Saddest Day Of My Life

My political leanings are well known; I’ve all but yelled it from the rooftops.

And for those of you who were concerned about my state after this…er… shock, I’m fine even expected such an outcome, though not like this.

So, anyway, the following bits are to justify the title. I wanted to actually make it ‘Say it’s not true’, after the Queen+Paul Rodgers song for World AIDS Day, but then this Advani phrase suits it better.

My first concern has been about this evil of reservations. And that there is an order of priority according to religion, to claim the country’s resources. If all goes well in the next three months, and for six-seven years following that, I’ll be free of all this nonsense. But what about the rest of the country? The heart bleeds.

The next thing has been about the blatant selling of our national interest. The N-Deal for one. It should have been renegotiated.

The most important thing however is the security issue. I’ve come close to getting blown to bits, but thankfully escaped.. once was at Forum Mall, another was at Army School. Both places they detonated bombs. And then there was the frenzied set of phonecalls to relatives in Mumbai and those in Delhi. I can (thankfully) only imagine the levels of anguish folks who’ve lost loved ones in terror attacks go through. I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone. I can’t bear to watch millions of innocent lives being compromised for cheap motives like staying in power.

And then there’s the issue of Assam and the North-East. The place is overrun by illegal immigrants, a potential security threat. And everyone concerned as of now, apart from the BJP and maybe the AGP chooses to look the other way, or even encourage it for electoral gains. Separatist movements are on full swing, violence is a daily occurrence. No one else seems to have reached out to these separatist groups, tried to begin a peace process. And integrate the North-East with the rest of the country. That is one region which shares more border with other countries than with our own. And China is encroaching on the borders, and Manmohan doesn’t seem to be having sleepless nights about that.

Freedom of worship is yet another thing. Proselytization has reached new heights, and is slated to continue. A minister of state calls our gods names and no one says a thing? And he doesn’t bother to apologize?Symbols of our faith are encroached upon, and no one seems to turn a hair. The levels of polarization society is seeing now has had no precedent.

I don’t care if the people in power are young or old. I don’t give a damn if they are rich or poor either. They can be illiterate for all I care. All I ask for is some amount of patriotism. Of what use is competence when you don’t look at the country and your countrymen with love and a feeling of belonging? I find that sorely lacking in the UPA and the Left, who put party and self interests above national interest. And who don’t seem to take pride in being Indian. They have the ‘We are a third-world country’ mentality instead of a ‘We can/need to be a first-world country’.

So for five years, I’ve been hoping for a change in governments, cringed at all the injustice meted out by the establishment,  and have seen an increasing number of people turn anti-UPA. But, well, I guess my sample space was localized… as is seen in the near-sweep of BJP in Karnataka, and the whole of Bangalore Urban. I was surprised Sangliana and Jaffer Sharif got beaten. And that Ananth Kumar was trailing for quite a while.

They say it’s good the Left is out… but now there’s nothing to stop Manmohan bending backwards to US demands, and considering it’s Obama, he’s surely going to demand his protectionist pound of flesh. And have his own solutions for the Kashmir problem.

On a more positive note, now the Congress can’t hide behind the excuse of the Left preventing development from taking place. It’s also good to see a non-fractured mandate, though one hopes it isn’t Amar Singh the Congress allies with. And now that their position is secure, hope they concentrate more on development than on nurturing votebanks.

On a lighter note, searches for ra_hul_ga_n_dh_i_s_girl_fr_iend are up again. Not scheduled to go down anytime soon, I guess. Folks say they are looking for the image of the future bahu of the nation, and by extension, the future kingmaker of the nation.

The folks at mind dry dot in have the best accuracy/resourcesUsed ratio w.r.t exit polls . Maybe Mr. Yogendra Yadav (not the one featured in this video) needs to take a leaf out of their book.

And for so long, the BJP’s slogan has been “Advani For PM”. Now that they have to sit in the opposition, it’s going to be “Advani Against PM”.

