CHENNAI: At the Corporation Council Meet, the Mayor was all smiles as the Rockefeller Foundation had selected Chennai for its 100 Resilient Cities challenge. He expressed his happiness and soaked in the proud moment for a while. But, he should have left it at that.
In a Eureka moment, he sought to enlighten the ignorant councillors and ‘young’ journalists about an important piece of modern history. Asking if the council knew who this Rockefeller fellow was, the Mayor, with his pearly whites on display, went on to say that Rockefeller was the person whom former US President John F Kennedy’s wife ‘Jocelyn Kennedy’ married after the latter’s assassination.
Stunned silence followed, and then a brief tap on the table by a few ‘ignorant’ councillors.
Only two problems. JFK never married a Jocelyn. The woman he married was Jacqueline Bouvier. The Mayor, however, got it partly correct. She did remarry after JFK’s death. But the former first lady wed a Greek shipping magnate named Aristotle Onassis. Secondly, John D Rockefeller, the patron and oil magnate after whom the foundation is named, died when JFK was still in college.
Thankfully, neither men were around to listen to the ‘pearls of wisdom’ but who knows if they were turning in their graves!
Dirty PR Trick
Cops often go to great lengths to ensure that crimes do not get played up in the media. But their methods, at times, are not of good taste. Of late, one of the most common dirty tricks by the Chennai police is to cast aspersions on the victim of the crime, whom they are ought to protect. It is very easy, especially in cases of sexual assault on women. Many crime reporters realised this when they were reporting a recent rape complaint by a young girl. During off the record conversations, the police spun a number of tales just to convince reporters that the girl was not of a ‘good character’ and hence her claims were ‘dubious’ or at least the rape case was ‘not very shocking’. Their imaginations and stories were so convincing that many reporters, in fact, believed them, until the real accused was traced and arrested. The police also claimed that the victim, a girl, had another boyfriend and the rape allegation was just to cheat her present boy friend. Another version was that the girl had intercourse with her present boy friend and that the rape complaint was to hide it from her parents. Last year, in a case of rape-cum-murder of a woman, the police spoke about the ‘sex chats’ the victim had with a few men, to convince reporters that it was not a ‘gruesome incident’, but just a case of an ‘illicit’ relationship that had gone awry. All the cops’ tales were proved to be blatant lies when the accused were arrested later.
Free ‘Service’?
Cops walking into an eatery, picking up the packed food and leaving without paying the bill is no rare sight. The attitude they put up is — ‘Don’t I deserve free food when I am policing for your shop?’ However, this young cop who appeared to have joined the force (Government Railway Police) at Chennai Central got snubbed by an employee of a sandwich joint. While placing the order and waiting for his sandwich this reporter spotted the cop clad in uniform and waiting in the counter. He called an employee and asked him for a sandwich. However, the staffer insisted that he make the payment first. The unrelenting cop dared the staffer saying, “Don’t you know that I work in the Control Room? Haven’t you seen me around?” The staff replied indifferently that he was selling sandwiches and not running a charity. The embarrassed cop walked away from the joint without a sandwich, but with enough humiliation.