Action hero

A recent episode involving a film star which made news. the thing is so funny.

1. Hero beats up wife and burns her with cigarette butts.
2. The badly battered wife files a police complaint.
3. Film industry elders prevails on her to withdraw the complaint in the 'interest of the family and child'.
4. Wife does a somersault and says she tumbled down a few steps and sustained the injuries.
5. Film producers association rushes to ban our hero's alleged girl friend, also a film star, from the inudstry for 3 years.
6. Hero lands up in a hospital with asthma and jaundice even before he can step into the jail.

Sure facts are stranger than ficiton. If you just narrated the whole thing to me I'd think that it is the story line of the latest tear-jerker serial on TV! Wonder if the film fraternity 'elders' would do the same if this happened to their daughters? May be yes, after all. Tradition and family honor is upto the woman to keep, while man simply upholds the same by beating his wife. If you take a sample, may be 50% women will respond that their husbands have the right to beat them up. May be that's how the term action hero came about after all.

An uncanny resemblance

A fasting old man has caught the country’s attention; more so, of the TV channels. While the camps should have been Anna & anti-Anna, they are now conveniently termed as ‘India’ & “anti- India”. I always used to think (based on reports) that Americans are a stupid people, they sometimes elect their presidents depending on who ran a better and attractive election campaign, not based on the candidate’s merit. Presidential electinos are jsut like selling a product, the glossier the advertisement, the more the sales. Its like they just swallow whatever crap is shown on their 'TeeVee', no questions asked. Its so pathetic to see how Indian middle class has degenerated to those levels. May be, it was not degeneration after all- it was like this through out; just came out in the open now.

              Our penchant for swallowing news and views from the TV has made us not very different from the Americans. We’re just as conceited as they are. Poor chaps (the americans), so lonely at the top till now.

You simply cannot utter a word about Anna because anti-Anna is anti-India. Such a sad state of affairs. My sincere apologies to the Americans for criticizing them. It’s a classic case of spotting a speck from someone’s eye while there is a log in mine.

I guess there were indications of this rot all along. Now I recollect hearing a man from Orissa talk. He was working in IT in Bangalore. His native place was either Bolangir or Kalahandi district, or some other name which one I forgot. Whichever it was, it is infamous for drought and poverty and is always in the news. So I thought I’d show off my general knowledge and asked him if it is true that droughts and other such calamities are common there. He looked at me as if I was talking about some other god-forsaken place and flatly refused any knowledge of such a big problem. I bit my tongue and thought it better to keep further GK to myself. But the thought was jarring, how can a man from that place deny the existence of a problem that is news in national newspapers. That was one sign.

The other sign was the facebook posts which derided anybody who decided to say Anna had shades of grey and he wasn’t a saint. If FB had a dislike button, you would be buried under a barrage of them.

Subtle and Minor signs, but all the same with a huge undercurrent.

 So I guess we aren’t an enlightened polity after all. Applying a little bit of extrapolation…may be middle class is the same everywhere.

In memoriam

One of the greatest composers in Malayalam cinemas, Johnson master passed away two days ago. It was an untimely death which fills me with melancholy every time I think of it. He should have been like any other music composer. Bu the personal element was added by ‘Gandharva sangeetham’ which I used to watch regularly at dinner time when I was home. Every night he would be humming tunes on his guitar, with the contestants singing his beautiful melodies sometimes. He always came across as a frank and simple man who never tried to hide his feelings. As they always say, he will continue to live forever through his beautiful songs. A day of real loss for malayalis.

The City of Dust

Bangalore was eponymous as the "Garden city". Later it earned so many other tags, like the 'IT capital'. Obama elevated it into celebrity status still later. 'Bangalored' has evolved as a verb for outsourcing.

There are times when one feels it is apt to call it as per the title of the post. The 'dhool' kicked up at times is too much that it even impairs visibility, like fog. The levels of pollution is just too much. Personally I know people who have had worsening of asthmatic attacks after coming to the city. Sitting in an auto at times, I'm horrified to think what colour my lungs will be, after inhaling all the smoke from the traffic.

The dust is not just confined to the air. You find it everywhere...on the seats of the auto, on the seats of the metro buses. When you get into the bus and is overjoyed to find a vacant seat, within moments your joy vaporises when you find the seat caked in dust, may be even someone's shoeprints. But you have no choice but to grab that only seat, for there are another a dozen people behind you eyeing that lone seat. Initially I used to worry sick over my kurta getting dirty from all that dust on the seat..but now I have learned to console and congratulate myself that my kurtas are dark colored and will mask the dust! But all people are not such rollovers like me. One of my friends who recently moved to the city is thinking of covering herself in a burkha even though she is not a muslim. For the time being, she makes do with covering herself up with a shawl .i.e her face and head, leaving just a slit for the eyes. That terrorist like appearance of hers has spawned a  new series of jokes in the dept! She has a paranoia about all the dust in the air. She says she finds her head coated with dust and the head comb quite full of it after a bus ride.She says there is a lot of dust on her face. I cant help but wonder if that shouldn't be true in my case too. Some how it has escaped my notice. Well...guess my standards of hygiene have taken a beating.

