By V.S. Karnic, IANS
Bangalore : India’s IT hub is in the grip of a cold wave, cricket frenzy and talk of return to active politics of Maharashtra Governor S.M. Krishna to help the Congress take on fellow Vokkaliga caste strongman and arch political rival H.D. Deve Gowda of the Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S).
The cloudy weather, chilly winds and a forecast of rain, just ahead of the third and final India-Pakistan cricket Test that began Dec 8, forced Bangaloreans to dust up their woollens and worry if the expected five-day match will get washed out. But the weather gods were merciful.
Not just Bangalore but entire Karnataka was eager to watch the local lad Anil Kumble lead his team on the home ground and hope for a win to wrap up the three-Test series.
Like the weather, Krishna has also been keeping fellow Congressmen in Karnataka guessing. As the city was engrossed in cricket, he was busy performing elaborate pujas at a famous temple around six kilometres away.
He performed ‘Mahardura Yagna’ at Kashi Vishwanath Temple, in the city’s congested, wholesale market area of Balepet.
The ‘yagna’ and the fact that it was conducted after a gap of six decades added grist to the talk that Krishna was propitiating gods to facilitate his re-entry into active politics. But it will need Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s nod.
Gandhi is under pressure from a powerful section of the state unit to keep him away from the state.
Krishna’s supporters have been camping in New Delhi for days to impress her that he can add vigour to the sluggish and faction-ridden party unit in Karnataka and prepare it for assembly elections, expected in April/May next year.
His track record in Karnataka has been mixed. He led the party to a resounding victory in the 1999 assembly polls and became the chief minister. But the party was routed in 2004, winning just 65 of 224 seats. After a while he was shunted to Maharashtra as governor.
Krishna has been a frequent visitor to the state and the one person keeping count of the number of times he has come to Bangalore from Mumbai is JD-S chief Gowda.
Gowda in fact wants the Indian president to find out if Krishna has been hopping to Bangalore with the permission of the president or not.
Weather, cricket and Krishna-Gowda politics have dominated the Bangalore scene so much that an international conference on two areas that the world is talking about – nanoscience and nanotechnology – almost went unnoticed.
The two-day ‘Bangalore Nano 2007’, the first of its kind event in the country, ended Dec 7. About 500 delegates from India and several other countries attended it and discussed the prospects that nanoscience and nanotechnology hold for electronics, bio pharma, engineering and other areas.
Amid all the events, the one that caught the fancy of the youth was when Yamaha unveiled its million-rupee super bikes – Super Sports YZF-R1 and the Torque Sports MT01 – in the city Dec 4.
With a price tag of Rs.1.5 million, the bikes, costliest two-wheelers in the Indian market, are being put on sale in Bangalore, New Delhi, Chennai and Ahmedabad. The bikes would not be manufactured in India but brought into the country as completely built units and sold.