Aug 02

Remember the 1993 Bombay Riots?

As I wrote previously, the 1993 Bombay blast case trial has finally come to an end. All those convicted in that case have been sentenced. 12 have been given the death sentence and quite a few life sentences. All of us are happy. After 14 long years many of those responsible for that horrendous act on a Friday afternoon of March ‘93 have been brought to book. The TV news channels cannot stop talking about the verdict, more so because Sanjay Dutt was convicted. This is a good point to slightly divert from the topic of this post. Here’s an article by T V R Shenoy related to my previous post. It talks about how nobody is above the law and about the priorities of our gazillion news channels.

Getting back to the topic here, I was wondering if justice has really been done. Sure, justice has been done to all those who died in the blast that Friday. Justice has been done to their families and also to the over 700 people who were injured in the blasts. But any of you remember the Sri Krishna Committee report? Haven’t heard of it you say? Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. That report has been gathering dust in some corner of some government office, ignored by the governments since 1998. The media is oblivious to it, no wonder you don’t remember it.
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Aug 02

Maintaining traffic discipline in Delhi

Delhi to an outsider can seem to be a good place to drive. There are large roads, many of whom are maintained well (of course that vanishes when it rains, but that is a different issue). However, Delhi suffers from 2 curses:
1. Delhi has an extremely large number of vehicles, thus causing a major problems during peak time.
2. People in Delhi have the feeling that their time is extremely valuable, and wasting any of that time in traffic is an offense.

Why this talk about traffic? Well, for the past some time, the Delhi Government has been running radio ads calling for traffic sense and giving advice to people, and then having a small talk from the Chief Minister, Sheila Dixit about how it is so important to maintain discipline on the roads.
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