A Calendar War!

A massive revolt is brewing in the world of Calendar. The protesters, numbering 364, have hit the streets and gave vent to their anger against the “hegemony and supremacy” of December 12 which gets all the attention of the world for being the birthday of superstar Rajnikanth.

At the heart of the uprising is a perceived sense of victimhood among the rest of the members of calendar. “We are treated like second-class citizens. What sin have we committed to face such a discrimination?” asked a protester, waving a placard that read “We want justice”.  Others also pitched in, vigorously waving banners containing slogans like “Do not make Dalits out of Dates”, “Dates too have dreams”, “Fight for equality”, “Down with one-man show”.

What came as a final straw for the simmering calendar community was the hype generated on the occasion of the sequential numerological arrangement 12-12-12. The breathless media coverage of Rajnikanth’s birthday and what it meant for humanity has stoked anger among the aggrieved dates. “Now, enough is enough. This is hurting our sentiments. We will not take this injustice and discrimination anymore,” fumed an agitator.

An emergency meeting of the rebel members was held to chalk out a future course of action to ensure a level-playing field for all those engaged in chronicling the journey of time. “Folks, we have been silently discharging our duty of recording the events and putting up with all the bullshit that goes in the name of human history. Now, the most important challenge before us is how to correct the mindset of human beings. They can neither have equality among themselves nor can they treat us equally. We need to speak up now,” said January 1, the senior most member of the group.

The meeting assumes significance as the unprecedented upheaval threatens to shake the very foundations of the sentinels of time. “Can we condemn December 12 as communal and a creation of RSS? This may please secular forces,” suggested February 28 whose only claim to fame is that Digvijay Singh was born on that day.

However, the meeting overruled his “pseudo-secular” idea. Then, the gathering turned its attention towards June 19 who always begins like a roar but ends in a whimper, exactly like the scion of India’s first political family born on the day.

“Can I send my team of observers to gauge the public mood on our plight?” asked June 19 in a hesitant tone. A senior member chided him, saying “Abey, Chup! Moov Math Khulao Meri. You know something? We have been telling the world that you will soon play a larger role in the affairs of the calendar management. But, you always slip into your shell and disappoint us.”  

While the main agenda of the meeting was to register a strong and unequivocal condemnation of the undue importance being given to December 12, the members also spoke about the need to debunk astrologers and numerologists for perpetuating wrong notions about certain periods of the day in a calendar year. “We take strong exception to the human concept of “Rahu Kalam” as it paints us in poor light,” a resolution adopted at the meeting said. 

Cries of a Comedian!

Indian stand-up comedians are now a worried lot. Their very survival is under threat. The reasons are not far to seek. Politicians and news channels are rapidly transgressing into their domain and may soon render them jobless.

“Look, our survival essentially depends on our ability to concoct bizarre situations and come up with funny lines to entertain the public. With politicians and television channels sounding stranger than fiction and thereby providing free and wholesome entertainment to the people, we sense a clear threat to our source of livelihood,” explained a leading professional comedian Rahul Joshi.

To buttress his point, he cited the recent statement of Samajwadi Party leader Mohan Singh that his party was not amenable to lobbying by Walmart because no one in the party could speak English. “Now, with a funny statement like this, do you need any further entertainment? And, on top of it, you have news channels repeating these bytes with special effects throughout the day. Do you think anyone would still feel like coming to our comedy shows?” asked Joshi.

Agreed Rehman Qureshi, another stand-up comedian whose stage performances have been facing dwindling crowds these days, forcing him to narrate jokes about Kim Kardashian’s wardrobe malfunction to hold the audience attention.

“We consider Digvijay Singh as the biggest threat. None of the comedians can ever match his twisted words. The next big threat is from India TV whose investigative crime stories and reality shows have become the main source of entertainment for urban audience,” he lamented.

The affected comedians have created a facebook page “We Hate Politician-Media nexus” and have formed Jaspal Bhatti National Federation of Professional Comedians to counter the emerging threat.

In Andhra Pradesh, the Telangana Congress MPs’ rib-tickling public performances, with unfailing regularity, have sent shivers down the spine of professional comedians. “If the present trend continues, we will soon be out of jobs. We cannot even give vent to our frustration by asking “where we are going?” because that expression has been patented by Chandrababu Naidu,” rued a local humourist Kantipudi Subba Rao.

