All eyes are on Jayalalithaa once again. In 2004, it was a hasty and ill-considered National Democratic Alliance (NDA) decision to snap ties with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and shift to the ADMK, led by Jayalalithaa. DMK got 40 out of the 40 seats in the Lok Sabha elections on the back of a powerful alliance in Tamil Nadu plus Pondicherry and the NDA was thrown out.

This time, anxiety reigns in AK Gopalan Bhavan, the headquarters of the CPI (M), for they’re getting a strong feeling that Jayalalithaa, meant to be one of the most important bulwarks of the Third Front, is going to cut and run.

Initially, Sitaram Yechury called Jayalalithaa, earlier today. She didn’t take his call so the CPI (M) spoke to Chandrababu Naidu and got him to call her. “We’ve heard rumours that you’re talking to Narendra Modi,” began Naidu carefully.

“Well, anyone can talk to me,” Jayalalithaa replied and after a few pleasantries, the conversation was over.

Jayalalithaa has only one objective: somehow dislodge the Congress from supporting the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government in Chennai. If this happens, the government falls and if the Congress supports ADMK, well, Jayalalitha is Chief Minister!

The numbers are like this. The Assembly has 235 MLAs. The halfway mark right now is 117. DMK has 95 and is currently supported by ally Congress which has 35 making the alliance a comfortable 130-strong.

Over the last few months, all other alliance partners have drifted away from the DMK and have joined the ADMK. They number 38 seats, including PMK, the Left parties and Vaiko’s MDMK. So 38, when added to 60 seats of ADMK is a minority but when the Congress supports it… presto! the government falls.

This is the politics of Tamil Nadu. That is why the DMK is being super careful on the Lankan Tamil issue and on everything else. And that’s why DMK insisted Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh come to Chennai for the public meeting. If publicly the allies appear on the same platform it is that much harder for them to walk out of the alliance.

Nowadays, whenever companies sack their employees, the standard line is … “their performance was not in line with our parameters.” Or, something similar. While it may be true in some cases, that argument looks more than a bit stretched in most.

Let’s do a reality check. Not so long so, industry bodies were claiming that there’s still dearth of good talent. With companies in an expansion mode, hiring was frenzied. Head hunters would call executives aggressively. And in the event that a particular executive was uninterested, pat would be the reply, “Would any of your friends be interested?”

But things have turned for the worse. With recession plaguing the entire world, the demand for talent is no longer so great. In fact, companies need to cut flab.

And all that excess capacities built up in anticipation of future growth need to be pruned. So, quite a few employees have had to take the bitter ‘layoff’ pill.

But by branding the ‘laid-off’ employees as the worst performers is grossly unfair. If the company’s plans have gone haywire, it is not the employee’s fault. Instead of admitting this, many are harping about non-performance, stricter parameters and so on…

The fact being that no management wants to admit that their ambitious plans have gone wrong and in many cases, over-aggression has caused them grief.

Take the example of real estate companies – huge land banks were built by buying at astronomical prices. And that too in the latter half of 2007-08, when it was well known that the subprime crisis is looming large over the world.

Now that many of these projects are under hold indefinitely, can the employee who is being thrown out be called a non-performer?

In fact, the word ‘non-performance’ has almost become a joke. Sample this: Recently, when the two senior employees (CEO, COO types) left an organisation, a mail was sent to the corporate communications enquiring about the reason. The response was something like this… ‘individuals whose performance were not in line with the company’s parameters quit’.

It isn’t funny…

Raju is perhaps a means to know what’s with economy. How the average person, and businesses, have been affected in this downturn which is supposedly on reverse gear (that’s what experts say). Ask Raju. He supplies tea and coffee to a few offices.

Over the past few months he has seen business from the staff from five offices vanish. But, his lament: “The office remain unoccupied.” He has also seen the number of cups of cofee and tea he sells fall steadily. He says it is still falling.

He says many of the new real estate developments have also not given him any business. One, they have their own cafeteria. Or, two, no one has bothered to take up the office spaces that have been built recently.

Raju is not alone. There are many such coffee and tea sellers. I used to have not met over five years. He was another tea and coffee guy who supplies tea and coffee. He had even managed to buy land in Bangalore.

