Your article Dash the Dart (Feb 20) made interesting reading. I’ve been in this industry for a decade and know it inside out. The postal department has woken up after all these years and realised that the tortoise has overtaken it. It’s now crying foul and saying that the courier industry is illegal when it is actually contributing almost Rs 300 crore to the government as service tax. Not only that, since it has never got the status of industry, there are hundreds of hidden players giving direct or indirect employment to tens of thousands. The industry was born out of the necessity created by the indifference of the p&t department. People needed safe, efficient delivery of their goods, with proof. However, there is still a segment of mass mailing that the postal department can effectively corner from courier companies: volumes. The latter can’t mobilise the resources to deliver huge volumes. This is where the postal department can provide good service and demand the right price rather than give in to market forces and reduce local mass mailing rates to Rs 1.50.
N. Chandrashekar, Secunderabad
An efficient mail delivery system that served millions of Indians for over a century, both at home and abroad, is now on its deathbed. And all because those who headed the p&t department did not let it innovate despite its advantages of manpower, network and reach. To now bulldoze its way through will only worsen its health. It should know that poachers relish their prey more when it is half alive and still juicy. It should make use of its positional advantage and allow courier companies to collaborate with it to the remote interiors of the country.
K.J. John, Baroda
There is nothing about Rang de Basanti that warranted the feature My Yellow Icon (Feb 20) on the film. To say that it has struck "a unique chord", or that its protagonists have become "mini icons" or that the film’s notion of "patriotism and nationalism are in tune with the sentiments of the times" is sheer exaggeration. rdb is an interesting film because of its plot, script, style of making or its music in the first half, but towards the end it’s hackneyed and long-drawn. To consider it pathbreaking or compare it to Black is unjustified, irrespective of its commercial success. And though it may pretend to, the film has no real message; even the fears Kanti Bajpai expresses give the film undue importance. There have been films in the past showing violent retribution (the Big B’s Inquilab) against corrupt politicians, but the Indian public is sensible enough to know that meting out such vigilante justice is possible only in films.
Sandip Kumar Pitty, Calcutta
I went to see Rang de Basanti, expecting it to be exactly what it turned out to be—mediocre fare appealing to urban Indian youth not because of any message, but because it "looks" good. I walked out of the theatre to see and hear what I expected to see and hear. Enthusiasm and inspiration being waxed eloquent into the fanciest mobile phones, while tossing away plastic cups and popcorn packets on the road, honking impatiently and cursing one another while trying to make their way out of a badly managed multiplex parking lot. What is more, the script was poor, Aamir Khan too old to play a 25-year-old. India does not need thoughtless, heedless young men to shoot people, it needs a grassroots-level civic movement. Show me a film like that and I will be inspired. Sadly, I’ll be the only one seeing it, such is the reality of India.
Jyoti Ganapathi, Champaign, US
I share Kanti Bajpai’s concerns that "we need analysis, not caricature, and solid programmes of reform, not bursts of righteous outrage", but wonder how many people in the age group 13-30 have seen The Legend of Bhagat Singh or Netaji—the Forgotten Hero? We need films like rdb with a contemporary idiom to appeal to today’s youth.
Nirupama Kotru, on e-mail
Apropos Prem Shankar Jha’s piece, Not This Way to Valhalla (Feb 20), if it comes to a clash of civilisations, Muslims have very little to lose. Muslim countries have the worst indicators of development and education. At least, they may start from scratch after everything is destroyed by "precision bombs". The publishing of those silly cartoons, which were clearly designed to hit where it hurts most, was an act of supreme stupidity. Europe and the West are hurtling down a suicidal path. It’s time the East (India and China) injected sanity into our discourse.
Tabrez J. Siddiqui, Goettingen, Germany
Europe is convulsed by a fear of Muslims and a loathing of China and while it’s great being an Indian there in these times, I’m not at all surprised at the furore raging in Europe (Man Bites God). There is genuine fear among ordinary people that globalisation doesn’t respect national problems or boundaries and one now must adhere to both national sentiment and international ones as well. The reprinting of the cartoons was foolhardy at best but look through the news archives of toi of the last two or three years and you’ll find a depiction of Shivratri that did not meet with any protest. Maybe it’s because people realised that to react to crassness would only draw greater attention to something best ignored. I remember just one letter appearing thereafter admiring their guts to publish what they did in a Hindu-majority country. Maybe you could have interviewed Farooq Sheikh instead of the aimplb lawyer? We need more voices of sanity.
S. Sonee, on e-mail
In times of Islamophobia, Vinod Mehta strikes the right note in his Delhi Diary (Feb 20), European papers have only betrayed their arrogance and ignorance by printing the offensive cartoons. It is one thing to castigate sections of Islamic hardliners and quite ridiculous to equate Islam with terrorism. These cartoons do not support free speech but in fact reinforce the prejudices that are pretty entrenched in Europe’s collective unconscious.
Raza Rumi, Islamabad, Pakistan
Agreed that India should cohabit with the US but does one need a referee in Prakash Karat for the act (Delhi Diary, Feb 20)? The Left leaders may be doggedly against Uncle Sam but they are advocating that India follow their own version of the Monroe doctrine. Independent foreign/economic policies and living together with the US are not mutually exclusive. India is mature enough to know which side of the bread needs butter.
Gyan Ranjan Saha, Calcutta
The metaphor "getting into bed" was itself a poor choice for the issue, worse was its protraction. Vinod Mehta seems to suggest that it’s okay to sleep with someone so long as you get to pick the "size of the bed" and the "colour of the bed-sheets". Here, I suspect, even the staunchest of Mehta’s erotica readers won’t side with him.
Prashanth Pappu, on e-mail