PS: On a personal note, I didn’t stick around watching the counting unfold (I can’t watch India lose a cricket match, d’you think I can bear to watch it lose its pride, wealth, and everything else?) and so I actually managed to get stuff done. Not everything went my way, but my laptop mysteriously came back to life this afternoon… (it had died a week or so back) hurray!

Suggestions for Election Posters of Rahul Gandhi

So there exists an opportunity now to make election posters into collector’s items or posters to adorn a girl’s room. One of the candidates is a single half-Italian man. With dimples, at that. And no, Dino Morea is not standing for elections. Yet. (Which is actually a relief, given his recent departure from his Musu Musu Haasi-era good looks).

The scion of the dyNasty is who I’m talking about. No, I don’t say Mr. Gandhi is goodlooking. But he has all the right qualifications. Single? Check. Italian blood? Check. Dimples? Check. Fair complexion? Check. Under forty? Check (1970-born). So when I see this torturous poster every morning and evening exhorting me to vote for this man whose face doesn’t compare with that of John Abraham and Shayan Munshi in the neighboring hoardings, I cringe at all this potential going waste.

So… well… some pointers here to the folks who make posters for the Congress:

• Who are we trying to kid? Thirty-nine isn’t Young. Atleast not for first-time female voters in the 18-25 age group. So…. attempt to cast him in the Sanjay Dutt – SRK slot, not the Hrithik slot or John Ab slot. The struggling-to-be-fit-and-succeeding one.
• In a few years, he looks like he’s going to have more chins than the Hong Kong telephone directory. Dude…. or should I call you Uncle… work out, for godsake! SRK tops you with lines like “Yeah, Rahul Gandhi is goodlooking, but I have a six-pack’. And get Outlook or The Week or ToiLeT Paper or CNN-IBN or NDTV to chronicle your morning workout. And get cracking. The media goes gaga about Modi’s (if only figurative) chhappan ki chhatti….this is your chance to score one over him by proving that he is just all talk while you have the real stuff… and by extrapolation this is true for other issues like development, as ToI will write.
• Get a better photographer. Not your current one, or these presswallahs whose cameras add ten pounds to your face. Stretch your neck a bit when they take a picture of your face. That way you avoid the extra chins being added. Maybe you can strike the thinking-man pose – looking skyward in contemplation.
• And smile. Or grin. Widely. That’s what Italian men are expected to do. You don’t have it in you to look like a sleek mafia don – you need a darker skin tone and sharper features to carry that off. So take the pretty-boy route out.
• And sign off with Hasta la Vista, baby. Yeah, it’s Spanish, but who really knows the difference between Spain and Italy? People take Romance languages rather literally.
• An accented English/Hindi is okay. For the same reason as above.

I certainly don’t want the Congress to win this election, however narrowly. My loyalties are well-displayed on the widgets on the right here. But heck, if we are having posters that are going to be plastered everywhere from Malleshwaram to Basavanagudi, from Indiranagar to Rajajinagar, we might as well have posters good enough to be called eye-candy.

And… I guess the best thing for Mr. Gandhi to do would be to adapt a line from Jhankaar Beats to be his guiding light – Jeete toh jeete, haare toh haare, har dil ko apna banaana hai. My tips might or might not help with the former, but the latter, quite surely it will.

Rahul Gandhi’s Girlfriend

If you landed here searching for ‘Rahul Gandhi’s Girlfriend’ or variations of the same, please pause a few moments to answer the following questions for me in the comments section below. Please. Pretty Please.

1. Is this your first time searching for Rahul Gandhi’s girlfriend?
2. Are you male or female?
3. What motivates you to search for Rahul Gandhi’s girlfriend?

Coz over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed my blog gets a scary number of hits for ‘Rahul Gandhi Girlfriend’ and the like, and I’d like to know the method behind this madness. It’s nice that people are election-aware and all that in this election season, but why are there so many searching for Rahul Gandhi’s Girlfriend and ending up on this blog? It’s not even in the first page of results! (Of course… after this post, it will be).

