ONCE UPON A HARRY POTTER

By Meenakshi Rohatgi

Teenage success – success before maturity – could be disastrous. Just look at what happened to the Harry Potter trio – Radcliffe and Emma and Grint – who captured global imagination without really trying hard for it. Worse still was the case of Culkin, the hero of Home Alone episode. At 22, Culkin divorced his wife, actress Rachel Miner, whom he married at 18 and separated from at 20!

Then Culkin began dating actress Mila Kunis and postponed a possible engagement in 2006. And as late as January 2011, we are told the couple broke off but it was an amicable split. He had a stint in prison for drug abuse, considered normal for celebrities.

Fortunately, Radcliffe did not take to drugs because he preferred alcohol. Radcliff and Emma were just nine when Christopher Joseph Columbus, the Producer-Director of Home Alone, spotted them. Grint, the third of the trio, was eleven. Today Radcliff is worth £48m, and is starring on Broadway in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

Emulating the lifestyles of the rich and the famous has given nightmares to Radcliffe, who is struggling to come out of it. Emma the innocent is no more innocent. She allows her body to be photographed semi-nude or near-nude for a fortune! Who knows the good times may end sooner than expected. Grint shies away from the media, and very little of his darker sides are known.

J k Rowling, the Queen of Magic, has invented the three little stars, who basking in her glory, made it to the Fortune’s list of millionaires. The single mother that she was when she started writing her 7-volume Harry Potter, is now married with three children – that magic three (children) who made her famous. Celebrated among all the trains is King’s Cross train from Manchester to London, wherein she outlined her plots. Why even The Elephant House, the café in Edinburgh where she wrote the first Harry Potter novel, has become a booming real estate and a tourist attraction. All because an idea fell on the right head, like the apple on Newton’s.

RAGINI SINHA
Ministry for Mishaps!

The last Railway Minister who set standards of efficiency was Madhavrao Scindia. The Railways have fallen on bad days ever since. George Fernandez who succeeded him was nicknamed Minister for Transfers because he focused his energies on issuing transfer orders for `friends’. Lalu was Minister for Catering because he focused his attention on the passengers sipping tea from desi cups made of clay. Paswan was Minister for Quotas because he ensured the right of the OBCs in getting employment. With her eyes firmly set on the Writer’s Building, Didi was Minister in Absentia where the bureaucrats and petty clerks ran the ministry.

It never occurred to these ministers since Scindia that rail safety was their primary responsibility. Instead, they seem to believe safety is the primary responsibility of each of the passengers who take the risk of travelling by the Indian Railway. Things have come to such a sorry pass that in one day two accidents are reported. And the media is more concerned about the faux pas of an inefficient minister of state than on measures to prevent such accidents recurring. With human error becoming too frequent, no one talks of reducing the speed of night trains that are most frequently in the mishap news, or banning the running of trains through terror-hit areas, especially at night. Falling safety standards are only symptomatic of the benign neglect and abdication of responsibility at the top. And the civil society is nowhere to be seen to redress the genuine problems of the people!

JOYEETA CHAKRAVORTY

SIT AND RUN

Unmistakably, the governance of the country is slipping. Slipping into the court of the Supreme Court as the credibility of the Executive is crumbling, pillar by pillar and brick by brick. The slipping rate is so alarming that we might soon witness the Supreme Court running Home, Finance, Defence and External Affairs, as a prelude to judiciously taking over the PMO. Since Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Cabinet colleagues have absolute confidence in the Supreme Court, and any further discussion on the matter sub judice, the transfer of power will be smooth.

All began with a harmless takeover of the sensational Aarushi murder case where the suspicion of honour killing grew by the day. Then came the Commonwealth Games bungling by Kalmadi & Co, the Adarsh scam betraying the Kargil martyrs, the Telecom games by Raja that shook the corridors of power, the Hasan Ali (Baba) case of black money, and the latest of all, the Dayanidhi Maran’s favouritism folklore, all billion dollar scams.

Scams are nothing new in India. The NDA too had its share of Hawala, Coffin for Kargil martyrs, Tehelka tapes, and others. The murder of Satyendra Dubey, a former Kanpur IITian and Dy. GM of The Golden Quadrangle project in Bihar, who wrote a confidential letter to Prime Minister Vajpayee, and that of cartoonist Irfan Khan in Delhi, and the total absence of criticism of the government in the media for the entire five years suggest that things were not transparent in those days.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s only fault is that he is honest to the core and wanted transparency in governance. And he is being amply rewarded!

HIDE-AND-SEEK PM

Ever heard of a Press Conference without the Press? The one that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh held recently had none of the respectable figures that make the Press what it is. Prannoy Roy, Rajdeep Sardesai, Arnab Goswami, Barkha Dutt, Rahul Kanwal, the television superstars, were not invited. Nor were the editors of the largest-circulated English newspapers. India fortunately – perhaps unfortunately for the PM – has a vibrant media that have been bring to light bungling after bungling of governments.

Jawaharlal Nehru used to hold a Press Conference every month in contrast to the three in the seven years of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Nehru would mesmerize the media and gave the newsmen a feeling that together with the PM, they are running the country. He gave the same feeling to the villagers whom he was addressing that they are participating in the governance of the country. He used to flatter them by asking, `Who is this Bharat Mata?’ and would reply, pointing to each one of them, `You are the Bharat Mata. When you are starving, Bharat Mata is starving. When you are well fed, Bharat Mata is well fed.’

Nehru was a great political artist and a theatric performer. When he wanted to get rid of some deadwood or ideological enemies in the Cabinet, he introduced the Kamaraj Plan, of which the supposed author K Kamaraj Nadar himself knew nothing about! The plan axed Morarjee Desai, the serious contender to the throne should Nehru die. V K Krishna Menon, another contender, too, out of the Cabinet, the decks were cleared for Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had a talent for bringing warring factions to settlement.

When Nehru found that the Praja Socialist Party was winng bye-election after bye-election in the late 50s, he adopted Socialism as the Congress ideology, taking the wind out of the sail of PSP. And he asked all the PSP leaders to join the Congress since there was no ideological difference between the parties. When any of the chief ministers became too powerful, he brought them to the Centre so that they will be under his nose.

A prime minister has to deal with the media and the Opposition, which is in good measure a test of his leadership qualities. The appointment of P J Thomas as Chief Vigilance Commissioner destroyed the credibility of the Manmohan Singh government. The bizarre handling of Anna Hazare-Baba Ramdev incidents has not enhanced the credibility of the PM either. And come the Press Conference without the Press, so to speak. There is only one rational explanation for it. When Manmohan Singh was sworn in a second time, he could never have imagined the sort of PM he would become in two years. Afraid of seeing his own image in the mirror that the media is, he decided to shun it!