Bandra Stall : Three generations and featured in Bollywood hit.

This stall abutting the Mount Mary shrine wall has been there since the Church was upgraded in 1904, says owner Santana Miranda. ” We were also featured in the movie Amar Akbar Anthony”, she proudly tells.”See the movie and look for the woman standing at the left side of the gate. She is my mother-in-law. You’ll see her smoking a beedie.”
The plastic sheet covered stall sells votive candles in different colours, wax body parts that devotees wish cured through prayer to the Shrine’s Patroness Mother Mary. She also sells little packets of roasted gram and Bombay’s famous halva packed in rectangular pieces.
Santana claims she is 72 and says she remembers playing in front of the shrine when she was a little girl and her would be father-in-law Antonio then owned it. “My son Alvin now helps me.”
The family hails from Margao in south Goa and Santana says she will go for the feast of St Francis Xavier coming on 3rd December

Sntana at her stall

this year.

Miners barges block Goa river

Miners barges block Goa river.

Play to Gallery – Lose Credibility

Soli Sorabji is a legal luminary and has been sought after not to just grace discussions,but to make telling points. So it exposed either the immaturity or the deviousness of Barkha Dutt when she cut him off mid-sentence. He was just about to question the precedents of Anna Hazare, which sadly no journalists do. The programme was We the People on Sunday 31st July.

Iwonder if Anna Hazare would have got his share of the limelight were it not for the media fawning over him, now to the extent that he sounds more like the Mad Queen in Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland.  I noticed a first hint or realism coming from Rajdeep Sardessai when he noted that the unreasonable demand for a referendum on a Lokpal draft would lead to anarchy. Is the common man sufficiently educated to decide the merits of the varios versions ? Eminent Ex SC judges have expressed reservations about the constitutional validity of the Jan Lokpal draft and yet these worthies ( which include the media ) have ignored them. Why does not anybody ask Justice Verma about the different drafts ? And if this is about a referendum, then why not the muncipal sweeper ?

It is time the media as ishappening in Britain, is put under the scanner here in India. We have too many half baked anchors playing to the gallery without putting issues in the proper perspective. I feel The Hoot needs to play amuch bigger role in this effort.