Tweet is a very lonely man

Much ado about a Tweet but it takes special talent to come up with this analysis. :)



The context of this quote and videos of the entire discussion from which the above prized quote was gleaned can be seen at this blog post by Amit Varma, one of the panelists.

Update: Someone started this on an email group I am on and while I cannot reproduce their verse here, here's my contribution.

Twitter this, Twatter that!
--------------------------------

i.
Look! Tharoor's under a dark cloud
for saying whats on his mind aloud
Serves him right for being outspoken
Who does he think he is - Ashton?*

ii.
The Tweet is a very lonely man
Will Tharoor now be an also-ran?
Much ado about a pol's tweet
Cows make for sumptuous meat!

iii.
Five-star luxury he does like
Waiting for the CPI now to strike!
But the nerve to call us cattle
He deserves a rap on the knuckle!

iv.
Tom's not smiling, all distraught
Says we need some restraint in thought.
Tharoor's in Liberia, can't join in for a chat
Fly coach or business, you fat-cat?

* Those amongst you who are not lonely...er who do not Twitter, that's Ashton Kutchner - the demi-God [pun intended] of Twitter - the tweeter with the most "followers". Also, you will need to see all 3 videos at http://tiny.cc/LonelyTweet to get all the jokes (like 'fat-cat', Liberia, etc.)

“Sometimes they just stare at you”

And that is the least of the problems women commuters in trains and buses of India have to often endure. But since we, as a nation, cannot seem to change our sexist attitudes and behavior, we have to seek alternative measures to curb this - like running special ladies-only trains.

© Chiara Goia for The New York Times

Elsewhere, Japan has its own problems to deal with when it comes to public transportation!

Tokyo police have begun a week-long crackdown against the twice-daily scourge of gropers on commuter trains.

and   

A Japanese rail operator said Thursday it is installing blue mood-lighting in its stations in a bid to stop people committing suicide on the tracks of a busy Tokyo line.

And so it goes....

Imagine what you desire

Very creative ads!

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” - G. B. Shaw

Monkey Business

This is hilarious! Love the "but let us first come to power" election promise! ;)


Indian politicians, election issues, and monkey business!

Monkeys may be a major menace for the citizens of Agra but the candidates seeking votes are wary of taking them on as they feel their action could offend those who see the animals as holy. 


State forest department officials and local NGOs estimate there are about 20,000 monkeys in the Agra region. The aggressive animals have been attacking residents, especially women and children. In the last six months there have been three deaths due to attacks by simian herds.


But when voters ask the candidates for the Agra Lok Sabha seat - where balloting is scheduled May 7 - what the would-be MP will do to curb the monkey menace, all of them turn hesitant. Residents say they fear a backlash from many Hindus who see the monkeys as holy and do not want any action to be taken against the animals. 


Samajwadi Party candidate Ramji Lal Suman said he would sort out the problem after discussions with the forest department officials and NGOs working in the field. "After all they (monkeys) too have a right to life, but human beings need to be protected from assaults. We will definitely find ways to make life safe for the locals," Suman told IANS. 


Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate Rama Shankar Katheria refused to say whether he thought the monkey problem was serious enough to warrant a discussion. Many politicians, especially from the BJP, regularly feed the simians bananas and other fruits at a dozen known locations in the city, particularly the Yamuna Kinara road. 


Congress candidate Prabhu Lal Katheria said the monkeys would be relocated, "but let us first come to power". 


Bahujan Samaj Party candidate Kunwar Chand Vakeel has reportedly not discussed the issue with his campaign strategists yet. "We have not discussed the problem yet, but the official agencies should tackle the menace if it is so serious," said Netra Pal, an active supporter of Vakeel and a social activist working in Dalit areas.

This is hilarious! Only in India! 

P.S. Monkeys have been in the news in India for some time now. Especially in Delhi, where the monkeys have been accused of "invading" government buildings and even the police headquarters has been attacked by a monkey gang (Now we have the answer to the question: Who will police the police? The monkeys! :)) and a deputy mayor's death has been blamed on monkeys. The whole brouhaha over monkeys in the capital, of course, was beautifully captured in the recent movie, Delhi-6.

