"Adjourning" Days are here again !

The esteemed Members of Parliament meet again.

For a 21 day session, and are supposed to process 31 bills , which when signed by the President, are supposed to become law.

I've never figured out how they decide the length of a Parliament session.  Ideally,  that should get clear once the work on processing the 31 bills starts off, so they get an idea of how much time it takes.

Today , Parliament was adjourned  due to the condoling of the death of two members, and later due to the usual chaos , where the opposition was supposed to be  hampering the work of Parliament. Maybe tomorrow, someone will run into the well of the house, and shout slogans, and they will adjourn  the  house again.

4 hours were lost, costing the tax payer one crore Rs.

What's a few crores here and there ?  We are looking at scams running into hundreds of thousands of crores,  the possibility of a private airline being showered with a bailout of thousands of crores, albeit through banks, almost all of them nationalized. Government  still hesitates to announce the names of folks who have stashed such large fortunes in black money abroad, that recovery of these may even fund a metro railway system for some big city.

I doubt if anyone is seriously shaken up about Parliament sessions not happening and wasting crores. 

I just have one suggestion. What is this about  having "sessions" of Parliament ? Monsoon session, winter session, summer session ?  Like the various "fashion weeks" ? 

Presumably, the government needs preparation time before presenting the bills for discussion and voting.

Now that the preparation is done prior to the winter session, ( at least I hope so),  I have a suggestion.

Why not keep Parliament is session, not for just for 21 days , but till all 31 bills are passed, no matter how long it takes.   ?

(Reminds me of my school days, when the teacher would have us sit after school, and complete stuff which was due yesterday,  and we couldn't go home till we finished. This was also used as a punishment for unruly behaviour by folks in my class. The whole class got punished for a few folks behaving stupidly.  Just saying . )

There should be no concern about cost.  MP's live in subsidized conditions.  Food in Parliament is subsidized to such a level, I am not surprised that no one bothers about rising prices of food grains,  in the life of the common man.  Living quarters subsidized, communications and travel subsidized, laptops free,  junkets free,  publicity,  free.

Let them attend Parliament  without a break.  They can always shout slogans and run up and down  into the well of the house, to exercise their limbs.   The Speaker can keep attendance  through some buttons on the MP's desks.   They can have a special 2 hour break after every passed bill. 

Currently , they are objecting to the presence of a particular Minister in Parliament, because he is presumed guilty.  Other people , ordinary ones, have been thrown into jail for less.  And no one even stopped traffic for that, forget Parliament.

So get him into Parliament sessions  on Skype.  Those who don't want to see him can simply put their laptops (free) on standby or  hibernate along with their laptops.

But, for a change, get started on the 31 bills. Debate them , discuss them , even fight, call each other names, apologize, whatever.  Process the bills.  Some will pass, some will fail, but the session will end definitively.

We cannot go into the next session of Parliament again with a backlog of bills.

Ordinary citizens having backlog of bill payments,  are penalized, hounded, and humiliated.

This is but a small  price to pay, for MP's.

Just think.

They continue doing this (adjourning and delaying) for 5 years, and by law, they can retire  with a full decent pension with all kinds of assorted benefits, you and I can never hope to see in our lifetimes......   

Some Adarsh solutions....

Buildings built with the blatant connivance or calculated blindness of , the powers that be, and in complete disregard of the laws of the land, are nothing new in Mumbai. This has been so for several decades. It is also observed, that those officers who are perceived as being obstacles in the development of such buildings and societies, are summarily transferred or removed from the scenario under some pretext.

The very inappropriately named " Adarsh " (= ideal) housing society scam wins the shameless award on all fronts. The land wasn't theirs, they misled authorities in various ways, they built 25 more floors than they were allowed to, registered owners for flats on those floors, and till the RTI activists forced the data out into the open, no one in the government, civilian or military thought of giving the project a second look. What is more, an adjoining piece of land was being eyed by some more unscrupulous government folks for construction of an Adarsh-2.

Consequent to questions in a rarely functioning Parliament, and various so called authorities, who were caught with their hands in the till, big guns like chief ministers were forced to resign, the environment ministry stepped in to check if CRZ coastal regulations were disobeyed and have now recommended that this whole 31 storey building beemolished/destroyed/bulldozed, as an example .


There are many people who purchased flats here at a later stage, putting in their life savings, and were reassured by the fact that it had so many big shots as members, that there would be no problems anywhere in the paperwork. These people are now upset , and wish to know what happens to their money.


(This is a bit like the Mumbai roads, where the Municipal types , hand in glove with the road contractors, deliberately certify substandard work, and get paid again and again, cuts going to facilitators, and nobody gives a damn about subsequent traffic and pedestrian problems, or what is worse, ambulances carrying emergency cases, who get stuck in the mess, sirens blaring desperately. Unlike the fellows above cribbing about life savings, here it is an actual life involved, and these delays often prove fatal. But the big difference is that we are lowly tax paying citizens and these are corrupt leaders, legislators and politicians).


