Bharat Rakshak

Letter From London
When Olympic Rings Led to Suffering
Sudeshna Sen

We’re into the last lap of the excruciating, painful long preparations for the Olympics, which is finally on our heads now with less than a week to ignition date. Mostly, us Londoners are just waiting for the state of siege in the city to pass — I can’t express it better than a random tweeter, who said it felt like someone else is throwing a party in our house, at big entry fees, and we’re all locked in the basement.

The next two weeks may be grim, but so far, the pre-event national mood is rather funny. The British are world famous for their national pastime of whingeing; moaning about the Olympics has been de rigueur for more than two years now. This time, events have gone beyond the whingeing stage, exhibiting signs of a tragicomedy with distinct overtones of farce. It’s a bit like those children’s books, a series of unfortunate events.

The headline shambles is G4S, the private security company that was to provide the thousands of security personnel at the event, suddenly threw up its hands two weeks ago, and said they hadn’t managed to rustle up enough staff — so the armed forces had to overnight commit thousands of extra soldiers, some just back from tours in Afghanistan, to frisk bags of visitors at the gates. Never mind the red faces, the massive cost will now be picked up by, of course, taxpayers. Current estimates for time taken to get into the venue is about two hours, so if you do have tickets, please be early.

After months and months of debate, discussions, parliamentary questions and so on about whether the Home Office would be able to manage serpentine queues at airport immigration, we now hear that the border staff are planning to go on strike a day before the Olympics. Which might mean, unless they cancel, you could be waiting for half a day instead of the usual two hours to clear passport control.

Last week, us poor Londoners were suddenly accosted at tube stations with a message from London’s colourful mayor Boris Johnson, telling commuters to, well, basically try and not use the tube during Olympics. We’re hearing mutters from tabloids that train drivers may go on strike during the games, but we don’t know how credible that is. Despite all the desperate planning, everyone expects traffic to be gridlocked, with almost all arterial roads closed for something or other. Oh, and the first batch of arriving athletes got a taste of London gridlock when their bus driver lost his way and took over four hours to deliver them from the airport in west London, to the stadium in east London, a two-hour journey at the best of times. The Olympic lanes, the special lanes for dignitaries to whizz by in their limos, aren’t open yet, you see.

Meanwhile, the latest is that Danny Boyle, director of Slumdog Millionaire, who’s the creative director of the opening ceremony, is locked in artistic battle with the official Olympic broadcasters over camera angles. And, at the last minute, has been forced to chop 30 minutes of his programme — because, if it goes on for much past midnight, London’s public transport will shut down, and nobody will be able to get home. Odd nobody realised, London’s trains have always been a bit like Cinderella and shut down on the dot of midnight. Oh, and tickets. After a major palaver sometime last year about tickets — which were sold on some complicated ballot system and nobody really got anything they want, or ended up with tickets to Taekwondo — it seems thousands of tickets are still unsold. And they’re available from anything to 20 quid for stuff nobody wants to see, to £2,000 for the wanted events.

The biggest sore point, of course, is Locog’s — the Olympic organising committee’s — police state enforcement of sponsorship rights. You won’t, in a country that went wild with buntings and flags during the Queen’s diamond jubilee, see any signs of a party mood. That’s because nobody is allowed to use the word Olympics or medals or 2012, or any such word or image or logo that might infringe on the rights of the sponsors: Coke, McDonald’s, Visa, etc. It’s created some howlarious incidents, like florists being asked to remove decorations shaped like rings, or small cafés asked to remove flaming-torch breakfasts from menus.

The funniest was when workers at the site objected to not being able to buy their favourite British chips anywhere. Since McDonald’s is a sponsor, you can’t get the trademark British chip in the venue, except with fish and chips. The latest salvo was when Sebastian Coe, head of the committee, told a TV channel that you can’t wear a Pepsi T-shirt or Nike shoes to the Olympics. Locog clarified: it seems individuals can, but groups can’t wear anything branded by non-sponsors. You won’t be able to use the ATMs around the area with any card other than a Visa, so be warned. Carry lots of cash.

