When I was doing Engineering in Kerala, there were about eight or nine engineering colleges. It was a competitive atmosphere and only students with good rank would get admission. The losers would pay money and get admission in one of the zillion private engineering colleges in Karnataka. Since lot of Mallu money was flowing to other states realization dawned on some enterprising Mallus that they could mint money if they opened private Engineering Colleges in Kerala.
Now every street corner has an Engineering College. Even Kerala State Road Transport Corporation has one. The qualification for admission is that you should not have a tail.
The wealthy Communists first opposed the establishment of private colleges. When that failed they decided to oppose the fee structure and in a spirited display of violence, SFI and DYFI activists threw stones at the police and destroyed KSRTC buses. In the final toll, 141 police officers were injured and 112 vehicles were damaged.
But now some Communists have gone ahead and started an Engineering College and this has caused the DYFI to agitate against CPI(M).

Interestingly, the People’s Arts and Science College, which is the first self-financing college under the CPM, is functioning in the building of the Azhikodan Memorial Library.
The issue is snowballing into a major crisis in the CPM, which has been in the forefront of agitation against self-financing institutions in the State. While the party workers were getting brutally beaten up in the agitation against self-financing institutions, the CPM leaders themselves were starting self-financing colleges, said the DYFI leaders here. [CPM’s self-financing college evokes protest from cadres]

As a demonstration of how democracy works in Communist parties, the mother ship warned the monkey brigade of dire consequences if DYFI continued with its protests against CPI(M). (No more public property for you to destroy, young man).
But then this is not the first time we have seen hypocrisy from the Communists. Isn’t it?

As commenter yum yum noted, the leftist movement in Kerala had lot of support from the farmers. The Communists fighting the evil zamindars managed to take over the land and redistribute it to the poor folks. Now Communists have become the new Zamindars. They will decide what you should grow in your own land. If not the consequences are disastrous since the Communists know only one way to persuade.

If a Kerala farmer quits growing paddy and grows another crop on the same farmland, he will have CPM comrades landing with sickles and axes to ‘restore’ the farm for paddy. No matter if growing paddy is just not profitable, no matter if you have stiff farm loans to pay back.
Last week in Palakkad, the comrades, chanting slogans invoking hardliner V S Achuthanandan, descended to destroy arecanut and other crops in many farms. About a dozen of them have been booked for it.
The sickles and axes have been coming down on many parts of rural Kerala, as a strong ‘corrective’ political statement, right from the ’90s. They continue to swing.
The late A Kanaran MLA, top honcho of the CPM’s Kerala State Karshaka Thozhilali Union (KSKTU), had effectively used it to get local Muslim landlords in north Kerala’s Nadapuram belt to fall in line, his men laying waste acres of their standing cash crops overnight.
In Alappuzha, Kanaran’s hardline guru and Politburo member Achuthanandan unleashed his men on paddy farms whose owners – many of them marginal farmers – had to switch to other crops. It finally took a high court order to get the cops to halt the destruction, at least temporarily.

And what is the justification for all this autrocity and utter disregard for individual freedom?

Achuthanandan now says the party will continue its “peaceful” agitation in every Kerala panchayat, and will not allow any more fields to be lost to paddy, “at any cost.”
“I’d never asked our comrades to destroy any kind of crops, only to oppose paddy field reclamation. But our young men get excited and naughty sometimes,” Achuthanandan told The Indian Express. [Party waves the sickle, cuts off cash crops from Kerala farmers]

These young men seriously lack female companionship (or male companionship), if their idea of getting naughty means destroying the livelihood of poor people.
Related Links: Workers agitating aginst Communists, The High Court verdict on Coke, Your’s are small too, Not for the family, The Communist “U” turn

Kalaripayattu, according to Wikipedia is probably the oldest martial artform in the world (video here). It is now mainly practiced in Kerala and said to be the basis for most of the Chinese martial arts. Around the 16th century, chekavars (people trained in Kalari) were used to settle disputes between people, kind of surrogate warriors and they have been immortalized in Kerala folklore. (If you want to see life of people of that era, the best movie to watch is Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha, written by M T Vasudevan Nair in which Mammotty played the best role of his career)
While there have been many Malayalam movies about Kalari only one Tamil movie (Indian by Shankar) I know of and no Hindi movie has shown this martial artform. Now thanks to Jackie Chan, Kalari is getting a world audience.

