful north to the bustling and sunny southern beaches.

Lashed gently by the Arabian Sea on one side and grounded by the western ghats on the other, it was a land you never wanted to come back from....until your money ran out.

It was also difficult to imagine that this was indeed part of the larger chaos called India.

Unlike the rest of India, there were no dirtly slums, the roads were smooth and people friendly. Crime was low, there were enough tourists to keep the state and its inhabitants reasonably affluent. The Goans, otherwise prompt and cheerful (our cab driver --Joe--used to appear every morning at 9 smartly dressed, with his sunglasses), however, kept their shops closed in the afternoon, to ensure they had their feni drink and their 'siesta' every day.

Except for a couple of crowded beaches like Calangute and Miramar and a couple of 'shady' beaches like Anjuna and Vagatur--where European hippies from the 60's had settled down to peddling soft drugs--the rest of the state was, indeed, 365 days a year on holiday. That was Goa then. Sedate yet fun.

But how long could El Dorado hold out while the rest of India was falling prey to corrupt and mostly criminal politicians, cut-throat commercialisation, and a general descent into jungle-raaj.

First came the rape and murder of Scarlett Keeling, a British-teenager-gone-astray, who had wandered into the drug and crime infested underbelly of Goa. The three men who allegedly committed the crime, supplied her with drugs when she needed them and expected sexual favours when they needed those. She probably protested one night, with a fatal result: she was raped and killed on a beach in the middle of the night.

The top suspect in the Scarlett Keeling case is being protected by the state government and the drugs mafia, which is now well-entrenched in the state, alleged Scarlett's mother while vowing to pursue the authorities until justice is done.

Now, a 14-year-old German girl has gone to the police and registered a rape case against the son of Goa's education minister. His son has disappeared and the minister is claiming that he is innocent and that all this is a political conspiracy hatched by his opponents.

Sound familiar? I bet it would, to anyone who has lived his life in the rest of India.

BPO workers are NOT techies!

"Techie murders techie"
"Techie charged with data fraud in BPO"
"Shifts taking toll on mental health of techies in the BPO industry".
These are some of the screaming headlines from Indian newspapers in the recent past.

It is astounding, if not painful, to see the number of times BPO workers are referred to by the most casually used term in this country--"techie". The term is used interchangeably for both IT professionals and the multitudes of Buntys and Bablis who now work in the BPO industry.

It is like calling both a doctor and a nurse "medico".

It has been bothering me personally a great deal since I have been a 'techie' myself for the last 13 years. The IT industry has been in the limelight for the last 20 years and, unfortunately, most people do not know yet (or may be don't care) what exactly an IT professional and a BPO worker do for a living.

A techie, of course, is short for technology worker. While the use of the term might help headline writers of newspapers due to its brevity, it also creates in the minds of their readers an image of a smart, sharp and professional individual who has gone off the rocker due to work pressure in the industry and has turned to murder, fraud and other crimes. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The majority of mainstream IT employees--comprised of those working for companies such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, etc--are actually smart, sharp, professional people. They are some of the brightest minds in the country, graduating from engineering colleges after tough entrace tests for these institutions and four years of hard work. Once in the industry, they are again into a routine of hard work and intellectual grind while providing software development and maintenance work for some of the world biggest companies who are clients of their employers.

BPOs, on the other hand, are largely staffed with graduates (sometimes even non-graduates) looking for jobs to pay their way through college, or for their mobiles, clothes, watches or even dates at the Cafe Coffee Day or Barista. They generally work in shifts carrying out business processes of these same client companies, typically manning their call-centres or doing their back-office work, which is rarely technical in nature.

The BPO (or IT Enabled Services) workers are really a slice of the general youth population of the country and ills that plague the rest also plague them -- peer pressure, mass consumerism, globalising cultural influences and the need to somehow become upwardly mobile as quickly as they can. All these forces act on their minds, and consequently on their behaviour, manifesting in acts of fraud, violence, etc.

So, next time you want to call someone a techie, please be sure the person is at least an engineer--if not a software engineer. Or spend one night @ the call center. And a day at an IT company.

Raging against Raj

After two years of trying to wish away this eventuality, the Maharashtra government is finally facing the inevitable--arresting Raj Thackeray. Cops from Jharkhand are in Mumbai with a non-bailable warrant against Raj for one of his speeches against Biharis. The government is making all the right noises about the need to "tame" Raj and his MNS men.

Raj, on the other hand, dared the government yesterday to arrest him, warning that "Maharashtra will burn" if it does.

This is a nightmare that no politician wants to face. The groundswell of support that Raj has garnered with his "Marathi first" ideology and his continued diatribes against the Hindi-speaking migrants to the state has been worrying the ruling Congress party anyway. If it arrests Raj now, it plays into his hands by being perceived as anti-Marathi. So, will CM Vilasrao Deshmukh bite the bullet and let Raj be arrested? It's anybody's guess.