Coffee and teawallahs, if you spend some time speaking to will always give you insights into what exactly is happening to the economy. I have always seen them as a group that gives a true picture of what is happening with the economy on which you get data. But, such data is often collected and analysed by analysts and experts who give you numbers and analysis, but miss out the finer points.

So, hail Raju. Oh, but he has no data and numbers and laptop to analyse the data.

I could see him from my second floor balcony. He was a black man in this early 50s, wearing a thin pullover to suit the mild-warm English summer. Apart from the silver chain around his thick neck that glimmered a bit from the bright sunlight, there was nothing to suggest that the man was endowed with reasonable wealth. His grey tracks that stopped a few inches above his ankles and the worn-out black sneakers suggested this even more.  Yet something about him suggested that he was serious about his dreams.

He was sitting at the park bench opposite to the waterfront (a small man made tributary drawn from the famed Thames) and staring at the brochure he must have picked up from the Royal Quay sales office.

The sales brochure was in all-color printed on high quality art paper alluring any prospective property owner to buy a piece of dream that is built on the East-end Docklands.

He did not seem to be reading this brochure. Rather he was simply staring at the pictures. At one point I could clearly see him stroke with right thumb a particular section of the map that said where he was sitting or where his dream house was located on the map. As he turned the pages more pictures of show apartments stared at him. He wasn’t smiling. He seemed a bit afraid, may be a little nervous to be precise, almost as if his mind was oscillating between reality and possibility.

About 10 minutes later he quietly stood up and made a small semi-circle around the waterfront and measured his steps towards the sales office. What happened after that I do not know. But I would like to believe that he decided to buy a house in the Royal Quay and someday I will bump into him in the elevator and say hello. He may nod back and not give a second thought about the stranger he just met in the elevator. And I will not tell him that he once shared his dream with me and am glad he secured his future and that of his children.

All this is possible. Reports in the media suggest that prices in the UK have now fallen to March 2005 levels. After all every dark cloud has a silver lining to it. And the cup sure is half full. All this if you wish to see it…

On my way home yesterday I paused for half an hour or so atop the pedestrian railway bridge at a minor local station in Delhi. Watching the people below in constant and reassuring motion, and caressed by a gentling, diesel-tinted breeze — now here comes the dreadfully trite thought — I thought: is it possible that India is globalisation-proof?

Not in terms of infrastructure and economics, certainly, but culturally? To the implied order of globalisation we happily oppose the multifariousness and extreme individuality of our cultural selves. We’ll buy your cars, in other words, and take your jobs, but we won’t become like you. Heck, we won’t even become like each other.

From my railway bridge, the view encapsulated this contradictory non-contradiction. Immediately below was the evening commuter crowd and the various pavement professionals who serve their needs. The place and the people were at once drab and extremely lively.

Beyond the station were the yellow-painted residential lines of junior railway officials — old and pleasant single-storey quarters, their uniformity defeated by the residents’ “customisation”.

Above the trees beyond the railway quarters, a glimpse of passing Metro trains, with their neat, contained, mathematical outlines and all their human cargo held within — nothing like the well-worn commuter trains at my station, each carriage with its fringe of passengers travelling al fresco.

In the distance in the other direction, the police headquarters skyscraper — the police, rarely respected, sometimes lawless, and generally either feared or held in contempt; the DDA tower, falling apart like everything the DDA builds; the Indian National Science Academy, which looks permanently asleep…

There’s really no gap at all, in other words, between the rational perfection of the container and the natural imperfection of the human contents — except in the case of the Metro. Unlike elsewhere in the globalised world, law and the will to homogeneity are not sufficient to hold the ideal and the real apart. That’s an irrevocable, culture-specific thing. And culture usually wins; when it doesn’t, the price paid is very high.

The Metro brings this contradiction to a tingle-inducing peak: so neat, so clean, so foreign and expensive — how long can it last? It will be a constant struggle against habit and apathy to keep it looking good and running well. This kind of thing can only work because India pays for Delhi, and will continue to pay. It’s all maya, in other words.

