Snapshots

N Chandrababu Naidu may be losing his flock to the Congress with alarming rapidity, but his penchant for computers is finding heavyweight takers in BJP-ruled Gandhinagar. Last week, on instructions from Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel, the Gujarat Government started a computer course for ministers. And after grasping the basics, like the fact that a mouse isn8217;t just a rodent, some of the ministers are even developing an interest in the course. But this new-found love for cyberia has had an unusual fallout.

In its determination to be more loyal than the king, the Gujarat School Education Board decided to discard the old system of sending the higher secondary science stream results to schools and, instead, chose to put them out on the Net. What the Board forgot was that thousands of students lived in small towns, where there were no Net connections. Even in cities like Ahmedabad, anxious students either couldn8217;t access the Board website, or all they found there was a list of toppers. Angrystudents and parents, naturally, denounced the Board for indulging in 8220;a publicity stunt.8221; If the situation didn8217;t turn ugly, it was only because someone in the Board remembered to send the results to district education offices.

Hot Raid

At A dank theatre on the outskirts of Jammu early this week, something strange was happening. About a dozen scribes from various national and local dailies were glued to the 35mm screen watching Woman in Paradise, a regular movie with lots of hot stuff from a skin flick spliced into it. And the hosts were the Jammu Police top brass. The overzealous cops had raided Amba theatre on the city outskirts and sealed it for screening scenes from a blue film. And to ensure that the raid got the coverage it deserved, Jammu topcops decided to show the 40-minute movie to the hacks on the crime beat. The official explanation for this unusual form of entertaining journalists was that the police wanted to show the fourth estate how strong its case was against the theatreowners. Well, that was one hot raid.

Reunion Time

A well-known Bengali saying can be thus translated: 8220;The wild are better off in the forest; the children in their mother8217;s laps.8221; An animal born in the circus can hardly be described as wild8217;, but animal lovers in Vadodara rejoiced when a local court ordered that an Asiatic lion cub 8212; confiscated by the forest dept 8212; be returned to the Apollo Circus, from where his mother and he had been borrowed8217;. Laxman the cub had made headlines in Feb when the police raided a farmhouse outside Vadodara and found him being exhibited, in violation of wildlife rules, at a birthday party. Since then, he8217;s been at a park near Gandhinagar. Soon, when the red tape is untangled, there8217;ll be a mother and child reunion to touch all hearts.

Out Of Colour

Here8217;s a quintessentially Indian story from a village in Maharashtra8217;s Solapur district. On an inspection of a primary school, the Chief Executive Officer of the Zilla Parishad walked into a classroom tocheck whether the children were being taught the basics. Who in the class, he asked, could tell him the colours of the national flag? Some 30 faces stared at the official, as the teacher hemmed and hawed. After an embarrassing pause, a girl raised her hand. The colours, she said tentatively, were white, red and green. By now the official was really worried. He then turned to the teacher: You tell the class what the colours are. Pat came the reply. The colours are orange, white and green. Are you sure it is orange and not saffron, asked the bewildered official. No sir, it is orange, said the teacher, before adding that there was a fourth colour 8212; black of the Ashoka Chakra. The officer, working to minimise the school dropout rate, decided to drop out of this class.

PM8217;s Shadow

We don8217;t know if the BJP-coalition will come back to power after the elections, but Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee8217;s Private Secretary and member of the PM8217;s extended foster family, Shakti Sinha, obviously is anoptimist. He has decided to stick it out in his current job, and hopes to continue doing so after the elections, instead of taking up the prestigious London assignment he got just a couple of weeks ago, that of the economic minister in the Indian High Commission.

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But what if the BJP doesn8217;t come back to power? Will Sinha go back to being just another faceless bureaucrat in some ministry, after his current exalted status? Well, he could always stay on as the Private Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition, a post held by IAS officers, and one that Sinha lorded over when Vajpayee was PM. With such devotion to his boss, Sinha8217;s clearly Private Secretary No. 1.

Call For War

If you hear the World Cup-inspired audio cassettes flooding the market, you8217;d think Azza8217;s boys were preparing for World War III not that they have much ammunition for even the battle that lies ahead. Here8217;s one lyric, very AR Rahman but without his class, to whet your curiosity. 8220;Ek sena ladti hai sarhad par, aur ek tummaidan mein, tum dono ko sub logon ka salaam hai.8221;

There are not only exhortations, there are also words of inspiration 8212; 8220;Tere peechhe mandir ki shakti, tere peeche masjid ki taaqat8221; 8212; and a warning, too: 8220;Dekhna tiranga jhuke nahin.8221; So, what8217;s behind this explosion of such war-like sentiments? Before you rush to a shrink, check out what one lyricist has to offer in we hope self-defence: 8220;World Cup jin haathon mein hogi, duniya mein unki izzat hogi8221;. Nice thought, but tell that to Bill Clinton!

8212; Virender Kumar in Ahmedabad; Rohit Bhan in Jammu; Sunil Jain in New Delhi; Madhav Gokhale and Anubha Charan in Pune; Sumana Mukherjee in Vadodara

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Snapshots

Net BluesN Chandrababu Naidu may be losing his flock to the Congress with alarming rapidity, but his penchant for computers is finding he...