The wrath of Gods: Rab Ne Banaa Di Jodi

After a long time, I submitted myself to the tortures of a mainstream (incidentally the main streams in India are the gutters running proud and gushing in the middle of the streets) Hindi movie.

The movie was Rab ne banaa di jodi – from the messiah of love himself, Aditya the Chopra.

Aditya Chopra was born in the year 1955 to a family of renowned surgeons. Unfortunately, he lost his father to a brain surgery that he attempted on himself, and his mother to an accident where she sat on a scalpel. After his adoption, the young Chopra spent most of his time sighing and drawing tattoos of breasts around his young nipples (Incidentally, in an interview, he claimed that he still has nipples the red of a Washington apple: thankfully, the reporter didn’t ask him to prove his claim).
It’s around this time that devotees claimed that Aditya first uttered the word – “love”. Adtiya, again in an interview, claims that the idea sprang on him when he saw a dog in heat hold in abeyance a horde of others for a bitch. Unfortunately, what had really sprung on him that day was a close friend, young Karan Johar, who, so far, had restricted his “weirdness” to begging his male friends to let him shake off the last drops of their pee.
This was the start of Aditya’s first relationship and, tho’ too timid for drugs, he confesses that he did experiment with agarbattis and dhoops.
Growing up, Aditya fell into a depression and confided in his dad about his condition. ‘Well maybe it’s because you’re so fucking stupid’, his dad helpfully suggested.

The rest of the story is well known. Frightened by the complicated adult heights that his father had taken the notion of relationships with movies like Silsila and Kabhi kabhi, Aditya plotted a return to a pristine-white naivety. Not for him the idea of cheating husbands and wives, the contradictions and ambivalence of relationships. For Adi all it takes to have a romance is billowing curtains, heroines in white drenching in the rains and SRK named Raj smirking to glory and lifting his eyebrows even higher than Jack Nicholson.


Aditya’s success that followed derived from a shrewd insight into three critical factors that make Indian romance flicks Indian romance flicks.

1. India is a poor country. And frightfully aware of it. Not for it, the reality waiting to bite outside the cinema hall: instead, throw in the white babes and the Swiss Alps.

2. Most Indians have repressed relationships. Most men and women in India do not get to date before marriage: even the marriages are arranged by the elders. Hence, most Indians do not get to romance.

3. The Indian society runs on clichés. Education is usually vocational and, hence, technical: subjects like psychology and sociology are restricted to the inner walls of a few colleges. Indians are not taught to express themselves emotionally, their social awareness of their conditions is abysmal, their ideas of sex chastity and virginity medieval in its morality, their treatment of women horrible and… to put things in perspective, in any survey, a romance from Mills and Boons will be voted as a “mature depiction” by not less than 95% of the respondents.

Aditya had seen the failure of his father’s Silsila and realized that most Indians do not want to see even this tempered down reality (in the last scene, in an attempt to reconcile the errant man and wife to their spouses, the director resorts to a plane crash rescue, no less!) Most Indians who come to see romance flicks do not come to see a reflection of their own experiences (coz sadly they don’t have much to share there) but live a dream vicariously. Since, with the taboos clichés mindless-customs, most Indians have very dumbed down emotional quotient, they crave for loudness, repetition, clichés and an idea of romance usually associate with early teens in the developed world. And yes, like the father in DDLJ mouths, they want their heroes to live the lives they never would have.

Hence, the swiss Alps, red sports cars, leather jackets, flash of gori-chamdi, and the myth of ascendancy of Indian values above everything else.

The success of Aditya’s first film, DDLJ, lay in not the intrinsic value of the film but how it successfully adapted itself to the naïve idea of romance in India to a T. In the movie, the idea of consenting adults is never even mentioned. Heroines, even foreign-bred, weepingly succumb to the wills of their fathers and heroes, when having the opportunity, refuse to run away with them. And, of course, their love is so pure that they never even kiss.

Sample this dialogue from the movie (source: IMDB) –

Raj Malhotra: Do you love me?
Simran Singh: More than anyone else.
Raj Malhotra: Do you trust me?
Simran Singh: More than I trust myself.

