While engaging in a favourite pastime, Chhetria Patrakar was even more entertained by all the fuss about idiots this past month, which took up even more ink than usual. Chetan Bhagat, whose book Five Point Someone is the basis of the Raju Hirani-directed film 3 Idiots, complained that he had gotten no credit for the "story". Evidently we Southasians are so taken with this feud that even officials at the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development felt compelled to comment, to the effect that the newest amendments to the Copyright Act, strengthening the rights of authors to collect royalties, might not bring relief to Bhagat. The latter will now also have to go after the Kathmandu weekly Nepali Times, which created its own version of the three idiots – Pushpa Kamal Dahal ('Prachanda') of the Maoists, Jhala Nath Khanal of the CPN (UML) and Girija Prasad Koirala of the Nepali Congress – who have been collectively bumbling around the country's constitution-writing process like three bulls in a single china shop.
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In true filmi style, a bizarre crossborder deportation by the Pune police of a Nepali citizen studying at the Film and Television Institute of India, on apparently trumped-up charges of 'terrorism', got the media very interested indeed – more so because journalists were told to keep out. (Nothing raises journalistic hackles faster.) The student, Neetu Singh, who was allowed to return and continue her education on condition that she not speak to the media, has long been estranged from her husband Amresh Singh, a mercurial politician lately associated with the Nepali Congress but allegedly servicing all parties including the Maoists and the Indians. Not that the Indian police have not in the past delivered supposedly wayward adult daughters and sons to complaining families on flimsier pretences, but terrorism charges make this story all the more entertaining (and frightening). However, if Amresh thinks this is a far-fetched supposition, he has his own theory to explain the allegation: "This is an overall conspiracy by a group that doesn't want to see the completion of the peace process, and doesn't want to allow the drafting of the new constitution." Really? Really.
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