BANDH

yesterday was bloody boring man. the entire manipal went dead because the ppl went on a strike(bandh). it all happen because former chief minister of madhya pradesy, uma bhati(something like that), was arrested in the state of karnataka for some crime called the 'hubli firing' whichi occured 10 years ago. she was from the opposition party, BJP. BJP was the ruling party until they lost the last general election to the Congress party a few months back. so the BJP members are claiming the arrest as a political head hunting. as a sign of protest, party members called for a karnataka bandh. karnataka has a population of almost 57 million ppl.

in manipal, everything went dead. there was no bus or autorickshaw service. all shops and petrol station were closed. there was no work of any kind. but the university still remained open(bloody hell!!). the streets were empty except for the heavy presence of the police in case of any violent outbreaks. in udupi, there was a sit in protest by the BJP party involving almost 600 members. they sat down and blocked all major roads, preventing all vehicle movement.

not everyone here is a BJP member(though a majority are) and not everyone supports the bandh. but once a bandh is called for you have to comply. if you open your shop, a group of radicals will come and assault you and destroy the shop.it has happened before. the police cant do jack shit about anything cause they are taking orders from the politicians. plus to that, the police corruption here is even more open and serious compared to back home. so the bandh may seem very succesful but in actual fact the general population are forced into it to serve the self interest of the political elite.

with no food stall open, we had to cook for ourselves. actually it was Mr WW who cooked for us. the only thing i did was to openned a can of stew pork and heat it up. i cant cook for nuts. the other day i tried cooking sweet and sour fish using those instant powder crap.just need to add some ingridients and cook a bit. when i finished cooking it looked nothing like wats on the packet. in the packet, the gravy was golden orange. mine was brownish black. shit!!

well, at least the stray dogs still ate the fish.