Kusum Choppra

This is being written not merely as a journalist, but also as a woman who has been wife of an Army officer and mother of another one. In the entire noise made over the Leh incident, there was little said about the genesis of the spat:   the lady wife. What was she doing at a post virtually under the nose of two aggressive neighbors, triggering off an ugly spat?   When   wives of officers are allowed to make such excursions, they are also expected to follow some niceties, including making themselves presentable before the sahayak enters the officer’s quarters or wait till after;    instead of triggering off   such incidents, if those reports are actually true??    One can only wonder. Another key element to the Leh episode is the level of jawan – officer antipathy.   What is the cause of this? Is it merely the lack of discipline that triggered it off?   Or do the causes lie deeper? Perhaps it   begins at the recruitment level itself.   As the Army becomes increasingly technolo

So many religious, social, cultural sentiments are hurt nowadays in India.  the Dirty Picture was banned for TV fearing exposure to young children.  But what about the exposure to delicious boobs?  No voice has been raised against repeated Ads on TV, purportedly for our 'national' dress, in which the model displays her curvaceous booty clad in wispy lacy bras?   Not even after Jashwant Singh let fly at the white paper, declaring that it was like a bikini that 'covers only the essentials and reveals the non essentials'? Hurt sentiments anyone?

India as the land of sharp contrasts was brought home on a fleeting visit to a mall on Sunday.  In many rural areas, bathing is a luxury not frequently afforded. When possible, some one will run to the store for that tiny cake of soap ususally used in guest rooms. There it will do for the whole family, with any leftovers carefully stored for some future emergency. And there in this lavishly appointed store were huge chunks of different flavored soaps offering customers exquisitely different experiences.  Inquiries yielded that the cost of a 10 gm sliver would range from anywhere from Rs. 40 / to 60/-.  Would that little sliver suffice for the generous abulations of M'Lady or M'Lord, or perhaps one of their little ones, I wondered.