Now sample a few dialogues from Closer (I know it’s not a fair comparison but I regard the latter as a watershed movie in the depiction of relationships):

Anna: I'm sorry you're...
Larry: Don't say it! Don't you fucking say you're too good for me. I am, but don't say it.

Larry: Is he a good fuck?
Anna: Don't do this.
Larry: Just answer the question! Is he good?
Anna: Yes.
Larry: Better than me?
Anna: Different.
Larry: Better?
Anna: Gentler.
Larry: What does that mean?
Anna: You know what it means.
Larry: Tell me!
Anna: No.
Larry: I treat you like a whore?
Anna: Sometimes.
Larry: Why would that be?


I do not wish to present a contrast between the movies’ maturity quotients but their contexts. Imagine, screening a DDLJ to an audience nurtured on a diet of reality-probing films like Closer and releasing Closer to an Indian audience.

It is the quintessential argument most of Indian media has forgotten: a thing’s popularity is not a statement on its intrinsic value.

After DDLJ, Adi tried his hand on four multiple romances (five if you add the disastrous imitation of Pankaj Kapoor’s Santa by the under-talented Anupam Kher). Mohabattein was supposed to be a showcase “first time in screen together” for the big B and the small S but there’s little much to showcase when each of the stars is a horrible two-dimensional caricature: one mouthing pratishtha sammaan samriddhi even while taking a dump, the other playing violin and talking to ghosts. With veteran thespians like Jugal Hansraj, Uday Chopra, Preeti Jhangiani and Kim sharma, the movie is now best known for its stellar performances, lucky Uday’s minute-long pappi and Preeti’s kathak, or whateveritwas, in the rains.

RNBDJ is the third on the block from this purveyor of love.

It’s been three weeks since I saw it and much of my initial reaction is now tempered down. But if there was only one word that I could use to describe it, it would have to be – horrible.

I think the movie started with the director’s desperation to connect with the audience that he lost to his langotiya-yaar Mr. K Johar (in an interview, Aditya quoted ‘Pehle he stole my innocence, now he’s stolen my plots!’). Why not plant the idea of a SRK-Yash Chopra banner romance in every Indian romance. SRK quoted (and this is as an actual quote) that he picked the idea of his two characters for participants he saw on one of his shows. While the second character is played to a T, since it is essentially a small-town SRK duplicate, the main character – the resilient and silent Indian middle-class – is a farce. Is this how the director and the actor really see the character? I forgive Adi – the scion of a famous producer-director, his idea of middle-class India is susceptible to be a clichéd warp-zone. But what about SRK and his humble Delhi beginning? Is this how he understands the emotional constructs and motivations of the middle-class?

This actually demonstrates a theory of mine: if the daily activities of any man become constant news feeds, if the man is seen on interviews over interviews regarding his views from choli designs to world peace, if a man starts talking about himself in the third person, if his private jokes become grist for plot-lines and compering contracts: that man is gone. His sense of reality and self-perception as acute as ol’ Canute’s (tho’ Canute knew he could not order the waves back).

The premise is so stretched that even the director is not convinced about it. Hence, the hero has to mouth fifteen-minutes long rationale for his actions to a yaaraa, a mannequin and the audience (as stoned to boredom as the mannequin) after every half an hour.

One quality that needs to be appreciated in the movie is the principle of minimalism. Everything is there only for a purpose. Not for it, tangents and threads that clutter our daily lives.

Hence, the movie starts with SRK visiting a wedding at an old teacher’s place. The teacher has only a few scenes to plod the story along and is only present in those sequences: first to introduce SRK to is daughter as his best student ever (the best student goes on to bag an exciting job in Punjab Powers and the personality of a doormat), have a heart attack to the news of a tragedy and then get his daughter married on deathbed. The daughter, when she moves to her sasural, does not even carry a picture of him with her – so quickly are the dead forgotten.
The daughter is depicted as the socializing and bubbly sort: in fact, that, one guesses, is the reason for her grouse with her new hubby’s fidgeting inhibited personality. Yet no name is mentioned after the father’s death and no relative or friend comes visiting the bride. I guess that this might be a hidden tribute to the anonymity of character of Satya, of whom the only fact revealed was that he came from Hyderabad.

