It never rains but pours!!

BJP can certainly vouch for that now, misfortunes seem to have been lined up for them. For everyone's benefit, BJP is one of the two main national political parties in India. It all started during the Loksabha (Indian general elections) poll campaign earlier this year.

First, they had differences in nominating their prime ministerial candidate, then intra-party fighting between Arun Jaitley and BJP top brass, Varun followed up with his hate speech, to top it off, Advaniji kept going over his broken record 'Manmohan Singh is the weakest PM' and maybe he was hinting about his health, only God knows? To steal the limelight, there were disputes between CM and ministers in Karnataka and the state govt's inability to act against atrocities committed by SRS. Anyway, none of these incidents helped them to put up a fight against UPA or Congress in particular and hence they were shown the door by Indian electorate.

That loss must have hurt BJP for sure. So, after that we expected some re-grouping and re-building to save the image of the party among masses. Nope, it only got worse. Nobody was ready to take the responsibility or nail down the cause of the defeat. An open acceptance came later from the party lead and each one of the top leaders gave their own reason for BJP's defeat.

Commotion within the party after such a loss took things to a point of no return. Jashwant Singh, Yashwant Sinha and other top leaders came out in open against top BJP office bearers. They tried to resolve their internal disputes in public. The streak of such incidents is continuing till date with the latest one being Jashwant Singh's book on Jinnah. What is it that is causing so much issues in BJP? Lack of tolerance, I would say.

How many of these BJP leaders have read the book on Jinnah in full? If BJP announces that the views expressed in the book are Jashwant's personal views and they don't endorse that, then why expel him as a knee jerk reaction? On one hand, BJP claims itself to be a secular party but on the other hand, they couldn't tolerate someone claiming Jinnah to be secular in his book. When someone writes a book on a leader, they have a certain level of freedom to express their point of view. I haven't read the book but if BJP leaders have, why can't they express their reasons to expel him? They themselves keep reducing the chances of getting any votes from non-Hindu communities.

More importantly, all these issues keep detracting BJP from playing the role of a constructive opposition party. There are so many other important issues we have in hand. Several states are in drought, swine flu is spreading across, a few key state elections are coming up but BJP says "No sir, we are busy getting the title of Big Joke Party, please leave us alone".

From my school days - Final part

Ramu was from the state next to ours. He used to speak in English most of the time during classes. We weren't sure whether it was because he wasn't comfortable with the regional language or due to his practice in earlier school. In our school, though the rule was to speak in English all the time, nobody paid a scant regard to it. Only thing beneficial out of it was, teachers used to collect a fine of Rs.1 everytime they caught us conversing in the regional language.

All our teachers pointed Ramu as an example and asked us to speak in English like he did. As majority always wins, we made him talk in the regional language like all of us did ;). Other thing about Ramu was he was very interested in Maths among other subjects. He used to keep working on amateurish vedic mathematics during those days, tricks to quickly multiply numbers and similar things.

As we got along with each other, I started visting Ramu at his house during weekends or holidays. We started spending a lot of time together and all three of us bonded into a close unit. And it continued this way till the end of our tenth grade. After that, we decided to pursue further education in a different school. Due to a gap in communication during the long holidays and due to different advices from relatives and friends, Naresh and I ended up in different schools for the next year. With that, our wonderful 4 years together came to a temporary halt. Ramu joined the same school as I did and at least I had one known friend in my new school.

From that point till date, each of our lives have run in different directions. Each of us took a diverse path in our career and life. During this time, we came across a lot of new friends during our college days and we got introduced to each others' friends. Sure, we added a one or two to our close gang, to write about them, will be a blog for another day. And though its been nearly 5 years since all three of us met, we keep in touch through occasional conference calls. None of us are in our home country now, and our trips to our homes don't seem to overlap at all. But, I am sure the day will come when we will get a chance to remember, rejoice and re-live those fun filled memories.

Yours

Vj

From my school days...

It was the first day of my 6th grade in school. I did all my schooling from kinder garden till the 10th grade in the same school. Though there wasn't a big environment change when I moved into my 6th grade, it sure changed my set of friends. Till my 5th grade, I have had friends, but none very close or none whom I could recall now. It will be pretty much a different guy every year, next to whom I happen to sit.

But in the sixth grade, students from three sections of 5th grade were merged into two. So you know how it is during the school days, guys from the same section tend to stick together, they hesitate to group with guys from a different section. This kind of stuff goes on, at least for some time. And there are interesting little fights that go on when such a merger happens. Like, who will be the winner of arm-wrestling between B section champion and C section champion, who will get the first rank between C section topper and A section topper. As silly as it may look now, as serious it was at that time.

So, when this merger happened, I used to observe a few of the new guys in silence. One guy, in the name of Naresh, in particular caught my attention. There was this guy who was very silent, I mean, I hadn't seen anyone in my school like him till that time. Somehow, I started to develop a liking for him, for the reason he was silent, calm and sturdious. I started talking to him at every chance I got. I used to move to his bench during classes and we used to discuss together about the subjects. And, like that, it continued.

The bond started thickening and we became very good friends during the seventh grade. As we can choose our places at the beginning of the year, we chose to sit next to each other on the first row (we were nerds) in 7th grade. And we pretty much share our entire time in school together studying, playing, teasing and doing all sorts of things a 7th grader would do.

And after a few days, a new guy joined our class. His name was Ramu.K.

(to be continued...)

PS: Names have been changed in the story.

என் தோழி என் காதலி என் மனைவி

தோள் மீது தோள் வைத்து தொடர்கதை பேச

தோழி யாகிறாள் என் உயிர்த் துணைவி

மடி மீது தலை சாய்த்து கவலைகள் எல்லாம் தீர

காதலி யாகிறாள் என் கண்ணின் மணி

என் மீது கண் வைத்து தனக்கும் மேலாய் எனைக் காக்க

மனைவி யாகிறாள் என் மனதின் மகாராணி