We should move Bollywood over to Dollywood!

Indian Cricket has moved away from Bombay to Mohali and Rajkot, why not Bollywood? The new Film-City should be established in the ‘National Capital Region’ like Noida and Gurgaon for the IT industry. This move would create a million jobs up North and ease the pressure on Bombay. In any case most of the talent in the Indian film industry comes from other parts of the country. Bombay is also called the Tinsel town of India. It has a lot of glamour attached to it. People from all over India converge to live their dreams. Most of them fail but a few succeed. This creates a lot of unnecessary traffic in the commercial capital of India. Besides, this should also address the grievances of some of the Marathi manoos.

Delhi Metro must reach Meerut by 2020…

Meerut City and Meerut District, both are too close to Delhi for comfort. Besides having a terrible history of 1857, Meerut could be a great asset to Delhi and New Delhi. Delhi Metro is a rapid transit system in the Indian National Capital Territory of Delhi which does not include Meerut. Earlier, the whole area, 100 kms radius around Delhi, was supposed to be a ‘National Capital Region’. Or was I misinformed?

Meerut City is 72 kms north-east of New Delhi. It has a population of 1.2 million people. According to Pradeep Thakur of TNN, “Meerut contributed a handsome Rs 10,089 crore to the national kitty in 2007-08, leaving fancier cities like Jaipur, Bhopal, Kochi and Bhubaneshwar in its wake. It did even better than the state capital, Lucknow”. This could be a great opportunity to develop ‘Delhi-Meerut Corridor’ but also a grave challenge because of a disproportionately high Muslim population.

The Muslims of Meerut are highly skilled people and, till a few decades back, had very articulate leadership also. I am talking about the days of  Major General Shahnawaz Khan, MP (Member of Parliament) from Meerut. Ever since Chaudhary Charan Singh became the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1967, the relations between Hindus and Muslims in Meerut have been tense, to put it mildly.