The heroine’s grouse with her new hubby tho’ is entirely justifiable. Not only had he gone to develop a personality befitting the gods, he also has the following strange characteristics: a habit of pulling his shirt-tails in front of his crotch every five seconds, a queer disinterest regarding sex (with a wife like that sleeping downstairs in another bed the – what one gathers – virgin hero coolly walks about in his pajamas with no tell-tale frustrated bulges on display), and ( in another tribute) no relatives and friends except for an impossibly mismatched yaaraa. The yaaraa tho’ is quickly explained: the plot needs his hair-dressing skill and saloon for the hero to transform into his other role.

As for the main plot, do you really want me to go there?


I think the movie might one day be hailed as the dawn of the absurd in Indian mainstream cinema.

For all its box-office collections, this movie is the first note in the death-knell of the half-career of Mr. Chopra. Do remember that even Khalnayak was a resounding success – nevertheless it did start the decline in the fortunes of Mr. Ghai.

Shawl ke neeche kya hai

It was more than a year and a half that I was returning to the arms of my first love: Bangalore; and one since I had boarded a flight. My travels to the heartland of Punjab and, a couple of times, homewards bound, had been on good ol’ trains. (The last journey, cramped on a side upper above a man who lies sprawled on his side lower bed for nine straight hours, has already cost me my back that started acting again today.)

Perhaps it was the downturn or just the erstwhile Air Sahara crew, but the standards of service I saw were very poor. No Air India sort PSU reality bites but I have seen better service at Irani restaurants (an interesting metaphor since some of the fliers treat the staff as badly).
What was really bad about the service, besides the service itself, was the forced smiles. This comes from the rather stupid America-originated myth that good service comes with a smile. No. Good service comes with a good service – punctuality, neatness, attentiveness and, if you’re really that good, anticipation.
Smiles are very personal expressions of emotions, much like kick in the groins, and let’s not some lucky asshole from Minnesota corporatize that too. Fake smiles reek of deceit and, even, a certain revulsion – like the smiler would much rather stick something really sharp up your nose.

My airhostess, who forgot my order for a sandwich (a sandwich I was willing to pay the exorbitantly overpriced charges that these flights charge) twice before telling me, smilingly, that the pantry is closed had a smile that seemed to be like she was grimacing while trying to take a crap standing up.

Of course, it might have been the brood that had plonked into the seats, just minutes before the flight took off, all around me. A young man – there’s some irony to call a creature, of habits and customs so ageless, young – had approached the decent corporate-wallah sitting on the aisle asking him to “adjust” as he was with the misses. A phenomenon usually reserved for trains. The man, much settled with his laptop out and seat belt buckled, obliged – perhaps from a sense of bewilderment.

There had been a huge uproar when the family had alighted earlier – apparently they had forgotten a “bachche ka bag” on the bus and had asked the flight attendant to bring it. Strange since there was no kid amongst the seven odd family that scattered all over. Anyway, for a few moments after the doors closed, it seemed that the bag had not been brought in.
‘What you forgot the bag?!?’ The old man seated just ahead of me asked incredulously of the nervous steward.
The mom seated next to him whispered to someone and asked what there was in the bag. ‘Nothing much’, someone whispered.
‘Forgot the bag!?!’, the man started rising.

Now, he was standing and shaking – literally. I could feel the righteous indignation swell in his, as I imagine, reddening face as he scraped it from the bottom of the barrels of the opportunity.
I saw his hands grip the seat in front and inhale a deep breath – I swear. Another hostess chose this moment to play spoilsport and rush in with the bag. I saw the man deflate back into the seat and rise only when the flight landed.

The plane took off. I smelt parathas in the air as they were passed around once the seat belt sign went. The man seated next to me rolled the one passed to him into a dick-shaped roll and munched at it thoughtfully.

I don’t remember really know what caught my attention: for some reason the man on the middle seat – a mid-twenties bugger with receding hair, developing paunch, who evoked images of a fat kid being fed dahi and cheeni by his boy-loving grandmother who petted his hair as he ate – would lean over and say something to the lady seated on the aisle – the lady donning a specks, waist-length braided hair and a studious expression – and then glance over his shoulders in my direction.