Personally, since I have no intention of getting into the Olympic spirit, I don’t much mind the lack of merchandise. I’m pretty sure, though, that despite the last week’s alarums and excursions, the British will be able to pull off a pretty impressive spectacular, and at least the kids will have fun. Since I’m paying a weekly Olympic levy for the last five years, and will keep paying till 2016 or even after, I intend to squeeze what little joy I can get out of it.

workers at the site objected to not being able to buy their favourite British chips anywhere

jamwal wrote:A bit NSFW pic from Reddit from a post titled "note to self: never get a massage in china... a friend posted this picture of her back on facebook"
Whole back covered with painful looking bruises from a type of massage called "cupping" . Looks dangerous

Prasant wrote:Haresh, that's right. Their target demographic is the blue collar worker, especially in BNP/ strongholds (Essex, West Yorkshire, Burnley etc). It's a simple algorithm - blame the social and economic ills of the UK on the imigrants, rinse, repeat.

As for the campiagn to ridicule India, I would say it is down to us to give it back. Very often you will find comments on message boards saying something on the lines of "If they spend billions on their military, why should they ask for aid from us?". You then have to remind them that we categorically refused aid, and Britain literally begged us to take their money, 40% of which gets plugged back in to the UK via "offsets" anyway.

Jhujar wrote:

jamwal wrote:A bit NSFW pic from Reddit from a post titled "note to self: never get a massage in china... a friend posted this picture of her back on facebook"
Whole back covered with painful looking bruises from a type of massage called "cupping" . Looks dangerous

I actually had this couple of times. The marks disappear within few days. Its not as bad as it appears.

Sriman wrote:Anuj Bidve's murderer convicted, sentencing tomorrow.

http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/anuj- ... der-248014

Lilo wrote:Well...the euphemism for latrine used to be "London" from where i come from

I happen to be terribly annoyed this week. I find I haven’t been invited to all the super red carpet events like Posh and Beck’s party, or the special receptions for the 40-odd heads of state floating around the city these days, or on to Roman Abramovich’s luxury yacht. That’s apparently displaced as many local houseboats by meter length who used to be moored on the canals around the Olympics stadium and have had to shove off, coz he’s paying hundreds of pounds for parking, and they were well, always just lounging around paying normal mooring fees.

Nor have I been invited to, how does one describe them — the private pleasure houses being set up by various sponsors, like Omega. Or to LN Mittal’s uber-secret high-level private dos. Of course, as a rather cranky friend I was complaining to, pointed out, I’m not even going for the ones who were naff enough to invite me this season. Oh well, he’s got a point.

Frankly, the trauma of wearing high heels and formals and being polite to people over cheap champagne (which makes me sick, please note, expensive champagne does not) totally outweighs the value of being seen at these places. I never get either a hint of a story, nor meet anyone remotely worth cultivating beyond three minutes. I hate red carpets. They make me feel like a cross between a rabbit caught in the wrong headlights, and a weasel (why am I not in those torn jeans with a mike or camera on the other side of the ropes?)

Isabel Allende, the iconic Latin American writer, made me feel comfortable with my networking phobia when she once told me why she hated networking parties. When you are about 5-footnothing, hemmed in by 7-foot-tall people who can’t seem to move aside to give you space to move or breathe, networking events are not just boring, they’re like being on the Virar fast at rush hour. Red carpet doesn’t mean everyone deodorises either.

Still, I’m miffed. It’s a classic aspirational, middle-class attitude, to be annoyed at not being invited to events you actually wouldn’t ever go to. It is also, I realise, a rather Brit attitude. I find I’m localising with a vengeance. Instead of taking things like special VIP lanes for traffic as a given, like we do in Mumbai or Delhi, I’m being annoyed about it, and getting all welfare state liberal. As London’s mayor Boris Johnson put it in his inimitable way, we like complaining because it “improves the quality of our enjoyment,” if we happen to be surprised that something actually turns out to be fun.