And if you really want info on Rahul Gandhi’s girlfriend, it might help to check this post out.

And… I really wonder why a goodlooking guy with Italian genes and desirous dimples (just an expression… I personally think he looks like an overgrown schoolboy) is yet unmarried… something sinister, the bitchy old maid in me says.

A Second Helping of Minestrone

Hmm… I’ve been writing a lot of obscure posts of late… much more than usual anyway. Guess it has something to do with the large number of non-disclosure agreements I’ve signed, the even larger number of documents marked ‘Confidential’ I’ve read, the security measures I’ve religiously followed, and the like, of late. I almost feel ready to work at R&AW (Yes, that is still an ambition. Only, now, it’s narrowed down to NTFO and Joint Cipher Bureau).

I’ve not done much reading of late. Nor do I travel by BMTC anymore. Basically I don’t indulge in activities that are blogpost-fodder.

I might want to write about the recent conversion-yada and the media reports that followed, but then I have neither the time nor the inclination to respond to people who’d read it and say, “Heck, where’s my flame-thrower?”. The sweeping generalizations and general lack-of-informedness of such a bunch are too much to take, and I’d not be saying anything that folks haven’t already said on the comments section of Churumuri.

Talking of Churumuri, this one screenshot of Aaj Tak reporting on Rahul Gandhi deserves a look:

Aaj Tak screenshot on Rahul Gandhi's meals

Moving from TV to radio, I find that all radio stations in Bangalore sound the darned same! Same songs, same boring RJs, same programming formats. Little wonder then that listener loyalty is at rock bottom or lower. And it’s not entirely the channels’ fault… the private ones aren’t allowed to telecast news. I’m not sure if it would be better if they were allowed to… all news channels also sound/look the same these days. On a more constructive note, why can’t they innovate and do something other than have music with breaks for R-bit Jokers to talk idiocy in? Just give the music a rest for once? And have something nice like a talk show? Or some serious discussion forum for once? Or atleast an arbit discussion forum? Stand-up comedy?

Though I must say Radio One is one better than the rest… Chamrajpet Charles, Ulfat Sultan, Ghanta Singh… I laike!

But even it doesn’t come close to what RadioCity was in its first couple of years. The sheer variety of music they played was mind-blowing. Obscure and unknown should-have-been-hits unearthed from nowhere! I had a bout of nostalgia when I accidentally came across the soundtrack of this Sunny Deol-Sushmita Sen starrer Zor. The music was composed by Agosh, of Paisa fame. They were the same guys who composed the first few RadioCity jingles.

And where did I come across this song? This godawesome Music Search Engine: Guruji Music. Guruji.com is the Indian search engine… searches only pages which are from India. I don’t much use their search, but their music search is the best thing on earth since sliced bread. They comb the databases of all the Indian music streaming sites. End result, any Indian song since 1932 can be found on that site. Wow!

And I also found the only Kannada song that Kishore Kumar has sung. For those of you interested, here it is – Haadu, aata aadu. Frickin’ wow!

Though, I must say it’s clunky. I’d prefer a better interface that allows me to search on multiple parameters at once, that allows me to filter my results on more than one field. Like now when I’m searching for Asha Bhonsle, I end up with close to 20 pages of results. If I’m looking for Bengali songs of hers from the ’70s, I’ve to either filter my results to only the Bengali tracks, or to her ’70s tracks, but not both. And it doesn’t support boolean search. Doesn’t support quotes which ensure your search string is searched for as such, and not its variations. Side effect: if you search for Rock On, the ‘on’ is ignored, and your results include some arbit ‘rock the party mix’ too.

I watched Rock On last week. Goodlooking Arjun. Okay-looking Farhan. Sweet-looking Purab. And I’ve never seen a better-looking dying person than Luke Kenny. Who, in my opinion, looks better with short hair than with lustrous locks that makes me hate the hard water of Surathkal even more for ruining my once-lustrous locks.

