Thoughts on the Year and random predictions

The idea of updating the blog more frequently is definitely due to the lack of exciting things to do in office right now, but it does not mean that the blog will be orphaned when the rat race starts once again from next Monday. It is one of my resolutions (yes, I make them and stick to them seriously) to blog at least once a week in the coming year.

Am sure every year which passes by leaves us with a lot of emotions, most people I know term their year as a mixed one, for every happy occasion they have had two not-so-happy / sad ones. The current year has been eventful for me. It would be absolutely unfair to term it as good or bad. Starting with the wedding in the beginning of the year to the big deals cracked in office to the usual marriage related financial tension to the realization that the stress in office is here to stay; there has hardly a day which has been boring. When not faced with usual office / home / marriage / money related moments many books and movies made life fun and interesting.

I would love to do a 'My Top 5 of Everything' kind of a list for various things in the year (in fact started by doing the movie post last week), but then I would be intensely personal and would not be appreciated by all. So I will instead focus on some interesting trends / incidents in public domain which I witnessed this year and my thoughts on the same.

The Ambani War: Though both the brothers have enough shady deals / skeletons in the closets, my sympathies in this one lie with the younger one. Simply for the fact that the Government has put the weight of its entire machinery behind the elder one, and whenever the government does something like that there is something fishy. Picture this, older and younger brother sign a deal and get it approved by High Court, Government is aware of this. Now 5 years later government comes out with a policy which supposedly favours the elder one and says that his deal with the younger one is invalid. And then they make some weird noises about how a PSU should be treated differently than a private entity, pls tell me why? Elder one is of course happy and repeats the lame line in SC 'We cannot do anything without government consent'. If he was aware of this why the hell did he sign the freakin deal 5 years ago, unless of course the intent was mala fide and he knew the government would back him when we wanted to dishonor the deal. SC will reprimand the elder one and the government, but the younger won’t get any gas.

The Mumbai Traffic: I started my career working in Nariman Point 4 and a half years ago, after some drunken moments at Ruby Tuesday I would sometimes take a cab home, I would usually reach home in 45 mins - 1 hr (in the normal post 8.30-9.00 pm traffic), worst case scenario it would take one hour fifteen mins max. Now it takes me 1 and a half hours minimum and the maximum till now has been 2 hrs 45 mins. Having made this point, I simply have 3 observations to make.

• Number of cars are increasing and road length is not.
• Number of potholes / constructions for metro / monorail / telephone cables / flyovers / any other random thing have exponentially increased, none of the proposed flyovers or rail projects look close to completion in the next 2 years
• No one in the BMC / State Government cares about the traffic.

The Merus and Megacabs have made travelling slightly more comfortable, but as usual the political rascals had to screw things up, so antiquated black and yellow cabs continue to fleece us, ricks still make the deafening sound. But who cares...the cab and rick drivers are an important vote bank, let them fleece the middle class who anyways never turns out in full strength to support us.

The Great Indian Political Drama: With the retarded leftists silenced, we will have a stable government for the next 5 years but,

• Sycophantic congressmen will still bypass ministers / relevant authorities and try to get in the good books of Soniaji and Rahulji
• Mayawati will still treat UP like her fiefdom and do what she wants, law and Supreme Court be damned
• BJP will continue fighting and gift the next few state elections (save Gujarat) to the Congress so that the whole cycle of extreme corruption can begin again (yes the BJP guys are also bad, but not even half as experienced as their congress counterparts)
• MNS will continue bashing up random people from time to time to get mileage; Sena will retaliate by bashing up more random and innocent people in a game of one upmanship.
• Karunanidhi and his family / cronies will try to make up for the loss of income in Delhi (due to a strict PM) by plundering TN and ensuring that the coffers are completely empty by the time the fat lady gets her chance to steal.
• Expect many more morchas / dharnas / marches / fasts for statehoods

Global Relationships: US will continue saying nice things to us and continue giving money to Pakistan. China will continue its aggressive stance and our fattu ministers and officials will continue saying its nothing to be concerned about. Aussies will continue bashing Indians both on and off the cricket field.

Sports: As usual the administrators lived up to their reputation and screwed everything possible. In cricket we had bad pitches to shady state board elections to random sackings of professional event managers. In Hockey the mystery about who controls the game in India still continues, on the field we managed to draw a few games against also rans like Belgium and China, I don’t think the big boys like Germany, Holland and Australia even wanna play with us. In Chess, the AICF duffer continued harassing Humpy, thank god Anand shifted to Spain so that he could concentrate on his chess and not internal squabbles. As usual Mr Kalmadi emptied the funds made available for the CWG and ensured that preparations are way behind schedule.

Ok..Now this is developing into a full on rant session, so I better go and get myself some food.For people mentioned in the blog (I know you don’t read it but anyways...) pls not to take offense uncle, I was only joking.