P.S. I just noted that I have had a similarly titled post in October 2007 after the deputy mayor's death.

Folk Art meets Safe Sex

Anand Ramchandran of Son of Bosey fame points us to this hilarious safe sex awareness video from India.

It is not supposed to be funny but supreme WTFness and hilarity is guaranteed if you watch it. :)

Veena Reddy - Marathon Runner

Btw, I saw this girl at the Boston Marathon yesterday. I figured she probably made it well within 3 hours. (Anything within 3 hours is an absolutely amazing time in my books!). She went past us in 2.30-2.35 or so... while the winners (women) had gone past us at 2.20.

The last name indicates she is of Indian origin. Hence it perked my interest.

And sure enough, a quick Google search for Reddy gave me the desired info.

Veena C. Reddy, United States, 2:45:46

She came in 16th yesterday!

IMPRESSIVE! A job well done! Like I said.. she HAD to have done it within 3 hours! (Btw, I had never heard of her before yesterday.)

Also, some career notes (last updated 2008)

Reddy was a member of the track and tennis teams at the Moses Brown School in Providence, RI, but took time off from running while studying at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She later joined the cross country and track teams at Wesleyan, and entered her first marathon while in college, which turned out to be a painful 3:40 experience. She has since dramatically improved her time, placing sixth at the 2004 Ottawa Marathon (2:49:14), and finishing as the sixth American at the 2004 New York City Marathon (2:49:55) while starting behind the elite field. She set her marathon personal best at Grandma’s Marathon in Minnesota in 2006, finishing fifth in 2:41:30. She rounded out her marathon season with a strong 20th-place finish at The LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon in 2:42:03. Reddy, who ran the Boston Marathons in 2002 and 2003, has already qualified for the 2008 Olympic Team Trials in Boston with her performances at Grandma’s.

Personal Notes:
Reddy was born in Rhode Island and attended the Moses Brown School in Providence where she ran track. She attended Wesleyan University where she received her bachelor’s of arts degree. She later earned her master’s in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and works as an architect at Ballinger Architects in Philadelphia.

Music, The Universal Language

Watch this :) Awaara like you've never heard before.

Seems, Awaara and Raj Kapoor were famous not only in Russia, as I had previously known, but also in Turkey.

The chemistry between Nargis & Kapoor is so palpable. Makes me almost want to go see Awaara & Shree 420 again NOW! One of my best-ever romantic scenes in any movie is Nargis and Raj Kapoor under that umbrella in the rain in Shree 420. Pyaar ho jaayein! :)



Back to Turkey & Awara...

Inspired song this .... hear! Also, its remixed version.


Also this Turkish TV dance recital to Mukesh's voice!

And this dancing at a Turkish wedding to the Turkish version of the song! (The lady in turquoise blue is positively drunk or high! ;))

Seems they even remade the movie named "Avare", released in 1964 and *ing Sadri Alisik and Ajda Pekkan.

I gleaned all the above from a blog post by Quizman/Arun Simha. He's also posted about it at the rec.indian.music.misc newsgroup.

There's more fascinating comments in the IMDB entry for Raj Kapoor's 'Awaara'.

Excerpts:

==
1. When I was little, my grandmother often told me about a movie from her younger ages - Awaara /released as Bradyaga/. She was always telling me, that when it came to Bulgaria it was a total hit. People watched it more that 20 times! (especially the gypsies, who thought of Indian people as their ancestors). If I ask somebody, who is over 50year old about that film, I am sure, that he will remember it. And when the main actor - Raj Kapoor visited the country, thousands of people traveled to see him. My grandma, who was one of the best portrait photographers at that time and was asked to make his pictures with the leaders of the country, remembers that he and his wife never acted like international movie stars. They met with ordinary people, visited hospitals and orphanages. Why was that film so special? Especially in Bulgaria - a country on a Balcan peninsula with such a different culture from India? First of all, it was so different from the Soviet films that were broad-casted at that time. It was full of life, passion, love, music, and nevertheless - it was a social film - about the problems of the different classes. And it made a country so far away close. It was the first step for the good relationships between our two countries.