The music is nice. The lyrics are tacky. Which adds to the entire rock-band effect – they sound juuust like they were written by an average-Lakshman-aka-Lucky type.

The performances are nice. Especially the lady who played Arjun Rampal’s wife. And Purab Kohli. And his oh-so-sweet looks deserve another mention.

But the plot is tripe. Every bit of it. More so since it puts in every damn cliche in the book, and even more so since it seems like an elaborate excuse to fit in the music.

However, in all, it doesn’t feel like an assault on my senses. Which seems to be the only parameter I seem to use to evaluate movies these days.

Now that’s a post I’ve been meaning to write for close to a year now – how to evaluate movies. I somehow have never been able to get the right words to express what I mean to say. And never the right lines either – everything I want to say seems to be a contradiction in itself.

Talking of Lakshman-aka-Lucky, Ashok Krish (who does Jalpa, shows Jilpa and puts Gilma, and comes up with amaklamatic expressions like “Holy Mother of Mel Maruvaththur!” and “Holy Saint of Samayapuram!”) has a friend who’s come up with a new term for folks BITSians refer to as ChOMs (Chapati-oriented Monkeys. Their terminology, not mine) – read all about it here.

And when I talk of evaluating movies, this post sort of says part of what I want to say. But then, for that matter, Dipta Chaudhuri/Calcutta Chromosome frequently says all that I have to say, more succintly and in a more feel-good way than I can ever dream of. Mr. Chaudhuri, I don’t know if you read other blogs or what, and if you read mine or what, but let me tell you, right from when I stumbled onto your blog while looking for Quick-Gun Murugan, I’ve been a diehard fan of your writing style. The feel-good-ness and positivity of your writing is something I aspire to achieve.

Another thing about this blog… he blogs on Bengali literature so passionately that it kindled in me the desire to read some Tamil literature. And what did I do? I, who take the better part of an hour to read the review of Anniyan in Kumudham, jumped straight into Kalki Krishnamurthy’s Ponniyin Selvan. That’s like the average Korean starting off with Wordsworth. My sister and I spent fifteen minutes deciphering the contents of a page before we realized it was the preface.

My saga didn’t end there… I found an English translation of the novel. Thanks a ton, Dushyanth. 44 chapters later, the translation ended. But the action in the novel was just beginning. So, well, I was left wondering what happens to Vandiyathevan and Aditya Karikalan… and Poonkuzhali and Kundhavai.

Next step… I asked my granny to read it out for me. Brilliant experience, I must say, especially with granny putting interesting trivia and fundae on Yaazhpanam, Pazhayarai, Kalki Krishnamurthy, you name it. But then granny being a very busy granny with more books to read and more grandchildren to pamper has gone to visit cousins of mine and once again I’m left high and dry right in the middle of all the action.

Oh, and my BMTC post got the attention of Bangalore Mirror. Only, they chose to publish it without my permission. While I now have adequate grounds to sue them (they violated the Creative Commons Non-Commercial License my blog is under), I think I’ll be content with just informing the losers that there is something called a LICENSE, and that arbit copypasting from the Net CAN put you in serious shite.

And the publishing DID get ME into serious trouble with the cousin I’d mentioned in the post. And it did drive me to a point where I seriously considered suing Bangalore Mirror for indirect emotional torture.

Aaand we come close to the end of yet another post that is about everything in general and nothing in particular. I’m considering starting a blog which publishes really, really arbit posts collected from bloggers blogosphere-wide. What say?

I was thinking of calling it “Minestrone for the arbit soul”, or some such. And maybe I can get a book version published. And come up with newer editions, all named “A(n) Xth Helping of Minestrone for the Arbit Soul”. And maybe I can use clustering algorithms to group posts into broad groups. Label generation will have to be perfected to automatically generate titles – “Minestrone for the Sporty|Filmi|Paparrazi|Bangalorean|Bong|Political soul”.

What say?

