Nerve Endings Firing Away

On the Gandhi items auction, Ambika Soni talks to Rediff:

On the choice of Vijay Mallya:
I don’t think Mallya is a controversial choice. I don’t think anybody will think like that.

I got feedback on TV that the government has done a good job. So what if he sells beer?

Jinke hath main tha who kya abhi tak beer nahin pi rahe the? (Didn’t the man who possessed these things ever drink beer in his life?)

Immense WTF! I think she means James Otis, and not Gandhi, right? Was someone suggesting that jiss haath se beer piya hai, uss haath se Gandhi ke chashme penehega? And there are plenty of such choice paragraphs that make you go kya hoga iss desh ka. The Otis guy although an idiot was smart enough to generate enough buzz and controversy among which involved telling India to invest more in Gandhian ideas instead of war. This buzz ended up driving up the price of the items under the hammer and what otherwise had a reserve price of $20,000 ended up as a bidding war between two (or three) Indians driving up the price to nearly $1.8 million. Ravi Batra, the lawyer for Otis even called the bidding a “small Cuban missile crisis”. What? Was the Dandi March and Civil Disobedience comparisons taken? Anyway, the idiot (and his lawyer) laughed all the way to the bank. Now will Mallya give it away for free as Soni claims he will or simply add it to his personal museum that includes Tipu’s treasures among other things? You can’t really stop him if he builds his own museum and throws it open to the Indian public albeit with an entrance charge.

This interview was to get a sense of the “multi-pronged strategy to bring Gandhi’s items back.” I wish the UPA government had any strategy for India’s national security and continued economic development.