I was really absorbed in the book but this repeated action broke through my concentration and irritated me. Earlier, when the man had settled down the man had observed me, the book and my action with a dull uninhibited curiosity. They dropped off my horizon soon enough – but not before I caught them holding hands, and, more than that, the tell-tale suhaagan ki mehendi – or whatever it is called. Thankfully, on the girl’s hand. The man had a kadaa of gold on his left wrist.

I must have read for an hour before I turned my head towards their direction again – I had noticed the silence that had fallen from that quarter, but only with the attention of someone listening to a bore over the phone while surfing porn.

My reason to go back to them was simple – I had to take a leak and cross over them to reach the aisle.

The couple was sharing a shawl – and it was draped over their heads.
The shawl – with small mirrors on it – was scintillating in the dimness and if discretion and privacy was what they were looking for, it was a wrong choice of shawl.

Like a wish denied, my pee gathered unbelievable momentum with each denied second of relief. I peered and found that there was no movement from within the shawl – none. The heads were too far apart.

What the hell were they upto? I thought angrily.

And then I realized that I was looking for movement a little higher than it was – I will leave this at that.

On cue, the wheezing matron rose like a arthritis-tormented phoenix from the seat in front. Now the fun starts – I thought. Curiously, after pausing for the slightest of seconds at the sight of the shawls over two mounds of heads, the matron roughly shook the shoulders of the son, and handed him a baggage to hold while she took a pee. The son climbed out of the shawl with the passively disturbed expression of a babu who had just been perusing a file.

I grabbed the opportunity and took a break myself. Coming back, I was relieved to find that the couple were out of the shawl – for the time being./

They remained silent and apart for a few minutes and I slipped back into the book. A while later, I noticed another glance over the shoulders towards me. I looked back to discover a pattern. The couple would drape the shawl over their heads, the man would hold his head apparently inert while the woman worked at a with a ferocity very incongruous with her spexy accountant expression of trying to remember a section from an accounting standard, the shawl would keep slipping off their heads but the man would catch it just in time and drape themselves back, then – after ten minutes or so – they would break apart and stare ahead like they were two perfect pair of strangers, then – after ten minutes of rest – the man would turn towards her, look once over his shoulders at me, and up would go the shawl again.

The plane landed finally and I was spared more of this ridiculous spectacle.

The worst of Bolllywood superhits

In an earlier post, I lambasted Raja Sen for trying to teach us Hollywood.
But I still love this cheeky bastard. In the following article in Rediff he talks about the worst superhits in Cinema which include Gadar, the new Devdas, Fanaa, Vivah, Raja Hindustani, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, Mard, Heyy Babyy, Karan Arjun and No Entry.

It's so refreshing trying to someone not buckle under the custom of being politcally-correct and polite to even the trashiest.
It takes courage, willingness to face the inevitable 'And who do you think you are mistah' and social exile.

Keep up the good work, Raja.

Reading Keep off the Grass

Yesterday, I walked to the Landmark to read a book. A particular book.
The author was a fellow-alumnus but that didn’t mean anything. Irritated by one his media gimmicks, I had attacked this author in this blog some time ago on the basis of just a blurb on the book and still felt guilty about it. Besides, the hyper-publicity the media machinery had built around the book and the decent reviews he got from most casual readers had done its work. I read a couple of interviews and the guy seemed decent and down-to-earth; he talked about soul-bending experiences and restlessness and being inspired by my favourite Indian writer.
So I went and read.

Why do you write a book about it when you’re not even serious about it? The two hours I spent bent over the book, while great works beckoned me all around, was like trying to listen to a man talking without thinking what he’s talking about. in both the act of prattling and this book, what is talked about is not important – but the – Look I’m talking – is.
I won’t even judge the book on its literary merits – like Chetan Bhagat the author is on the defensive even before you get to pick his book. I myself am a philistine as far as theory of literature goes, but I do believe good reading is not only about style, it’s about substance. It’s about honesty.
This book is a fundamentally dishonest effort.
The book starts with the protagonist, who’s just lived the Indian wet dream of having screwed a blonde and left her begging for more, launching into a path of self-discovery when she asks him when he plans to go back to India, Pak, Bangladesh or wherever he is from. And so the hero does: after a painful (for both the reader and the protagonist) conversation with a father who seems to be cut and pasted from Harold and Kumar.
The purpose of the blonde is to get screwed – there is nothing more about her other than a reference to her job and her liking for investment bankers – and the purpose of the father is to be a caricature of a first-generation immigrant Indian father. They are not deliberate caricatures of the Simpsonian/MAD irreverence and stereotype-questioning liberalist modes; they are caricatures because the author never really bothers to fill the colors to the desultory lines he’s sketched around them.
In my alma mater, the author meets a Kargil-ka-sipahi (nothing less my folks) and a cool dude (two pages follow describing the inherent genius of his IIT pedigree: a page and a half more than the pages that the author gives to any other character.)
Regarding the confused identity of the ABCD protagonist, it comes across as convincing as Shabbir Khan doing a Rafi.

