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Sep 29, 2022
Myind Staff

Russia to formally annex four more areas of Ukraine tomorrow

Russia's Vladimir Putin will hold a signing ceremony on Friday formally annexing four more areas of Ukraine where occupied areas held Kremlin-orchestrated “referendums" on living under Moscow’s rule that the Ukrainian government and the West denounced as illegal and rigged. Putin will attend a ceremony tomorrow in the Kremlin when four regions of Ukraine will be officially folded into Russia, spokesman Dmitry Peskov said while speaking to reporters. "Tomorrow in the Georgian Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace at 15:00 (1200 GMT) a signing ceremony will take place on the incorporation of the new territories into Russia," Peskov said, adding that Putin will make a speech at this event. The official annexation was widely expected following the votes that wrapped up on Tuesday in the areas under Russian occupation in Ukraine and after Moscow claimed residents overwhelmingly supported for their areas to formally become part of Russia. The United States and its Western allies have sharply condemned the votes as “sham" and vowed never to recognize their results. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Thursday joined other Western officials in denouncing the votes. “Under threats and sometimes even (at) gunpoint people are being taken out of their homes or workplaces to vote in glass ballot boxes," she said at a conference in Berlin. "This is the opposite of free and fair elections," Baerbock said. “And this is the opposite of peace. It’s dictated peace. As long as this Russian diktat prevails in the occupied territories of Ukraine, no citizen is safe. No citizen is free." Armed troops had gone door-to-door with election officials to collect ballots within five days of voting. The suspiciously high margins in favor were characterized as a land grab by an increasingly cornered Russian leadership after embarrassing military losses in Ukraine. Moscow-installed administrations in the four regions of southern and eastern Ukraine claimed Tuesday night that 93% of the ballots cast in the Zaporizhzhia region supported annexation, as did 87% in the Kherson region, 98% in the Luhansk region and 99% in Donetsk. Ukraine too has dismissed the referendums as illegitimate, saying it has every right to retake the territories, a position that has won support from Washington. The Kremlin has been unmoved by the criticism. After a counteroffensive by Ukraine this month dealt Moscow’s forces heavy battlefield setbacks, Russia said it would call up 300,000 reservists to join the fight. It also warned it could resort to nuclear weapons. Also on Thursday, Ukrainian authorities said Russian shelling has killed has killed at least eight civilians, including a child, and wounded scores of others. A 12-year-old girl has been pulled out of the rubble after an attack on Dnipro, officials said. “The rescuers have taken her from under the rubble, she was asleep when the Russian missile hit," said local administrator Valentyn Reznichenko. Reports of new shelling came as Russia appeared to continue to lose ground around a key northeastern city of Lyman while it struggles to press on with chaotic mobilization of troops and prevent the fighting-age men from leaving the country, according to a Washington-based think-tank and the British intelligence reports. The Institute for the Study of War, citing Russian reports, said Ukrainian forces have taken more villages around Lyman, a city some 160 kilometers (100 miles) southeast of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. The report said Ukrainian forces may soon encircle Lyman entirely, in what would be a major blow to Moscow’s war effort. "The collapse of the Lyman pocket will likely be highly consequential to the Russian grouping in northern Donetsk and western Luhansk oblasts and may allow Ukrainian troops to threaten Russian positions along the western Luhansk" region, the institute said. The British military intelligence report claimed the number of Russian military-age men fleeing the country likely exceeds the number of forces Moscow used to initially invade Ukraine in February. “The better off and well educated are over-represented amongst those attempting to leave Russia," the British said. “When combined with those reservists who are being mobilized, the domestic economic impact of reduced availability of labor and the acceleration of ‘brain drain’ is likely to become increasingly significant." That partial mobilization is deeply unpopular in some areas, however, triggering protests, scattered violence, and Russians fleeing the country by the tens of thousands. Miles-long lines formed at some borders and Moscow also reportedly set up draft offices at borders to intercept some of those trying to leave. Image courtesy: Mint

