Road side banners – copying Pune politicians

In PCMC and Pune you will find that road side banners are put up on every chowk and street corner for the local leader, corporator, MLA, MP’s birthday.


These are not made of cotton, with text and pictures painted by hand – as you would have seen during election times prior to 1996-97 era. The banners that you see nowadays can be mass produced, they are made of glossy, synthetic plastic type material – can have pictures with digital image quality printed by machines.

These are the “coding” standards used –

Every one is called “Bhau”, “Sheth”, “Dada”, “Saheb” or “Rao” and every one is a “Karya Samrat”. There is lot of “urf” terminology used (in English - a.k.a or also-known-as)

So if you are a budding “nagar sevak” or even the 5 year old son of a “nagar sevak” – you will find 10 feet * 10 feet banners put on roads for occasions like birthdays, any major festivals etc, with probably 20-30 small size photos of people who are “shubhekshuk – or “compliments from” inserted at the bottom of the banner.

For MLA or a minister, the banners will be 30 feet by 10 feet – with full body size pictures – shown in different style/poses – one in the traditional white political dress, one with a suit in color, and the same one in black-and-white.

Taking inspiration from this, few of my Capgemini and alumni friends made up a 6*4 feet banner for one of our alumni member who was getting married – they actually put this up in the lane where this person (who is getting married), lives. Here is the actual picture of the banner put up in the Aundh area – I am sure the locals would have been amused!!!

Movies to watch when you have nothing to do!!

If you have time, and nothing worthwhile to do, you can watch these 2 movies – (I watched both of them last month). Another equally irritsting movie is FARISHTAY - with dharmendra and Vinod Khanna.

Tehelka – A 1980’s film directed by ANIL Sharma (the same person who directed GADAR and VEER). An atrocious film - out-of-the-world dialogues - Indian army officers (Shammi Kapoor, Mukesh Khanna, Aditya Panchsoli, Naseerudding Shah, Dharmendra trying to bring down a dictator from a Kashmir type country/state ruled by evil Amrish Puri. The guns used in the movie are iron pipes, painted black, and welded together. Even a kid can tell that those are FAKE guns. I guess the first movie which showed “real” hardware being used was Roza.


Hum Saath Saath Hai – A not-so-successful film from the Barjatya’s – very character is not only named – “something”-Babu, but also uses the Babu suffix in every dialogue, not only referring to the character in 3rd person, but in face to face talk as well.

While on the topic “Babu” – lot of Gulti film stars are “babu” - Aditya “Babu”, Naga “Babu”etc. I can’t imagine why would a film start want to be called “Babu”.

Imagine Shahrukh “Babu”!!!!! or Hrithik “Babu” on the credits!!

Trivia –

One thing in the gulti movies – if a star is famous by a particular screen name or epithet – he HAS to be introduced in all movies with the same name – the junta will cause a riot in the theatre if a different name is used. So Cheeranjeevi has an unique epithet, Nagarjuna has one for him and so on..

This was told to me by one of my friends – I will need to verify by watching a gulti movie in the theatre.