If familiarity really does breed fondness, CP is in real danger of falling madly in love with Mahinda Rajapaksa;he seems to keep doing things that cannot be ignored.Though he had to return, jet-black moustache droopy and quivering, from Oxford recently, the lion of Ceylon still roars as loud as ever to protect his kingship against the slightest upstart challenge.With the suffocation of the mainstream media well under way, King Mahinda has turned his eyes to the next enemy: posters.Over the last few months, security forces have arrested about two dozen people,many university students, for pasting and handing out posters touching upon issues such as workers' rights and the privatisation of higher education. One of the offending posters was for a play titled 'An Uncertified Death' and had the line 'Whoever comes to power whenever, uncertified deaths across the country'.All the world may be a stage, but the Lion will have none of it, it seems.
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Almost a month after Open magazine's explosive exposé, the Radia-media battle is far from over. While the first set of tapes implicated known journalists, including Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi, Outlook posted 800 new tapes, sending jitters down the spines of the high and mighty of the Indian media.Right after the first set of tapes was released, the entire big media region in India zipped their lips, with nary a peep even from commentators who are all fire and brimstone every time a government official or a nonmedia person for that matter is implicated even remotely in some vague wrongdoing. Great show of 'solidarity',people! We must stick together, and nothing must come in the way of our revenue, NDTV, meanwhile, had set up a debate (read: desperate face-saving measure) in its studios. To say that Dutt bungled it up big-time would be an understatement. Her protestations about leading Niira Radia on might have been believable, had she not behaved like the goddess of 'political journalism' and shot her mouth off constantly. Sanghvi, on the other hand, has reportedly been demoted, but he claims that the change in position had nothing to do with 'Radiagate'. He is currently regaling readers with inane food-related tweets from exotic locations.
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Not to be outdone, media houses in Pakistan also went cuckoo in their own special way (but of course!). A few days after the first Wikileaks cables were released and the Real Powers-that-be-in-the-General Headquartersin-Rawalpindi had gone into damage control overdrive, suspicious-sounding reports were given pride of place in the extreme-rightwing Nawa-e-Waqt and The Nation; and just about everybody else jumped onto the bandwagon.Urdu daily Jang, English daily The News and TV channel Geo News reported that US diplomats had referred to India's army chief as an 'inept geek'; had said that India had a major role in terrorism in Waziristan and the nationalist unrest in Balochistan; India's army high-command had 'close ties' to the affron brigade; Pakistan's chief of army staff 's tenure extension was welcome; and, finally, that,the ISI chief smelled like roses. Okay, so CP made the last one up, but what difference does it make?It took a media blog, Café Pyala, to first call them out, followed by The Guardian's Declan Walsh. The next day, 'profuse' apologies, plagiarised editorials and retractions' followed. It turns out that the 'Daily Mail Pakistan' was the first one to 'plant' the fake Wikileaks story which Online picked up. The Daily Mail 'editor-in-chief ' later patted himself on the back for a job well done (faking leaked cables is a lot of effort!) with claims such as how India's establishment is not as 'milkwashed' as the liberal, beghaerat bloggers of Pakistan would have us believe. Oh, sir, CP's heart gardengarden ho gaya at your display of patriotism, and if facts have to be fudged in the process, well, what goes of anyone's father? CP cannot help but feel sorry for Raj Thackeray. Assaulting non-Maharashtrians is just something the bechara has to do to earn a living (likely under pressure to keep the family business going). Raj is at heart an artsy type: photographer,painter, cartoonist and, like so many others in Bombay –ooops, slip of the tongue, CP means Mumbai, of course – a film fanatic. Only natural then that Raj, combining business and pleasure, would want a private, pre-release screening of 332 Mumbai to India, based on a real incident where a Bihari man hijacked a bus to highlight the MNS's roughing up of … gulp, let's try that again … to highlight the MNS's defence of Maharashtrian honour. But these filmwallahs,with typical filmy arrogance, are refusing, hiding weakly behind the Censor Board's green light. So Raj took action,sending his goons to blacken and vandalise the film's posters,clearly an effective lesson in good manners. But the real-life drama soon developed more twists and turns than a solid masala flick with Raj swearing off any interest in the film and director Mahesh Pandey saying he'd already screened it for MNS vice-president Vageesh Saraswat as well as apologised for the North Indian protagonists calling the city 'Bambai'. CP hopes Uncle Bal throws together a snappy cartoon about yet another Maharashtrian victory.