Sep 28, 2022
Richa Yadav

King of Comedy in India: Raju Srivastav

The fiercely popular comedian, actor, and politician Raju Srivastav can be inarguably addressed as the ‘king of Indian comedy. Satya Prakash Srivastav (25 December 1963 – 21 September 2022), ‘Raju’ was born in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, to a poet father. With his amazing grip on language and his ability to add a colloquial hint to it, when needed, he gave a new dimension to Indian comedy in Hindi. He started his journey as a comedian by mimicking the people around him. This continued until he watched the superhit movie ‘Sholey’ for the first time on the big screen and began enacting scenes from ‘Sholey’ replacing characters from his own surroundings in his local intonation. At the beginning of his career, he used to dance to Amitabh Bachhan’s famous songs like ‘pag ghunghru bandh’ in Bachchan's get-up. He could mimic Bachhan’s voice so well that people began calling him ‘junior Amitabh’. Raju had won people’s hearts for decades due to his comedy gigs. Despite being an outsider, he made a place for himself in Bollywood. He made people laugh with his mimicry of politicians like Indira Gandhi, Atal ji, and Lalu Yadav and Bollywood actors like Shatrughan Sinha, Jitendra, and even Hema Malini. He did more than 5000 stand-up comedy live shows. Even before he came on many TV shows, he had released his cassettes, CDs and DVDs later on. He rose to fame after participating in the first season of the stand-up comedy show, ‘The Great Indian Laughter Challenge in 2005’. He made guest appearances in several films like ‘Maine Pyaar Kiya’, ‘Aamdani Atthani Kharcha Rupaiya’, and ‘Baazigar'. He later ventured into politics by joining the Samajwadi Party and then switched to the BJP. He had been a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party since 2014. He also served as the chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Film Development Council and continuously worked with the government to establish a film industry in Uttar Pradesh so that more talents could get a chance to make a living with their interest in performing arts. Raju never used derogatory, abusive terms or sexual undertones to make people laugh. Despite people's demands and suggestions to take his comedy to the ‘next level by opening up’ Raju always came up with decent, clean comedy. His content never crossed the limits of decency or reflected vulgarity, which has become the first milestone of several other youth comedians in India and abroad, today. Then, how did he create content without latching on to cheap sets or sexual suggestiveness? He created characters from the people he saw around him while growing up in a rural and small-town setting of Unnao and Kanpur. His characters were real; ‘Gajodhar’ and ‘Sankata’, with their colloquial language, expressed their simple curiosity and innocence and touched the hearts of millions, hitting the audience’s funny bones to the hilt. He was a keen observer of his surroundings; his jokes effortlessly flowed from extremely simple day-to-day life and made people laugh because of its sheer familiarity and relatability. Turning the rural and semi-urban reality of UP into fine-tuned, intensely crafted humor came naturally to Raju and was reflected in all his presentations. He made his art look so artless; this was the beauty of his comedy. In an interview, when Raju was introduced in a prolix way, he smiled and said, “if Raju is such a big star, then I must sit and listen to him sometimes”. He smiled and refuted the idea by adding that he was a commoner. “All subziwale, doodhwale. Rikshewale are my friends. I observe and just mimic them”. He was no less a comedian than a micro-observer. His character ‘Gajodhar bhaiya’ was a true representation of the rural mindset. The kind of comedy Raju did require an understanding of the culture, especially the rural dynamics so that he could touch on the nerve of people and represent them in a humorous way. His performances were not only hilarious because of the content but also because he used his body to bring out his characters to life, be it a child, a woman, or some old man from his village. He added life to inanimate objects- described what inanimate objects were thinking and added a hint of satire. E.g., look how they are pulling me, said the local train when constantly the commuters held the handles hanging from the train ceiling; in a full plate in weddings, roti hangs out from the plate as if kids were sitting on a higher platform with their hanging legs, and ‘achar kahta hai, mai toh bhula hua hun, kisi niwale mein eksaath aaunga, aur subah bataunga mai kaun hun’. That's why Raju Srivastav is certainly, the king of stand-up comedy, who could so naturally represent real-life events in a hilarious, comic form. It will not be easy for comedians to match his level in the years to come. People loved listening to his jokes repeatedly. “I can do anything to make people laugh”, he used to say. People like me who have grown up watching Raju Srivastav’s comedy, I am sure have always found him relatable and relevant and have collected memories and bundles of laughter for life from the comedian. It is because of him the era of standup comedy shows came into being; he introduced this craft to the country as a stand-up comedian. Raju’s brilliance in his stand-up made millions of people laugh at his setups, whether they were from first-generation, second, or even third of his time, people from a higher or middle class, he got them all. Kudos to an institution of comedy in himself. Image source: Koimoi