Sorry, I disagree. Bigly. Who is Rihanna? Okay, 100 million followers on Twitter! That’s tough (we need that grimacing emoji here). Amitabh Bachchan has only 40 million, even our PM has only 65 million, but hey, what’s a hundred million for a country of a thousand million, with another forty as loose cash? Okay, so she’s from Barbados. The only Barbadian we know without a Google search is Sir Garfield Sobers, the first cricketer to have hit six sixes in a row, in a single over. Our only connect with that sphere of the globe is cricket, and that’s a dirty bequest of British colonialism. Down with cricket! Sorry, Rihanna. Who is she to attempt a Twitter sixer against India? With a simple flipper, our foreign minister had her caught at silly point. Did she even do a Google search on where Punjab and Haryana are? What does she know about Indian farming? Beyond that VatiCNN story? Has she seen Manoj Kumar’s films? We certainly googled her three generations, and thoroughly agree
Dead centre of a long cold winter, and there seems little chance of a year-end tonic for the spirits. If the sun plays truant even in otherwise balmy Bangalore, you can imagine New Delhi from afar all shrouded in a spiritual smog. Who can blame our parliamentarians for feeling the chill just in anticipation! The average age of all the gallants in the Lok Sabha is around 54, and the grey eminences of Rajya Sabha round off to a genteel 62. Like clever schoolboys who wish to play truant, they are citing good reasons to skip the entire Winter Session.
You can’t argue against Covid-19, can you? Of course, they never much complain about elections the occasional private grumble about sore throats aside. Maybe the presiding officers could have considered an open-air session, gram sabha style, to get the juices flowing. The real people’s parliament is elsewhere, though. The Delhi borders are the new central vista. And they will neither defer nor cancel the congregation … or shall we sa