But more seriously, even I haven’t quite converted to the loony liberal fringe, but I’m wondering what all these Olympics are about. We’ve had business summits. Political summits. Networking summits. Celebrity summits. Pressers with mums of Olympians, and 1948 (or whatever) athletes and so on. Torch relays with plenty of Coke at £2.50 a bottle and Lloyds flags. The only glimpse of my first real athlete — only recognisable from the sinews of his thighs and the even bigger athlete badge he was sporting, was a random Croatian walking around Whitehall on Friday.

Whatever happened to the alleged Olympics Spirit? This is all about marketing, business, networking, sponsorship, and the general hype that surrounds a Hollywood release, including a Danny Boyle. “Put down that Pepsi can, and there’ll be no trouble,” said the grim-faced army guy on the last cover of Private Eye, UK’s subversive satire magazine on its cover. Here’s a question. How many real athletes, who competed Saturday, could actually stay up till past midnight to watch the opening ceremony tamasha?

What we’ve not had as yet, is any sport whatsoever — other than when the North Korean women’s football team walked out because they were playing under a South Korean flag. Whatever happened to the personal excellence, sports, celebration of individual performance stuff ?

There’s not even a hint of a whiff of that, it’s just a five-ring circus. Ooops. Not allowed to mention the five rings, sponsorship infringement.

Personally, I’m not a sporty person. However, if I’m forced to put up with, and pay for, an overdose of steroidal types over-running my city (hyperbole, I’m sure none of them take steroids, or any illegal thing) I’m afraid I don’t see the point of an Olympics, which is actually being run by Coke, Visa, McDonalds, Dow Chemicals, BP claiming to be greener than Greenpeace, and so on. Where are the athletes? The games? The spirit of competition? They’ll show up in the next few weeks, but I know they’ll be poor cousins to the sponsors and the spin doctors.

Do we really, as a world about to go into an economic tailspin, need to celebrate personal physical excellence, or endurance, or sporting excellence through this kind of over-commercialised crassness?

The new look Olympics – run by megacorps – came after, I gather Montreal had a bit of a stumble and LA made the mould in 1984.

Then we had the likes of Athens, Barcelona, Beijing, next we’re doing Rio and then Russia. I suspect the original Olympian sponsors like Zeus, Apollo, Artemis et al, would have had thunderbolt waving fits.

kind of over-commercialised crassness..

shyamd wrote:You guys should have seen twitter yesterday when India came out - Arab elite were all praise. Good soft power. Apparently the Indian team had more screams in the stadium than any other foreign team.

Now, 17 years later, those horrific events have been revisited in the book, The Meadow, written by British journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark.

The book does not just hint that the government wasn't keen on mounting a rescue, quoting crime branch sources, it claims it wasn't al-Faran but forces loyal to the government that had bumped off the tourists with the connivance of the special task force and the Army.

The then Narasimha Rao government, the book alleges, wanted to use the hostage crisis as a tool to build international pressure on Pakistan. It says the government had intelligence about the movement of the terrorists and the hostages, including high-resolution images taken by an armed forces helicopter.

In another fantastic claim, the book says when a woman foreign tourist who had seen five hostages being taken away to Aru on July 5, 1995, reported the matter to the nearest Rashtriya Rifles (RR) camp, a major raped her.

It says the RR ran informer networks of surrendered militants (or renegades) and had put in place a cash-for-corpses incentive scheme. The renegades used to be paid between Rs 10,000 and Rs 20,000 per corpse depending on the seniority of the slain militant; but the RR never conducted any physical verification of the bodies, the book says.

Letter From London
The Hangover’s Here, Can Cursing be Far?
Sudeshna Sen

If you live in London these days, there’s only one topic of conversation. Europe is still going down the drain, with Spain and Italy teetering on the edge. Stan-Chart has had a massive crash with US authorities. David Cameron has openly admitted to cracks in his coalition with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats. China is slowing down, the Bank of England has — again — downgraded forecasts for the UK, and so on. But who cares? It’s Game Time, folks. The only political controversy everyone is talking about is something obscure about school sports schedules, which is currently putting more pressure on the prime minister than his splintering relationship with his coalition partner.