2. This movie is itself a legend. In 1988 TRT (Turkish national television) was to show that film. As I was a little child I could notnow about the movies but that day my mother, grandmother, my uncleswife all got together and prepared delicious foods, and watched thatmovie on TV. Perhabs on that day all women in Turkiye were watching that film.

Mavi Boncuk, a delicious movie has reference to this film. On that movie Munir Ozkul says: - Aaah Awaara (at the time he looks toAwaara's poster) I've grown my children by selling it's tickets, played for 6 months on those days.

It is a fact that Awaara was a great success, on those days a film was playing for only a week but Awaara was in vision for 6 great months.

Fascinating stuff. Music & the movies are indeed the universal lanugage.

P.S.  the lyrics in this song from Sangam is hilarious. I guess the lyrics translate karne bore hua Turkish translator ko :)

The Bill Gates of India

Nandan Nilekani (ನಂದನ ನಿಲೇಕಣಿ), Co-Chairman Infosys, was on The Daily Show yesterday.

He's doing the US media rounds promoting his recent book Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation. More about his book here.

Btw, seems he is kinda responsible for the phrase Friedman made popular... "The World is Flat"

The book's genesis is a conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase—the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:  


As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: "The playing field is being leveled." What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!

P.S. Subject line sobriquet "Bill Gates of India" was uttered by Jon Stewart yesterday but its been said before. Eg: see this Time magazine profile: "Seattle has Bill. Bangalore has Nandan." 

Aaah...I see now that Friedman wrote that profile. And he writes: "It was his insight that the global playing field was being "leveled" by technology that inspired me to write the book The World Is Flat."


Btw, Stewart also kinda calls Nandan the "Madonna" of Bangalore. :)

Cover Art

I saw this on Facebook too and thought it was a fun cool thing to indulge in for a few minutes.

A new viral meme is currently infecting Facebook – the Make Your Own Album Cover game. The game has four simple steps:

• Get a band name! Simply use the title of a randomly-generated Wikipedia article. 
• Get an album title! Use the last four or five words from the last quote on a page of random quotations.
• Get some album art! Use the image thrown up using this Flickr tool, which generates random images without copyright restrictions.
• Make it look nice! Using Photoshop, Paint, or whatever graphics software you have, fiddle your band logo and album title into some kind of visually-pleasing assemblage.
  

The Guardian has some examples here and here.

For the record, this was what I arrived at the first time I tried it when I saw it on Facebook:

1. Chiefs of McGhie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiefs_of_McGhie
2. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. (from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy)
3. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tupzu/3296574637 Hmm! They seem happy, not unhappy! ;)

I just realized that the first time I tried it in Facebook, it asked to pick the last picture on the page with Flickr's last 7 days page, with no consideration for copyright issues. The Guardian article (first link above) links to the random tool to come up with an image without copyright restrictions. Hence, I tried it again just now using that tool and here are the results:

1. N. Padmalochanan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Padmalochanan
2. I've always been insufferable. (Fran Howitzer)
3. http://flickr.com/photos/7634307@N02/3319589347 Hmmm...would make for nice cover art!

And much as I hate taking on the name of someone else even in jest, let alone that of a commie politician from Kerala, that's the luck of the draw in this random game... and so, here it is:

 

P. S. I have no idea who N. Padmalochanan is as today is the first time I am hearing of him... but the commies in India are insufferable indeed. Always have been! But that's for another thread some other day but for now I leave you with this blog post by Amit Varma about "a series of historic blunders"

The Jai Ho effect

Slumdog Millionaire and the Oscars for AR Rahman seem to have sparked an interest for Indian music in the West again!

This post at Boing-Boing informs us that last week Putumayo has released a compilation of music by various Indian musicians ...

Putumayo Presents India compilation

... And while it does feature two tracks from Bollywood star composer AR Rahman (Slumdog's Oscar-winning musical director), the collection also includes lounge music, folk, classical, and of course high-energy Indian indie pop.