Obscure tailpiece: I’d just like to say thanks to two gentlemen I know. Communication is a wonderful thing.

A far-fetched What-If situation – The Martyring of Manmohan

Just done with the morning paper where the PM’s security arrangements for his trip to Sri Lanka are discussed. They seem quite extravagant this time, due to the Tiger threat. Reminded me of the other time there was a Tiger threat with the Congress….

It is a known fact that Sonia Gandhi distrusted R&AW, and Indian intelligence in general. When her children were travelling in Europe, it was an Italian security agency that provided the needed security cover for the children of the then PM. When Raul and Bianca (apparently that’s what they were christened… can anyone confirm the (un)truth of this statement? While it sounds probable and not really something you can crucify Sonia on, it sounds suspiciously like the product of a Sonia-is-Italian-to-the-tips-of-her-toes person’s imagination) were crossing from one European country to another, one of the European agents there considered it his duty to inform his Indian opposite number of the same… when he was met with surprise and disbelief – the Indian secret agent had no knowledge of the PM’s kids being in the vicinity. And the European then quipped, “The movement of the Indian PM’s children are known to the Germans, the Italians and the Spaniards, known to all other than the Indians”.

Sonia Gandhi later went on to dismiss Indian security forces and bodyguards of the PM as ineffectual, and went on to embarass them for the same. She rubbed salt in their wounds when she made them train under Italian security personnel – a double snub as not only were Italian agents considered so inferior that their Indian counterparts didn’t even consider them worthy of even exchanging tips with, but our men were forced to train under them, be snubbed and bossed over and abused by them.

All that pales into insignificance when we come to the incident of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. After an incident where he was hit over the head with an unloaded rifle by a Sinhalese naval cadet after signing the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord, it was obvious the Tigers brooked no friendly intentions to him. Thus when R&AW warned Rajiv Gandhi against going to Sriperumbudur as no force on earth could protect him against a suicide bomber, Sonia suggested he go on with his plan and have Italian security.

And we all know what happened after that.

A while later, Nalini, the backup bomber got her sentence reduced from Death to Life Imprisonment. And now Priyanka has a private meeting with the same Nalini. She also says she pardons Nalini, and that it is her way of coming to terms with her loss. Only, Priyanka has no right to pardon her… it was a crime not against an individual, but against the country. Now there are talks of releasing Nalini to “better Indo-Lanka ties”.

Sonia also accused the DMK of being hand-in-glove with her husband’s assassins. And now she doesn’t hesitate to have an alliance with them for the polls.

Also, the enquiry commission appointed to probe into Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination which moved fast under the previous government is now moving much slower than before, when intuitively it should be the other way ’round.

This, along with a lot more instances, have caused an increasing number of people to wonder if there is a connection between LTTE and Sonia Gandhi. Or if Rajiv’s assassination was engineered by Sonia Gandhi.

If we choose to give credence to this theory, maybe the imagination wouldn’t have to leap too much to visualize the prediction I put forward here.

So there’s simply no chance of the UPA winning the next election, what with the backlash from both the Left and the Right. Now if Manmohan is mauled by a Tiger, maybe Madam can cash in on the sympathy wave that will result on the brutal assassination of an erudite scholar and statesman?

Or maybe this is simply too fantastic a route to take with no easy explanations to give for the assassiantions, and with too many questions asked with no easy answers… and you can’t foist blame too easily on the LTTE unlike the way you can on Al Qaeda.. the Qaeda has no mailing address, while the LTTE has its own website.

So maybe Madam will simply take the easier, tried-and-tested way out by declaring internal Emergency.

Or maybe all that hype will boil over and they’ll just concede defeat and take their seats as Opposition.

Or what the heck…. they might just return to power on their own “secular” steam.

I’m dying waiting for election season. News channels as well as the Blogosphere are never so alive and interesting and full of emotion as it is then.

PS: This one by Subramaniam Swamy makes for interesting reading – Know Your Sonia.