There were two phrases that I caught straight from English August (I just completed another of my annual perusal of the work a month ago) – and the descriptions of the India the protagonist sees is heavily borrowed from the book too. This I am not averse to actually since EA is the sort of book that inspires a new vocabulary to define the Indian everyday experience. Only the effect most of the times was seeing an adaptation of your favourite movie scene in a Mukesh Bhatt directed/ Bharat Shah produced movie.
Sadly, there are a couple of places where the author does score. But it’s only because all of us do have some eloquent wisdom in us.
Not all of us are literary giants – not all of us are the Gabriel Garcias with fantastic tales to tell. I have read Shashi Tharoor a lot despite the fact that I think he’s not the foremost of the writers writing on India. But it’s his honesty of effort that makes me want to listen to him.

I questioned my judgement: as someone once told me, it might be just plain jealousy. I went back to Google – determined to find an echo to my own feelings about the book. Ultimately, I found a short review where the writer describes the effort in the words “As if the author was just writing to finish the book and wanted just see himself in print.“
I read about a book a couple of weeks. That means 25-30 books a year. In the 20 years ahead that probably remain with me, I will read another 500-600 books: such a woefully short number. Do writers like these understand the value of the space that they have squatted on and destroyed?
Two questions:
1. Why write a book when your heart is not even into it
2. Why publish this (this for the publishing house) desultory effort
I have a lot more to write on this theme which I will write shortly. I will go and finish the book in the evening today.

India Under Attack - Our sensibilities under a bigger one

A week into the attack and we are blabbering like terrorism touched our lives on 26-11 the first time.
Actually, it did. This is the first time that the rich and the powerful are in the cross-wire. And in this might still lie our redemption. That the rich have been inconvenienced. Shobha De, the renowned socially conscious intellectual, who regularly expresses her empathy to the cause of the Mumbaikar with scathing articles on which starlet is getting buggered by which producer and thought-provoking books like Sisters, is now suddenly the voice of the angry Mumbai. So far, the odd blasts on locals hardly touched her; this time she might have to watch behind her back at the Sheraton while she trades gossips with other equally socially-conscious corporate wives and socialites.
You probably have heard about the brave lady whose outlasting contribution to Indian journalism is the creation of the brain-bending Page 3 and whose funeral was attended by many teary-eyed strangers, but did you know that an entire Muslim family of five got shot at CST and who might not have registered an equally generous attendance on their funerals -- despite the fact that they had not even created the cult of Page 3?
Or do you know the name of anyone shot at CST?
Instead, we know that Suhel Seth escaped by the thinnest of whiskers – but whether that is good or bad news is anybody’s guess.

If I am seen to deride the dead here, that is the intention. A dead citizen, for a nation, is as good as any other. But the media’s biased coverage makes me wish that for this kind of coverage I should have seen a lot more of those “celebrities” dead.

Can we cut the crap about martyrs and heroism and enough is enough?


Of martyrs
Sandeep died while flushing out terrorists – but that was his job, right? The idea of martyrs reeks of causes bigger than everything else and that leaves no room for any doubts and questions. Even the terrorists who died are being hailed as martyrs elsewhere. Given a choice between martyrdom (shahaadat) and being alive on virtue of better intelligence and equipment, I think I know what Sandeep might have chosen first.
Nobody wants to be a martyr (except for suicide bombers perhaps but that is also only a means to a bigger end) unless one has to. A man doing his duty and dying because of faulty management practices is not a martyr – he is a victim.