Btw, the video at the link above features Kiran Ahluwalia, who is one of the singers featured in this album. I have not heard of Kiran Ahluwalia before. (In fact, I am kinda surprised she's the face of this India music compilation ad (video at the link below). It just may be that she's the most easily accessible artist for the ad, being based in Canada.)

Anyways, this seems like a collection worth buying! Has an interesting array ofmusics:

Track Listings

1. Zara Zara - Bombay Jayshree
2. Khwaab - Niraj Chag featuring Swati Natekar
3. Naino Sey - Sanjay Divecha featuring Kailash Kher
4. Shiva Panchakshara Stotram/Shiva Shadakshara Stotram - Uma Mohan
5. Homeward Journey - Satish Vyas
6. Tere Bina - A.R. Rahman & Chinmayee
7. Nagumomo - Susheela Raman
8. Ganesha - Deepak Ram
9. Vo Kuch - Kiran Ahluwalia
10. Maavan Te Tiyan - Rajeshwari Sachdev

Btw, I have heard Susheela Raman before ... the first time being on PRI's The World on NPR some years back. I thought she was pretty good....that dusky voice somehow haunting and alluring, despite the Western accented lyrics in some pieces distracting from the music itself. For example, hear this song - Salt Rain 'Maya':



Lots of other videos on youtube, including this one with Cheb Mami... one of my favorite raï singers.



You may recall Cheb Mami from his haunting voice in Sting's Desert Rose... but the stuff from Cheb Mami that I like includes: Neli Neli, Le Rai Cest Chic, etc. [I have a tape somewhere of his music that I used to listen to all the time in the 1998-2002 period.]

btw, just FYI... in case you are not familiar with him or his music - his name is not Cheb! Singers of raï are called cheb (shabb, young) as opposed to sheikh (shaykh, old). In fact, Khaled (who had become quite famous in India in the 90s with his song Didi is also actually called Cheb Khalid.

Jai Ho!

"Slumdog Millionaire," the movie about a poverty-raised teaboy who goes on a game show as a way to find his lost love, takes home the best picture award and leads all films Sunday with eight Oscars at the 81st annual Academy Awards. 

Slumdog Millionaire wins 8 out of 9 possible Oscars. 2 Oscars for A. R. Rahman. A first Oscar for a Spanish actress. An Oscar for Kate. (Finally!). RIP, Heath. (Such a loss!)

Yeaah! What a Night!! [List of winners can be seen here.]

Of Angels and Devils

And speaking of devils, read Salil Tripathi's excellent article in the Mint today: Of Angels and Devils, which talks about two recent incidents in India.

Incidentally, Salil, who mentions Satanic Verses in the above article, also wrote an excellent piece last week on the 20th anniversary of the publication of that controversial novel. Do read -

Disturbing the universe

After two decades, Rushdie’s controversial masterpiece remains a testimony to freedom of expression and the power of imagination

More articles by Salil from the Mint here.

The times they are a changin'

Changing times in India too! A blogger from India writes (emphasis mine):

Acceptable Losses

I lost my job last Monday.

...

Even a year ago, such an unceremonious exit in India for a senior manager of a company, who has put in more than 30 years of service, would have been unthinkable, unless of course he had committed some financial impropriety or been charged with sexual harassment or something equally unsavoury. But right now, unfortunately, we are not living in normal times. Companies, their balance sheets all bleeding and under pressure by the shareholders to reduce costs and increase efficiency, are becoming increasingly jittery and unsure of what to do.

We know desperate people tend to make impetuous decisions; the same is true for desperate companies as well.

....

The above blog post was found via Desipundit.

Two books

I am eagerly looking forward to two debut novels by people I know -- one who I know fairly well and the other whose blog I have merely followed off-and-on and happened to meet socially during my recent trip to India.

