Power cut

This R. K. Laxman cartoon taken from 26 July, 2008's Times of India demonstrates the effect of power cut on our politicains. :)

Omar Abdullah's Lok Sabha Speech

I was really lucky to have been there in front of the tv when Omar Abdullah of the J&K National Conference delivered his impassioned speech on the floor of the Lok Sabha during the trust the vote over the Nuclear Deal on 22 July, 2008. He spoke with a tremendous confidence and command which not only displayed his experience of having been around for 10 years but also gave us a peek into his emotions. It was a short two minutes speech but of such eloquence and feverishness that it will be remembered for years to come.

In stark contrast the PM's speech was barely audible. He appeared nervous and amidst loud outbursts from the Oppositions demanding his resignation he chose to submit it in writing to the Speaker.

My ardent wish is to hear an Indian Prime Minister and President to speak with the kind of flaming enthusiasm Omar Abdullah exhibited in the Lok Sabha.

So impressed was I in those two minutes that I am putting here the entire speech for you to read.

Sir,

I am a Muslim and I am an Indian and I don't see any distinction between the two.

I see no reason why I as a Muslim have to fear a deal between India and the United States of America. This is a deal between two countries... it is a deal between, we hope, two countries that in the future will be two equals.

Sir, the enemies of Indian Muslims are not the Americans... the enemies of the Indian Muslims are not deals like this... the enemies of Indian Muslims are the same enemies that all the poor people of India face- poverty, hunger, unemployment, lack of development and the absence of our voice. It is that we are against... the effort that is made to crush our voice!

Sir, I am not a member of the UPA. I do not aspire the membership of the UPA. I am extremely unhappy with the way in which my friends in the Left have taken on the self impose positon of being the certifiers of who is secular and who is not.

Sir, until a few years ago I was part of this NDA... I was a minister with them and these same Left people considered me as a political untouchable. They considered me as an outcaste because I was a part of the NDA. Today these same Left people are telling me that all secular parties must unite with the BJP to bring down this government!

Sir, I had made the mistake of standing with them once on the question of Gujarat... I did not resign when my conscience told me to. And my conscience has still not forgiven me. I will not make the same mistake again.

(On being interrupted during his speech over the Amarnath issue Omar Abdullah retaliated by saying in Hindi)

Aapne Amarnath ka aarop lagaaya... aap ek jagah dikhaaein jahan kisi Kashmiri ne yatra ke khilaf baat ki ho!! Aap ek jagah dikhaayein jahan kisi Kashmiri ne kaha ho ki humein yatri nahi chahiye!! Aap ek jagah dikhaaein jahan pe yatriyon ke upar humla hua ho!!

Woh hamari zameen ka muddha tha. Hum apni zameen ke liye ladhe. Aur hum marte dum tak apni zameen ke liye ladhenge!

Lekin hum aapki tarah firkaparast nahi hain... hum aapki tarah communal nahi hain. Hum masjid nahi girate... hum mandir bhi nahi girate. Ek sau saal se bhi zyaada Amarnath ki yatra chalti aa rahi hai. Aur jab tak Kashmir mein musalmaan hain, Srinagar aur Amarnath mein aapki yatra chalti rahegi!

Main yeh baat daave ke saath keh sakta hoon ki in logon ki tarah meri siyasat badalti nahi hai- aaj is taraf kal us taraf. Humne secular forces ke saath haath milaaya hai aur milaate rahenge.

Jammu and Kashmir National Conferece will vote to support the motion moved by the Prime Minister.

Refresher course (3)

Here are two more refreshed posts for you:

1. Spin-a-yarn: Click on the title to go to the post. The original one was titled Story Behind a Picture and has been kept as it is below the new version.

2. From fat to slim (4): exercising: Click on the title to go to the post. Unlike my other posts where content was inadequate, here it was in plenty and so I decided to modify it.

Refresher course (2)

This is second in the series of my attempt at adding something more to a few of my old posts. The following are two of the updated versions.

