Cooperation and development

In a certain state in a certain country, the Minister in charge of the environment came across a video clip showing a man and woman carrying out acts of an environmentally friendly nature. He therefore downloaded it to his phone and passed it on to the Minister for cooperation, an agreeable fellow who cooperated by watching the video clip in the House. This attracted the attention of the Minister for woman and child development - who very rightly considered it his job to investigate the state of development of the woman in the video. While the latter two were engrossed in studying the developmental and cooperative nature of the activities depicted therein (which taken to their logical conclusion might even have resulted in nation-building!) they were filmed by a TV crew. The rest is history, of a sort.

As explained above, the Ministers were only doing their job - and with exemplary dedication, given that some of the scenes in the video are said to have been stress-inducing. So all the fuss seems to be about nothing at all, but for one important point. These worthy gentlemen were showing disrespect to the legislature of their state at a time when it was discussing a serious crisis: the hoisting of the flag of a foreign country in Bellary, the historic city after which the surrounding district is also named. The flag-hoisting was presumably an act of sedition, so it certainly should have engrossed the Ministers. To be sure it was a confusing story, since it emerged that it was not people friendly to the foreign country who raised its flag, but people hostile to it. Maybe that's what made the whole matter very confusing to the Ministers, who decided to take care of their office work instead?

But they should have paid attention, since it's the most exciting thing to happen in a rather dull part of the country. The last time Bellary was in the news, it was about something genuinely boring: the illegal mining and export of iron ore, about which this long-winded report was eventually written. The report estimates the value of illicit iron ore exported during 2007-10 to be roughly 100,000,000,000 rupees, or 2 billion dollars. If I were ever to attend an assembly session discussing such a piffling matter it's more than likely I would prefer to browse videos, cooperative or otherwise, on my phone.