![]() My grandfather lost the panchayat election to a man from a lower caste. When I was a child my grandfather had been the village headman, but by the time I was in my teens power had shifted. Most of his other relatives worked the land a cousin became a doctor but others, if they left Jadopur, managed only to find low-paying jobs. My father had been the first person in the entire district to get selected for the Indian civil services education had been his ticket out of the village. I took my son on a walk to the village school that my father had built in my grandmother’s memory. But then my father found the documents of sale that showed that the land had indeed been bought, back when he was a boy, from the family that was now claiming the land. My sister said that it left him disoriented. This news had come as a blow to my father. Another family in the village claimed that they had papers from the beginning of the last century showing ownership. ![]() Several months ago, my father was told that someone else had ploughed the field. Corn had been planted in one of our fields the young plants were only ankle high. When I visited the village as a schoolboy, I had always wanted to draw or photograph what I saw. When we entered the village, the placidity of the place reminded me how much I missed it. Jadopur, our village, is several hours’ drive from Patna. My father, who is nearly ninety, was interested in showing my son our ancestral homestead. This time I applied well in advance, and I also appealed to a senior official in the foreign service who had been in high school with me. Because of this, security clearance had to be provided by the Indian Home Ministry. This was because my wife was born in Pakistan. When I traveled to India last, I was unable to get a visa for my son, who was then twelve. Which is all to say, there was quite a bit of toxicity in the air. In response, the Pakistan Foreign Minister, Bilawal Bhutto, had said at a press conference that ‘Osama Bin Laden is dead, but the butcher of Gujarat lives and he is the Prime Minister of India.’ A day or two later, a BJP leader announced that he would award two crore rupees (about a quarter million dollars) to anyone who would behead Bhutto. My friend said that at the UN, the Indian Foreign Minister had reminded the world that Pakistan had hosted Osama Bin Laden. The news came from New York, the city I had left a day earlier. I had slept a few hours but was still jet-lagged when I met a friend for dinner on my first night back in Delhi. My friend said it would be a good title for a Delhi painting.Īll over Delhi the billboards showed a picture of Narendra Modi and the words: Mother of Democracy to Host G20. I asked a friend of mine about the phrase ‘particulate matter’ – I had heard the term used to describe what gave the atmosphere its dark colour. ‘Weather trends show capital no longer gets benign fog.’ Delhi’s air was described as carrying ‘a large share of chlorides, sulphates and nitrates, and ions of calcium and ammonium’. When I complained about this to my publisher, he showed me a news item on his phone. ![]() Very quickly I developed a sore throat and then a cough. It was foggy outside, the air smelling acrid. So hot that there were reports of overheated birds falling from the sky. "I always say, God gives you seven seconds to make a decision," Smith said on one broadcast.The last time I was in Delhi it was hot. Smith said on the Thursday broadcast that Miller needed to check his decision making. The name of Alabama's Brandon Miller surfaced last month in court testimony involving the capital murder case of former Crimson Tide player Darius Miles and another man, who are charged in the fatal shooting of 23-year-old Jamea Harris. More: Charles Barkley is thought-provoking but wrong about impending NBA lockout | Opinion Barkley is Thanos and Smith is Captain America, a brilliant analyst with a sharp sense of humor, too, who wears turtlenecks under suit jackets and diagrams plays on the big board the way Steve Kornacki breaks down polls. CBS basically hijacked some of that magic bringing Barkley and Kenny Smith, another former player, to the tournament. Barkley is mostly known for his work on TNT for their studio show "Inside the NBA." That's become one of the most popular studio shows in the history of television.
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