First up, coming this April is Amit Varma's debut book, My Friend, Sancho (Hachette). The book had made the Man Asian Booker longlist ain 2008 and based on the excerpt here, the novel, which is supposed to be a love-story, looks eminently readable. Although Sancho herself does not make her appearance in the excerpt, the suspense created in this short excerpt leaves you eager to find out more about the characters of the book! That's rule # 1 of what a well-written book is supposed to do -- make the reader want to keep turning the pages. In addition to Sancho, more fun is promised in the novel in the form of a talking lizard and a policeman who talks in bullet points. I can't wait for the book to be published!

And in May, Chandrahas Choudhury's debut novel, Arzee the Dwarf (Harper Collins) hits book-stores. Read an excerpt here and be wow-ed. Like I wrote in a comment at that post, if the rest of the book is as good and well-written as the excerpt of Arzee at the wall, I'm going to love it! Chandrahas has made that non-descripit alley come alive... "squelchy slop", "his footprints following him all the way in", "spat into the water, as if expelling the thought" ...and much more to delight. And then there is the whole surreal-ish narrative of Arzee getting on the wall and looking at his reflection in the muck and his  accompanied nostalgic thoughts. Pure poetry!

Here's wishing success to Amit & Chandrahas. Go break a leg, guys!

Being normal again

Am in Mumbai till the end of Jan and hence blogging will be intermittent or even non-existent. 

Just a quick note then to point out an article by Salil Tripathi about the year that taught the city of Mumbai to fight its fears. 

Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the Polish communist who founded the Bolshevik secret police, once said: “The only object of terrorism is to terrorise.” The only recourse left for us, then, is not to feel terrified.

The year has taught me much more than facing my fears... it has been devastating in many ways but the thought that I would like to leave the year with is that "whatever does not kill me, makes me stronger." One wonders though whether one has scraped the bottom of the barrel (on many fronts) in 2008 and 2009 will bring better days ahead or is the end still not in sight. One hopes it is the former.... 

Glorious India

(I've added some hyperlinks to the books & Eric Meola's web-site in the text below, which is from a NYT article)

India: In Word and Image

These books about India bring to mind two kinds of traveler: the type who approaches a country earnestly, guidebook in hand, and the type — more devoted to escapist pleasure than betterment — who surrenders to a place and absorbs its essence by osmosis. Arguably, the second type has a more memorable journey, while making less effort.

The encyclopedic INDIA (DK, $40), by Abraham Eraly and others, seeks to govern the ungovernable — a rapturous, multicultural civilization hurtling into the future — by compressing it into orderly compartments. There are, for example, panoramic landscape photos, and neatly laid out sections about prehistoric India; the daily life of a Punjabi schoolgirl; Gandhi; ayurvedic therapy; textiles; jewelry; a Hindu bride; and various types of architecture.

Although the text is accompanied by striking pictures, some of them fascinating depictions of religious rituals and domestic life, the images and words are meant less to seduce than to inform: there are more than 24 million Christians in India; its state-owned railway is the second-largest employer in the world; it didn’t publish its first vernacular newspaper until 1822. This is not uninteresting cultural data, and the authors have devised a painless teaching method — short chapters, timelines and plenty of images to hold our attention. The well-organized research will provide a comprehensive, if clinical, briefing for a traveler to the country, as long as that traveler plans to confine himself to civically optimistic settings. As thorough as the book appears to be, it avoids some of the less enchanting details of life on the ground. There is no entry in its lengthy index for “poverty,” and there are no photographs of disabled beggars or fields of garbage being picked over by small children.

© Eric Meola

Eric Meola’s photographs in INDIA: In Word and Image (Welcome, $60) also present an idealized India, but one that is impressionistic and so tailored to the hedonistic armchair traveler that looking through it constitutes a kind of exotic five-star vacation in itself. The portraits, landscapes and photographic studies of flora and architecture are more art than documentary, and are accompanied not by history lessons, but by masterly literary prose that delights us and — isn’t this really the point? — makes us long to go to India.

