I wrote this for The Times of India. The original story is here : http://bit.ly/aFTxH5

The chief minister of Maharashtra may soon declare a holiday for a new celebration, the ‘Washing Lenin Festival’. Befuddled? So were we. But blame it on Ritiesh Deshmukh. A few days ago, the actor tweeted, ‘’Most families don’t wash their Dirty Lenin in public’’. Don’t castigate Deshmukh. After all he does have political genes and they were sure to affect him some day.

If you are famous then your tweets have more followers. Only a skilled Piped Piper can lure the tweeple over a cliff and into a stormy sea. And celebrity Twitter followers are often at sea with their spello-studded tweets.

Virender Sehwag can be quite cryptic online. The cricketer regularly posts musings about life and love on the forum, but his followers were taken aback when he once posted: ‘’Living is very simple..loving is simple.. wining is also simple..laughing is too simple..but, being SIMPLE is very difficult!’’. Did he mean whining or wining as in ‘wining and dining’? It has to be one of these two connotations since the Indian cricketers excel at both these W words only. The verb winning, on the other hand, does not figure in their vocabulary. It is only mentioned sotto voce, so it cannot possibly figure in Sehwag’s tweet.

With Twitter going mainstream, every side heroine and spot boy seems to have a real-time page of their own. While some outsource this work to their PR army, others prefer connecting with their fans themselves. The celebrities that choose to update their own profiles without any interference from those boring image-correcting middlemen are every eavesdroppers’ delight. Every time that hidden flaw surfaces, fans feel more connected to their idol. They curse the media for sanitising grammatical errors and spellos that their idols make.

Today, Twitter is saturated with bigwigs scaling a vast range from the wannabes to the comebacks and the ones ruling the roost. Every time they take a false step, their followers are adventitiously amused.

Sameera Reddy who is learning how to ride a bike was so excited that her tweet was full of vigour. “Its invigourating! What an amazing sense of freedom on the road!Graduated to a pulsur 2day!’’. After landing at the international airport in Mumbai, and in a vulnerable state of mind she posted, “Landed at intl airport-can’t change ppls opinion of Mumbai-Overheard some foriegners say it’s smelly & dirty! It’s home & I’m glad to be bck!’’.

Another entertainer who doesn’t cease to amuse is Chunkay Punday, sorry, Chunkey Pandey. His last gem read, ‘’Started d match, we’r feilding. actually i am also handling commentry along with the feilding ’’.

Yuvraj Singh had people guessing with his arcane words when he tweeted, ‘’Can’t sleep too excited to go to windies ! Goin to the gym chocalate for breakfast yummyy! Oh by the way goodmornin everyone rise and shine!’’.

The verified and very official account of Shilpa Shetty, a dance addict, wished her ‘tweetos’ a “Happy Independance Day’’.

Her contemporary Ayesha Takia has diets on her mind and it shows in her tweets. She once tweeted, “My spot boy immidietly said ,madam neeche raste pe dus rupey ka do milega,400 rupey mein party!! Hahahahaahahhaahha!! How much v hav laughd’’. Also wine is on her mind and is reflected in this tweet, “Farhan has been lighting OUDH (agar wood) in the house!!smells devine!!if only v cud send smell tweets id send it 2 all of u!!hahahahahah!’’.

Shahid Kapoor experienced a meteoric rise on the popularity ladder after he tweeted, “Sonams bday today ….. Wonderful girl .. With the sweetest smile … Wishing her good luck n good health .. Sure she will do her parents’’.

But everyone’s favourite entertainer on Twitter, Salman Khan who is being himself, has unwittingly revealed his love for the apostrophe (which incidentally is a symbol for belonging to). “Y am I not tweeting for the past 3 day’s?’’ he asks his followers. All one can say is that hope’s that’s all’s well’s that end’s well.

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Everyday I walk very close to this fence. It is usually not as naked as it looks in this photograph, which I took on Independence Day.

I was so excited not to see the saliva + paan mix on it that I decided to take a photo.

I was immediately questioned about my intentions by a cop. Told him why. He was very amused.

Too bad the fence of the BMC, the richest civic body in the country, is in such a sorry state.

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A link to the original article:
A woman cop could book you for jumping signals

You may notice a rather petite looking traffic police constable in neat khakis furiously blowing a whistle and making hand signals amidst heavy traffic. The hefty Mumbai traffic constable unit that combats pollution, dust and rowdy drivers, now has been infused with 15 fresh female recruits. For the first time in the city, women will man traffic signals, shattering another glass ceiling in a male-dominated profession.

Previously confined indoors and assigned duties that didn’t require physical exertion, the female members of the traffic police monitored CCTV cameras at the Worli headquarters of the Traffic Police. To take up the new challenge successfully, they were trained in the various nuances of traffic control. This involved learning nine arm signals and how to deal with traffic offenders, face-to-face.

