Wordsmiths & Newsplumbers

BY R.K.MISRA In fishing-as in politics-nothing is more ungainly than a fisherman pulled into the water by his own catch. Hurling muck from the safety of the shore and making it stick may have brought  Narendra Modi to the helm of India in 2014 but the Teflon- coated  frying pan is itself on fire today . His government  faces the filth  of the    Lalit Modi revelations, the bloodied Vyapam scam and now the Madhya Pradesh Dental and Medical Admission Test taint. Oscillating between  maladministrative  misdemeanour and crass corruption charges are veteran minister Sushma Swaraj, Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhararaje Scindia , MP chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan, and Maharashtra minister Pankaja Munde  .After’ pehle’AAP law minister Jitender Singh Tomar landed  in the ‘cooler’ over his qualifications,union HRD minister Smriti Irani is next in line for a judicial scrutiny of her venerable CV. Meanwhile, Modi’s anti-corruption plank is in tatters and the school boyish lin

BY R.K.MISRA  This June, the heat in Gujarat was such, that sweat soaked clothes faster than you could take them off. And when there was nothing left to shed , you still wanted to take  off the flesh to sit in bare bones. A respite seemed in order. And I took off like a hare being chased by a dozen hounds. So, from smouldering Gujarat to the cooler climes of Himalaya ringed Uttarakhand was a journey from the frying pan  into an ice-pit. It was nature’s air conditioner, complete with climate control at work and the aroma and atmospherics of the mountains thrown in for good measure. The world of news is an eternal, dizzying merry-go-round, more addictive than marijuana and as dangerously exciting as riding a tiger. Frying news and baking analyses gives the kicks but you can end up as supper yourself trying to get off, as so many of my ilk will testify. Forty plus years in the news pit, sick of political muckraking and suffering from acute print paranoia, one was game, neverth