Apart from this blame game, the building scheduled for destruction, has involved millions of man-woman hours of very hard work by some very ordinary rural folk, imported for this work from rural areas, and made to work, possibly by bypassing, and flouting safety norms , all so the contractor can increase his profit. There is a huge amount of material that will go waste in this demolition exercise. There will be immense noise, dust, and possible money pollution associated with this.


And unless, the environment ministry does a survey of all illegal buildings in Mumbai, and takes similar action, this one-off recommended action by the Environment ministry will be seen as a symbolic action, and will go the way of all symbolic actions, like bureaucrats posing with brooms and protective hats on "Keep your city clean " days, while unprotected municipal class IV conservancy staff continue to fall and drown unprotected into drainage manholes, and suffocate in the gases..

The question is what do we do with a 31 storey building.


It is clear that unless they had planned the 31 storeys at the foundation stage (deep enough) itself, somebody didn't suddenly get an evil brainwave at the 6th floor, and suddenly decide to build 25 more. The land, it seems belongs to the Military, but nothing was done about it, and eyes were kept closed, to enable Military types to buy flats there.

It seems like a good idea, to take away all the flats from the people who have registered and bought them there. None will be homeless, as they have other homes, maybe several. Possibly in Mumbai itself.


There are some more ideas.


a). Shift all the ministers out of their sprawling bungalows in Malabar hill, and allot them a flat each in Adarsh. This will sharply cut down house makeover costs, at public expense. I don't pay my taxes so somebody can have silk curtains in a room with 5 AC's, or so that someone can order expensive furniture for a totally unnecessary makeover. Come to think of it the minister needs a makeover, not his house. The possible emptying up of large sprawling tracts of land in that area, would possibly lead to some planned forestation efforts in an area where we now speak of heights of buildings, shamelessness and power, instead of heights of old trees.


b) Convert the building into a subsidized Children's Hospital, where people from all over Maharashtra/India can come and get the best of treatment, with some lower/upper floors reserved for dormitory accommodation for the parents of admitted kids.


c) A Working women's hostel, as well as a place of refuge for the increasingly ill treated senior citizens, with adequate security. This security could be provided by our military because it is supposed to be their land.


d) The solution to revert back to the place as residences for the Kargil War Widows is also possible. However, a house is more than rooms and walls; it is also about extended family, reliable neighbors, social milieu and interactions, and there must be then a way of ensuring that the house remains with whoever it has been granted to. Most times, senior extended male family members rule the roost, take over the benefits accruing to the widow, and she is back where she was. Unless the government can set up a vigilance system for the occupants, this solution will not work.


e) Maharashtra Police at the lower levels have inadequate benefits. They need more recruits, they need to offer more benefits at the basic level, and police housing is something which has been crying for action. Adarsh could be something where they could have police housing for the lower echelons. Officer levels have guaranteed housing with cars and orderlies, and these facilities are often times abused. It is time that we did something for those, who risk life and limb on the roads of Mumbai, regardless of the weather, with inadequate protection (armswise), provide you the one live captured terrorist at the cost of their life, only to have the top echelons, move around in beaconed cars, giving endless statements and excuses about inefficient non-working bullet free jackets and messaging confusion during 26/11.


There could possibly be more innovative solutions I think the first one would be a cost saving one. The Mantralaya offices would be within walking distance. Minister types walking with their alphabetically enabled security detail, would draw admiring glances from the public, avoid traffic jams, improve pedestrian facilities in a city that believes only in 4 wheelers. There would be an immense saving in petrol. The WSJ, Time and Huffington Post post will write about this, and maybe we can arrange for the symbol obsessed types to wear a beacon on their head as they walk to work.

It just occurred to me that when we ordinary people think of investing in a flat, and particpate in getting a loan or membership in a housing society, we are always asked to submit a court affidavit on stamp paper , declaring that we do not own any other property within the city. I wonder what all the cheaters at "Adarsh" did . Or maybe , their affidavits were actually printed on stamp paper which was itself part of the earlier Telgi Stamp Paper Scam . So much for false declarations on false stamppapers, or true declarations of false stamppapers, or false declarations on true stamppapers.....Never mind.


I wonder if you have any other solutions for the usage of this building . ..... suggestions welcome!

What NOT to see .......डोळे मिटून बसा......

A noticeably non-trivial correlation between television as a medium, and distraction and effect of it on school children has tended to cause bad blood between parents and cable operators. In many households, cable TV subscriptions are simply cancelled during January to March, so that school children can pay more attention to conjugation of verbs, factorization, theorems, latin names of plants and shakespeare , rather than get distracted by motorcycle chases, murders, secret rendezvous, revengeful k-serail mother-in-laws, and advertisements for cellphones.

