Suresh Menon: It's a 'free' world
Suresh Menon is a writer based in India. In his youth he set out to change the world
I wouldn't be surprised if I heard a Corporator say, "Give us free passes to the cricket match or we will not collect your garbage." The elected members of Bangalore Municipal Corporation, or the Corporators, are clear on what they want from life. Free passes, free membership to all the local clubs and, if possible, free facelifts, free hair transplants and more. They are an inspiration.
I have been wondering what humble columnists who churn out a few thousand words a week can learn from the Corporators (scientific name: Corporatorae Bangalorium; physical features: mouth hanging open, hands outstretched). Here are a few ideas:
- Give us free petrol or we shall leave dangling participles lying unattended all over the place. No one will turn up to clear up the non sequiturs, and if we continue to be ignored, we shall leave out the second ‘m' in ‘accommodate' whenever we need to use that word.
- Give us free housing or we shall end our sentences with a preposition and cheer for Sri Lanka when they play India. (We will agitate for free television sets so we can watch the matches live).
- Give us free haircuts or we shall mix up punctuation, using a mere semi-colon where only a full one will do or a comma where text is begging for a full stop.
- Trim our moustaches free of charge while we listen to music on iPods supplied free of charge or we shall refuse to begin a sentence with a capital letter, and find different ways of spelling the word ‘freedom' - none of them correct.
This feels good. I could write the manifesto for Corporators everywhere - "give, give, give, give" to be followed by "or else, or else, or else, or else". This, as a Corporator went on national television to point out, is not blackmail. It is entitlement.
In a city where garbage is king it is not surprising that rubbish trucks have to be escorted by security to ensure they reach the destination. It is a lovely thought, rotten tomatoes and putrefying material being guarded by grown men in uniform.
Against what? The world's first over-ripe-mango heist? Tolstoy might have written a whole novel about it; Thomas Hardy a poem. Unlike Marlon Brando in the Godfather who advised his cohorts to make people an offer they couldn't refuse, cricket authorities in Bangalore are in the unhappy position of making refuse they can't offer.
Not to the garbage collectors, anyway. Perhaps the stand-off can be resolved by getting the politicians to take a cricket test: identify the following players, what is the LBW law? Where is mid-on? You get the idea.
But then they might demand a free answer sheet be supplied to them, and we'd all be back where we started.