Talking about hygiene, today I had to sit next to a lady who was smelling like hell. You have to trust me when I say this 'coz I'm someone who is relatively resistant to bad smells, even when people cover up their noses, I can usually take it in without batting my eyelids. But this time, I was floored. Her body odour almost made me nauseous that I had to turn my face the other way and sit. No, this is not about telling everyone should use deo or such stuff. About taking bath may be...but lets talk about that when we know about water availability.

PTSD

Caught a glimpse of the TeeVee (the US pronunciation) when I was preparing a brief on the ISID NTD meeting. Just caught a wink of a scene showing an airport. Needless to say, it brought back the PTSD. (for the uninitiated- it is Post traumatic stress disorder). Just mention North statio/Lechmere, I;m ready to throw fits anytime. At the risk of sounding like a gas bag, I’ve to confess this trip has done me to death with regards to air and subway travel. As much as we enjoyed Boston, by the end of the week, we’ve had enough of the subway travel that I began to feel weary and nauseous at the thought of the shuttle bus from Lechmere to North station. Actually the subway is qyuite nice. But the problem was, we were making around 8-10 trips per day in a matter of, may be 12 hours. Now that isn’t so nice.

The same goes for airports. I’ve seen more airports and had more take-offs and landings in a week than I had in my entire short life. Actually when we missed the AI flight and had to stay over in Chicago, I was kind of secretly pleased; variations in barometric pressure 6 times in 24 ours had made my ear sick and me very nauseous on the inbound flight. This time atleast we had a break on the outbound ;-)

May be all this PTSD is gonna last just a few weeks and then I may be back to wishing for more of the fare. Hope that time is a long way off :-)

7 khoon maaf (pardon the 7 murders)

The translation of the title from hindi is mine, pardon me. After seeing the film, there would surely be the 8^th murder, that of the director. I can’t pardon Vishal Bhardwaj for directing this after the wonderful hopes he gave after Ishqiya [Now, that was some movie]. How can you ever destroy all the suspense of a movie with its title. Now that’s dumb. After the 1^st murder, you realize you have to plod through 6 more. In the end, nobody can blame you for baying for the script writer’s bloody blood. Priyanka Chopra is wasted in a role with potential. She did a much better job in ‘Fashion’. None of the male co-leads have enough in the plot to explore their repertoire. Fine actors, Irrfan khan. Nasruddin Shah, all wasted. The fellow playing the narrator, could do more with his face, for that was one of the better scripted roles in the movie. 

Honestly, if there is a Susanna in the society, she deserves mental treatment. The movie at times seems to be trying to evoke sympathy, portraying Susanna as the victim.

If you are asking me why write a review for the film which was released last year…that’s coz Air India forced me to watch this on its flight. This was the only movie in the flight DEL-BLR. The other option of course, was listening to Annu Kapoor and Durga Jasraj, which I was in no mood for.

Shit happens! :-)

May be a smile is not what you expect at the end of such a comment. Well, actually I dont know why I included that ..but now, now, let it be :)
Every day I've to walk 10 minutes to the my department after I get down from  the auto. Of late its' become kind of routine to see human shit on the side walk. Well if you're thinking why cant you look away and not see it; there's always the chance that you are going to step on it if you dont watch where you're going. so you get, it, you've to see it to avoid it! Coming from a place where this is not a common sight, it got me thinking who is doing this and why aare they doing this on the sidewalk which thousands of people use everyday. actually I pity the sweepers who have to sweep the sidewalk every day and encounter this.
Obviously those who're doing it dont have toilets. Not surprising in an aspiring metro like B'lore where large number of people live in slums and dont have access to toilets. So much so for the aspiring metro tag. next, when are they doing this. Obviously whoever is doing it has to be finished with it before people start the office hours. so they complete their ablutions at the crack of dawn, especially women for whom privacy is a bigger issue. Many people in the slums wake up at 5am or earlier to complete their toilet activities in the dark. Just imagine, if you have to answer nature's call during the brighter part of the day, there's nothing you can do but torture you GIT and sphicters. I shudder at the thought. But it is happening even as I write.
Now this shit on the road gets worse when it rains. I guess you can just imagine the effect of water. I'm secretly glad that my slippers broke  and I had to resort using a covered shoes instead. So what about the less fortunate ones without even footwear? Hook worms, roundworms, leptospira, e.coli and god- know-what pathogens.
So what can be done? Obviously, construct public toilets, create awareness about necessity to use toilets for defecation. Easily said than done. The above said slum dwellers are not suffering due to lack of toilets. What if you have just one toilet for a 1000 pupulation slum? The numbers also matter.

In my case, I suspect some folks living around 200 feet from my sidewalk. They are the only people living in the vicinity coz its not a residential aea otherwise and other settlements are a little farther. But I dont know if I'll blame them. The poor things have been thrown out of their homes when their shanties were demolished for construciton of the Metro rail. They earn their meagre living from weaving baskets from palm leaves and other natural products. The construction work disrupted the many years long arrangements and paraphernalia they had for cleaning and drying and other processing of the raw materials. But still their workmanship is of excellent quality, even in the squalor they live in. They have no other place to go, they simply dont know any other place, so they now live in simple tents made of tarpaulin in the same place where their homes once stood. All their belongings are kept on the roadside. Leave alone toilets, they dont even have a roof over their heads. Now, who can blame them?