Seven years in the planning and preparations, preceded by months and weeks of angst and controversy, London’s Games have undoubtedly won that absolutely crucial medal: the hearts and minds of people. Even us curmudgeonly columnists — and there are many like me — are grudgingly admitting that, well, since obviously a good time is being had by all, we might as well join in and not be churlish. The whole city is on holiday, it’s the ultimate staycation. Offices are doing dress-down, dress up, and dress in red, blue and white days. The mood was set from Danny Boyle’s zany opening ceremony, which an English media commentator described better than I can: as globally incomprehensible as marmite and jellied eels, but uniquely British. We are like this only. Since then, the mood has escalated. The international media and visitors are not, as one told me, being awed by sheer firepower like in Beijing.

They’re being charmed by a quintessentially Brit spectacle, sometimes quirky, not always very efficient, but always with a wry sense of humour and a smile. It’s Monty Python (or Mr Bean if you like) meets Chariots of Fire.

London is putting on a show, and Londoners are on the world stage these two weeks. And we’re putting on the best act we can, at least for these two weeks. Londoners aren’t known to be friendly — in fact, we’re mostly downright grumpy all the time — try and find an unfriendly face around the city these days, and you’ll have to look really hard. Britain doesn’t do services. London is easy to get completely lost in. All of these clichés are usually true: I’m always being stopped by hapless and lost tourists around central London asking for directions, with no signage in any language except English. These two weeks? Thousands of citizen volunteers are on hand to guide you through the maze of transport and travel arrangements, or anything else you may want. Services? Even the checkout counter attendants at Heathrow shops are smiling. And no, it doesn’t come naturally. Olympic hospitality service training began over two years ago, with a massive scheme to train frontline hospitality staff for providing service with a smile.

“It’s the atmosphere. The crowd atmosphere is amazing,” said one visitor. Team GB athletes, replete with a historic haul of medals, are all crediting the crowd support and home team spirit for egging them on. Already, the kind of columnists who do these things are analysing the crowd and spectator-pleasing aspects and twists, with DJs coordinating events and random entertainment in between the sports. That was the crux of Seb Coe’s winning bid seven years ago, to connect with the younger generation and make sport fun. Despite other goof-ups, Locog has clearly got that bit correct. It’s all a massive party, fancy dress welcome.

Of course, no party can be successful without the guests. Mood, that elusive thing, is being passed back and forth between the contingents of fans and visitors who are willing to be pleased, and locals and volunteers who are happy to oblige. Being London, which is easier to get to than Beijing, many of the European teams have considerably large fan bases to cheer them on, if not a local population. Like the Polish, who said they feel on home ground.

Oh, and while not on the subject, I’ve been seeing bits and pieces in the Indian media, which is as expected, going through its usual wailing act about the state of sport in India. Dear people, don’t crib. It might seem a bit sad when you look at league tables. When you’re bumping into a dozen people from places as diverse as Estonia to Australia to Colombia and Venezuela, a medal tally of six doesn’t look bad at all. Considering that most Indians would never dream of watching women’s boxing or archery or wrestling the rest of the year, or four years, don’t blame those poor people for their performance now. Every team coming here has golden hopes — most are dashed. That’s sport. Enjoy the party instead, like we’re doing.

I’m going to miss all those purple volunteers and the general cheer from next week. I know my Londoners. There’s going to be a massive hangover, and as soon as the guests have left, we’ll go back to fighting over the washing up. The miserable commutes, traffic jams, collapsing public transport and rain will start up again, and we’ll go back to being famously grumpy. The blamegames and post-mortems, not to mention the bill for the party, will sour everyone’s mood again. These days, we’re betting on whether the whingeing will start up even before the Paralympics, or last for at least a month longer.