All cyclones are feminine as they display ‘Shakti’ (power). The one pounding Odisha and Andhra coast right at the moment is called ‘Titli’. Even as thousands suffer at the hands of nature angry at our misbehaviour, Odisha is least perturbed because its disaster preparedness is superb with the best outfits of evacuation, rescue, rehabilitation and resettlement in the world.
A couple of years ago, an American expert had expressed great wonder as to how a relatively less advanced state like Odisha had picked the unusual skills of keeping people safe and happy during and after cyclones and floods. The answer is simple he got to know: the 1999 Super Cyclone taught Odias the most critical lesson in recent history. Hence the best outfit in Odisha which rushes out to any location where distressed people need help.
Titli damages will be minimal as the land is managed by the will of the formless Lord Jagannath, Who inspires the human community to behave like members of one family and one objective: live and let live.
It’s also amusingly true that the Lord is a bit sore with the people serving Him at his Puri abode.
For decades on end, servitors, expected to be pious, peaceful and protective to devotees, have turned unruly, greedy and blasphemous except for a very few in the community who have remained godly and strictly religious in every sense of the term.
Lately, as the servitor menace exceeded all limits of misconduct, greed and lawlessness, distressed devotees knocked at the Supreme Court door and got real good relief. But the rules imposed were defied by the unruly ones allegedly at the behest of wicked politicians and some publicity-hungry political midgets.
A mob act by hooligans has brought infamy to Odisha, known hitherto as a land of happy, law-abiding people. The restraint-based responses by the police administration and the temple authorities are being hailed as extremely mature behaviour. Investigation is on full steam; and most certainly, culprits, conspirators and political crooks would be exposed soon. Defying the Supreme Court rulings publicly by some politicians has not been taken well by any member of the Hindu community. The Odisha political arena is witnessing an amusing drama. Damodar Rout, who had joined the BJD late, is now out of the party with mad designs. People may say he never abandoned the party; he was thrown out.
But the truth is he went on irritating the party leaders so badly as to be eventually shown the door. When the party was formed after Biju Patnaik’s death, he kept away along with late Ashok Das and a few others saying the party was one of fools without any sense of ideology and that it had chosen ‘snail’ as its party symbol, which was too mean for senior leaders like him.
He had problems with the then principal advisor Pyari Mohapatra who loathed talkative and arrogant politicians without much knowledge about bare laws and rules of governance. But Dama lost patience and believably fell at Pyari’s feet in private and organised a place for himself in the party.
He never expressed any regret or remorse for having said uncouth and unsavoury things about the BJD. As the BJD soared in popularity and electoral success, Dama gained importance only because Naveen Patnaik trusted him as a sane and skilled leader who could speak convincingly and organise mass support for the party. Lately, his age-old gimmicks and tantrums became prominently visible.
Despite direct and indirect cautioning from time to time, he didn’t seem to care imagining he was indispensable for the BJD and no power could have him dislodged.
Eventually, when his mind turned more senile than usual, he was sufficiently warned about bad conduct and damage being caused to party, but he wouldn’t give the anxiety a damn and continued with buffoonery, no matter what the occasion or the disaster by way of consequence.
Most interestingly, Damababu was for long considered a highly scrupulous statesman with a fantastic sense of ethics. Personally, he was a difficult person with home adversaries, strong-willed bureaucrats and women. Bijubabu had a personal looking for him because he cured animals for a living and, therefore, bailed him out of many a traps he had walked into due to personal conduct not socially acceptable. Lately, he kept defaming a tough, young bureaucrat, who is a highly trusted lieutenant of Naveen for his absolutely logical and perfect administrative advice, and did his act so brazenly without any reason or rhyme that the whole party began taking a beating.
At long last, the rope given to him by the boss was withdrawn by way of a warning. Still, he did not improve conduct; rather, went even more virulent in attacking the young officer when he was being hailed as a performer par excellence countrywide. So, he had to be dismissed.
The erstwhile ‘animal saviour’ is now out in the wilderness and has turned insane like many other detractors in the past making tall talk and passing warnings of dire consequences in vain. Around the same time, tales of misdemeanour and acts of corruption are surfacing. When he was Minister for Cooperation, at least one solid evidence of having placed a degenerate top cooperative functionary quite past his retirement age without satisfying any of the prevailing norms or rules. One Tushar Panda, head of the cooperative banks, was to retire in 2013. He stayed on by passing a special self-serving order and never left office. Between the dark, service-void years between 2013 and 2015, he ran the bank domain like a fiefdom and did all that can make himself money and material of pleasure.
In 2016 or so, he obliged the senior decision makers and got his services regularised by illegal means. The Secretary of the Government was so influenced that he got a computer purchase consultant from the IIT, an allegedly corrupt Bengali gentleman, to make a recommendation for Panda’s extension citing grounds of Panda’s inevitability in the organisation for his computer purchase experience and something more to that effect.
The file of extension was placed before Minister Damodar Rout, who approved with a tricky note saying, “everything appears to be in keeping with law”.
The document never reached the CMO as planned by the conspirators against the State; and Panda, after staying on as head even after retirement without any extension granted by the appropriate authority, became boss yet again.
No one knows how he got the void two years between 2013 and 2014 regularised. Damodar Rout did it on a quid pro quo basis. All that’s being exposed here is the fact that Damababu is not as clean or scrupulous a person as he keeps claiming all his life.
Lastly, the saffron brigade in Odisha is now a morally beaten down community as the Modi-Shah duo has frustrated the crowd by not taking the poll tests earlier along with Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh.
The latest survey shows the Congress would get a clear majority in the three States by winning 117 of 230 seats in MP, 130 out of 200 in Rajasthan and 54 of 90 in Chhattisgarh. The BJP might manage only 106, 33 and 57 seats, respectively, in the three States.
For all this disturbing information, Modi and Shah had decided to go for the elections in December as the damming results would most certainly affect the general elections in April-May of 2019. But as it looks, the wiser ones warned them against the blunder.
People, in the high tech information age, would figure out the trick and brand them cowards. The BJP is of course heading for disaster as Manohar Parrikar is sick, and the insultingly ignored stalwarts like Jashwant Singh, Arun Shourie and Shatrughan Sinha and more have begun negotiations with buoyant outfits like the Aam Admi Party to teach the saffron gang a lesson.
The most amusing fact that surfaced only two days ago is that the ‘15 lakh-rupee deposit’ in every Indian citizen’s account by scooping out all the black money stashed abroad was a big bluff by way of a marketing strategy to garner votes. Nitin Gadkari has said it emphatically in a public interview already.