The color-drenched images evoke an Eden where beautiful women, plump children and succulent fruits compete to catch the eye. But the accompanying text — excerpts from works by writers including Kiran Desai, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth — is less reliant on the hot pink saris and temples that dazzle tourists. Given the largesse bestowed on Western readers by Indians writing in English, the selection process for the passages included here must have been agonizing. From them, the reader learns not just about India the ancient civilization and exotic destination, but about Indians ­— in all their eccentricity and humanity. The country’s tastes, nuanced colors and protocols are also revealed.

Next to an image of a woman’s hair festooned with orange flowers is R. K. Narayan’s description of a mature protagonist, regarding herself critically in a mirror, just before she steps into a garden to gather jasmine for her hair. “She was more or less satisfied with her reflection, except for two strands of gray hair which she had just discovered; she smoothed them out and tucked them cunningly into an under-layer.” With those words, the writer extends Indian citizenship to women on all continents.

Similarly, a passage by I. Allan Sealy allows us not merely to learn about India, but to know it intimately. He describes an encounter with Indian sweets: “Here are pannikins of crushed pearls, trays heavy with sweetmeats, the mouth-rejoicing gulab jamun, the tongue-delighting jalebi, the tooth-vibrating kulfi, the universe-arresting Sandila-laddu.” Such words can hold their own with any pictures, even Meola’s glorious photographs of a bewitching country.

A brush with grief, loss and hope

And while Bombay, the city of my childhood, suffers through the horrors of a terror attack (and its aftermath), the entertainment value of art and music seems so inconsequential and immaterial. And yet, it is through these "renovating virtues" that..

..whence–depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse – our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired...

Art... the renovating virtue; through which our minds are nourished and invisibly repaired. Catharsis through art, if you will.. though neither words nor paintings will heal easily.

Also: 1, 2, 3.

All links via a Metafilter post.

News from Here and There

Blogging will be slow for the remainder of the month. Couple deadlines for projects I had agreed to earlier this year loom.

In the meantime, here are a few news items from the US (here) and India (there) that I ran into in the last few days:

• I am sure this kind of thing has been happening in Bombay, Delhi, etc. for decades now.. but amazing that Wired magazine has done a detailed report about how thugs that have taken over Bangalore's real estate. The author, Scott Carney, is a Chennai (India) based journalist, who I bet has had some interesting times in India! (As his website says: He drove a 1964 Royal Enfield Bulletacross India --twice. Scott once had to transport a body out of the lawless state of Bihar, India. To do so he had to construct a makeshift refrigerator out of plywood, blocks of ice and an air conditioner." Enuf said!) (Hat tip to Neelakantan for pointing me to the Wired piece.)

• Extremism at McCain Rallies Comes Naturally: The post posits an argument (a social psychologist/scientist's viewpoint) that "Like-minded people in a group grow more extreme in the way they are like-minded." Many quotable quotes in the post but my favorite: "Homogeneity creates extremity -- or, in the news of the day, a McCain rally."

• This NYT magazine article last Sunday takes a detailed look at the class-divide and the working class vote, a subject that has been brought to the fore ever since Palin landed on the national stage and started calling Obama elitist and out of touch with America's small town values. Also, hear, in Obama's own words, how media outlets like Fox News are perpetuating this schism. (Oh..he said schism. He must be elitist. Who talks like that! :))

"I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls," Obama told me. "If I were watching Fox News, I wouldn't vote for me, right? Because the way I'm portrayed 24/7 is as a freak! I am the latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal. Who wants somebody like that?

"I guess the point I'm making," he went on, "is that there is an entire industry now, an entire apparatus, designed to perpetuate this cultural schism, and it's powerful. People want to know that you're fighting for them, that you get them. And I actually think I do. But you know, if people are just seeing me in sound bites, they're not going to discover that. That's why I say that some of that may have to happen after the election, when they get to know you."

• Richard Russo writes that Sarah Palin is no Main Streeter: “”Her view doesn’t work in either small-town world, the nostalgic one or the more realistic one. She just misses both points.”

• The height of political opportunism and ridiculousness!

..as soon as Tata left, Ms Banerjee dropped her demand that the land (and only that land, no other!) be returned to the farmers. Admitting at long last that the land is no longer cultivable since what was to have been a factory stands on it, she now wants the state government to bring another car project to Singur!