Last year, Chan happened to see a CD the Kerala Tourism Department sent him, requesting him to be the brand ambassador of its tourism initiatives.
Kerala Tourism could not get Chan, but Sathyanarayanan — who performed the traditional Kerala martial art Kalaripayattu in the CD — impressed Chan so much that the superstar invited him to be part of his new film.
Sathyanarayanan flew to Shanghai for a 30-day shoot with Chan for The Myth; the film includes Tony Leung Ka Fai, Bollywood actress Mallika Sherawat and television actor Sudhanshu Pandey.
Since then, Sathyanarayanan has not looked back. “I am getting a number of offers from Hollywood. All because of Jackie Chan only,” he told rediff.com.[Jackie Chan and the art of Kalaripayattu]

Now Sathyanarayanan has been invited to act in another Hollywood movie and there are few enquiries from other film companies abroad.

Did you know that the Communists, who made a fortune fighting for the poor, is against the Asian Development Bank. When ADB officials visited Kerala, the DYFI, which is the monkey brigade of the Communists gave them such a reception that they literally ran away. But in West Bengal, the Communists are taking money from World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and Japan

Aligarh Muslim University’s Executive Committee decided to grant 50 percent reservation to Muslims from all over India and many people were opposed to reservation based on religion for a university funded with the tax payers money. But Shabana Azmi, says

“It is unfortunate that it has been given a communal colour. It should not have had any political ramification,” she told reporters here on the sidelines of the launch of a book `Jama Masjid, Call of the Soul’.[Shabana Azmi backs reservation at AMU]

Yes, reserving half the seats for Muslims is not at all communal. By the same definition of communal by these secularists, Muslim League is not a communal party.

With IT and airline industry booming in India and people seem to be really misusing the freedom

Every day for the last four months I have been hiring. I come to office each day, hassle my recruitment team, agencies and consultancies for resumes, perform interviews, negotiate salaries and make offers. It’s amazing to see how people negotiate for salaries and perks, no one asks anything anymore about what the job entails, what they can contribute, or how they can grow and realize their dreams here. It’s about pay, and people are eagerly willing to display unbridled stupidity in managing their careers by focusing incessantly on money.
Heck, the time it takes to finalize an offer nowadays, I could send out an offer letter, go have several children, watch them grow, put them through school and then head back to office, the candidate is likely to have finished negotiating his pay and ready to join.
We need to wake up and smell the stink of the decay we are creating all around us in the IT job market.Year-on-year end people here expect nothing less than 30 to 45% salary increases, where as the average salary hike in the US per year is 3% and Eastern Europe is 4%. I could go on and on about the quality of the flotsam and jetsam that washes on to my desk in response to job ads, but we all know it. Sometimes it takes as many as 40+ interviews to close one position.[A very interesting note!]

That was the IT industry. Air Sahara is now offering a 40% salary hike to its employees to retain them. Lo oks like it is a great time to be an “employee” and a bad time to be running a company. For those of you in the software field, I have a question. How do you deliver a project on time?

There are many bloggers who take potshots at us Mallus. We don’t like to name names, so instead, we will provide a hyperlink. But guess what. Quietly, the Malayalee takes over

The roll call is a veritable who

The Kerala Communists have always come up with excuses to prevent companies from setting shop in Kerala. The Communists are against exploitation of all kind and this is a major problem when people want to work and earn a living. If they work, they will get exploited. So unemployment is always better. But dig this. One of the major employers in Kerala is actually the Communist Party, because, “some animals are more equal than others”. The Communists run a TV Channel and now are planning to start an amusement park.
The only person who was not amused as P. Chidambaram who found that the party has assets worth over Rs. 40 Billion. And the Communists responded immediately:

