Monday, May 12, 2008

Monday Musings

Saturday being a holiday for me and too hot to go out, I picked up a whole bunch of newspapers on the way back from home. I had planned to read all of them thoroughly but my attention span being what it is I could only skim the headlines. One thing I noticed was that the Saturday supplements of all the papers- The New Indian Express with its ‘Expresso’, ‘TV and Cinema’ of Deccan Chronicle and ‘Weekend’ of The Hindu have all gone tabloid. The latest to change was The Hindu.

There was news of two book readings in the city in the papers. One was by Anju Poddar on Saturday at the ITC Kakatiya and the reading on Sunday evening at Taj Deccan was by Shobhaa De. I haven’t read any of De’s books but enjoy some of her columns in the TOI. I did not attend either of the book readings and stayed put at home. The ‘Outlook’ magazine’s latest issue carried a rather interesting review of Shobhaa De’s latest book by Bhaichand Patel.

The constituency I live in is going to the bye polls at the end of the month and the election fever has already started. It began with a massive traffic jam on Saturday due to a procession taken out by one of the candidates. Yesterday evening one of my neighbours kept popping into all the houses in our lane to inform excitedly that a candidate he supports was visiting our lane. I have never faced a candidate on a house-to-house visit so was a bit nervous what to say. But in the end, the candidate didn’t turn up and my neighbor was not to be seen for the rest of the evening.

In the run up to election day the clamour is only going to increase so much that one will be upto the neck in posters, leaflets and banners. One happy side effect of the bye-election that it would be a holiday on election day, that is 29th of May. There are no holidays until the end of July so it comes as a welcome break.

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