Kolaveri Didi in Time's List

Mamata Banerjee has been named among the 100 most influential people in the world by the Time magazine in its 2012 list which also includes US President Barack Obama, secretary of state Hillary Clinton and billionaire investor Warren Buffett. Apart from Mamata, advocate Anjali Gopalan, who works for the rights of gays and the transgendered, is the only other Indian in the list released by the magazine. Mamata said, “This is not a honour for me alone but for Ma Mati Manush.” In recent days, Mamata’s government has been criticised for choice of newspapers for state and state-aided libraries and a professor’s arrest over circulation of a cartoon featuring the chief minister. Time said the leader spent years struggling on the margins but ultimately she proved to be the “consummate politician”. “Though much of Indian society remains hidebound in patriarchy and tradition, strong women still prevail in the nation’s political life. Mamata Banerjee rose to the fore last year when she and a movement she built from the grassroots wrested control of her home state of West Bengal, ending three and a half decades of sclerotic communist rule,” Time said. Referred to by her supporters as ‘Didi’, Mamata was labelled by critics as a “mercurial oddball and a shrieking street fighter”. Through successive elections, she steadily expanded her power base while chipping away at those of her opponents, Time said adding that her lower-middle-class background was no obstacle in a country “notorious for its dynasties”. “She out-Marxed the Marxists. And as chief minister of her home state, she has emerged as a populist woman of action — strident and divisive, but poised to play an even greater role in the world’s largest democracy,” the magazine said.

Maximum City chokes

Lakhs of commuters in Mumbai had a harrowing time on Wednesday as Central Railway services were thrown out of gear following a midnight fire in a signal cabin between Kurla and Vidyavihar stations. Among the worst hit were office-goers and students appearing for their university exams. Only 70% of the normal suburban services were operated on the day and it is expected to take 3-4 days to fully restore CR traffic. Long-distance services were also affected up to Pune and Nashik, forcing the cancellation of at least four incoming and outgoing trains.

Kayani on India

Pakistan army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has underlined the need for resolving all disputes, including Siachen, with New Delhi and said his country believes in “the doctrine of peaceful co-existence with its neighbours, especially India’’. Kayani said Siachen"consumes a mammoth amount of national exchequer that must be diverted to the people of the two countries’’ while speaking to reporters after surveying rescue operations in Gayari near Siachen, where over 100 soldiers remained buried after a avalanche slammed into Pakistan’s highest battalion headquarters there on April 7. He accompanied president Asif Ali Zardari to the site. “The military standoff in the frozen high mountains of Siachen not only threatens the environment but is also an enormous burden on the taxpayers of both the neighbours,’’ the general said. His comments come days after the leader of the largest opposition party — PML (N) — Nawaz Sharif called on Islamabad to take the lead in withdrawing troops from the world’s highest battlefield, where more soldiers die due to inhospitable weather than in battle. Kayani said Pakistan was forced to deploy troops in Siachen after the Indian deployments there in 1984. “The world knows why we sent our troops to Siachen. It was India which deployed its troops at the Glacier in 1984. We only mounted a natural tactical response,’’ he said. “We are only manning the border on this frigid outpost in the line of duty. We will pay whatever cost we have to for the defence of Pakistan.’’

Another one !!

Another dead fish washes up in Mumbai.... A dead whale shark was found on the shore near Badhwar Park, Colaba, on Wednesday. Environmentalist D Stalin of NGO Vanashakti said this is the largest species of fish found in the Arabian Sea. Stalin added that the fish does not look injured and a necropsy (postmortem on animals) would be able to reveal how the fish died. Stalin suspects that the fish choked on some non-biodegradable substance.

Somewhere in Hyderabad....

The renovated domes of the AP high court being painted.

BJP retains MCD

The BJP won the North and East Delhi corporations, leaving the Congress on the fringes even in its strongholds in the slums, unauthorized colonies and the Muslim-dominant areas. In the South Delhi Corporation, BJP will have to win the support of independents and the BSP to muster a majority — a prospect that doesn’t look difficult — for a clean sweep. The BJP leaders claimed that the results indicated a distinct anti-Congress mood in Delhi. Last time, too, BJP had swept the MCD election, but lost the assembly poll as well as Lok Sabha seats in the city. However, what must be disconcerting for the Congress is its loss in East Delhi, where the Dikshit government has carried out focused development, and in the unauthorized colonies. Lack of development in the latter as well as irregularities in the regularization of unauthorized colonies are said to have damaged the party’s standing in these colonies where lakhs of voters live. Known to be traditional Congress voters, they appear to have turned their back to the party this time.

Ellisbridge

It is not the first time in the 120-year-old life term of Ellisbridge that there have been serious debates over pulling down the 480-meter long iron bridge. Six attempts were made to pull it down, but each of these attempts had fallen flat and the bridge had come out trumps defying it all. The very first attempt was made in 1973 when a proposal was moved in the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) to widen the road after concerns were raised on increasing traffic in the city. This move was scuttled by a group of heritage lovers in the city. In 1979 the group even influenced a resolution to be passed in the AMC to name the stretch between Town hall and Sardarbaug as ‘Engineer Himmatlal Dhirajram Marg.’ Almost a decade later, the standing committee of the AMC brought out a plan for the construction of a new bridge in place of Ellisbridge. The plan was approved by HUDCO and a loan of Rs 5 crore was approved for the purpose. This time too an active citizen’s body which also included members of INTACH pleaded with the prime minister’s office. Several letters were also written to Rajiv Gandhi who was a senior leader in the Congress party. The appeals scuttled the move to demolish the bridge. HUDCO also withdrew the loan amount. The same year mayor Rafiuddin Sheikh proposed to build a new bridge on a new loan and then build shops underneath the bridge to pay the installments. STUP consultants had even submitted a plan for the new bridge. But Sheikh died that year. In 1986, it was decided for the first time that the Ellisbridge would stand and two new bridges will come alongside it. This led to another round of uproar when Amadavdis realized that nearly one third of the Manek Burj, the founding bastion of the city will be damaged in the bridge expansion. “It was in 1987 that AMC decided to preserve Ellisbridge as it is and two years later declared the bridge’s boundary, the Manek Burj and a natural waterway near the bridge as protected sites. This was mandatory for procuring a no objection certificate (NOC) from the Archeological Survey of India (ASI). It was only after this NOC that the AMC decided to built two new bridges on either side of Ellisbridge,” claims Vandana Engineer in her book ‘Rao Bahadur Himmatlal Dhirajram—The Man behind the Bridge’. Vandana is the great grand daughter-in-law of Himmatlal Engineer and now settled in Houston in US.