1. Hoping against hope: Click on the title to go to the post. The original post was titled "Don't lose hope" and contained quotes, dialogues and poems on the same topic. I've changed it more or less. The old one is kept as it is below the new version.

2. Fun tag: Click on the title to see the post. As the title says this was a fun tag where each song was picked randomly to answer some questions. I have added comments for every song to make some meaning out of the nonsense. :p

Marathi Bible blogs

I am posting here the email Daddy wrote to publicize his new Marathi Bible blogs in order to publiciize it further. :)

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On 22 June 2005, the 104^th birth anniversary of my father, Ratnakar Hari Kelkar, and twenty years after his death, I had launched a web site www.bible-marathi.com on which his Greek-Marathi translation of the New Testament was placed in the public domain. This was a simple and an essentially static web site. For consulting just a couple of verses or reading a brief passage, an entire New Testament book had to be downloaded in pdf format. The text could not be copied easily. There was no guest-book or hit counter. The web site was hard to improve and manage. And since recently it had become very difficult even to open it.

On 22 June 2008, three years later, I decided to put the R H Kelkar Marathi New Testament on a new blog http://marathibible.wordpress.com and get all the extra advantages that the internet offers today. The Marathi Bible site has an all-new look now.

A hundred passages from the R H Kelkar Marathi New Testament have been made available here for fast access as jpeg images. You can select them individually from a list of topics given in English, or in groups like What Jesus Said, Paul’s Writings, Christian Living and so on. If you are looking for something specific, there is a search box in which you can type it in. If you wish to know what others have been reading, you can see the Top Ten Views.

For those with a more scholarly interest, the R H Kelkar Greek-Marathi Word-Book can be consulted on this site. And of course, the 27 individual books of the R H Kelkar Marathi New Testament are available here as complete pdf files for download and reading in their entirety. They are also available on a parallel site http://navakarar.wordpress.com.

What’s more, the all-new Marathi Bible site has plenty of space for your comments for which you do not have to log in. You can freely express yourselves and share your feelings with others.

-R R Kelkar

Refresher course (1)

I was going through my previous posts and found some of them lacking in content. I remembered how for these very posts a friend had chided me for just putting lyrics of songs or poems by Emily Dickinson and hence not having much value. I also recall getting all hot on hearing the criticism . What I didn't do then I've decided to do now, which is to refine some of my earlier attempts and the following two are the first in this series of "refreshed" posts.

1. Heartbreak
Click on the title to go to the new post. The original was titled "How is a heart broken?" and simply contained the words of Emily Dickinson's poem.

2. Mera kuch saamaan
Click on the title to go to the new post. I have retained the lyrics and the brief background of the song from the old post. But I have added a little bit more to by extrapolating on the theme of the song.

Sweet cherry

This post is dedicated to my niece Mandavi who recently turned 5 months old and came visiting us in Pune all the way from her home in Bangalore. Her journey began on a good note. My sister told me that Mandavi gave lots of people smiles at the Bangalore airport and in the plane.

The first time that I saw my niece in Pune was in this restuarant near my work place where my sister and brother-in-law had dropped in to have coffee. My first reaction was "ki yeh kitni badi ho gayi hai!" (since my last trip to Bangalore which was in March). She was sleeping very sweetly when I reached the restuarant but soon woke up and she gave an equally sweet smile! My day was made instantly. But there was more to come. My sister asked me hold the baby something which I hadn't done earlier on account of her being too small. Mandavi happily came in my arms. This brief milaap (meeting) had to be broken because I had to return to work. But the same evening my sister and Mandavi dropped in at home for a few hours. This time Mandavi was propped in my lap as I sat on my bed and she enjoyed my company. My sister happily told everyone from then on that there is a special connection between Maushi and niece.

