Two Cents on Pride and Culture

First Cent: This whole obsession with getting back Mahatma Gandhi's personal belongings has gotten really crazy now. And everyone involved seems to be trying to outdo the next party in being idiotic.

Firstly, I don't understand why India's pride is at stake here if a dead (even if arguably great) man's slippers and glasses and few other things get auctioned off. Haven't some really priceless pieces of art and architecture been also auctioned off earlier? And, though I am not very sure of this mainly because I AM NOT INTERESTED, weren't these things already in foreign possession? So why this sudden fuss? The only thing could be that this is close to the election season. I mean I have genuine respect for Mahatma Gandhi, and a visit to his Ashram in Ahmedabad was one of the highlights of my recent trip there, but I am pretty sure he wouldn't have cared either.

Now the Government says that it'll go all out and bid for these items at the auction. Am I the only one who finds it really idiotic that they are openly declaring that they are going to bid anything to get these items back in an open auction. Opens up some interesting prospects for the seller.

And the rediff news article says that James Otis, the seller, 'wanted the Indian government to shift priorities from military spending to health care, especially for the poor'. Is the man crazy? Or are we?

Second Cent: I had made a post some time back about how Bangalore is looking more and more like Delhi each passing day.

The latest bit of resemblance is how this city is getting unsafe for women. It will take a long long time to get anywhere close to Delhi, but it seems all determined to get there. Such incidents have suddenly become very noticeable, so they are either just being reported more now even though they were always there, or some sick bastards have suddenly realized that they can get away with a lot of things because Mr Yeddyurappa has some very twisted ideas of what constitutes Indian culture.

There have been quite a few incidents lately where women walking alone in a jeans or in a pub with a man or riding a bike have been misbehaved with. And even slapped. By people at random. For no reason. What kind of castrated, low self-esteem, frustrated moron would slap a woman, and think that he is protecting Indian culture.

Bangalore is an amazing city, with a culture that people have unbelievable pride in, and not altogether unjustified. Even for someone who has been here for less than a year, it feels great being called a Bangalorean, being part of that community. So, it truly sucks when I see something like this spoiling what is supposed to be a rich, tolerant, beautiful place.

Even though, I am also sure that if I see a couple of guys on a bike slapping a single lady on the road and driving past, I would not do much beyond standing there and cursing them. Sucks.

Quizzing in Durgapur

This last weekend was spent in Durgapur, which for some reason I am really fond of. Made a couple of extremely enjoyable visits there when I was studying in Kolkata, and then there were some really nice visits from home too when my parents were staying close to it. I had never imagined a town so developed, when I made my first trip there. So, it's probably the memories.

I was there this weekend to conduct a couple of quizzes at NIT Durgapur, at their tech fest Aarohan. It was a really nice experience, not the least because of their hospitality. It actually felt like coming to a place I have a relationship with, and I hope this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

MnA has been doing quite well. We have done some good quizzes, while some other invites didn't work out because of time issues (it's difficult for us to do a quiz, on most occasions, on a weekday). The economic downturn has had both good and bad effects - people have become more cautious with money and so value our low cost-high standard quizzes more, but at some places they are so short of money that they just prefer having local quizmasters. But since this was never meant to be a money-making venture, we are happy with almost anything we get. Which has included invitations from some colleges I really wanted to go to as a quizmaster, and a weekly gig for a regional supplement of one of India's biggest English newspapers. There are some other things in the offing that might or might not work out. But the high of running a company, even if it is largely informal, is just awesome. There's this motivation that I can garner while pitching to someone or negotiating with someone that I never knew I had in me.

The trip also made me realize something I had not thought of very consciously till now. I love interacting with under-grad students. That might be a very important sub-conscious reason why I decided to make an effort to conduct quizzes instead of just being happy with my great job. There is this confidence that I have seen in so many under-grad students (though my experience has been limited to some of the best engineering colleges of the country only) that I haven't seen in anyone older. Confidence in their abilities, in the fact that they will achieve every dream they see, without any concern for the world that might be barely holding together outside their campuses. It might be foolhardiness, but what would we be without people like these?

