The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Ticklish issue

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Tuesday, Oct 23, 2007
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Ticklish issue

The adage that “One man’s meat is another man’s poison” seems perfect to describe the tribulations local MP Lagadapati Rajagopal faced at a couple of press conferences he held over the last few days. Reporters of a vernacular daily with a large circulation kept confronting him with a statement made by K.S. Rao, his fellow Parliamentarian, about minimum support price to paddy. Though the reporters were different in the press conferences, the questions were the same. They wanted to know how two Congress MPs had diagonally opposing views on the same subject. Mr. Rajagopal had to use considerable tact to answer the questions without undermining his senior party colleague.

Some spirit this!

Telugu Desam Party (TDP) spokesperson Nannapaneni Rajakumari is doing what she is best at. Addressing a gathering at Uppuluru as part of her party chief N. Chandrababu Naidu’s road show to garner support for his fight for a hike in MSP for paddy, she launched a scathing attack on the Rajasekhara Reddy Government for “paving the way for belt shops to thrive.” Even as she asked a few locals about the number of belt shops in their area, a shabbily clothed man emerged in a highly inebriated condition. Unable to control the swing of his body, he spoke in a slurred voice: “Why don’t you lead an agitation in favour of total prohibition,” he said, causing embarrassment to the local leaders who directed party workers to take him away. People in the vicinity laughed, saying that the man should practise what he wanted to preach, prompting someone in the crowd to quip: “Why should the TDP be exempted from the rule? Rajakka (Rajakumari) should also stop preaching what her party had failed to practise when it was in power.”

Dasara mamoolu

Family members look forward to Dasara festival for celebrating it with great gusto, but the bread-winner of the family dreads to think of it for a different reason altogether. The age-told tradition of seeking, rather demanding, ‘Dasara Maamoolu’ sends shivers down the spines of heads of middle class families. The tightly worked monthly budget goes for a toss, what with every Tom, Dick and Harry demanding the ‘Panduga Mamoolu’. Barbers, electricians, vegetable hawkers, newspaper agents, auto-rickshaw drivers who take kids to school, postman… the list only goes on and on. Gone are the days when only those whose services are not directly paid by citizens demanded the mamoolu. One wouldn’t crib about paying to the likes of a postman, an electricity lineman or a street sweeper, for their services are not paid for by us. But the disturbing norm is to find the likes of a barber, a vegetable seller or a newspaper hawker, with whom we only have a purely business relation, demanding the same. The worst hit are those who shifted to a new locality, as they are forced to part with the ‘maamoolu’ to the familiar faces of the old locality as well as to the unfamiliar ones in the new neighbourhood.

A break

Top officials in the district seem to have taken some much-needed break from their daily rigmarole. District Collector Navin Mittal has proceeded on official duty to be part of a training programme at Ahmedabad. He will be back in action only on November 1. Municipal Commissioner Natarajan Gulzar is on leave from last Saturday, but on personal grounds. He is expected to be back only next week. Interestingly, while a query to the district public relations officer about who is holding the fort in the absence of Collector elicited a clear reply that it is the Joint Collector, the same query to the public relations officer of the VMC, who himself has been holding the additional charge of public relations section in the VMC for long, elicited a rather vague reply: “I think, it is the Sub-Collector. We do not have any official communication!”

Habits die hard

Habits die hard whatever we achieve in our life and it proved true for a key person of a non-governmental organisation Asaraa spearheading a legal battle against unauthorised liquor shops popularly known as Belt Shops.

At a press conference to announce its move to send legal notices to all the elected representatives from Guntur, for their alleged failure to raise voice in appropriate bodies against proliferation of such shops, one of the key organisers lighted a cigarette even as he was passionately explaining the pains taken to educate people on evils of alcoholism.

A perplexed battery of mediapersons made gestures to let him know that smoking was no less an evil and that was indication enough for him to put off the lighted stick and seek an unconditional apology for not having practiced what he was trying to preach.

G.V.Ramana Rao, P.Sujatha Varma, J.R.Sridharan and K. Srimali in Vijayawada and

Ramesh Susarla in Guntur

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