I seem to have lived life with the wrong ideas till now, until Mr. Salman Khursheed came along. There was this beautiful line he gave when questioned about that-which-must -not-be-discussed. He says "we have found out some mistakes and are rectifying them, that's what supervising teams are for anyway." This line would have been of great use to Mr. Ramalinga Raju had he thought of it then, just replace supervising teams with the fraud squad. Post-Kalmadi, I am very clear on how to live life, the mantra is not to have morals, it is to be open enough in your misdeeds to be deemed incorrigible. The world doesn't look so cruel when you look at it through these glasses.
The mess that we find on our hands seems to beg the question, how did we win the bid in the first place? The only sight I can remember is one of Aishwarya Rai, Rani mukherjee, and co. Dancing away to glory at the Melbourne closing ceremony. They were supposedly giving a taste of what was to come in Delhi. A true taste would have been to hire one of our Chennai water tankers and have them spray muddy water on the audience in a surrealist demonstration of India's bureaucratic inefficiency. That probably started the trend of hiring dancers to grace every ceremony, I also suppose our film stars took this as a sign from the higher-ups that they must take their show abroad. Now music launches are going international, Kuallywood anyone?? Back to the games, a friend of mine recently visited the commonwealth games "stadia" and said there was no chance they would be completed in time. Maybe that is Mr. Kalmadi's master plan, maybe he is planning to show the world its blunder in choosing a city to host an international event and thinking its pride will ensure the smooth organization of the events. While writing this, I have a vivid image of Mr. Kalmadi standing on top of one of the stadia and shouting "everything drowns", bearing an eerie similarity to the joker.
Having conveyed my thoughts on the organizing of the games, I'm going to try and give three possible scenarios that could pan out come October 3rd :
- Shame, no doom
An independent committee steps in, Kalmadi is fired and exiled to Rio (the world is never cruel to him). The games are restored to some semblance of order. By order I mean the swimmers need not wade and the sprinters need not swim.
- In Bollywood we trust
We witness the return of our heroes as the opening ceremony, by dint of extreme planning, is made to last the entire 12 days, in the end the baton is passed on to Glasgow, all the gold, silver and bronze medals are melted deposited in a certain Swiss bank account.
- Doomsday
My nightmare comes true, to top it all, Kalmadi paints his face in the colors of the Indian flag, and wears a purple Sherwani. I become an oracle and adopt Mr. K's business model, my chair costs Rs. 70 lakh you know.
By the way, writing satirical posts is extremely relaxing, try it out.
Nice post Harsha.
ReplyDeleteI hope to see the 3rd option come true. :P