Films I Have Seen Recently

Half the fun of watching a good movie, or reading a great book, or coming across some amazing eating-joint, for that matter, is being able to tell people about it. I don't think I would have enjoyed reading Ulysses or watching 8 1/2 so much if getting through them didn't grant me bragging rights, especially to those people who had tried to do the same and failed. Even otherwise, the joy of watching something like Fargo or The Big Lebowski is to be able to go over its finer points with other connoisseurs of good cinema. Or laugh about them over cheap booze.

Even though my movie watching has continued more or less unabated, thankfully, I haven't been getting time to write about it here. Or even talk about it with anyone else, except occasionally with a few friends in my mails or over GTalk. There are a few other movie enthusiasts at my small office, but I don't want to give my colleagues an impression that about the only thing I do after work is see films and read fiction. Plus, not many people can get enthusiastic about stuff like Korean romantic films or Japanese sexploitation flicks.

This mail is solely about some of the more interesting movies I have seen in the last 1.5 months or so, and would like to suggest to you too.

Some of these movies have been nominated at the Oscars this year - Milk, The Wrestler, Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - and you would have seen them anyway. There are others though, which are equally good, if not better than some of these, but would be lost to memory after doing short tours of the festival circuit, resurfacing as a 'cult classic' some years from now.

I have maintained a record of every movie I have seen since 2004, and it'll be easier for me to go to the list and pick out the memorable ones. But, I would like to do this without looking at the list and see which movies have actually remained etched in memory.

The first name that jumps to my mind is this Swedish film called Låt den rätte komma in, or Let The Right One In. I see that it's at 191 on the IMDb Top 250, so it might not exactly be forgotten soon, but I haven't met too many who have seen this. It's a very unusual take on the vampire story. The snowed-in sets that it has been filmed in make the story of a young (or not so young) female (or not so much of a girl) vampire (as much of a vampire as one needs to be) living a lonely life even more striking.

The next one is The Fall. It's not even a good movie, in the strictest sense. It's just a beautiful movie. The story, maybe to show how inconsequential it is in the general scheme of things for Tarsem Singh, the director, is made up in the movie as it progresses, at times changing characters or setting in the middle of the narrative, because the little girl with a broken arm, for whose benefit the story has been thought of in the first place, is not happy with some part of it, or does not understand some other element. Every shot in the film, that supposedly used no CGI, is painstakingly created, but some shots are particularly breathtaking.

Then there's Blindness. It's one of those rare instances where I have strongly disagreed with what Roger Ebert had to say about a film. This film could be read into a lot to decipher messages about how, today, we look at things, but rarely ever see them. But, for me it was simply a thought experiment to see how people would behave if everyone went blind. Would our notions of shame, propriety, communal behavior still remain intact, or, as happens in the film, we will drop everything, including clothes in some people's cases. A slightly painful film for some people to watch, but very interesting.

JCVD has to be one of the quaintest films I have seen in a long time. Jean Claude Van Damme plays a character strongly inspired by his real life persona, who is known by the same name, and has had a similar film career of having played out repetitive roles in regressive, violent, B-grade flicks. Going through a really lean phase on personal and professional fronts, he reaches absolute pit bottom when he gets involved in a bank heist. This is probably the first time when I realized that Van Damme, whose kick-boxing movies I did enjoy as a kid, can actually act.

A friend gifted me with mint-condition DVDs of six Korean films recently. I have had time to watch only two of them, and one of those was good enough to be a part of this list. It's a strange film again, with very unique characters, whose motivations and responses aren't always clear. Wang-ui Namja, or The King and The Clown, is one of those stories that seem to flow completely on their own, without any pre-meditation, reaching a climax that might seem out of place if seen or spoken of out of context, but could not have been avoided if the story had to run its full course. It is a little over-the-top, as most Korean films are, but here for once, it goes well with the kind of characters that populate the screen.

And the final name would be Ta'm e Guilass, or Taste of Cherry - another of Abbas Kiarostami's masterly creations. Like a number of his other films, the main set in this film too is the protagonist's car, and most of the characters are real people, with no acting background. A very simple plot - a man looking for someone to cover his grave after he lies down in it and commits suicide - is made interesting by how different people respond to this curious demand.