Of enough is enough
Mumbai has had enough – what the fuck is that supposed to mean, anyway? If the next incident happens at Chowpatty, would the people tell the terrorists that we told you that we had had enough the last time, phir kyun aayaa baba?
Well I have had enough of my corporate life, but so what? The choice is mine what I mean to do about it.
A day before the attack, the biggest issue in the city was the Manoos content of the vada pav. A month before, in response to attack on desperat students appearing for a national exam, some of the city's gliteratti, hands on gloves with the thugs running the son-of-the-soil show in the city, went on record tacitly supporting the cause.

If we can't have the same candlelight vigil when a city remains silent when students are beaten to death, I say, you can shove the burning candles up your Manoos-asses for all I care.


Attacking our national heritage
I don’t care if Taj is listed as No. 1 in world heritage or No. 8298.



Two reasons:


Just like any dead citizen is as good as any other, the contrast between the Armani and the langot notwithstanding, any bombed place in India is as good as any other.


Second, if a place requires shoes on your feet and a wallet full of grands, it’s not a national heritage site for me, it’s a strictly commercial venture.


I don’t care if Tata made the hotel as a grievance to an insult of national or strictly personal nature, but the fact is that before 26th I would have to be stacked with cash to sit in that whtevertisnamewas bar and my driver in the slippers and dirty pants would have been denied entry by the guard.
Just because a lot of rich people, who write all the fancy columns in the world and claim to speak for a nation of billion, have fond memories of a place, a place does not become more esteemed than any other.

Worse has happened, India, and we have found ways out of it.
At one time, Manipur and Punjab produced a steady stream of bodies in the national dailies. The lessons learnt at both places was that victimizing a community can never assure a long-term peaceful solution.

Just forget this talk of wars, compulsory military service, POTAs.

Going to war with even a non-nuclear nation leaves scars for decades to come.
Giving laws like POTA to even an efficient police force is fraught with danger; and we're talking about the Indian police here.



This is from people who have no problem seeing future statesmen in people who have led genocides against unarmed civilians.

This is from people who have arrogantly assumed that the country’s best interests are aligned with the interests that serve them the best.

This is from people who’ve no moral qualms over the fact that their rich lifestyle is largely an effect of the incredible poverty of the country (the ridiculously cheap labour); and no thoughts for the facts that the resilience of cities is mainly a question of daily survival of the majority living in its shanties and that the enemy was at least willing to die for what he believed in.

The point is that I don't think that most of us who claim to be the elite and the peaceful liberals care much about justice, liberalism and "national character" as long as it doesn't inconvenience us.

These are macro forces that take years of history to shape, and just because your fancy dinner got interrupted by the forces of politics you don't care about, history won't take an accelerated pace.

The bitter dose

The worst thing about the crises like Taj stand-off is the rhetoric that follows. The cliche of spirit of Mumbai, the cliche of "Enough about this spirit of Mumbai", "terrorism has no religion" (Actually true: religion has terror built into it and not vice versa) blah blah.

Then the diplomatic use of "foreign hand" (as opposed to member up our patriotic arse), "dastardly act", speeches of blood, toil, sweat and tears.

Would, tomorrow, the mama at the Traffic Junction stop on his tracks for a second before he accepts a bribe of hundred for the challan he threatens to cut?
Would the aggrieved respectable shop-keeper at CP, who always stays at the Taj when in Mumbai, start filing sales tax and declare his true income for 2009?
Would a hundred men in the crowd, tomorrow, stop a couple of men bashing an auto-wallah instead of ogling?

Two friends had solicited my opinion, gotten jarred by the fact that I have broken order by instead of fuming a choked "This time they have gone too far" I breathed a tired "We always had it coming", and then asked me what ifmy parents were there inside? How would I feel then, heh?
Sad and Angry. I still am. But the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

remember the Olympics and the promise of 3o medals next time? Exactly how do we want to achieve it, I wonder. Cricket is back as strong as it ever was.
I am not questioning the righteousness of our national preference It is what it is and that is why we fare poorly at other sports, other than the odd unavoidable sparks of genius.

Same with our politics: it is what it is and what we have allowed it to become.
India, its corruption and its third-world afflictions, are what they are and no amount of self-congratulatory rhetoric can change that.

