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...