amalgam

I am not a big fan of the movie ' Black '. I think the true inspirational story of Anne Sullivan-Helen Keller was turned into a overtly dramatized average movie. I have never understood the mind of Sanjay Leela Bansali. A director of a movie is primarily a story-teller. I wonder if Bansali ever tries to tell a story. He directs his movies as if he is trying to paint a sequence of paintings. It's possible he uses the colors as metaphors. It's possible! Only I don't see it. And I wonder how many do if there are any.  Anyways, seems like, so distracted was I while viewing it that I missed one gem that was embedded in the movie. The song 'Mausam ki adla badli mein' sung by Gayatri Iyer , almost flawlessly. Now, I am not a music expert by any standard but as a listener I do consider this song as one of the best compositions of the last decade. It's crafted to near perfection, if not to perfection. The composition is haunting, the rendition mesmerizing a...

'Sharad Pawar is homosexual. He removed two beautiful female faces from the IPL. And he let Shahrukh Khan stay', my friend argues. However strong the argument may be I would rather have to disagree, at least partially.  Gender discrimination? Lalit Modi created IPL selling one of the easiest things to sell today. Cricket. He let all the his blood relations and relations from marriage to eat as much of the pie as possible. And I am surprised the BCCI bosses took 3 long years to realize that there is money in IPL and not in ODIs and Tests and that they needed to have the reign back so that they could fend for their relatives. As I argued in my last post, as Indians we are a very family oriented society. Our ethical code is rather simple - if it is good for the family, it is good, if it is bad for the family, it is bad. So now all the teams which had Modi and his relatives benefiting will be terminated and all the ones having BCCI bosses' stakes in them will prosper....

"Indians defecate everywhere", commented Naipaul in his "Area of Darkness", the first book in the trilogy on India. As an outsider, this is how he viewed Indians on his first visit to India. Off course, many of us thought it to be a statement made due to ignorance of what Indianness is and we openly romanticize the idea of a 'maidan' visit early in the morning. Sanitation is a western concept and therefore we don't really think very highly of it. We do not want our feces to go to waste and would rather use it to fertilize our agricultural land. We take pride in such organic way of life. With the scarcity of space in urban environments we have been forced to defecate in our own homes. A revolting idea. We do that with a lot of shame but we do makeup by urinating in open public spaces. It satisfies our urge to be and behave Indian. The Indian government being Indian supports this idea of Indianness by not providing basic sanitary amenities and util...

Check this article. I loved it and could not refrain from keeping it away from you guys. Won't say more on it, just go straight to the article. You will find the article on Op-Ed section of New York Times. Of Mice and Monologe By Mark Leyner I AM absolutely baffled as to why the announcement of a scientific advance heralding the advent of talking mice has not generated a peep from the chattering classes, particularly since it’s a story about chattering ... and chattering mice, to boot. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have engineered a strain of mice that possesses the human FOXP2 gene, considered by evolutionary biologists to be among several crucial components that endow people with the capacity for speech. Already, the swap of mouse FOXP2 for human FOXP2 has altered the way the mice communicate with one another (their ultrasonic whistles have become slightly lower-pitched).

I found this article at this link , and found it an interesting read, more so because this was published on Nov 14, 2006, almost an year after he became the Chief Minister of Bihar. This election, even though not an assembly election, will decide whether the people of my home state have started to cast their vote for development and progress or are still voting their caste. History Grants Nitish Kumar An Opportunity in Bihar By Ramesh Menon. India is looking at Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Will he take the reins that history has graciously given him to change the future of one of the most backward states of the world’s biggest democracy? Some television stations in India have conducted polls on the popularity of chief ministers and Nitish is one of the best. If he wants a place in the history of India’s fractured politics, he can bid for it. But it is not going to be easy. One cannot help feeling tickled with the poll predictions that the media toyed with before the resul...

There is an over left and seven runs needed. Ganguly at the crease - I expect KKR to win and began writing my post in praise of Ganguly and his famed resilience. It is Ganguly's turn to remind us of the stuff he is made up of. When KKR looked dead and gone Ganguly comes to the party and guides 'his' team to a fantastic victory. We are continuously and imaginatively 'informed' about the insides of IPL and KKR in particular from someone called FakeIPLPlayer , and we know now that Dada will ... And then the unthinkable happened. Ganguly fell in the penultimate ball with his team still needing two runs to win. What followed can only be described as the most entertaining thing to happen in IPL 2, after the blog that has King Khan (I am avoiding the nomenclature used in the now famed blog of the FakeIPLplayer, even though I am tempted to do so) fuming.