Dot Kaun ?

A writer's block is more painful than normal constipation. While there are many churans and molasses to loosen the blockage in the gastro-intestinal tract, a thought blockage has very few laxatives. One of the toughest jobs, I find, is to come back and complete an unfinished blog entry.Many of my blog entries thus have to undergo abortion owing to the callousness of this mental obstinacy.The idea of this post was to pen some quick reviews of the websites of the leading regional parties and never has the word quick been so humiliated. But as they say, better late than never, so here it is...........


Samajwadi Party (http://www.samajwadipartyindia.com) : Its the great visionary party which has correctly identified English as the root cause of underdevelopment in India and has promised us that they will do all in their power to root out this evil.
And Computers ....oh my God....that wretched thing which is gobbling up all Indian jobs......Probably the Indian IT industry generating 60 billion USD is actually a major ISI ploy to destabilise our economy. Thank God for Mulayamji else we were all headed for certain doom. The brilliant manifesto also highlights the plight of bullocks and cows who have lost their ploughing jobs to the mean tractors and are thus ending up in the slaughter house. Now this is what we call tackling the recession by the horns. Meanwhile the General Secretary of the party Mr.Sanjay Dutt has been warned by a District Magistrate for making amorous advances towards the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Mrs.Dutt, his staunchest supporter meanwhile not surprisingly is busy buying clothes in London.
The homepage of their website correctly shows the socialists of today showing the right way to the socialists of yesteryears:

Nothing of much interest within the website unless Jaya Bachchan's phone number interests you. The photo gallery has some nice quips though. For e.g one photograph shows Mr.Yadav flanked by two armed commandoes and has the heading "Words of Wisdom" with the caption "Samajawadi Party will never concile with any other party".
It does not matter that there is no word such as concile in English. He is against the whole language anyway.


Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (http://dmk.in/) - With a sincere urge to know the reason why Mr.Karunanidhi always wears dark glasses, I googled for it. The probabilities expressed ranged from a permanently rotating eye ball to a venereal disease because of which he cannot face the world eye to eye. Utter nonsense, my point is, why would a politician need a venereal disease to not be able to face the world ?
Anyway the homepage of their website seemed pretty boring and unsophisticated till something caught my attention. In much the same way that the Ramsay Brothers would have calligraphed their latest flick 'Chudail ki Dysentry', the wise designers of the DMK website too have added a similar link that reads 'Midnight Arrest' in a font seemingly dripping with blood. But the fun is when you click the link. I would not spoil your fun by describing it in words. Have a GO yourself and experience the maturity of the world's largest democracy and yes do try clicking the Skip option in the page.
The remaining sections within the website were completely outdated or irrelevant with the election manifesto of 2004 being the latest link in the chronological links.
As regards their policies, well that is not important as long as the Sri Lankan government is fighting the LTTE.


Bahujan Samaj Party (http://bspindia.org): This was the first image that greeted me on their website

Can you blame the chap Afzal Guru now ?

I was initially impressed by the honesty displayed by the party in the website when I saw downward arrows against the Leadership and Achievement links. But I soon realised that the arrows only meant the presence of more links rather than being indicative of their performance in those areas.
The party highlights a very important demographic fact below:

As you can see, according to BSP, there are billions of Untouchable poor people in the country. Now since the Iron Lady is not to be questioned unless one wants to be turned to Rust,I did some elementary mathematics. Considering that the entire population of India is around 1.2 billion, it would mean that all of us Indians would need to be Untouchables to fulfil this observation. In a sense that is quite a progressive thought which would lead to huge savings in the defense expenditure of the country because of the simple reason that No One can Touch Us now.
The website per-se is quite okay. There is all the information you want as long as the information concerns Mayawati. Rest are all 'Comming Soon'.


Biju Janata Dal - No websites. After they cunningly dumped the BJP, they are now extremely wary of any web-designers.


All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (http://www.aiadmkallindia.org) - I wonder why a regional party, with a presence in only one out of 28 states, needs to have the 'All India' tag in its name !!But then I guess the party cadres have always been motivated by bigger sized entities.

Another boring and very poorly designed website. There was such a lack of material in the site that I actually opened their manifesto and would you believe what I found in it :

Jaya Ho...Jaya Ho...!!!!


Shiv Sena (http://www.shivsena.org) Bala Saheb needs a nail-cutter immediately. The sharp finger jab at you from the homepage is not very welcoming to say the least but then what place does decorum have in Shiv Sena anyway. Again a very rudimentary website in terms of content with the picture of two Thackerays taking nearly the entire page. Four of the five links do not work and the only so called material in the site is in the form of embedded You Tube videos. What is more surprising is that the website is not in Marathi !! Some MNS workers came to know of this and damaged a few cyber cafes in protest.


