Mumbai Underground: Greener than thou

Consensual dissent
The deputy director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research, Dr R S Sharma, got a bitter taste of women’s wrath at a recent conference arranged in the city to discuss surrogacy. He was discussing ICMR guidelines that stated that the husband’s consent was compulsory for a married woman to enter into a surrogacy contract, when a woman doctor questioned the reason for this clause. “Don’t you seek your husband’s permission before joining a job?” he replied, in jest. His light-hearted comment attracted an immediate uproar from the conference with several women doctors standing up in mock protest and getting support from male doctors present in the room too. The flustered Dr Sharma finally joked that he would write a letter to the parliament seeking to change that clause and, to calm them down, also promised a well drafted bill on assisted reproductive techniques.

Cyber ‘jungle’
The latest government department to be targetted by cyber criminals is the Maharashtra forest department. A website in the name of ‘Maharashtra Forest Department’ is available on the net with URL  http://mhforest.evenweb.com and was allegedly propagating that on payment of a certain amount, citizens can get several posts in the department without going through the screening process. The website even had the official logo of the forest department. Once the forest officials got the news of this website, it put out a notice warning citizens against ‘the false publicity being propagated by the said website’. The website has been taken off by the website administrator after complaints. Earlier this year, hackers claiming to be from Pakistan had made the MMRDA’s MMR-Environment Improvement Society’s (MMR-EIS) website their favourite target. The homepage and other links associated with the MMR-EIS had been hacked several times by this group, who pasted their names on every link. The IT dept of MMR-EIS had to repeatedly change the settings and finally managed to gain their website back.

Swachh marketing
The change in scenario at the state-level politics has caused much dismay between the alliance partners at the BMC also. Recently, a senior Shiv Sena leader took offence when someone praised PM Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, as the first initiative by senior leaders with the subject of cleanliness. The senior Sena leader said, “All these efforts have been taken by senior leaders of the Sena in the past. It is just that the Sena has not been marketing its initiatives like the BJP. It is like we have handed over our ideas to them, for them to market and seek praise.”

A DG on song
Director General of Shipping Gautam Chatterjee was the chief guest at the Seaman’s Unity Day Celebrations hosted by the National Union of Seafarers of India at the Indian Sailors Home in Masjid Bunder on Thursday evening. Chatterjee, however, did not simply deliver a speech and hail the return of seven Indian sailors from the clutches of pirates, he was also one of the musical main events. While professional singers had been hired for the evening, Chatterjee surprised everyone by taking to the stage with a rendition of ‘Choo kar mere mann ko kiya tu ne kya ishaara’, in a voice that boomed all the way over to P D’Mello Road.