For 23-year-old constable Anita Haribahu Gajare, standing for long hours on the road, facing the travails of nature on the job can be physically draining. She credits this ability to her tough upbringing as a farm hand on her parent’s cauliflower farm in Ahmednagar. Worli’s Cadbury junction, Hughes Road and Chowpatty bandstand were the first traffic signals where female constables have been posted since last month. Joint commissioner of police (traffic), Vivek Phansalkar confesses that the Home Minister’s instructions to fill up the 30% reservation for women in the police force prompted them to take this step. “The girls have been trained for a year and will also be learning how to deal with people on the job from their male colleagues,’’ says Phansalkar. And if male road rage becomes too overpowering for them to handle, then they can always fall back on their male counterparts for assistance. “When both men and women are getting the same salary, then they should also fulfill similar duties,’’ he says. Although Thane and Pune have active women traffic cops on the road, Mumbai will see them for the first time.

At the Chowpatty bandstand signal, 26-year-old traffic constable Priti Suresh Changan doesn’t hesitate to pull up male drivers. Her male colleague acknowledges that a lady cop can deal with errant female drivers more tactfully than they manage to do. Changan will soon be taught how to use the breathalyzer to deal with female drunken drivers too.  The only thing that seems to be worrying the new female patrol is sun burn on duty. Pandit Kale, assistant commissioner, Mumbai Traffic Police says they have seen a steady increase in applications from women ready to man traffic signals.

A few points I’d like to make:

• I don’t know how many men would offer a woman police a bribe.
• Wish they’d have a different uniform from the male cops.  And better shoes. I saw Anita stand barefoot the other day.
• Their male counterparts told me women won’t last on the road. ”They’re worried about their complexion and don’t want to turn as dark as us,” said one cop at the police station.
• Never understood what the traffic police’s duties are… Some only catch people for lane crossing and arm signal once in a while. They’ll not bother if any other rules are being broken, even if they are in front of their eyes. Sad.

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The bus must've stopped, for sure.

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It was my Twitter friend who introduced me to chatroulette.com, the new internet sensation and brainchild of 17-year-old Russian student Andrey Ternovskiy. It’s a simple enough contraption — no registration, no user names or passwords, just cam-to-cam conversations at the click of a mouse. The disconcerting part: the person in the webcam opposite you could be anyone anywhere in the world, one of the 1.5 million strangers who visits the free service everyday.

Journalistic obligations compelled me to connect, with some amount of trepidation. It isn’t easy being transported face-to-face into a random stranger’s domain. But it had to be done.

A few clicks had me reeling through a kaleidoscope of humanity. I met teen boys looking for boobs, a white-haired citizen breaking into a song, a gang of cheerleaders doing a shimmy, rooms of inebriated people grinning, and talking cameras pointed at pillows. With every consecutive ‘Next’ click, I came upon strange people talking strange languages, armed with props, puppets and pets; disguised with masks, wigs, sunglasses and superhero costumes. I was transported to bedrooms, dormitories, offices, kitchens and dark corners.

Two boys, tucked under a blanket, on a bed with the flag of Turkey in the background asked me where I was from. They then came closer to the camera and whispered, ‘Can you do webcam show?’ Obligingly, I swayed my head and started singing Strange Love. A few seconds later, I was singing to a blank black screen. I had been nexted.

Nexting is a verb. You get nexted when the stranger on the other side brutally clicks the ‘New game’ or ‘Next’ button immediately after seeing you (I later realised the boys were looking for a different kind of show). Mutual predilection keeps roulette exchanges going until one party decides to depart, and to my consternation, most of my conversations lasted for a fleeting few seconds, as I was ‘nexted’ by 16 people in two minutes.

Rejection hurt. It felt like I had lost my mojo and muchness. Girls didn’t want to talk to me, the boys asked me to put up performances and racists disconnected after I told them I was from India. And then there were those who I nexted. Like every chatroom, this site streams its share of sleaze from around the world. It’s a flasher’s hotspot and you may chance upon a macho type doing a full monty and other unmentionable acts. Statutory warning: To avoid embarrassment it is advisable not to chatroulette at work.

All this talk with strangers and randomness brought back teenage memories of Yahoo chatrooms where every conversation started with the ASL (age, sex, location) question, everyone had a pseudonym and anonymous role-playing was savoured. But then everything’s not a secret on the site. Another service called chatroulettemap pins screenshots of the site’s users to a map using their IP address and geolocation tools.

Having being nexted too many times, I decided to don a colourful wig and look alluring. A cryptic façade, I figured, might help me gel a little better with the demanding strangers. It worked wonders. My next encounter lasted for six whole minutes. We didn’t talk, just stared into each other’s eyes. Fido looked debonair. He was wearing a black tuxedo with a bow tie. But a few incomprehensible barks later, I was bored and decided it was time to wave out, and say goodbye to Fido the pug and his master who only stood behind, giggling at the advances we were making.

At 2 am, IST, the only time I can surf the web without someone peeping at my screen, I met WB Yeats from Toronto. He ended every line in a rhyme and thought his words were sublime. The game got better with every click and I have to admit, I have become a Chatroulette addict. It’s a great break from the mundane text and photo talk on Facebook and Twitter.

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Bandra's Indira Nagar slum has been built on a pipeline. Residents of this slum pay monthly rent and have designated watchmen too.

Pets are part of family. An animal activist once told me that while the rich abandon their pets, the poor actually take good care of them

``Aye bakre ki aulaad, yeh public ke liye hain,'' said the shopkeeper. Poor goat just wanted to scratch himself against the Kurkure packets

Kids always want their pictures taken. And they are fascinated with how fast digital cameras produce photographs

The 3-year-old rooster was the original subject of this photograph

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