Okay, just letting off steam

bikram

Bikram Vohra | March 14, 2014



What with this Khobragade lady and the US courts now throwing out the case against her (so much for the big fight) and leaving crusader attorney Preet Bharara with a little egg on his face because the loophole offered  him to put in another case is boring as hell and he should let it go. No one gives a whistle in the wind, Preet, get over it. Move on, find another diplomat. But hey just a sec, now we are told her kids have American and Indian passports and her non-stop chatterbox Dad says it is not a big deal. Nothing in this family seems to be a big deal. Either the Indian passports have been voided or they haven’t, what’s the confusion and why is everything so knotted up? And how does an Indian diplomat’s family get American passports? I am lost in this wilderness.

These are just government servants representing their country and often enough messing it up so you know what truly tees me off, like goes up my nose is that special counter and immigration for diplomatic personnel at the airport.  There is abs no reason for them to get this treatment. None. Nada. Zero. Since most of them do sweet all but attend parties and junkets and get freebies why can’t they stand in line with the rest of us great unwashed people.  

Every time I land in Delhi I notice three or four posturers pouncing about with their different coloured passports behaving as though they were going straight to the PM’s house or to meet Sonia Gandhi and save the world and all they are doing is coming home like the rest of us. And they all have that nose-in-the-air aren’t we superior expression.

Sometimes I truly believe and yes, it might be laced with lashings of envy, there are far too many diplomatic protections and immunity is being misused. Why should they be protected? Who even knows them. Why are they afraid?

They do nothing so dramatic, have very little redeeming value for the money spent on maintaining them and it is only we Asians who give them so much importance. A cabinet Minister in Brussels stood with me for a cab once and he was flying economy and no one even said hi to him. Narrow the gap.

Comments

 

Other News

Climate change is stealing sleep

Climate change has at least doubled the temperature-related sleep loss across 1,338 major cities worldwide over the past five decades, highlighting an emerging but often overlooked public health consequence of rising global temperatures. A new study by Climate Central estimates that between 2020 and

Cabinet approves Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme

The union cabinet chaired by PM Narendra Modi has approved the Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme (MPMS) with a budgetary outlay of Rs 62,500 crore. It aims to further scale up the production, deepen domestic value addition, strengthen supply chain resilience, enhance global competitiveness. It

Building infrastructure is only half the job

Recent stories of stolen railway wires, disappearing communication towers and missing public infrastructure are often treated as bizarre law-and-order failures of India. Yet they raise a more fundamental question. Why does the State often discover the disappearance of a public asset only after it has alrea

New Delhi’s Indo-Pacific strategy enters a new phase

India appears to be investing fresh dynamism in its Indo-Pacific strategy. At the time when the US, under president Donald Trump, has adopted a conciliatory approach towards China and has changed the name of America’s Indo-Pacific Command to just Pacific Command, India has quietly moved towards con

CAG flags major fiscal lapses in Maharashtra

Maharashtra`s fiscal management has come under sharp scrutiny after the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India, in its State Finances Audit Report for 2024-25, flagged significant budgetary inefficiencies, accounting irregularities, understatement of key fiscal indicators and widespread governanc

The health sector research we are not doing

Some neglect is loud. This kind is quiet. It sits in research never commissioned, data never collected, questions never asked. In South Asia, that quiet has let the region’s worst health problems stay understudied, underfunded, and out of sight of those who could act.  

Upcoming Conferences





Archives

Current Issue

Opinion

Facebook Twitter Google Plus Linkedin Subscribe Newsletter

Twitter