July.23 : The world seems to have stopped paying attention to Japanese politics as Prime Ministers come and go in quick succession — the present holder of office, Taro Aso, is the fourth in three years — and the perennial ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), in office for five decades except for a short break in the mid-90s, staggers on. Yet Mr Aso’s travails have a new edge stemming from his decision to call a general election on August 30 after the LDP lost heavily in local elections.

Oct.15 : Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accomplished a unique feat, with help from his Armenian counterpart Serge Sarkisian and Europe and the United States, in engineering an agreement with his neighbour burying the nearly century-old feud on whether the killing of Armenians towards the end of the Ottoman Empire amounted to genocide. Historical memories run deep, and the commemoration of a tragic event had become a matter of faith and nationalism for Armenians and their powerful diaspora of 1,5 million in the United States. Turkish analysts are hailing the accord, signed in Switzerland, as an event of the century, but it is the most significant development since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

"God is light

And we’re paying the electricity bill."

From Sayings by Bachchoo

To

The Rt. Hon. Tony Blair

Ex-PM-in-Waiting

Dear Tony,

I don’t suppose any British paper will give me the space for the following view. The UK media has maintained a conspiracy of misunderstanding, muddle and whistling in the dark when confronted with the most serious threat to British civil society in our times.

"Opiates are the religion of the masses!"

From Bachchoo’s Das

Sassural (Vol. I)

Augest.08 : Tony Blair’s press secretary said "we don’t do God". He thought it would sound eccentric if Tony began, as American Presidents do, to call on the grace of the Almighty. They praise God and sanction the ammunition.

"I cried because I had no shoes

Then I saw a girl with high-heeled Jimmy Choos

The sort of clogs I’d get if I was able

— er… I think something’s gone very wrong with this fable…"

From Proverbs of Perdition by Bachchoo

Sept.19 : Former u.s. President Jimmy Carter, reacting to the anti-Obama demonstration in Washington this weekend at which a million people gathered to protest against his reform of the American healthcare system, said America was still "racist". He went on to explain. Even after the civil war and civil rights, there were people who did not believe that a black American could or should govern the country.

"The old know the secret

The young pretend,

Seeing the beginning

Is seeing the end."

From Handwriting Practice

by Bachchoo

July.04 : If I feel like what Emperor Nero must have felt when the thought of transference to a minor key obsessed his evening as Rome was aflame at his feet, it is because while the world is in turmoil my thoughts turn to the Cambridge University lexicographers’ announcement that henceforth spelling duznt Maturr.

Oct.29 : By staging the cop drama in West Bengal, the Maoists have shown that apart from holding territory and causing mayhem, they can take on the government in the game of public relations. For weeks, the Union home minister, P. Chidambaram, has been spreading one message, that Maoists are murderers and the sympathy the urban intelligentsia has for the Maoist cause is misplaced.

"If centipedes wore shoes,

Shoe-makers would be rich".

From The Proverbs of

Bachchoo-ka-Adda

Nov.06 : "My name is Farrukh and I am a ganjeri!" — er... not really, but that’s the way one would introduce oneself if, on the lines of Alcoholics Anonymous, there was a parallel organisation called Ganjaheads Guiltridden, Stoners Unstoned or Charsis Incognito. There doesn’t happen to be such an organisation and with the state of the law as it is, neither can there be. If I turn up at an AA meeting and confess to my addiction, I haven’t put myself outside the law. Similarly, if I go to a Give-up-smoking-tobacco clinic to get nicotinised by therapy or whatever else, I am legal. But anyone who signs up to a group such as the above invented ones is liable to end up on a police list of "charsis charged with drug abuse".

April.15 : Two Features of the sordid Jagdish Tytler affair are particularly depressing and disgraceful. The first is the Congress Party's malodorous flip-flop. With brazen insensitivity, it first gave Mr Tytler a ticket for the Lok Sabha elections even though two years ago he had been forced to resign from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Cabinet because a judicial commission had indicted him for his role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots during which nearly 3,000 Sikhs were massacred in the nation's capital. At then the Congress developed cold feet and ordered Mr Tytler to withdraw his candidature (and meted out the same treatment to another 1984 accused, Sajjan Kumar). Why?

On the last day of April when the Lok Sabha was, as usual, plunged into bedlam, an angry friend asked me, "How is the conduct of these members of Parliament different from that of Bhajji on the cricket field?" When I answered that it wasn’t, he retorted, "If Bhajji can be punished, then why not recalcitrant MPs?" The next day both of us were elated because Speaker Somnath Chatterjee — his patience exhausted, as all his appeals for respect for Parliament’s dignity and decorum had fallen on deaf ears — named 32 trouble-makers and referred their case to Parliament’s committee on privileges.