For anyone who has attended any of Raj's sabhas, it is obvious that he has studiedly taken over from his ailing uncle, Bal Thackeray. He looks the same as when Bal Thackeray was his age, speaks the same and evokes the same kind of response from his audience, maybe stronger than what his uncle could manage.

But, this is not to say that this is due to his oratory skills or his charisma.

Over the last 20 years, Bal Thackeray's Shiv Sena toned down the criticism of migrants and even included some north-Indians as its office-bearers and has moved more and more from the right to the centre. Blinded with putra-prem, Thackeray Senior also did a Dhrutarashtra when he chose to appoint his own son as his successor to lead the Sena, ignoring the more suitable Raj.

When Raj first formed his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, he was written off as yet another disgruntled Sena leader leaving the party to form his own outfit. No one paid much attention to him for some time, while he carefully thought out his strategy to reclaim what he thought was rightfully his. And no one was ready for what he unleashed.

A wave of repressed Marathi anger--against the swathes of UP and Bihari migrants who have invaded Maharashtra over the last few years--hit the state after a fiery speech by Raj at Shivaji Park in Mumbai last year.

This was followed up by agitations against allotment of college seats to north-Indians who could pay hefty donations, at the cost of local students. Then came the issue of signboards in Marathi. Once again, Raj and his men followed up and enforced a law that was created by the government itself.

Now, it is about the jobs. Raj has taken up cudgels against the Bihari and UP students who come to Maharashtra to appear for recruitment examinations for the Indian Railways, while Maharashtrians are not even aware of these jobs. The Railways are, of course, under Laloo Yadav's administration and hence Biharis are being favoured, says Raj.

These are not new issues. All these have been raised by most political parties in Maharasthra at one time or another, especially the Shiv Sena. However, the way Raj has run away with the ball has all these parties worried, if not scared.

Also, the Sena was always Mumbai-focussed. Raj has made it more comprehensive by including all of Maharashtra, and people all over the state have responded since the problems with north Indian migrants have been affecting them for years and they did not have anyone raising their issues.

If he were to be arrested, it could only increase mass support for him and anger against the government. Something the government could ill-afford with the state elections just round the corner.

When it comes to reining in Raj, for the ruling Congress-NCP combine it is a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Deep trouble

Sonu, a two-year old boy from Agra who fell into a 150-ft deep abandoned borewell on Thursday, was pulled out dead yesterday.

It did not make much news. After 5 days, no one expected the toddler to come out alive. The TV news channels, who were covering it minute-by-minute on day one, had moved on to something more sensational or trashy than a tragedy that befalls poor Indian children with alarming regularity.

The story repeats itself every few months. It was the fall of 5-yr-old Prince in July 2006 into a similar borewell shaft and its round-the-clock TV coverage that first brought home the horror of these death traps to a nation inured to needless deaths. Prince was lucky though. After 48 hours of falling into the 70-ft pit, he was rescued by the Army and locals and became an instant hero.

Earlier this year, 6-year-old Suraj was playing in a farm when he fell to his death into a 13-feet iron pipe of 8-inch diameter (!) left inside another abandoned borewell at a village near Jaipur.
The story of Advesh from Jhansi and Sarika from Bikaner is the same. They died in similar accidents in January this year. In March, two-year-old Vandana was rescued from a 45-feet pit near Agra.

Who leaves these tunnels to hell open? And how do these children end up falling in them? What are their parents doing when these kids wander off to these death traps? And, how come all these cases happen only in northern India? And how is it that none of these kids seem to have surnames? These are some mysteries I continue to grapple with everytime an incident like this is reported.

My guess is -- most of these borewells are dug by officials and/or contractors to see if they can hit a water source underground and then abandoned when the venture is not successful. The cost of filling up a 70 to 150 feet deep well with 8 to 12 inches diameter is probably more than that of a poor child's life. So, they just move on to another hopeful piece of land, leaving the hole open or covering it with some dried vegetation, or trash, or a mixture of mud and gravel. After a while, nature uncovers their negligence for innocent children to fall prey to.

It is heartening to know that the President of India has finally condoled Sonu's death and the Rashtrapati Bhavan has issued advisories to "the Ministries of Rural Development, the Urban Development, the Water Resources and the Home Affairs so as to prescribe necessary safety standards and to take safety precautions while digging borewells and to instruct accordingly their respective field formations for ensuring their strict compliance". I guess the President has done her job and kids can play safely now!

A non-governmental organization (NGO) has also filed a complaint with the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) to probe Sonu's death while asking “how many more children will die” after falling into open bore wells before the authorities decide to act.

The Prime Minister and other leaders responsible for running this country, however, have not even bothered to acknowledge this problem yet. They are probably busy solving other, bigger problems : terrorism, religious massacres, separatist struggles, Naxalism, etc. So, they are likely to get around to this pretty soon. Good luck, children!