It wasn’t clear to me why I wanted travel to Benaras for a few days - a filthy, dusty city in this hot weather? But it’s something that just had to be done. I rounded up a couple of friends and we were on our way. I didn’t expect to be bowled over by the place in any case - and so I wasn’t disappointed. Surprised, yes, that in a pilgrim town so rich, with hefty sums coming in from various sources, there is practically no infrastructure to speak of. With it’s dirty ghats and disastrous roads, it’s quite evidently a very forced exotica that cannot be understood by everyone, far less by Indians.

But all isn’t lost here. If there is something that can lift this temple town from the clutches of filth - it is the early morning boat ride along the ghats. Uncharacteristically (to be awake at 5 am) then, I left my friends peacefully sleeping and hurried down the stairs of the hotel, looking around for a boatman. Thankfully, there was one waiting right outside the door and led me down to his boat at Assi ghat. I wondered if I had stepped out too early, will my boat ride end even before the sun rose? Turns out, the timing couldn’t have been better. None of the other tourists were out yet, and there wasn’t a single person along the ghats.

The majhi rowed towards the main Dasashwamedha ghat, and we watched the faint glow in the sky illuminate the clouds. It’s only on this little boat, a safe distance from where the eye can spot the dust and grime, that Benaras looks beautiful. The ghats were perfectly peaceful, the water of the Ganges suddenly appeared cleaner, and the banks dotted with temple tops, every bit as charming as one would have imagined it to be at one time. The stillness was calming, balmy and even refreshing. A good half an hour later, everything suddenly came to life. In a matter of a minute, there were several people pottering around the banks, with a string of boats filled with tourists just like me taking pictures by the second, admiring the rising sun. But I was done, and we rowed back to Assi ghat, away from the hullabaloo.

I had probably taken all I needed from Benaras …but as a happy bonus, the same afternoon proved to be something else altogether. Perhaps it was the repeated mention of Benaras Hindu University in Hindi classes back in middle school that we found ourselves keen to visit the premises. A couple of kilometers into tree-lined roads of the university, we happened to halt in front of the Birla Vishwanath temple. I wasn’t particularly keen to go inside, but wandered into the temple grounds nevertheless in the hope of some quiet under one of the trees in the lawn. And then there was a distant, curious singing - that I followed into the temple. It wasn’t a bhajan, and quite unlike the jagran variety we are so used to in our cities. It was a raga in its pure form, and the voice singing it was wandering and light, but wondrously enchanting. On the second floor of the marble temple, we found, facing the deity, sat a blind, old man, almost a metre away from the microphone, playing the harmonium and singing effortlessly. A younger gentleman, further away, played the tabla. We sat close by with our backs against the temple pillar, closed our eyes and listened. Raga Yaman had never sounded better.

Reluctantly, we stood up to leave when he drew to a close. We gently thanked him, and told him how his voice had moved us. He was surprised, and humbled at the attention and asked us to stay for the prestigious Sankat Mochan music festival that was to begin in the city the same evening. Unfortunately, we were due to leave Benaras that evening, and promised to come another year and hear him sing again. His name was Pandit Ram Lal.

Twitter (a popular microblogging site) has been trying to fend it off, after it went under attack twice. Clickjacking is the latest hazard doing round on the web.

Twitter users first noticed the clickjacking prank in February and soon Twitter had shut it down. The site had tweets that carried a tag ‘Don’t Click’ followed by a link. Clicking the link took the user to a page that included a button that said ‘Don’t Click.’ Clicking the button automatically distributed the identical tweet. As imagined, this did spread pretty quickly.

Simply put clickjacking is an attack where some bad guy slips a malicious link invisibly onto a webpage or under a commonly used button on a website. When the user clicks on the link or rolls his mouse over the link, he becomes infected, explained security experts.

Although Twitter’s original fix wiped a page clean if it detected a malicious frame on its pages, but then hackers circumvented that and Twitter was forced to come up with another fix.

It is concealed spying, say security experts. “Web pages know what web sites you’ve been to …, where you’re logged in, what you watch on YouTube, and now they can literally ’see’ and ‘hear’ you,” wrote Jeremiah Grossman, founder and CTO of WhiteHat Security, in his blog post.

