We Indians do have an appetite for brinjals. We eat 8 million tonnes of this cash crop a year. Here, in the home of this fruit that we eat as a vegetable, as many as 2,500 baingan varieties have been grown on our land. It’s been part of our thalis for the past 4,000 years. It’s offered as prasadum at the hyper-holy temples in Tamil Nadu, no Maharashtrian celebration is complete without vaingi bhaat and Bengalis live for their beguni. Even then, the Government seems determined to stuff BT Brinjal down our throats, complete with its bacterial gene.

Back in the country Obama inherited from Bush, where the mother company of Mahyco (the source of these GM eggplant seeds) is headquartered, the US government hasn’t permitted the sale of raw GM veggies. Yet, our sarkar wants us to eat them without any health fears?

While brinjal’s been used as a home remedy for Type 2 diabetes, no one knows what health hazards this aubergene with a double ‘e’ will cause. Worse, if approved, there’ll be no escaping this born-in-a-test-tube vegetable. It will be sold without any labels, which means buyers won’t be able to spot or spurn this freak-food. 

Why was brinjal chosen as the GM debut crop? Here’s a possibly inaccurate posit. Is it because they know that baingan doesn’t arouse deep passions among us? That it’s just a humble food? Imagine the outrage if Mahyco had tried to mangle with mangoes? We’d have to mute our TVs to silence the screeching.
As for market supply, have you ever been to the bazaar and returned without the brinjals you need? The balloon-like ones that are oiled, poked with garlic and singed before being turned into bharta… The small ones, suitable for stuffing with dry masalas or spiced coconut filling.

We don’t even have enough recipes to match our bounty of 2,500 brinjal varieties. We’ve only seen the ones coloured purple and lime green, striped ones and baby eggplants swaddled in shades of pure white. We’ve only heard of yellow and orange kathrikai, as its known in Tamil Nadu. If our Government gives in, this GM freak will contaminate the gene pool and kill desi varieties. That happened with BT cotton.  ’Scuse me, am going home to make bharleli vaingi (stuffed eggplant) with non-bacterial brinjal. While it’s still available, uncontaminated by foreign bodies.

This is not your usual dating website. It is a portal only for beauties and hunks. Welcome to beautifulpeople.com, an online dating service launched in Denmark several years ago. Seeing the stupendous response (the site boasts of 180,000 members), the portal’s  founders have now decided to run it as a unified global website. Getting into the site is not easy. Applicants have to send in their photos, which are then rated by users as ‘Yes, definitely’, ‘Hmm, yes, ok’, ‘No definitely not’. According to Greg Hodge, the site’s managing director, people are fed up of wasting time and money meeting unattractive people on the Net.

The British Council library in Mumbai, venue of many a literary event and animated argument, is becoming the country’s first major library to go online. The half-century-old physical library at Nariman Point will cease to exist and its entire archive will be moved online. So members will no longer have to brave Mumbai’s notorious traffic jams to get there. Come January, all they’ll have to do is  log on, choose books and bingo, they’ll be delivered home. Simon Gammell, director of British Council, West India, is upbeat. “I believe we are completely reinventing our services.  We are planning to make 40,000 e-books available. And it could mean the beginning of a major change in the way libraries here function.”  Marielle Morin, director, French Information Resource Centre, Delhi, disagrees. “I think we aren’t finished with the need for the physicality of books or contact with a passionate librarian,” she says.

The Shiv Sena’s finally found out how it lost the Maharashtra election: perfume. It claims Congress workers went into polling booths in the interior and applied ittar (perfume) on its symbol on voting machines. “They told voters that they would smell their fingers to see if they had voted for the Congress. Voters, scared because Congress workers were waiting outside, voted for the party. Even Sena’s committed voters were scared and voted for the Congress,” says Shailesh Patil, head of the Sena’s call centre and newly-inducted member of Uddhav Thackeray’s coterie.

Granted, buying votes isn’t even surprising anymore, but some days after the Maharashtra polls, there was a shock of a different kind. A villager in Thane district whose family got Rs 3,000 for three votes decided to go on a buying spree that ended when a shopkeeper found a note was fake. He was beaten up and handed over to the police. As news spread, other villagers found their notes, too, were fake. As the anger threatened to spill beyond the village square, the police let off the first victim. “They would have torched us. The money was definitely distributed by politicians. They are poor people and suddenly everyone could not have earned Rs 1,000 notes,” says a police constable. The case registered is against ‘unknown persons’.