(Hat tip, Nitin Pai, who is editor of the zine, Pragati. Through his blog and the zine, Nitin and his colleagues hope to provide opinions in the Indian context that are "committed to economic freedom, realism in international relations, an open society, a culture of tolerance and good governance. Its efforts are directed towards increasing public awareness and education on strategic affairs and public policy."

And so it goes...

Most indecent behaviour, indeed!

supreme WTFness... though it is great that a high court can tell the Center "WTF are you thinking/saying" :)

The Delhi High Court on Monday pulled up the Centre for terming homosexual trait a “disease”. (Hat tip to Amit, for this update.)

The court’s observation came when Additional Solicitor General P.P. Malhotra, appearing for the Centre, contended that homosexuality is a disease that is responsible for spreading AIDS.

Describing homosexuality as “the most indecent behaviour” in society, the Centre submitted that homosexuals comprise only 0.3 per cent of the population and the right of rest 99.7 per cent population cannot be compromised for them.

Most indecent behavior indeed! Tell you what is most indecent - this! No...actually that's downright medieval and barbaric!

Amazing how kooky and retrograde this PP Malhotra guy is!

“AIDS is spreading and if gay sex is legalised, then people on the streets would indulge in it saying that the high court has given approval for it. Every citizen has the right to lead a decent and moral life in society and the right would be violated if such behaviour (gay sex) is legalised in the country,” Malhotra said, adding that allowing gay sex would pose a health hazard to society.

He also countered the gay rights activists' contention who had earlier pleaded that gay sex should be legalised in the country as many countries in Asia and Europe have done so.

"Our moral and ethical values are different," Malhotra retorted.

According to Section 377 of Indian Penal Code, a person indulging in gay sex can get up to life imprisonment.

People on the street will indulge in it... and everyone will then get AIDS, the "homosexual disease!" Where are we - in the Reagan led early 80s?

In any case, the remark reminded me of this humorous post at Overheard in NYC that I was reading earlier today with great bemusement.

Tonight's Movie: Big Trouble in Little Italy

Girl: Hang on... (bends over to tie shoe in middle of crowd)
Appalled mother: Don't do that! This is New York. You could get pregnant!

--Mulberry & Hester, Little Italy

Overheard by: Mark

So now then - don't bend when you go out on the roads of Mumbai; because then AIDS will spread rampantly in India (which has so far been so immune to these diseases that plague the immoral and unethical Western cultures!)

Find the humor in this and ROTFL is all that we can do in the face of such absurd ridiculousness, no?

Related: Amit Varma's post earlier this year about the prevalent attitude about this in India.

Bollywood songs

Considering my roots, it is strange that I hardly ever post music from India. So, here's some fare from Bollywood ... but not the blockbuster song-and-dance routines of recent years (mostly item numbers of late!) but songs from the 1950s, which I absolutely love more than any other period in Bollywood's history.

First up... Nutan and Dev Anand in a famous song from Paying Guest



And is there someone with a more beautiful screen presence than Madhubala in Indian films? Again, with Dev Anand (whose films from the 50s I love; though he's made nothing but c**p since; a few ok movies in the 60s and 70s notwithstanding! At 85, though, he has the kind of energy and enthusiasm for life that one wants to still root for him to continue making movies (that not many see; and its been so for almost 3 decades at least now!)



And the last one is actually from Pakistan, which I found it here. The picturization is not so great but the voice, that of Naseem Begum, is haunting in some ways and I loved it.



P.S. Given that a friend recently emailed me saying she remembered I used to love a particular S. D. Burman song, I should at least provide links to a few songs sung by him here; considering I have no idea when I will post Bollywood fare again!

Kaahe Ko Roye
o re mahji
wahan kaun hai tera musafir jaye ga kahan

Apparently, it was the 3rd in the above list that was my favorite! However, I have no recollection of being so much in love with this song back in the 90s when I knew this friend but memory is such a beast. We remember different things about each other and sometimes about ourselves!