The threat has only grown with every passing day. Now, every big company that values its brand name is working to fend off clickjacking attacks. For instance, Microsoft has included a new clickjacking protection feature in Internet Explorer 8 that lets websites safeguard their sites and visitors without browser add-ons.  Adobe Systems too updated its popular Flash Player to fix vulnerabilities over clickjacking. Clickjacking is both a web and a browser problem, but the fixes are likely to come from the browser vendors.

To make matters worse, using JavaScript, an attacker could make the invisible target constantly follow the user’s mouse pointer, thereby intercepting his first click no matter where it happens on the current page. The latest version of NoScript, a Firefox browser plugin that blocks Flash, Java, and JavaScript, includes a new anti-clickjacking feature called ClearClick. It reveals transparent or concealed windows so the user can see attempts to co-opt clicks for malicious purposes.

Quite clearly clickjacking can turn into the worst sort of security risk. Why? Because it is transparent to the unwitting user, simple to implement and difficult to stop.

“The greatest feat of Swami and his friends lay in putting together a cricket team for the MCC’ (the Malgudi Cricket Club) and challenging the neighbouring Young Men’s Union to a match. Just before the match, however, things go horribly wrong, and Swami has no option but to run away from home, wanting never to return to Malgudi again.”

For BCCI, however, the matches are taking place. So what if they come with well-choreographed crowd support. Why would a South African pay up to watch a first class cricket match being played by a bunch of Indians. A friend, who owns an ad agency had said of IPL: “You market anything well, no matter what, people will lap it up. Only thing it requires is money — the more the merrier.” That should explain the “huge” support it purportedly enjoys among the naive Indian who believes “cricket is more important than the nation itself”.  

When you see a bunch of white girls waving flags or whatever expressing their support for ‘their’ team and which promptly gets captured on TV cameras, it makes one think ”how much are they being paid to model as supporters?” 

Even a thin crowd of South Africans who are in the near-empty stadium are probably there because they want to “make some noise” and have a good time. After all, it must be cheaper for a South African to go to the stadium to watch the IPL match than go to the movies.

On the first few days of the drama, sometimes I was left wondering if the purported noise being made by the “crowds” in the near-empty stadium was actually a recorded sound from a European football match. It sounded very familiar to me. But, the thin crowds there I could not believe were capable of making the kind of noise they made sure the viewers got to hear.

Said the friend other day: “It is money talking.” Marketing is nothing but creating a smokescreen to sell a product.

I am left wondering “how much longer before we see a Swami-like job?”

Sunday was World Laughter Day. Laughter, true to the term, is a funny word. Add the letter ‘S’ to it and it becomes slaughter. Slaughter makes me think of the swine. Utterance of the word swine could bring someone — someone in uniform perhaps — to minds of security people today who have been asked to check all travellers at the Mumbai International Airport for swine flu in this sweltering heat.

Sweltering heat makes me think of Isha Koppikar who will be married to restaurateur Timmy Narang this year. Ms Koppikar was the last crush of my life. Is it that I have outgrown an age when I could have crushes on people or is it that Bollywood has run out of eligible crush material for me? I would like to go with the latter, but the former, unfortunately, is true.

Crush reminds me of the 35-year old Lalbaug bridge that is being demolished today. It falls smack dab in the middle of my route to the office. No, it may fall smack dab in the middle of my route to the office today, I am afraid, since Mumbai Municipal Corporation is overseeing the demolition, which is why I am writing this from home. This speaks volumes of the trust I have in the municipal body. Now the word body makes my mind wander a lot more than most other words, but it takes me right now to “Elements of Style” – the bible of English grammar – in which co-author William Strunt has expressed hatred for the term “student body”, and insisted that “studentry” should be used in its place, since it is clearer and comes without the ghoulish connotation he sees in the former term.

Studentry, however, is a word I have not been able to find in any dictionary so far. Far is what this passage is from humour, and talking of humour, Jay Leno is leaving NBC TV’s The Tonight Show after 17 memorable years, ironically, around the time when the world is celebrating laughter. Incidentally, The Tonight Show has spawned a number of Indian talk shows, notably “Movers and Shakers” (which became drab when Mr Suman tried to outshine the show’s script).

