Rickshaw race

Adventure racing on auto-rickshaw ...


Teams from around the world have begun racing across the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu in three-wheeled auto-rickshaws.

The 1,000km (590-mile) race, which kicked off in Madras (Chennai), will end in Kanyakumari, the southern-most tip of India, on 27 August. Participants come from as far as the UK, US, Hungary, Armenia and Russia. The Indian Auto-rickshaw Challenge is strictly fun, without any prize at the end of the race, the organisers say.

Colourfully named teams like Tamil Devils and Curry in a Hurry will get a first-hand experience of Indian roads. The Indian Auto-rickshaw Challenge is strictly fun, without any prize at the end of the race, the organisers say.

The Gods must be crazy

The Gods must be crazy...not the people :) effing idiots... damn ignoramuses fall for the same phenomenon again! Unbelievable..

Apparently, the Gods are drinking milk again.. :)

(Like the last slide in above link says:
"So the next time milk goes missing from your kitchen, don't blame the cat. Hail the Lord, look heavenwards and call it divine intervention!" :))

Osama gets horny

... Whitney (and her hubby) might need a bodyguard afterall!

Read more here.
Al-Qaeda chief and the world’s most dreaded terrorist, Osama bin Laden had a crush on singer-cum-actress Whitney Houston and wanted to make her his wife after killing her husband Bobby Brown.

Sudanese poet and novelist Kola Boof (37), who claims to have once been Osama's sex slave, writes this in her autobiography - Diary of a Lost Girl.

“He told me Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. He would say how beautiful she is, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband - Bobby Brown,” Page Six quoted her as saying.

Maybe he mis-interpreted her crooning of I'm every woman by taking them literally ;)

Whatever you want
Whatever you need
Anything you want done baby
I´ll do it naturally
Cause I´m every woman
It´s all in me
It´s all in me

I´m every woman
It´s all in me
Anything you want done baby
I do it naturally

Indian Maestro

Shehnai king Bismillah Khan dead -

Ustad Bismillah's unfulfilled dream

Profile

Remembering legendary shehnai player Bismillah Khan

Falstaff pays tribute... Bidai (found this link via Amit Varma's post, where he rightly expresses indignation at the UP government "declared a one-day mourning and closure of all government schools, colleges and offices" to mourn the maestro's death.)

Bismillah Khan is one of the few legends of Indian classical music that I have had the good fortune of listening to live... (On second thoughts, more than a handful, coming to think of it - Zakir Hussain (twice - once with his father Allah Rakha, and the 2nd time with his brother, Fazal Qureshi and Vikku Vanayakaram on the ghatam), Hariprasad Chaurasia, Shiv kumar Sharma, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt ...who else..hmm.. will have to dig deeper to think.. aah yes.. the dance maestro, Baiju Maharaj... hmm...

Trivia (via wikipedia article on Bismillah Khan)

1. He was the third classical musician to be awarded the Bharat Ratna (in 2001), the highest civilian honour in India and is one of the few people (how many have this honor? any one know?) to be awarded all the top four civilian awards.
2. He performed Raga Kafi from the Red Fort on the eve of India’s first Republic Day ceremony, on January 26th, 1950.
   

American Masters

American Masters is a great show, playing various episodes on WGBH & other PBS stations recently. I had seen a little bit of the show on James Dean last weekend...but today saw the entire hour of Albert Einstein: How I See the World .

More about the show at the link above, but here is a preview: Expelled from high school, unable to find a teaching job, and stuck working at a government patent office, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) went on to become one of the greatest scientific thinkers of all time. He used his free time at the Swiss Patent Office to develop his groundbreaking theories on the nature of time and space. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921 for his theory that light is made of waves as well as particles. Although his early theories paved the way for the atomic bomb, Einstein later became a peace activist, saying, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." By the time he died, Einstein was considered not only the most important scientist but the smartest man of his time.

Media in India

I could write a lot of things about the dismal levels that journalism (tabloidism or as Amit Varma calls it ' purplocity and verniness') has sunken to in India and how even TV gets worse day by day (though, admittedly my exposure to TV in India is negligible and I couldn't write much about it except to say that the little exposure I have to Hindi soaps during visits back home certainly did not whet my appetite). However, understandably, like in the US, TV aka the idiot box has garbage most of the time since the channels need to fill the 24 hours with something! However, this one crosses a line and should be strongly condemned by everyone in the TV/entertainment industry in India.

Amit Verma blogs about this Reuters report:

A group of Indian television journalists gave a man matches and diesel to help him commit suicide in order to get dramatic footage which was later broadcast on the news, police said on Thursday.The man died from severe burns to his body in hospital in Gaya town in the eastern state of Bihar on August 15, India's Independence Day.

OUTRAGEOUS!!!

Bollywood - 1

Exhausting & Awesome - Two contrasting Bollywood movies

Rediff review - KANK is an exhausting watch:
I feel older. A showing of Karan Johar's mammoth 22-reel Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna has left me unbelievably exhausted. I walk out of the hall feeling my cheeks for stubble, wondering if my clothes are suddenly dated and my hair's grey. For this is no ordinary 3.5-hour film. It is a saga that stretches on and on -- imagine, if you will, a Balaji Telefilms soap running for several seasons, time leaps and all. Yes, I've lost a sizeable chunk of my life, and you will too.

and ends...

"Damn, it still hurts. Think it'll take a couple more viewings of another film with a limping leading man to soothe the pain."

The film that blew (the reviewer's) mind being Omkara (official site), based on Othello, a great movie directed by Vishal Bharadwaj, director of Maqbool (which I have not seen but was based on Macbeth, it seems)...

Amit Varma blogs about the movie and refers us to a good review of Omkara by Baradwaj Rangan and also Jai Arjun Singh's raving blog post praising the movie, although apparently Falstaff is most unimpressed with Omkara.

Also, read an interview with the director, Vishal Bharadwaj, who started in Hindi movies as a music composer but after seeing the great acclaimed Polish director & Master of Cinema, Krysztof Kieslowski's Dekalog was inspired into making films.