My Morning Walk at the "Valley Park" Bird Sanctuary

I didn't realize that the trail where I go for a walk every morning (remember I have moved house to a different part of CBD Belapur) is also a "Bird Sanctuary" though I had suspected this all along, having heard the virtual sonata of bird sounds every morning. But the rain decided to play spoil sport, and not much of bird sounds were captured by my camera, as was originally intentioned.

The New Ad of, umm, New Axe!

Thousands of beautiful blondes, brunettes, Indian, Western, Mongoloid women, all of them swim, and slide down the top of the hillocks facing the sea. They jump over obstacles, panting, screaming, wearing green, blue, and red bikinis, and their skins glow, and their eyes are intent on only one thing. They are unstoppable as they swarm over the beach, careen down the hills, their supple bodies in the frenzy of arousal, they are unstoppable - this stampede of beauties, this dream sequence of every man.

The center of their attention is a man who sprays from a bottle of deodorant and smiles devilishly at his good fortune. For a moment I imagine it is me, because there is a reason. The advertising agencies call it “aspiration,” which makes even an almost bald man (me!) aspire to be the object of all these beautiful women. Sure, ads can delude people; some of them even live in an ersatz world created by so many advertisements, which they call: lifestyle.

It is my deodorant he is spraying over his body - Axe - but then I shake myself awake, as if from a reverie. It’s only the newest ad of your favourite deodorant – Axe – stupid. Sorry folks, for being so carried away. But the ad provoked because it was too gross. After all, as former Executive Secretary of the Advertising Standards Council of India, I am bound to have strong opinions on what an ad should and shouldn't be.

Meanwhile this is a discussion on the New Axe ad on Yahoo answers. Guess no one there, too, likes the ad. Is Hindustan Lever listening?

Seventy Years Together, Couple Die within a Day of Separation

"Death be not proud" wrote John Donne. Death pops up interesting surprises on us. This came as a true surprise, one that made me think enough to make me sit down at my laptop and write this blog.

But this death was expected. They, husband and wife, lived to a fruitful age of 95, were married at 25, created five children, never travelled outside the precincts of their village in Kerala, never saw an aircraft from close (or even sat in one), saw their great grand children, never touched a computer keyboard, and didn’t fall seriously ill until four months ago.

And they died peacefully at home with some of their children around them. Mercy’s sister’s father-in-law died day before yesterday, and his wife died a day later, after having lived together for seventy years. For a moment I want to stop and imagine this! Simple folks, a simple life of wearing dhotis and chatta-mundu, and eating unpolished rice for all their lives, and leading a Christian life of strong faith in their God and their fellow beings.

My parents also lived a similar life. Theirs was a life of sacrifices for their children, who looked after them in their old age. Both my parents (bless them!) never had stepped into an aircraft, never been to a holiday, never knew what a computer is, didn’t know about the Internet, and saved all they could so that they could leave it to their children, whom they considered profligate. When I suggested once that they should travel by aeroplane, my dad asked, “What for?” That was their culture, their own value system deeply ingrained in their psyche.

If there was a contest for the biggest miser of all time, my dad would win, without a doubt. After retirement when he settled in Kerala, he would control the use of water so that he wouldn’t have to use electricity to pump water to the overhead tank. So no flushing! When I came on holiday I would have to pay him to stay for a few weeks, or he would feel offended. I won’t be allowed to sit late reading a book as electric bills would go beyond his calculations. Result: he left me enough inheritances that I can educate my son without worrying. He died at the age of eighty-four and mother followed him three years later at the age of eighty-seven. They were of the same age.

The lives of these two couples – my sister-in-law’s in laws’, and my parents’ – are so similar that I couldn’t but compare them, and then, with that of mine.

BBC Worldwide Visionaries - Vote to Naught?

BBC has what is know as a Visionaries Debate going where two great people are pitted against each other, to slug it out, to see who is the better visionary (BBC Worldwide Visionaries). The latest one is Charles Dickens versus JK Rowlings. Now, I don't think either writers are visionaries in that they wrote fiction which is in the realm of imagination. Visionaries are those who do things, who are leaders and can see ahead and lead others to an idealistic goal. So BBC have you erred somewhere?

JK Rowling's success was mainly based on the marketing muscle of her publisher. Not to mention pre-release publicity hoopla of her books (does Harry Potter die?, etc). Also, pliss to note that her books are not affordable to the common-book-reading public. In this respect they are like an expensive brand of perfume, to be flaunted than read. I consider Enid Blyton a better writer than JK Rowlings. Enid wrote more books than Julianne and her books are loved by children and adults of all ages throughout the world. I still read her books, if for nothing more than reliving the guilty pleasure I had while reading it hidden within my textbook in class.

In my humble opinion (IMHO), though I admire both these writers, neither of them qualify for the position of a visionary, so my vote goes for naught.

India Wins Twenty20 Worldcup. "Chak de India!"

It felt great to watch India win the Twenty20 World Cup. I don’t usually watch cricket matches because it wastes a lot of my time. But Twenty20 cricket is different, it doesn’t waste much time and I see a game that is similar to soccer where a result is to be had within two hours or, in this instance three hours.

But I did watch some of the Twenty20 matches. It had the edge of the seat excitement that soccer and tennis has. And our boys under Mahendrasingh Dhoni showed aggression, sportsmanship and team spirit. (Now, “Sportsmanship” is a term I use to denote the disposition where a player is aggressive, but at the same time fair to his opponents. This is different from “sledging,” the sort used by Australian players, which is outright personal abuse and insult.)

