Below the line

While participating in a webinar on the current locust invasion, many wanted to know about the probability of these pests, which move in the millions, flocking to Delhi and surrounding areas. A Food and Agriculture Organisation expert responded in jest saying these creatures avoid urban areas normally as they can’t survive on steel and concrete.

His parting repartee, however, was that their invasion of a capital city like Delhi can have some positive impact. There could be, he said, quicker decision-making towards controlling these pesky insects which are wreaking havoc on farmlands in some States.

Public sector bankers who have recently been under attack for being risk averse, have begun to openly challenge such misplaced notions. One former chief executive of a public sector bank recently wondered as to why only bankers are getting blamed — for being tight-fisted — every time the economy nosedives. This former banker asked as to why nobody wants to talk about or raise questions on the performance of other government initiatives like the ₹25,000 crore Alternate Investment Fund that was hurriedly put together last year for providing last-mile funding to support stalled middle and low income housing projects.

At one point, the real estate barons of the country shouted from rooftops and in TV channels that this ₹25,000 crore amount was too little and may not even meet the needs of 300-400 developers in the metros. It now transpires that the SWAMIH Investment Fund has over the last six months disbursed only ₹15 crore to one project of Cable Corporation of India. So where does the problem lie — tight norms for funding, real estate sector not measuring up, government itself being tight-fisted or coronavirus?

During the lockdown, webinars and virtual meetings have become the norm and everyone is adjusting to this new normal. But corporate honcho Anand Mahindra believes the world needs a new term to describe virtual conferences and meetings. He recently tweeted: “If I get one more invitation to a ‘webinar’ I might have a serious meltdown. Is it possible to petition for banishing this word from the dictionary even though it was a relatively recent entrant?” Twitterdom was quick to respond, by coining new terms. One such being ‘diginar’.

US President Donald Trump’s thoughtless tweets created yet another embarrassing situation for India recently. While China and India have been trying to look at ways to ease the border tension that had escalated over the last few days, Trump sent out a tweet stating that the US was ready, willing and able to mediate between the two countries to sort the “raging” border dispute.

Given the fact that it was the US that has been engaged in a bitter trade and diplomatic war with China and has also been urging India to stand up against it, the sudden turning of tables took New Delhi by surprise. Trump’s tweet made it appear as if it were India and China that were the squabbling countries while Washington was an impartial observer ready to broker peace between the two. No wonder there was no official reaction to Trump’s tweet from the Indian government.

The controversy on whether to give hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a preventive medicine to healthy healthcare workers made Indian Council of Medical Research’s Director-General Balram Bhargava quite nostalgic in one of the Covid-19 press briefings.

It took him back nearly 30 years, when he said, in the town where he grew up, one used to get inland letters with public health advertisements neatly printed at the bottom urging one to consume chloroquine, a more potent predecessor of HCQ, if one had malaria. Wonder if nostalgia has anything to do with justifying usage of a related drug for a completely different disease.

Our Delhi Bureau

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