That leaves them with Doordarshan. If at all it is watched. It used to be that one watched the news every evening . And given whats being shown these days, I really hope no child watches it.

Welcome to the Parliament of India.

Parliament today, can be held up as an example of how a class should NOT function.

No one listening to the teacher, drowning his voice out; when one member is reciting something, others talk loudly and incessantly, drowning out the performance. When the teacher says something unpalatable, you rush to the front of the class and scream at the teacher.

Grown men sitting at desks, laughing at another's misfortune or discomfiture; suddenly elevating themselves full length, to snarl and shake fingers menacingly at someone , all the while trying to make a point; another one droning on and on and on making points across literature, sociology,politics,sanskrit, infrastructure, and even songs from hindi films whose lyrics fit the occasion like a motichoor laddoo fits in the palm of my hand

Meanwhile. the teacher type sitting at a podium, with what looks like a guard by his side, pleads with everyone to sit down. Repeatedly. he is soundly ignored and some peope rush down to the well of the hall, raising their hands and slogans, to make some points which could have been heard even from their seats. Some others start wandering around in between the aisles, some approach the officers , to try and interfere in their work. Meanwhile some three other guys, hitherto unknown for anything else, suddenly open a bag and start throwing around bundles and wads of money, as behind them, an entire group of people rise is support, raucously shoutng and making , what they think , is , their point.

We actually mugged up all kinds of things about Parliament, its functions, and its occupants in our schooldays; we were passed or failed based on our knowledege about it. Civics was an eminently boring subject. And now it appears, that a lot of what we learned, was simply not the case.

Had this happened in my school, the troublemakers would have been caned and made to kneel outside the class, for crimes, much,much less than this. Their parents would have been called. Some kids would have been marked as troublemakers, monitored, and an honest effort made to help them change. Shouting at the teacher was a no-no. You simply didnt rush to his/her desk and stand staring at her/him with a false bravado, mouthing disrespectful words. If your teacher didnt punish you , your parents would. School was sacrosanct.

And today , we read , day in and day out, about people being "bought" for crores of rupees. These are people we voted for , in what is considered the greatest example of a functioning democracy in the world. Issues be damned. Its all about payment. You pay , and they will vote against the Women's Reservation bill, and the women of India can go to hell. (If some of them actually have not already gone much further, if such a thing is possible). You pay and they will vote against a bill that ensures free education for some children upto graduation, and everything else be damned; their children are educated, arent they ? Want them to shout against a particular religion, pay them.

The young of India are learning , and how. Children kidnapping their friends trying to demand fake ransoms to make easy money ; stealing their family jewellery to finance the secret jailed paramour's bail; a youth creating a false correspondence with NASA and almost convincing a state government(Maharsahtra) to fund so called "further studies abroad" ; and of course, stealing credit cards, and splurging on malls , bars and similar stuff before the slow, long , corrupt, long hand of the law, catches up.

We need to fire these MP's and call an election.

Not because so many are itching to go nuclear and so many others cannot bear the thought, and rules demand that there be a count etc.

But because the recent scenes in Parliament, the crowning glory being the going-ons during the trust vote on July 22nd, make every simple minded, middle class , tax-paying, hard working, God-fearing,law-abiding, worried-about-children's-future-and-studies Indian, hold his head down on shame. Our representatives are a bad example .

And just out of typical middle-class curiosity, I have always wondered what happens to those currency notes that sort of flutter around and come to a stop in little known niches and gaps amongst the hallowed benches, when an exercise in undertaken to throw around bundles of currency notes in Parliament. Does someone (who sold his vote to the highest bidder, maybe, five minutes before the trust vote), suddenly get righteous, pick up a 1000 rupee note and take it to the speaker and say "here, see what I found, take it back etc" ? Does someone actually go around sweepping the stuff ? Do they keep track of how much was flung around ?

Is there checking of peoples' bags while entering Parliament? People who sell themselves for money may simply graduate to more. We have hardened criminals serving life terms coming in to vote in these situations.

Will there be a future where MP's will be subject to the same rules as a normal citizen ? Will a security officer of the august body, not allow his eyes to turn after seeing huge stash of currency notes being taken in to the main hall , and stop it forthwith? Is there something like 'contempt of Parliament' (akin to Contempt of Court ), where misbehaving rogue members can be straightened out and taught a lesson , without appointing a committee?

In the meanwhile, while TV channels continue to show the latest in the Saga of the Crores in Parliament, my neighbor, Mrs Sharma, has just packed off her TV in its original box, and had someone put it high up in the loft. Her son has just started 10th grade, and she fears elections late in the year.


Good luck, young man....