Con of the Millennium: Bharat Ratna for Sachin Tendulkar.

Whoever masterminded the campaign to get the Bharat Ratna conferred on Tendulkar must be a PR genius (or “guru” if one were to use a contemporary marketing buzzword). Imagine the amount of work that must have gone into whipping up the clamour in the media to nominate the player for the honour. The quantum of lobbying with the sports, culture and home affairs ministries and the PMO – all the foxy manoeuvres – must have required a phenomenal amount of money, influence and patience. Then came the imaginative master stroke to cloak the ludicrous proposal in a mantle of credible provenance: the enrolling of the late Dhyan Chand as his fellow conferee for the coveted award. Strike the right emotional chords. After all, Dhyan Chand played in all three Indian field hockey team winning the Olympic Gold in a row in 1928, 1932 and 1936 − the first two times as a player and in the last instance as a playing captain. He deserves to be a Bharat Ratna without doubt. Field hockey happens to be the poor cousin of cricket in India. By implication, Dhyan Chand is the underdog with whom the Master of the Universe is willing to share the crusade to win the country’s highest honour. What magnanimity! (By the way, is this the same large-hearted Sachin Tendulkar who sought in 2003 to get a Rs.1.1-crore Import Duty and Excise exemption for the Ferrari gifted to him by the manufacturer?) Even Anna Hazare, Middle India’s current hero and poster boy, and Asha Bhosale are demanding a BR for ST. The brainy Babus who have broadened the eligibility criteria for Bharat Ratna to include excellence in all fields of human endeavour need to ask themselves a simple question. Shouldn’t Har Gobind Khorana (1922 - 2011), the winner of the Nobel Prize for his role in the discovery of RNA vis-à-vis the genetic code not be the first in the queue? There is a precedence for this: Khorana’s Indian-British compatriot and fellow Nobel laureate, Prof Amartya Sen, got it in 1999. Is discovering RNA any less of a human achievement than scoring 99 centuries?

The earth won’t stop spinning every time you leave the room.

I’m an avid but passive TV trailer watcher. There’s a JAG trailer running at this time in which ’Mac’ tells ‘Harm’: “You know, Harm, every time you leave the room, the earth doesn’t stop spinning.” When I heard it, I thought to myself what a snide, nasty, bitchy thing to say. This morning, I read a report about Asha Bhosale’s rage at being denied the opportunity to sing ‘Mehabooba’ in the new Sholay and I said to myself the JAG snidey is the perfect retort to her Diva airs. Does she ‘own’ Mehabooba? Well, there’s a by-now-notorious precedent for that kind of high and mighty behaviour. The 1980s super model, Elle Macpherson, now a 42-year-old, 6-foot Aussie mother of two, claims she is the original ‘body’, so dubbed by the venerated Time Magazine. http://celebrities.netscape.com/story/2006/08/11/who-is-really-the-body/. She is outraged by the Victoria Secret’s The Body bra model Heidi Klum’s attempt to usurp her rightful throne. (Heidi Klum, by the way, is the 33-year-old, 5-foot-9 mother of two with one more coming soon.) Boys and girls, please note that Macpherson has her own skin-care cosmetic line called ‘Elle Macpherson The Body’, plus a lingerie brand and the fitness video (‘The Body Workout’. Klum, once called ‘The Body Two’ in deference to Elle surfaced in the US in the late 1990s. Both Klum and Macpherson regularly feature in the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit issue, including the latest one. Now on whenever I get an advertising brief exhorting me to write ads so that “we can own so-and-so positioning”, I shall think of Asha, Elle and Heidi before I get down to the task.