We have no infrastructure, water and electricity supply are still a scarce commodity, a cumbersome bureaucracy that sucks every penny out of development funds; we are usually corrupt, we would flee from a scene of accident but stop at one not involving us and then gloat at the bloodied victim slowly dies.
Why are we hankering about the necks of a couple of octogenarian politicians? What strict action do we want?
How is a strike, a war going to solve anything when the problem is with the product itself under attack?
And I am not being cynical and rhetorical when I ask these questions: seriously, you who talk of these things, sit down and let me know how any such solution would work in a five year horizon at least.

Blaming Shivraj Patil is as bad as incarcerating the Ebay CEO for the MMS. It was an intelligence failure that can only get highlighted once it fails.
Why are we assuming fool-proof systems in a system as wrecked as ours?

I am not even advocating – as some editorials-hogging fools regularly do – that we change our national character. Like it’s a bloody cap or something that you just doff off and put another instead.

In histories, dominant national characters have changed only with cataclysmic events – the revolution and terror in France, civil war in States or in the ruins of WW2 in Japan and Germany.
Perhaps, that’s what history is preparing us for: the bitter dose.

How to become a millionaire in a minute

Short on HLL at start of day with a thousand.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Honchos_caught_in_cross-fire_at_5-stars/articleshow/3762020.cms

Of terror and voter cards

I read an article today, the kinds I only read these days, about a conscious citizen trying to get a voter card. The crux is that he went through the travails of getting one made, finding a different photograph on his card, going through the entire process again and getting nothing. Then he takes time to work to go to the central office, finding others like him there, the office locked, the chief not picking calls and out till three, and an irritated clerk shooing them away – if it’s not here, you didn’t give it. I think he mentioned 200 people.
To those in Delhi and who have seen all that beaming – jago – hype, with even a national hijacked attempt from a tea brand featuring the new face of the country, away from their usual self-congratulatory post-91 reality-fantasy of the country, sipping tea and looking positively “awake”.

These were people who were not asking for any benefits – a locked pension file or a land record gone missing – these were people waking up from an electoral “sloth” and hoping to participate in the system. And this is what their awakening wrought.

A strange start to an article on terror.

But do you imagine the raw appeal of the machismo with which a group of boys, within minutes, have tattered the reputation of a superpower-claimant? The minute the first bullet in Taj was fired, the terrorists succeeded. Everything that followed was a special. And we know how much they have dolloped of that.

Terrorism – or naxalism also in our context – is a war with the state.
And what is the Indian state – if you take out the hollow jingoism – but that babu shouting at 200 people that they are lying?
And what is the state than those 200 people who don’t burn that office down and tear that man’s throat out?
This happened in the heart of Delhi. And there is an India, a whole pie of it, outside the Mumbais and the Delhis.

Suddenly, after Delhi blasts, the cops who are the biggest enemies of the daily-wage earners in the streets go, are suddenly supposed to be the confidants to whom all suspicions regarding “suspicious activity” is transferred.

In Lucknow, last Sunday, meeting a school friend from Lucknow visiting from Australia, after fifteen years of spending class1 to 10 seated adjacent due to the sequence of our names, our car was towed from a parking zone coz a dignitary suddenly arrived; a parking zone where half an hour ago parking fees was being collected. After pleading in vain for half an hour to an unrepetant cop, Ahsan, the friend, he had to pay 750 to release it. I mention Ahsan's Muslim idntity to highlight that many (but not all, I agree) of the frustrations of the community are ironically secular [Ironic since the country's claim to secularism is manifested usually in the meting out of daily injustices only - the priviliges bagged by either by quota or do-you-know-who-my-uncle-is].

Injustice is the fabric on which the Indian state is wrought - right from the PSU to the babu to the politician to the hawaldaar. The separatist movements, the naxalism and terrorism are only manifestations of its various forms.

The biggest myth regarding Shivaji that the Hindu thugs, claiming to be spokesmen of the religion, propound is that it was a Hindu war for lost pride against the Muslim villains.
Wrong. Read your history assholes. Read your economic history.
It was a movement primarily fired by unjust taxations and blatant corruption of a kingdom of wasted rulers and court intrigues. Forces of frustration do not change with time – while religion might ensure a peaceful afterlife of 72 odd virgins (depending on your choice of opium) - the issue of daily bread, and if you’re slightly fed, dignity, is directed more by governance.