That's it. For now. Got to leave to watch Delhi-6.

Ahmedabad Diary

The only way I can begin to enjoy traveling because of work, and traveling with any of my colleagues/partners, is if I start staying back in the city of our visit more frequently. At least if I am visiting the place on a Friday. I did that last weekend in case of Ahmedabad.

Ahmedabad is an interesting city. Not necessarily nice or bad, just interesting, curious. It almost feels like a castrated one. It was a weird feeling when I realized around 7:30pm the first night that I can't have a can of beer even if I was willing to pay 500 bucks for it.

This feeling of something missing was added to by the fact that I was staying at a place where room-service wasn't allowed. So, unlike most other hotels I have stayed at alone in the last few years, here I could not watch TV or a movie on my comp, sipping beer and having tandoori chicken in my room.

But, I still enjoyed the visit. For one, I have not slept so much over one weekend since I joined work, except maybe the fortnight in August when I was ill. I was staying on the IIMA New Campus, at their Management Development Centre there, which is as good as a 3-Star Hotel. If one ignores that small room-service thing. My room was extremely comfortable and very cosy, unlike the general impersonal feeling one gets in most hotels. And I had a lot of time on my hands to strangle and flog and kill.

The campus itself is really beautiful. Not beautiful in the same way as IIMC's is, but in a more functional, utilitarian way. IIMC would be a great campus maybe if I was studying how to make films, but IIMA looks like a management school. As I told a friend, I am still not convinced that IIMA's students or faculty or curriculum are any better than B and C's, but it sure does kick the other schools' ass when it comes to infra. Even B, which ranks much higher than C in this regard, and probably only in this regard, pales in comparison to A.

Didn't do too much sight-seeing, partly because everyone seemed convinced that there isn't much in Ahmedabad to see. I am not completely bought on that point yet.

I was quite surprised to see that bookstores are quite popular in Ahmedabad. Somehow had never associated Gujarat with being a booklovers' haven.

The auto wallahs there were also a welcome relief from Bangalore's and Delhi's. Most of the autos have this weird meter, which I didn't even notice the first couple of times.

There were two-three other observations that I had made earlier but got to confirm this time. Gujjus seem to go out with their extended families a lot more than any other community I have seen. It's very common to see at least three generations of a family hanging out together in malls, in restaurants, near lakes (I visited two during the weekend), eating at thela-wallahs (and there are more here again than I have seen in any other city) and everywhere else.

The other thing is something, which I wasn't sure too many people notice, but the person I told this seemed to have observed this too. There's this very strong fashion trend of wearing really low-back kurtis/blouses/tops/whatever else falls in that category, across economic groups. I generally won't notice a fashion statement even if you wrote it down and made me read it, but this was really that noticeable. No judgment, just an observation.

PDA is also more common here than anywhere else I have seen. While other BJP-governed states were witnessing idiotic acts of moral policing, tens of couples were moving about holding hands, sitting together and doing a lot else, in public places without any concern from anyone.

Maybe Modi should come to power at the Centre. Everyone in Ahmedabad seems to think so, at least.

That city in France

There was a time when Kamzor Kadi Kaun did not work on Indian television. One of the main reasons given, and I believe it is true, was that it was too disrespectful. It, in adherence to the original British format of The Weakest Link, treated its contestants as dirt. As people, who deserved to be ridiculed and made fun of simply because they had agreed to come in front of the camera for money.

I was watching Roadies on MTV today. And it made me think if today the quiz show was launched again with Neena Gupta, wouldn't it be a big hit, maybe with a numerologically correct name of Kkamzzor Kadii Kkaun? I felt insulted as a viewer when I watched Roadies. I can't imagine what kind of desperation would make these idiots to participate. In fact, from whatever I have seen of Raghu - that bald demon with a frenchie, who terrorises Roadies participants - I think he is intelligent enough to have latched on to the fact, earlier than most of us, that we have reached a stage where most of us feel extremely comfortable baring everything, figuratively and literally, in front of the camera. And enjoy others doing it too.