He disclosed that the state JAC of comedians was in the process of preparing a list of the endangered comedians whose only course of action is to wait for Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy to come out of jail and undertake “Odarpu Yatra” for them.

Scam Is In The Air!

This may well turn out to be the Mother of all scams. According to a latest CAG report, the country could have lost trillions of rupees since independence because of the failure of successive governments to auction or tax the most important natural resource: Air.

Using a complex set of formulae, the federal auditor concluded that greedy corporates made a killing by using the air freely without having to pay anything to the government. The private sector should have been brought under “pay-as-you-go” regime where the organisations pay air tax on the income they earn.

“These profit-driven private companies have been breathing it easy, quite literally. Instead, the governments should be breathing down their necks. How can we afford to lose such an important source of revenue?” the C AG said in a report titled “ConAir, an anatomy of national loot.”

The CAG proposed a scientific formula to calculate the total volume and density of air that a private firm uses depending on the area it occupies, number of people it employs and its productivity. “Once the private entrepreneurs submit project reports, the governments concerned should have gone for either auction route or calculated an appropriate tax structure for utilizing the crucial natural resource,” the report said.

By not doing so, the nation has suffered an incalculable loss, the CAG said and pegged the figure at 65 ⁹⁶⁰ trillion rupees. “We are not here to air-brush the economy but to clear the air about what we think is the biggest scam in Independent India,” it said.

However, a junior CAG field official, who retired recently, disputed the figure and the manner in which it was arrived at. He said he had suggested a much lower figure of 12 ²³⁰ trillion but was overruled by his superiors.

Meanwhile, the Union Minister for Countering Scam Reports, Kapil Sibal, dubbed the loss as “notional and presumptive”.  “Clearly, the CAG has overstepped its brief and transgressed into the policy making area which is the prerogative of the government,” Sibal argued.

The BJP had initially wanted to seize the opportunity to attack the UPA government for perpetrating yet another mega scam but soon realized that the “ConAir” report talked about the cumulative losses since independence.   

Singh's Speech

Indian scientists have achieved a major breakthrough in acoustics engineering. A device that converts silence into sounds was successfully demonstrated at the ramparts of Red Fort from where Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appeared before the nation on the occasion of 66th Independence Day.

His 35-minute silence was converted into sounds and amplified through the speakers. Though Singh maintained his trademark silence, all the countrymen got to listen to his message on a myriad subjects. The words flowed through the speakers and reverberated across the Red Fort ground while television channels beamed them live.


Not many know that there is science behind the sounds. “It is a red letter day for the scientific community. We have demonstrated a key technology that gives voice to the voiceless,” said a spokesman of the Advanced Acoustics Research lab at IIT, Delhi.


The indigenously developed technology should not be confused with the Speech Generating Device (SGD), made famous by internationally renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. “Unlike Hawking who uses an advanced computer system to build up words and then send them to a voice synthesizer, our Prime Minister can just remain silent, as he usually does, and the device will take care of communicating with the world,” explained a researcher associated with the CSIR-funded project.


A complex set of algorithms and intelligence systems built into the system will enable the Prime Minister to produce some re-assuring sounds, whether it is about the gloomy economy, power outages, scams or threats from Mamata Banerjee. For instance, when terrorists strike any part of the country, the phrases like “we will not be cowed down by acts of cowardice”, “Terrorism has no religion” and “We will bring the culprits to book” will flow from the wonder machine even while the Prime Minister remains tight-lipped.


In tune with the new technological development, the rules and procedures of the Parliament will be amended to replace the expression “written reply from Leader of the House” with “digitally synthesized reply”. Consequently, no supplementary questions will be handled by the Prime Minister.


The technological invention has cheered up the Congress leadership which has been facing constant criticism over Prime Minister’s deafening silence even in the face of serious crises. “This device should silence our critics. If BJP takes pride in its “Loh Purush” (Advani), we are proud of our “Silicon Purush”,” said an AICC spokesman.


However, the saffron party is not impressed with the invention. “We have a Prime Minister whose functioning is remote controlled by 10, Janpath and now we are told that even his voice is not his own. At best, we can describe Manmohan Singh as the country’s first ventriloquist Prime Minister,” said BJP spokesman Ravishankar Prasad.

NASA to probe Indian Parliament

After successful landing of rover on Mars, the NASA scientists are planning an ambitious mission to launch a robotic probe inside Indian Parliament to search for signs of probity in public life.