Talking of Jay Leno and talk shows, thoughts drift to a promising Bollywood star named Farhan Akhtar who used a Leno joke from the latter’s “the economy is so bad” series in a recent Oye It’s Friday (OIF) episode without giving due credit.

Talking about OIF and copying, Mr Akhtar also lifted a whole gag from Comedy Inc., an Australian sketch comedy TV series – the “check please” skit – and used it in another recent episode of his show. Now that I have mentioned Akhtar, I am thinking a recent movie of his where he squealed a song that had nursery rhymes for lyrics (Aasma Hai Neela Kyun, Paani Geela Geela Kyun Gol Kyun Hai Zameen, for instance) and passed it off as a rock number, head-banging and a euphoric adult crowd thrown in for good measure.

But I have made a promise to myself that I won’t get angry today, keeping in with the spirit of laughter day (hey, that rhymed! Mr Akhtar’s rock star rendition is contagious, I say), so I turn to Jay Leno again. As a tribute to the master of anti-establishment humour, I have tried and come up with a non-conformist joke. Though I’d rather an Indian comedian does this one, but alas, I guess that would be an improbability as we have become too touchy of late. So here it goes:

“Our supreme court recently ruled that irretrievable breakdown can’t be used as a ground for dissolution of marriage.

That’s such a relief. You see, marriage is an institution, and if irretrievable breakdown becomes a ground for an institution’s dissolution, guess which one would be next on the block?”

(Pause)

“The Indian legal system!”

Two weeks into IPL 2.0 and I still find myself completely detached to the happenings in South Africa. Sure, I saw Sachin Tendulkar bat on more than a couple of occasions. I make it a point not to miss any of Shane Warne’s spells, and if an SMS beeps in about a match going down to the wire, I do find myself switching on the TV to catch a few glimpses. But, if truth be told, I have an attention span of a goldfish when it comes to watching cricket these days, especially T20.

Friends accuse of me having an inexplicable bias towards the IPL and say that I locked the part of mind which could appreciate T20 and threw the keys away long time back. It’s not true, as I said, I do make an attempt to watch T20 and at times do find it entertaining even if not that engaging. Yet, I don’t myself enchanted by the spectacle or be even remotely interested.

I have heard colleagues saying, “Oh, IPL is a flop this time around,”. Others will say, “There is no sense of connect as it is happening in South Africa.” Neither of this is true.

IPL, in my opinion has been a success story so far. And I don’t mean it in terms of TV ratings or the money being made by the franchisees and advertisers.

Step into a sports bar and try asking them to change the channel to watch a football match like I did earlier this week. Dozens of people, not in the most sober state of mind, will boo you and ask you in the choicest of words, to simply buzz off. Somebody even yelled at me, “Get lost you pseudo, want to watch football when our national sport is being played”. Err, you are not watching hockey, freak show, I thought of telling the man but decided against the idea, seeing a Kingfisher bottle in his hand. Though one of the guys serving at the bar did took my side and said he too wanted to watch the football match. But couldn’t do much than give me a sympathetic pat on the back as if saying ‘I understand how you feel’.

Which brings me to the second point, of having no connect this time round. Was there a connect in the first place? Despite people going gaga over the IPL and crying out loud for being “super fans”, I still don’t see any connect so as to speak with the teams.

Facebook status messages change with every victory or defeat. One day somebody is Bangalore’d, so the other day he is creating a lot “Halla” over Rajasthan Royals. Kolkata becomes Kol‘kant’a. And from “Chennai all the way” it becomes to “Go Delhi Go.” Loyalty in sports comes at a premium but when everything is all about fun and games, it’s not too difficult to see why people crib about no sense of connect.

A cricket blogger friend of mine says that you need to watch IPL thinking that the average T20 spectator and an average test cricket follower are two different species. And the game “caters” to different sort of spectators.

This is what I mean when I say the IPL has been a success story. It has given birth to a whole new generation of fans for whom the Royals Rule. And it has successfully managed to divide cricket fans all across the globe in different categories to build an audience for itslef. Silly me, here I thought we were cricket followers and not format specific followers.