Summer in London brings with it many pleasures. There are great piles of varied greenery and lethally pollinous flowers, there are the numerous articles about summer foods, salads, vegetables and fruits that we hardly see in India (curly kale, Swiss chard, kiwi fruit and their ilk), there is the Island's majority community exposing swathes of peeling pink skin - no matter that this is the wettest summer since 1960 - and then, this year, the hysteria about the English football team's hopes of winning the World Cup and Tim Henman's chances of winning Wimbledon - both, alas, dashed, thank god. Hiding in the debris of the summer's real sporting events you begin to find the usual, slightly patronizing, reports on the cricket, the sneery prose of English cricket writers being bolstered this season by the Sri Lankans making a gift of their series to England in the Queen's Jubilee year. Based on nothing more than instinct, I have a feeling that India are now about to execute the same cricketing equivalent of tugging the colonial forelock. The bizarre English notion that Nasser Hussain's team can be mentioned in the same breath as Our Boys has been given some slight pause by the presence of Tendulkar, Yuvraj Singh and, most terrifyingly, the Tendulkar clone Virender Sehwag ('You finally get him out. He disappears into the pavilion. Then he loses three inches and comes out again!'). Indeed, if Sourav Ganguly really botches it up we might even manage to win the NatWest final well before this column makes its debut, but in the long run there is no real need for worry - there are four tests to follow the one-dayers. Between the absence of any movement from either Ganguly's backfoot or his brain, and the presence of the not-so-secret English weapons of rain, arctic wind, and the most boring bowling attack in the world, any threat of decent cricket from the 'hugely talented' Indians is sure to have been blunted by the end of August. I am well-known among friends as the worst maker of sporting predictions, and I hope to maintain my hundred per cent record, but this has been a topsy-turvy summer so you never know. This year has seen not only the crumbling of football and tennis giants but also some big game players on Wall Street and now in Paris. The only serious coverage, or if you like bad puns, un-coverage, of this is to be found in the latest issue of that venerable old American journal Playboy. Well before it hit the stands Playboy has been touting its 'Women of Enron' issue and now, finally, one can leaf through it and check out the real figures, so to speak. Looking at a motley crew of female ex-employees in various stages of undress one can be forgiven for reaching the conclusion that this is one fading American business giant trying to make money from the bloody demise of another - a bit like sharks tend to do. 'There is nothing wrong with a woman's body. We were born nude.' So tells us Carey Lorenzo who apparently sold energy at Enron's NYC office. 'At Enron, the hair on my arms stood up as I watched people running around.' Says Christine Nielsen, ex-project co-ordinator, describing the 'electric' atmosphere in her office in Portland, Oregon. Shari Daugherty is a former 'information technology security administrator at Enron'. As she stands in her all in all, hand in hand with a sports car in front of Enron's Houston headquarters, she talks of leaving the country. She is off to France with her husband ( another ex-Enronian) because 'it's near everything I hold dear: snowboarding, scuba diving, shopping and sex.' The fascinating thing is that Playboy manages to make the Enron women look exactly like all other Playboy women - vive la non-difference! Playboy and Penthouse and countless others have, of course, used the naked woman in the office/boardroom/executive jet/front-of-office-tower theme many times before - usually to signify the supposedly ecstatic union of money, power and sexual charge. What Playboy now does is to try and use the same suspects of pose and location to signify the exact opposite - the aphrodisiacal effect of the Captalist mini-Apocalypse. Whatever floats (or in this case, sinks) your boat, as they say. Post Enron we have seen at least two other big companies go down: Xerox and WorldCom, with many others now suspected of having built up 'a hall of mirrors inside a house of cards', as one lawsuit against Enron eloquently puts it. One is forced to wonder whether Playboy will now do an issue for every US corporate giant that goes belly-up. To let the imagination go just a little off the leash, there is no reason why we shouldn't see: 'The Women of General Motors', 'The Women of Microsoft', 'The Women of the US Special Forces' (or How They Took Us at Tora Bora) and, inevitably, 'The Women of the White House' (subtitle: A Bird in Hand...). The logic of the market being what it is, we should finally get Playboy's terminal issue, 'The Real Women of Playboy', with Hilda, Photo Archivist (breasts section), and Terri, Hef's Bather (in charge of left armpit) - I have to say the thought is maddeningly exciting. But given that Playboy is regarded by many modern people as slightly over-obsessed with women's bodies, if not downright sexist and misogynist, and given also that the name Enron conjures up quite different images for many Indians, perhaps one could suggest a different magazine issue based on the late unlamented company and its doings, one preferably brought out by a Bombay magazine, perhaps Debonair or Gentleman or some such. Perhaps one could have an 'exposé' of a slightly different sort titled 'The Politicians of Enron' (or 'How We Power-Stripped Maharashtra!') and get every politician involved with Enron, regardless of which party they are from, to pose fetchingly naked. Naturally the poses would have to be shot in the usual locations connected with power: corporate offices, executive jets, electric power plants, the Sachivalaya, Wankhede Stadium, the 'Benevolent' Dictator's flat with the tiger wall-hanging, and so on. And the Indian flag, which we are all now allowed to display, could definitely be used as a prop to drape, cover and titillate across the spread. I suspect the electricity generated would make the hair stand on our arms. What makes the hair stand on my head is the ease with which the Gujarat genocide has fallen off the international news pages here. The fate of Arafat and the ongoing butchery of Sharon are still with us, as is the progress of the trial of Milosevic, but somehow, after the distracting brinksmanship of the Vajpayee-Musharraf nuclear show, the British press has lost sight of the fact that one of the year's biggest tragedies still continues to play on in India. It's funny how, even in the serious broadsheets, the news sections mirror the sports sections. Like the World Cup and Wimbledon, Gujarat and the India-Pakistan business is now regarded as over and done with. Moving away from the newspapers I go on the net and download a report compiled by a friend and two of her colleagues who went from Calcutta to check out the condition of children who survived the killings in Gujarat. I print out the report and then try to read it, but the going is slow, difficult. The words 'horror' and 'rage' do not come close to what the stories trigger off inside me. As I go through the report one name catches my attention, that of a certain Saddam Hussain, age 8, of Ranadikpur village, Panchmahals district. Saddam, it seems, has only one expression on his face, a wide grin. The grin widens as he describes how he saw his mother being stripped naked and then beheaded by a mob, and then he buries his face in his arms. On my desk I have several newspapers carrying the details of Bush Junior's plans to invade Iraq. Completely drowned in the sea of maps and comment and listings of European reactions to the planned attack, is the story of the huge battle plan executed to destroy young Saddam's life. If Baghdad or Jerusalem isn't burning when Ahmedabad explodes the next time perhaps the ongoing war in India will make the news again.