Rice to the Occasion.
Published by Vijay November 14th, 2006 in Humour, Life in India, News, Random NoiseWhile watching TV at home on Sunday night, a news item in our city’s local TV channel got my attention.
A group of activists from a political party had hit upon a novel idea to protest the poor condition of the roads in their locality. The images on TV were priceless. I regret that I have no way of reproducing them here.
The TV showed a really bad stretch of an urban road with huge potholes and irregular bits of tarmac protruding out of the slush produced by this year’s excessive monsoon rains. (Imagine the pothole pictured here filling the entire width of the road).
A group of flag-waving, banner-carrying, slogan-shouting political agitators were planting rice inside the slush filled potholes.
While these people were protesting by planting rice, others elsewhere were marking their protest by uprooting planted rice crops.
COIMBATORE: Agriculture Secretary Surjit K. Choudhary rushed to Coimbatore to take stock of the situation arising out the drive carried out by some organisations against cultivating genetically engineered paddy.
Last Friday, hundreds of farmers and activists uprooted genetically engineered paddy crop on a trial field in Ramanathapuram village at Alandurai, 30 km from here. The local police had registered a case against Tamil Nadu Farmers’ Association president K. Chellamuthu and 89 others. The Government took a serious view of the incident and wanted the Agriculture Secretary to look into the issue.
Sharing his views on the incident, Mr. Choudhary wondered how anyone could take law into their hands. “If you want to oppose something, there are ways of democratic protest. You could have given a memorandum to the Collector and requested him to monitor whether the prescribed regimen is followed,” he told The Hindu .
I wonder what are the ‘ways of democratic protest?’
I like rice. Rice is great if you’re hungry and want 2000 of something. Mitch Hedberg
Photo Credits:
- Bad roads in Ammapet, Salem from The Hindu’s online archives.
- Woman in paddy field from Frank Starmer’s India flickr set.
Hmmm…
I don’t guess I have ever thought of a “definition” for “ways of democratic protest”.
I could see protestors over here pulling rice out of the ground. Sounds reasonable, as long as they owned the field.
As far as planting rice in the potholes goes…
I think that is a great idea.
In fact, it made me chuckle.
So it must definitely be a “good democratic way to protest”.
Well…
At least it seems that way to me.
later…