Monaco,the destination... not the biscuit!

Blogdosts, I am leaving tonight.It  is to a super glamourous destination.... and I am most excited. I have been to this tiny, jewel-like principality thrice earlier. But even that is not enough. Imagine! Thrice is not enough!!
I shall attempt blogging from Monaco and Paris.... I'm sure the Business Centre of the world famous Hotel de Paris will be accessible.... I hate travelling with my laptop. God knows it's arduous enough to negotiate international airports.... why get weighed down with additional baggage?
 As always, I shall miss this space.... this connect.
  Au revoir, mes amies.... as you can tell, I am practicing my school girl French, abhi se!
                                                                 ***************

                           This appeared in Asian Age yesterday.....

                                        Murder on the Mumbai menu….

 It doesn’t happen only in C-grade crime thrillers. It’s happening now! In a city nearest you!Mumbai has beaten Delhiin a particularly macabre game. It involves diabolical murders and sleazy plots that make even the horrific Jessica Lall killing look amateurish and clumsy. There was a time when Mumbaikars would express shock and awe at the violent goings on in the Capital. We would say a trifle smugly, “Thank God we live in a civilized city… we are spared!”  Ha, ha, ha! We’d read about Aarushi Talwar’s murder and tch- tch sanctimoniously (“This would never happen in Mumbai!”). Till a recent spate of grisly , cold blooded killings woke us up to a harsh new reality. The day Neeraj Grover’s body was discovered,hacked into several pieces, and Emile Jerome along with Maria Susiaraj became household names across the country, Mumbai received a rude wake up call.Now, after a series of sadistic crimes involving young ambitious starlets, ruthless boy friends, and merciless pimps, all of whom have conspired to kill  innocent victims in cold blood, Mumbai isn’t smirking. The latest sultry siren on the crime radar is someone called Simran Sood (RGV must be hot on her trail). Going by reports, she is a seasoned operator on Mumbai’s frenetic party circuit, making sure she gets into hard core IPL after- parties, where she networks with cricketers, movie stars and other influential people. Had it remained there, Simran would have been one more pushy starlet, willing to sleep around in the hope of getting a break. There are thousands like her on the fringes of Bollywood - attractive, sexy party girls who don’t let go of an opportunity to make money, score drugs and trap richie- rich men . Mumbai is an expensive city. Survival is one thing. But flashing a luxurious lifestyle, quite another. Someone’s got to pay for it! After the sensational murder of Arun Tikku, the 64- year-old- father of Anuj Tikku,  Simran’s name is being thrown around in a more lethal context.She has changed her lurid story several times and her latest ‘confession’ has her as the accused killer, Vijay Palande’s wife (earlier, she called herself his sister / niece / friend). There are a lot of red faces in Bollywood and  beyond, as Simran’s Facebook account  shows her posing with assorted celebrities like Neil Nitin Mukesh, Gautam Vora, various cricketers and others.

   The modus operandi in most of these cases involves smart, good looking girls ( ‘Honey traps’ as our cops call them) and their dangerous liaisons with hardened criminals. The motives are the same – greed. In this case, Simran’s ‘associate’ ( for want of a better word) gangster Vijay Palande has also confessed to killing Karan Kakkad , a rich boy from Delhi, because Palande fancied Kakkad’s BMW.  Kakkad was yet another Delhi bakra who wanted a touch of  glamour in his life.Kakkad wanted a shot at – you’ve guessed it – Bollywood. There are dozens of Kakkads who fly into Mumbai with stars in their eyes, and a couple of crores in their pocket. Fortunately, most of them go back broke, but alive. Those who are desperate, seek out the Simrans and Palandes who prey on such gullible men…. and increasingly, slit their throats when they are of no further use. Anuj Tikku was spared this grisly end, but  Arun,his poor father paid for his mistake of coming to Mumbai. Little could Sr. Tikku have known about the sinister plot that had been hatched by Palande to kill the old man, kill his son, and grab their pricy properties. He had done it before. He was sure, he could do it again.

 Just as the city was recovering from this blood curdling story, came the equally shocking news of  a Dehradun girl,  26-year-old Meenakshi Thapa, who was butchered by two people she’d met during a film shoot. Unable to claim a hefty ransom (15 lakhs) from Thapa’s family, the accused chopped her up, threw her body parts out of a running bus, flung her decapitated head into a water tank at Allahabad, and resumed their normal activities as if nothing had happened. According to the cops, one of Meenakshi’s alleged killers ( Amit Kumar Jaiswal) is a lawyer, the other ( Preeti Surin) his assistant. All three had tenuous showbiz links. Meenakshi had worked as a junior artist in Madhur Bhandarkar’s under production ‘Heroine’.No matter how these scripts read, the bottom line remains the same. There is a pattern to all three murders remains alarmingly similar, with Bollywood as the centerpiece. Whether Simran the seductress also worked as a match fixer, whether she really had a torrid affair with socialite broker Gautam Vora ( notorious for being the boy friend of   Viveka Babaji, the statuesque model who committed suicide), or  she knew some of the other celebs whose pictures she posted on Facebook, one thing is clear –  Bollywood Dreams are at the centre of  unbelievable violence.We used to mock Dilliwallas and the ease with which young girls were snuffed out at friendly, neighbourhood bars and clubs for their grave crime of not serving drinks to unsavoury characters after closing hours. Mumbai’s recent record shows how swiftly this megapolis has overtaken Delhiin the  society crime department.

   Even as Jerome, the handsome, athletic Naval officer sweats it out in jail, his girl friend has calmly gone back to the family fold in Mangalore. Today there are new criminal-celebs on the scene, with equally sadistic murders attached to their names. Let’s call it the Bollywood Syndrome. And let these murders be terrible and terrifying reminders to all those young men and women who arrive in Mumbai hoping to become Kareena Kapoor and Salman Khan. Bollywood is unapologetically carnivorous. It devours the unwary and innocent … spits out bones. Its appetite is huge. It’s beast without a conscience. Come here … and be prepared to die.