CPM State Secretary Pinnarayi Vijayan replying to the observations said in statement Sunday: “It is sad to note that Chidambaram instead of attacking the communal forces which are a threat to the country, has turned against the CPM that has done its best to keep communal forces at bay.”[Left under flak over assets]

Hey look, if you don’t let us make money, communal forces will rule the country, is the argument of the Communists. If you look at Pinnarayi’s statement, there is no denial of the facts at all. In fact, Pinnarayi does not have the sophistication of the 24 karat mallu when he denied his meeting with a terrorist wanted by Interpol.
Recently L K Advani came out against the Communists

“In national interest, I wish to caution Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh that your dependence on Communist support will prove to be a liability for anything good you many wish to do,” Advani said.
“The first thing India must do to achieve double-digit inclusive growth is to marginalise the ideological and political influence of the Communists, for their policies will neither deliver inclusive growth nor double digit growth,” he added.
Advani said the Communists have been fanatically opposed to every piece of economic reform, right from P V Narasimha Rao’s time to Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s tenure and now during Dr Singh’s time.
“I never cease to be amazed by the hypocrisy of the Indian Communists. For them, it is okay if China carries out economic reforms, but India must not. It is okay if China becomes a nuclear weapon nation, but India must not,” Advani said.[Left a liability for UPA: Advani]

The Communists did not deny of this, but said that Advani was charge sheeted in Ayodhya case and was boycotting the parliament. The Communist denial strategy these days is this – if you say our genitals are small, we will point out that yours are small too.

Mammotty is one of the finest actors of Malayalam Cinema. He has been around for a quarter of a century and is still acting in movies which are superhits. He is also a Communist and the chairman of the Communist Party of India Marxist-backed Kairali television channel. Once he was to act in a Coke commercial for a renumeration of Rs. 20 million, but backed off at the last moment, because the Communists were against Coke at that time. (The Communists were with Coke before that).
Where do you think the kids of such a staunch supporter of the party are living ? His daughter is in United Kingdom and the son is in United States – both symbols of imperialism according to the Communist party. But then Communism is always for the masses, and not for the family.

Everytime a western diplomat visits, there is bad news for India and usually the bad news is delivered after they land in Pakistan. Once Colin Powell announced that Pakistan is being upgraded to Non Nato Major Ally status after he landed in Islamabad. Indians were given no warning. Now Kofi Annan, being the United Nations diplomat did not have to be in enemy territory to deliver the message

Delivering a cracker of a parting shot, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan on Thursday poured cold water over India’s professed ambitions of being armed with veto power when entering the Security Council.
Additional permanent members in a reformed Security Council will not have the veto, he said, addressing a press conference after a rare visit to India. The high-powered panel set up by him, Annan said, did not envisage giving the veto to new members. It would be “Utopian”, Annan said, to expect the P-5 countries to give up their veto power or to extend it to new members. [Forget veto power, Kofi tells India]

Somehow he felt that the zing was not enough. So he came up with another zinger.

Annan also threw the government off balance by asking India to sign the CTBT and join negotiations for a fissile materials cutoff treaty (FMCT). India maintains CTBT is part of a “discriminatory” nuclear architecture, though it accepts P-5 positions on FMCT.

Annan’s statement is a clarification of what Secretary Rice told in an obfuscated way

Now, in terms of the UN Security Council, the United States has said that we believe UN Security Council reform needs to take place in the context of broader UN reform, that it is important, of course, to reform the Secretariat, the institutions of the UN, the organizations of the UN, it needs management reform and, of course, we should also look at Security Council reform. I said when I was in India that international organizations in general will have to take into account India’s growing role in the world in order to be updated and to be effective. [Remarks With Indian Minister of External Affairs Natwar Singh Following Meeting]

Atithi Devo Bhavah (Guests are like gods), that’s Indian culture. So we did not raise questions about Annan’s son or the oil-for-money scam or the corruption in United Nations. And when Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is in India, he can eat all the Biriyani he wants and exchange Sushi recipes with Manmohan Singh, but the veto power looks like a dream.