Year End Awards - Part 2

Last week, we started discussing the most relevant Indian awards for 2011. And I realized that we have been blessed with a bumper crop. I have had to leave out worthies like Bappi Lahiri and Digvijay Singh; and Shoaib Akhtar would have made this and every other list had he been born 200 kilometres further east. But, I promise you this ¨C lots of good candidates may not have made it, but those who did were solid gold! Here are the rest of this year¡¯s winners.

Fashion Statement Of The Year.
The Ritu Beris and Manish Malhotras of this world can eat their hearts out, but the single outfit that caught the imagination of the nation was a salwar suit. To be precise, Baba Ramdev¡¯s salwar and dupatta - the outfit he was wearing at 2:45 am on the 5th of June when the police finally caught him.

Never has a movement become an ex-movement faster. After all, it¡¯s really difficult to justify to your friends: ¡°well, we were taking this really courageous stand against the government when they sent in the cops, and our leader got caught while trying to sneak out wearing a ladies salwar suit.¡±
Legend has it that the policeman who finally caught him has yet to recover from the shock of seeing a oiled and gleaming black beard under that demure dupatta. And while Delhi police are not particularly known for their sensitivity, this one could not have been easy to stomach, specially at three in the morning.

For those who like these details, it was a really nice white chikankari salwar suit with an embroidered dupatta.

Performance of the Year
Two outstanding candidates, so I have to declare a dead heat. First, Sushma¡¯s dance drama at Rajghat in June this year. And while I am not sure about Pappu ¨C the jury is in; Sushma definitely can¡¯t dance. She manfully defended her actions by claiming that she was prancing to a patriotic tune. In my book, the major issue most people had was aesthetic.

And right up there with her was Kiran¡¯s little cameo at Ramlila maidan in August this year. Her 'ghunghat' dance against the nations MPs has to be the singularly most tasteless item number of the year. Even the solitary aide on stage with her looked embarrassed. And it takes a lot to overshadow Om Puri¡¯s amazingly enlightening speech around the same time. Like Sushma, she refused to apologize, and once again Anna must have been wistfully remembering his simple days back at Ralegaon where all you had to worry about was which whip to use on the local drunk.

Debut of the Year
Yes Ashwin did well, but it was Mamata who stole this one with a swashbuckling start as the Bengal CM. Mamata will always be credited with pioneering the Pepe style of politics in India. Pepe, for those of you not familiar with Asterix comics, was this little kid in ¡®Asterix in Spain¡¯ who always got his way by holding his breath till he turned red and everyone gave in. Mamata spent many years in the cabinet doing exactly the same thing, crying threatening, sulking and generally holding her breath till a weary Congress or BJP was forced to surrender.

Her first move was to name the state after a musical instrument (Bongo??). Fortunately, it has yet to take effect as it takes years for anything to take effect after 33 years of left rule.

The real conspiracy theory is that Mamata spent her time in opposition painting and writing poetry. And Buddhadev, the CPIM CM, was a playwright. The consensus was that Mamata¡¯s poetry and painting was a far greater infliction on the Bengali public then Buddhadev¡¯s plays. And for a culturally alive state like Bengal, better to have her do unimportant things like run a state instead of writing really bad poetry.

Brain Wave of The Year.
Kapil Sibal. All of us worrying about internet content controls and intellectual freedom do not even begin to understand Sibal¡¯s master stroke. First, he¡¯s got the Sangh Parivar to support freedom on the net. That¡¯s the equivalent of Obama applying for membership in the Al Qaida. Second, if the rest of the lunatics in government take him seriously, we could be looking at about three million new jobs policing the net. In these days of shrinking post offices and other public services, how else will we maintain a bloated public sector. And lastly, even if that does not work, for about two weeks the nation (and Arnab Goswami!) stopped asking simple questions like why the government had done no work at all for the whole of this term.