amalgam

I remember watching the movie 'Ek Doctor Ki Maut' on DD many many years ago. Pankaj Kapoor plays a doctor whose seminal research is met with stiff peer opposition. The movie was inspired by the real-life story of Dr. Subhash Mukhopadhaya. Dr. Subhash's story is tragic and the movie brilliantly portrays his frustration and in effect portrays the story of all individual in India who dare to have a mind of their own, or is creative or has seminal ideas. Sadly, hierarchical structures in all aspect of human life is a truth in India and this fosters nepotism, false sense of entitlement and concentrates all power at the top. Energy is spent on fighting this structure instead of doing something constructive. A piece in the Times of India made me remember the movie and I felt like sharing that article on this blog. The article titled 'Indian Crab Syndrome' can be fond here . The article follows. Indian Crab Syndrome by Shobha John Anyone who challenges the prevailing ...

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.

When Noam Chomsky was asked for his views on religion, in an interview , this was what he had to say: "...if you ask me whether or not I'm an atheist, I wouldn't even answer. I would first want an explanation of what it is that I'm supposed not to believe in, and I've never seen an explanation." I am sharing this with you all because I simply loved the beauty in the argument.

Last week I read an article titled "I am just a poor boy though my story’s seldom told ", that I would like to share with you. As an introduction to the article I share with you the first two paragraphs of the article here: That the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society. Sociologists have studied and described it. Socialists have tried to abolish it by dictatorship and central planning. Liberals have preferred democracy and opportunity. But nobody has truly understood what causes it. Until, perhaps, now. The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children. Working memory is the ability to hold bits of information in the brain for current use—the digits of a phone number, for example.

IPL began today. Mumbai Indians defeated the last year edition's runners up, riding on a fantastic knock by Sachin Tendulkar. The surprise for me was Royal Challengers beating last edition's champions Rajasthan Royals. The big performers for RC were Rahul Dravid, who played some fantastic, delightful shots for his 66 runs in 48 balls, and Anil Kumble, who finished with figures of 3.1-5-5. But, not before Shane Warne displayed his craft. Class and not youth is this IPL's character. Oooops ... Rahul hot again?

The last few months have been very difficult. Almost everyday, I have looked back to the past and have wondered about the major decisions I made in my life and how they have maneuvered my life and brought me to my present. Almost everyday, I am reminded of last stanza of the poem; The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. I am not sure if the roads I took were the ones less traveled, but the last stanza haunts me always. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. T WO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to w...

At fifteen, he sat down and made a list. At such a young age he jotted down all that he wished to do in his life. The list included things like; exploring the Nile, Colorado and more, learn about the primitive civilizations of Congo, Brazil and more, climb the Mt. Everest, Mt Fuji and many more, photograph Iguacu Falls, Niagara Falls and more, explore the underwater coral reefs of Florida and The Great Barrier Reef, Australia, Visit places like the Taj Mahal, Leaning tower of Pisa and others, write a book, make a telescope, publish an article in National Geographic Magazine, light a match with a .22 rifle, go to the moon and plenty of others. Puff! And that is just some of the items from his list that had 127 items in all. He called it "My Life List". Today, he has ticked off 111 items from the list. Some of the items still not ticked are; go to the moon, visit every country in the world (he has 30 to go) and feature in a Tarzan movie. Ha. John Goddard is an explorer, adventu...

What would you do if you came to know you have only a couple of months to live? Amar Kaul, the character played by Vinay Pathak in 'DASVIDANIYA' makes a list of things he wishes to do before he dies. He has three months to live. And is successful in ticking off all the items in the list before he says his goodbyes. His journey through the last months of his life is not only moving but inspiring and an education. Its one of the movies that makes you introspective.

When Lehman Brothers evaporated and the official anouncement of recession started to do the headlines, I started to search for answers. I was lost. I had little or more correctly no understanding of the stock market then. And my understanding of economics did not go beyond the demand and suppy curve. So, for the next couple of weeks I read and reread a lot of material on the internet. Became, for a change, a listener in discussions that broke out at office over coffee and lunch. The frequency and duration of coffee breaks increased and I was educated.

I collate here some of the comments and excerpts from articles that I read after the Mumbai terror episode. Maybe, just maybe, as a group, these thoughts will make some sense amidst the confusion, anger, hopelessness and hate that has gripped the nation.

With debates on the possibility and effectiveness of miliatary action on Pakistan doing the rounds these days the following article by Amitav Ghosh in the New York Times makes for a fantastic read and I share that with you here. India’s 9/11? Not Exactly SINCE the terrorist assaults began in Mumbai last week, the metaphor of the World Trade Center attacks has been repeatedly invoked. From New Delhi to New York, pundits and TV commentators have insisted that “this is India’s 9/11” and should be treated as such. Nearly every newspaper in India has put “9/11” into its post-massacre headlines. The secretary general of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the leading Hindu nationalist political faction, has not only likened the Mumbai attack to those on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but has insisted that “our response must be close to what the American response was.”

I followed NDTV and IBN CNN for close to four hours last evening. The fears that I expressed in my last post seemed to have come to pass. There was almost no mention of the Assam blast for the complete period that I followed the news. The 24/7 media had so much in hand that they forgot to give enough news time to the incidence in Assam. Yet found enough time to interview film stars and other celebrities for their reaction to Mumbai episode. I am not least bit surprised.

Another bomb blast. This time in Assam. Militants belonging to Karbi Longri National Liberation Front (KLNLF) are suspected to be behind tha blast. The blast went of inside coach number 8209 of 901 Lumding-Tinsukia passenger train, exploded around 8 am as it entered Diphu railway station. Almost 30 people are suspected to be dead as of now. Read More ... I am waiting to see how India responds to this. Will the anger rise or will it make the country resigned to the idea that life of terror is now the norm and inevitable. Will the country discriminate between terror based on who is responsible for it or on the basis of which part of the country is attacked?

This country has seen worse incidences of terror and destruction. The Kosi River killed much more than a lot of terror incidences. It was a calamity for which nature was not wholly responsible. Rather the reasons were man made. Definite negligence from political leadership and government officials. The same reasons that made last week incidence possible. So what makes the TAJ incidence so unique that the people of the country have woken up and have become vocal? I think the people of this country have always been vocal of their plight. Only this time the ones who are vocal are the people that matter. These are the country’s elite and for some reason have more say in the functioning of the world. When a helpless villager in far away interior Bihar expresses his tragedy of losing his family to the floods, it makes for a good fifteen minutes of news time. Nothing more.

With the visuals of the final hour assault by the NSG at Taj, I start my day. Within a couple of minutes into the commentary one could see the fire beginning to engulf the ground floor and the first floor of what is undoubtedly one of the most majestic pieces of architecture facing the west coast. Guns shot reminds of the some bloody Hollywood war movie. But the location is not some forest in another country. War zone is closer home.