The next day was rather hectic for Mandavi as we had invited many of our relatives for lunch. Everyone wanted to take over the baby. Surprisingly our baby didn't cry even once and braved it all. But when her father left Pune for a conference and Mandavi and my sister moved into our home it was enough for her. Finding a change of place and being unable to find her father around had her unsettled so much so that even when my sister left her alone with us for a few seconds Mandavi would start crying very badly. It made me feel so terrible as Daddy and my efforts in pacifying her went in vain. What made it worse for me was that I had hardly ever seen her cry like this. Still worse was when finally my sister managed to get her to fall asleep and as I closed a door (which I was worried would bang because of the wind) it creaked and Mandavi got up because of the noise and started crying.

In the following 2-3 days Mandavi had started bonding with Daddy. During the day she would nicely go into his lap and fall asleep. But there had to be pin drop silence or else she would get up. In the evenings we started taking her for a walk. It turned out that Mandavi is an outdoor child because she would just become peaceful what with there being a cool breeze and lots to see around. Just when we thought things had improved we had another round of visitors. My friends, Daddy's friends and relatives who wanted some personal time with Mandavi came over. It was only when the weekend came and it was just us that my niece could breathe easily.

I learnt a lot during that weekend. For example. How to change the baby's diaper? How to put her clothes on? Both these jobs are difficult when you are a novice and the baby is in an excited mood constantly moving her arms and legs. Most importantly I learnt talking to a 5 month old baby. This is a different ball game from talking to a 1.5 month old baby. You have to find tricks to keep the baby engaged since now the baby is mostly awake. You have to find songs that the baby loves but not overuse it as Daddy did because it spoils the effects. Mandavi's favourites are lakdi ki kathi, phoolon ka taaron ka and kukubara sits on an old gum tree. This involves some trial and error. Like one day we were listening to FM. Whenever in the song "Chak de phatte" would come Mandavi would start laughing. We have reserved slow songs and music to put her off to sleep and fast numbers when she is active. She loved it when I did some actions with the songs. My sister had come up with sing-songs of her own which she sang on particular times like massaging the baby and when giving her a bath so that the baby would know what activity was going to take place.

One day I caught her attention by reading out to her two pages of Jeffery Archer and another time from A Woman of Substance. I read out good passages in a tone as if I was reading to her Cinderella! Ofcourse later on she got bored and was more interested in tearing those books apart. :p

Then I invented this game in which I'd hide behind a cushion and ask "Maushi kahan hai?" and then I'd pop out from different sides everytime which kept Mandavi guessing and had her in splits.

The crowning glory of the second week of this trip was when we discovered that Mandavi had got two teeth on the lower side. They looked so cute and we felt immensely proud of her. My sister showered kisses on her and I told the news to all my friends. The sad part was that as a result of teething she was in a lot of pain. There were times when she cried a lot because of it. But we managed to keep her distracted mostly and when we couldn't Daddy would play this Korean music cd which was sure shot way of making her drowsy.

I took three days off from Wednesday to Friday which combined with the weekend gave me full 5 days at home. In the absence of any more disturbances and with Mandavi getting used to us time went smoothly. I will never forget how surprised I was to find her fall asleep on her own like a grown up while lying besides me. I always felt I had achieved something big when on a few occassions I managed to put her to sleep while carrying her around. It felt incredible watching her in my arms. I will always remember how when in her element Mandavi would make a lot of sounds as if she was talking to us. Once she practically gave us a lecture through her vocabulary of aaa's, laaaa's and eeee's. When she would be upset she would use the same words but with anger to register what my sister called "her complaint report".

Thanks to Mandavi's antics time just flew and soon 1 July arrived, the day Mandavi and my sister were to leave for Bangalore. I was forced to say bye to them an hour or two earlier than Daddy because I had to go to work. It felt funny to return home that day and not find my Sweet Cheery there. I realized then that my sister had been right in saying how these days that we spent with Mandavi would never come again. The fact is that our Kukubara will not be like this 5 month old baby again. Soon she'll be turning 6 months and by the time I'll know she would have become a year old. The best part is that each of these stages will come with there own new experiences and I am looking forward to that happening.