I liked the way they played as if every run mattered and they played like Indian tigers, and not the hyenas they were in other forms of the sport.

Would you believe this? The Indian seniors on the field are a tame sort, hanging their heads, mindful of the way they look, and ever so shy to make eye contact with rival players. But the aggression displayed by Shreesanth as he bowled to Matthew Hayden was exemplary. I like that fellow Mallu, and wish him well.

Well done India! Or, should I say like Shahrukh Khan, “Chak de India!”

cricket | Indian cricket | Twenty20 Worldcup |

Project Aardvark - for Those Interested in How a Software Project Takes Shape

I am a great admirer of Joel Spolsky (he is the guy who runs Fog Creek Software, a software maker), in fact I love his writing, the way he blogs his innermost thoughts as a programmer. His comments are full of wise memes and, the best part is, he is honest in helping out others who may be in trouble, considering as to how tough software coding is.

He got together a team of software geeks, gave them a software project and got a documentary filmmaker to make a film on how exactly a software project takes shape. Here it is for geeks and non-geeks alike to enjoy (Project Aardvark - The Movie about Software Coding).

Frown Jewels : outlookindia.com

This is Manjula Padmanabhan reviewing Binoo John's book Entry from Backside Only in Outlook - The Hazaar Fundas of Indian English (Frown Jewels: outlookindia.com). Excerpt:

"With a journalist’s flair for combining information with easy readability, John provides sharp, cheeky insights into the early flowering of the language, while maintaining a careful decorum in his own usage and abusage. It cannot have been easy: there are so many outrageous puns of the ‘backside’ kind to be attempted, so many rhyming-jingles of the ‘English-Pinglish’ kind to be created! But his gaze is kindly rather than cruel, as he surveys all the errors and omissions that ‘Indlish’ is heir to. However much we might wince at the mangled pronunciations of Indian newsreaders or sneer at the hybrid language of local banner advertisements, this book reminds us to be grateful to all the small-town babus and school teachers without whose early struggles with commas, colons and colonials, you and I would not be sharing this article today."

Manjula Padmanabhan, besides being a cartoonist and illustrator writes rather well as her blog will testify. You can buy this book on Penguin India (ISBN: 014310327X).

Even Porn and Prostitution for TRPs?

Here’s the story that had the Indian capital agog with rumors and speculation. A television channel broke the story about a teacher in a school forcing girls into prostitution and into acting in porn films. The police found no incriminating evidence, and it now turns out that the television channel was taken for a nice drive by some tele-journalist in a mad frenzy for a scoop. No, not only the tele-journalist was fooled, the print journalists, too, followed suit by publishing unconfirmed reports based on hearsay. The crowning disappointment of it all, as journalists would themselves say: NO STORY.

I have been seeing this sort of frenzy for some time now starting with the child Prince, who was trapped in an earthly dungeon of some sort. The media gave the rescue of the child live coverage and the nation was glued to the television. Of course, the TRPs would have gone up considerably for the channels concerned. Then followed stories about a child who enjoys a drink every evening with his father, a child who is apparently reincarnated and identifies who killed him in his early life, all centering around some child or the other. Dammit, all these for those bloody Television Ranting Points (TRP, my own coinage)?

Recently around 200 farmers committed suicide in the Vidharba region of Maharashtra. The issue of BT Cotton and hybrid seeds is festering and affecting a lot of farmers, and nobody seems to be bothered to report it. When Magsaysay Award winning author P Sainath tried to bring it up in a discussion in a literary show, he was cut short, too bluntly. No camera teams reached Vidharba, because it is difficult to report such news. After all, such news has no immediate TRP value.

Television Channel | India |

My House in Artist Village

 

This is my house at Artist Village which is up for demolition. I lived here for 20 years, and it was a sad day on which I moved out with a truckload of books, computers and accessories, furniture, and loads of memories. In it's place would come up a spanking new structure in a few months.

Baghdad Burning!

This blog "Baghdad Burning" is written by a girl is from inside Iraq and is a touching account of how the war has changed Iraq and it's people (Baghdad Burning). It would seem that post-occupation by America-led forces differences like being Shia or Sunni which didn't matter earlier were being used to blackmail and to kill. Excerpts:

"I remember Baghdad before the war - one could live anywhere. We didn't know what our neighbors were - we didn't care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it- depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night."

And this when she and her parents were preparing to cross over into Syria as refugees, after bribing the border guards:

"It happened almost overnight. My aunt called with the exciting news that one of her neighbors was going to leave for Syria in 48 hours because their son was being threatened and they wanted another family on the road with them in another car- like gazelles in the jungle, it’s safer to travel in groups. It was a flurry of activity for two days. We checked to make sure everything we could possibly need was prepared and packed. We arranged for a distant cousin of my moms who was to stay in our house with his family to come the night before we left (we can’t leave the house empty because someone might take it)."

And this after she finally crosses over into Syria:

"The first minutes after passing the border were overwhelming. Overwhelming relief and overwhelming sadness… How is it that only a stretch of several kilometers and maybe twenty minutes, so firmly segregates life [Syria] from death [Iraq]? How is it that a border no one can see or touch stands between car bombs, militias, death squads [Iraq] and… peace, safety [Syria]? It’s difficult to believe- even now. I sit here and write this and wonder why I can’t hear the explosions [in Baghdad]."

Iraq | Baghdad |