Janata Dal(Secular) (http://www.janatadalsecular.org.in)
Led by a man who has the unique capability of falling asleep even in his sleep, this party is really fighting for survival in this election.

A pretty professional website though you may initially confuse it for that of a restaurant but then on second thoughts, I think, all politicians have a great talent for cooking; the common ingredient in whatever they dish out is shamelessness of course.

A visit to the Join JD(S) section would clearly eliminate you and a large chunk of population from their membership because each such aspirant must be a 'habitual wearer of hand-spun and handwoven khadi'. Now that is what we call wearing patriotism on your sleeve.The entire website has a distinct and all pervading green and a little analysis has confirmed that the colour actually started transforming to its present tinge soon after the BJP government came into power in Karnataka.

Thats it guys. Let the dance of democracy continue. I hear that Rakhi Sawant wants to judge the show and marry whoever wins it.

So who takes the credit ?

For months now, I have been hearing of the Economic Depression and Credit Crunch. As financial crunch and me go back many moons, I never paid much attention to it until I heard politicians committing billions of dollars to help resolve the crisis. I wondered whether I could be a beneficiary too if I presented my case well enough and thus I started reading ........

The following is a short summary of a few terms which can help laymen like me understand what the hoopla is all about :

Sub-prime crisis: This is the mother of all reasons. People bought new homes with borrowed money, like most do. Then they did not like repaying like most don't. Banks wrapped up these loans in nice packages and resold them other banks and financial institutions. This concept of packaging actually originated in India as shown here and was silently plagiarized by the Americans.
What goes up must come down.
Yes brothers, this sad truth applies to economy as well.
So the prices of houses which had sky-rocketed fell big time and soon the whole world realised that the United States of America had sold shit to them.......once again.
One of the first to be crumble was the British bank, Northern Rock. Couldn't have chosen a more inappropriate name I say.

Fannie May and Freddie Mac - No, they are not McDonald Burgers. Actually two naughty banks who gave money to anyone and everyone who wanted to own a home. Yes even Barbie doll houses were financed. After all America is known to help build homes worldwide. Take architectural marvels of Iraq such as this for example.


Lehman Brother's Diwalia Bumper : It took 159 years for the collapse of this giant financial institution as they filed for bankruptcy in October 2008. In India, anything started jointly by brothers usually lasts till the brothers get married and thus such situations never arise.
On the day, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the worth of its shares had dropped 90% from its previous day close. Just ten more percent and I could have bought the company myself. Now before you start heaping praises at me for my business acumen, I must humbly say that I actually spent four of my formative years (read Engineering) in the state of Gujarat and we all know that when a Gujarati says he is going to the market to buy rice and oil, he actually means commodity trading in the stock market.
Okay now you can heap the praises.

Merrily Lynched : Within a day, Merril Lynch, another financial bigwig, was taken over by the Bank of America in what Wikipedia describes as 'distressing circumstances'. Just for your trivia, Merryl Lynch was ranked #1 by Forbes for 'stock picking and estimate accuracy' in 2008 and #3 by the Wall Street Journal in a similar category. It also won the Best Research House of the Year Award. How profound!
If only the Lehman guys had spent some time researching a good buyer for themselves. They finally landed with a company called Nomura which means No-Head in quite a few Indian languages.

Tata Bye Bye AIG - American Insurance Group. Wow ! Thats the only expression I have for this magnificently employee friendly company. Imagine this. You belong to the worst performing department of your company and your misadventures have caused colossal losses to the company to the extent that 80% of the company stake had to be sold to the Government for the company to remain solvent. In any other company, you would have been fired with Oxy-Acetylene up your soft posterior orifice.
But not in AIG. This marvelous company, which got Rs 8500 crore from the government to settle its bad debts actually paid the employees responsible for this downfall a very small sum of Rs 825 crore as bonus !! Now that is what I call a Dream Company.

Millions of people worldwide have been left unemployed as a cascading effect of the gross incompetencies of these so called Financial Gurus. Whole countries such as Iceland, Latvia and Bulgaria are going down under the impact of this crisis which is the worst since the Great Depression of the 30's. The figures in the stimulus packages cause temporomandibular joint dislocations (My sister is a doctor you see!).

But this is one laughter where there is no joke.

Happy Easters to all of you. The Lord would do well to resurrect one more time.