What India is under attack right now? The India that is under threat is an India we know is there buried beneath the miles of shit that we have let the “system” crap above it. Forget Shivraj Patil – do you really think that any politician in India in his place and things would have been different? Any party other than the Congress?

Bring on the terrorist laws (and make it all the more worse), platitudes and juloos. Today is the twang of the bow that was stretching since the past fifty years.

My fear is this: the sheer audacity of what happened today, and the Taj elitism of the hostages, would inspire a thousand of other “misdirected” youth trampled by the system who will vent their frustration against this invisible miasma of unrelenting injustice and oppression against a definite face, although anonymous and multitudinal, and the aphrodisia of an automatic in hand. These might be youths who've been running around courts for a piece of land lostin the 50s, the excesses of the local political goon or police, or one of the many things that are commonplace in an Indian middle-or-below class citizen.
There is nothing more ominous than a misdirected rage right now.

but unavoidable.

Shivaji didn’t break the stranglehold of the decadant Mughal empire in his lifetime; but the inspiring and enduring legend of his audacity, as opposed to the grovelling reality of successive kings towards the Afghan raiders, did.


To be born again, you have to die first; To raise an edifice again you have to raze first: this is the frightening reality that looms ahead unless the “system” changes from within.
How?

Stepaway from these brothers

Some of the greatest scripts start off with the question – what if? Unfortunately, so do the worst.
The prime example in recent times would be Adam Unfunny Sandler’s Click where the scriptwriter raised the cilched question – ok what if life could be controlled by a remote? And the monstrosity followed

Step Brothers apparently starts with the pairing of rather similar body-structured John Reilly and Will Ferrel. What if we got them together as retarded brothers?
If the 80s, outside the Monty Pythons, marked the acme of Hollywood comedy scripts (‘All of me’, ‘A fish called Wanda’), the 2000s must definitely mark the nadir.
Sample the comedies it’s delivered – The scary movies series, the ‘teen date’ type flicks, and movies like ’40 year old virgin’ and anything starring Katherine Heigl in a comic turn. In fact, a decade where comedy has been dominated by the likes of Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider.
It all started with Something With Mary. The hair-raising scene gave licence to just locker-room talk pass for comic timings. Genitalia and the various so-far private affairs that come along with owning one became plot plodders. Be it the stuck zipper in something about Mary or erections in Road Trip, Scary movies and 40-year old virgin. In Step Bros, of the 1hour 20 minutes movie, almost five minutes are spent on a scene where one guy threatens to bang the other’s drums with his balls and is then explicitly shown to do so (prosthetics, I assume; and hope).
When I was churning comic scripts in college, it became a challenge to get the laughs without sexual innuendoes. Not that I was a prude but simply it was too easy. Have Anil Kapoor mouth a ‘Teri maa ka...’ and then trail off and 90 times out of 100 you would get a laugh. Heck, even fardeen khan might register that average. And then ask Fardeen to deliver something really funny and count the laughs.
Risqué turns have always been a major theme in comedy – and no one has handled it with as much hilarity as that genius - Woody Allen. Everything you wanted to know about sex has got to be the best sex comedy ever. The last episode is entirely about a man making out and ejaculating and it’s HILARIOUS.

But there’s a line between risqué and tasteless, unfunny and funny that is as thick as Reilly and Ferrell together.
Step Bro never judges the line, the script and the direction waste two very good actors.
Reilly is no Jeff Daniels and Will Ferrell is no Carrey. And this is certainly no Dumb and Dumber.
Avoid this one unless you think one-minute long farts in interviews is the funniest thing you have ever seen.

On a side note, as soon as I saw this guy in a guest role, I knew that there was no rescuing the movie anymore.
With classics like Knocked Up, 40 year old virgin, zack and mimi make a porno under his belt – he makes Ben Stiller look like Chaplin.

The unfunniest man since Jinnah, someone please put the likes of him to sleep!

Ethics un-hinged

Some archbishop today just declared that forced conversions are anti-Christian. Of course, terrorism has always been un-Islamic. In the same vein as there is no Hindu terrorist.

Reminds me of my company that, by lieu of employing me, deigns to morally instruct me on the value of ethics and smiling at people.

Why can't - because it is not the decent thing to do - be reason enough?