Christened as NETA (New Experiment in Troubled Asia), the research project seeks to find answers to the age-old questions like whether honesty ever existed in the precincts of the massive circular edifice or whether it ever offered conditions favourable to sustain civility

However, some sceptics within the NASA establishment have questioned the rationale behind the exploration. “The chances of this mission proving successful are as bright as finding a twin of Sunny Leone on Mars,” said a dissident scientist.

“This is the most complex and challenging experiment ever undertaken because we are out to explore something that many believe is non-existent,” a top NASA scientist said.  Even a feeble sign of integrity in nano dimension will be picked up by the advanced radars fitted to the nuclear-powered rover to be lowered inside the Sansad  Bhavan using a complex set of manoeuvres.

The sophisticated rover will thoroughly survey the barren and lifeless six-acre area of the Parliament House including its famed sandstone columns, looking for “upright souls”. Its robotic arms will collect the samples like copies of government bills and statements, abandoned by the MPs on their tables or dustbins, and parcel out these samples into analytical laboratory instruments inside the rover.

The high resolution images of the members’ antics inside the House, particularly in the central hall, will be relayed to the NASA control room for psychological evaluation of their conscientiousness or lack of it.  The rover will use its on-board instruments to analyse the gibberish speeches and verbal duels to understand whether there was any period in the Parliament’s history that was conducive for honesty to survive.

“The scientific objective of this mission is to understand how the world’s largest democracy has come to be governed by two simple yet elegant instruments---deception and falsehood,” the project director said.

The Indian-origin scientists, who constitute a major chunk of the workforce at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, are excited about the experiment.  “Look, we finally have an opportunity to prove that our decision to leave our lousy country was right,” said a young Indian-born scientist.

Back home, the politicians across the board, on a predictable note, found the title of the project provocative. “This is yet another display of American imperialism and a blatant interference in the internal affairs of our country,” thundered the CPI (M) General Secretary Prakash Karat.  The BJP and its saffron affiliates saw the NETA mission as an affront on Indian sensibilities. They went a step further and claimed that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was in fact a “robot” planted by Americans as part of their larger agenda to capture the Indian market.

The Congress spin master Kapil Sibal, however, said that the impact of the NASA experiment on India’s image was only “notional”. 

Bofors, a Kiranawala in a Fortune-500 world!

Bofors, a child of pre-reforms era who went missing in Kumbh Mela years ago, is back now, expecting the nation to embrace him. But, little did this young man realize that much smoke has flowed from the barrel of the howitzers in the last 25 years.    

"I was hoping for an emotional re-union, reserved for a long-lost boy. But, what have I got in return? Nobody in the country seems to care about me," Bofors told Arnab Goswami on "News Hour", a programme that seeks answers from the nation on serious issues confronting the society like Aishwarya Rai's overweight and forensic analysis of Abhishek Manu Singhvi's CD.

Abandoned by both Sweden and India, Bofors poured his heart out during the prime time programme and pleaded with Arnab to get the nation acknowledge his pioneering role in scam-building and give him the pride of place among the big-ticket scandals. However, he was shouted down by other panelists.       

“Look, things have changed now. Size does matter. Look at Spectrum, CWG and Adarsh. What is Bofors’ standing in the market? It is like a Kiranawala taking on a Fortune-500 company. We advise Bofors to withdraw from race and accept defeat like a true sportsman,” said Congress spokesman Manish Tiwari. 

A mere 64 crore kickbacks was involved in the Swedish gun deal which is peanuts and does not qualify to be called a scam, he argued and ridiculed Bofors’ plea to be recognized as the original  “Con”gress man.  In a rare display of solidarity, the BJP spokesperson Ravishankar Prasad concurred with his political adversary and brushed aside Bofors, saying he lacks stature and qualification for a place in Bhrashtachar Bhavan.

“We have disowned Bangaru Lakshman because he was caught accepting a mere Rs One lakh in the Tehelka sting operation. Such a small amount is an affront on our image and stature,” the BJP leader said.

Being an investigator, adjudicator and moral policeman rolled into one, Arnab declared that Bofors belongs to the BPL category of scams and does not serve the purpose of enhancing the TRPs of his channel. 

“Tonight, the nation wants to know why inequalities exist among the scandals which are a pride of the nation. Your channel will work tirelessly to remove these inequalities and provide a level playing field for all scamsters,” the ace anchor concluded, before moving on to the next story to put the country’s leading nutritionists on trial for failing to check Aishwarya Rai’s overweight.