If the choice is between hot chilli and election speech...

Those of you who are in the business of column writing will agree with me on one thing, becoming an established, well read commentator is not all that easy, especially when you are not backed by a strong media conglomerate or a powerful campaigning machinery like that of IPL (P could be Political or Premier, depending on where your loyalties lie this week). However, I would like to continue with my column here for one simple reason that I feel good when some things get out of my mind even if it means speaking in the woods. So here is a birds eye(and brain) view of the key events that happened in my part of the world last week.

Now that IPL is out of the country, the law enforcement agencies can peacefully fight with terrorists, naxalites and likeminded people to help us live and vote peacefully. Talking about elections, amid threats from various social and anti-social elements, we managed to complete our first phase of polling somewhat peacefully which is the greatest upside event of the week IMO. I think the week will have a place in history because this is the first time we see a nation adopting ‘shoe throwing’ as a peaceful method of protesting against their oppressors. I see a parallel here between the civil disobedience method Gandhiji adopted against the British and I wonder whether this is what some people call as the ‘Third independence movement’ in India.

Another news item that caught international acclaim was that an Indian woman has eaten the hottest chilli in the world. Now those of you who eat from the ‘Andhra Style’ restaurants in my part of the world might ask whats so great in that. Well, the uniqueness in this case is that she also ‘smeared seeds of 25 chillies in her eyes in one minute’. Now that I bet is something you and I wont prefer to do, even if we can eat vegetable kholapuri three times a day. I don’t have any report on her condition after this, but whatever it is, we are proving again and again that nobody can beat us when it comes to gulping the wackiest substances in the world, be it chillies, bombs, bollywood-dialogs or election-time promises.

Now those are on the positive side, on the negative side, inflation dipped to the lowest level in three decades . I’m no ‘economic person’ like many of my peers in office and on the street to tell what does it mean to the common woman and her man, all I know is that it’s time for those in the Reserve Bank to start talking about some cuts that they will be doing to the ‘basis points’, which ultimately will result in banks forcing us to take more loans so that the economy grows and you and I will end up being life-time debtors (which we are already anyway).

Before I end this short column due to lack of availability of time, screen real-estate and content, here is the latest recession related catastrophe, and I don’t consider this funny, though whoever titled it that way might think so.