I watch only two shows on TV these days. Boogie Woogie and Indian Idol. It's convenient for me that both are telecast on the same channel, back-to-back, on Fridays and Saturdays. Both have this feeling of warmth, of respect for participants, that I really enjoy. Unlike most other 'talent shows', people here are really made to feel good about themselves, and their weaknesses and insecurities are not blown up disproportionately for the benefit of the viewer.

Particularly in case of Indian Idol, it's amazing how much genuine nice-ness the anchors - Hussain and Meiyang - and even the judges bring to the show. I have felt bad everytime any of the contestants has left the show. But today was particularly painful. Remo Ghosh - admittedly one of the weakest singers on the show - had been propelled forward and into the top 5 completely because he somehow could connect with the audience in a manner that very few people on TV can do. I really felt bad when he left today.

I was trying to frame this post in some way to talk about how difficult it is to be just nice and then why I like my firm so much because it just tries to be nice and thus is such an anti-thesis of what I always thought investment banking is all about - ruthlessness, money-mindedness, selfishness - but I lost the chain of thought somewhere back there.

Gods

I was watching an interesting movie right now when I had a revelation. Well, not a revelation exactly, but something that makes me understand things better.

In the movie, this chap, in a moment of difficulty and confusion, goes to the chapel and talks to God. I am never able to understand these actions. I mean, I have always believed that belief in God, by the majority of people around us, is important for life to run sanely. The idea that there's someone watching you all the time or that you'll have to pay for your deeds ensures that a lot less people commit crimes or just be plain selfish all the time than what would be the case if everyone was an atheist. It requires intelligence, or plain laziness, to know that there is no God and still keep oneself from committing crimes.But it still is difficult for me to understand how someone can have such blind faith in an abstract concept like God.

So, coming back to this chap. He was in a situation that I find myself in a lot. To cope with it he went and spoke to a stone idol. And whenever I find myself in situations like these, I invariably feel the need to talk to someone too. But in my case this 'someone' ends up being one of my close friends.

Just as a lot of people have utmost faith in their God, I have an unreasonable belief in my friends' ability to listen to me, understand me and forgive me.

I don't consider my friends infallible of course, but one needs to be flawed to understand someone else's flaws. God, assuming there is one, can't win against my friends in that department.

Butter Chicken in Gurgawan

Every time I visit Delhi it becomes clearer to me why anyone who has no personal attachment to the city would hate it. Which is unlike Bangalore, where unless you have some really bad memory of the city, you are bound to find it fantastic.

Even I used to hate Delhi, till I joined college there. And even though each subsequent visit after passing out in 2006 has made me cringe at how crude the people can be, how painful some interactions can be, I have still felt like I am coming back home.

The same might not be true for Gurgaon though. Which looks like one of the ugliest places I have been to in my life. During my short stay in NCR this weekend, I stayed in Gurgaon, close to a friend's place, even though I spent most of the weekend in Delhi. And just three nights in Gurgaon showed me why almost all my friends staying there crib about the place.

Unlike previous visits to Delhi in the last 2-3 years, where I would try to meet as many friends staying in that region as possible, this visit was to meet just one friend. Also, this was the first visit after passing out from engineering college that I was in Delhi and did not visit it. Glad I decided to do it that way.

And I had Butter Chicken and Dal Makhni. I had forgotten how much I like Delhi food. Even though Bangalore has some great eating joints and amazing variety in cuisines, and even though, unlike many North Indians I know, I absolutely love all South Indian food, there is something about having Jeera Rice and Butter Chicken in Delhi that can be matched by little else. Like everything else about Delhi, this also has its own nostalgia attached to it, especially when had with a bottle of Kingfisher/Sandpiper, but even if you went to Delhi for the first time in your life after reading this and had Butter Chicken, you would know what I mean.

Once

I have been visiting the blogs I gave links to in the previous post on-and-off since then. They don't feel like my blogs. For many of the posts, I don't even feel like I ever had, or could have had, those thoughts. And I am not talking about those that I wrote in an inebriated condition.

One interesting aspect of revisiting these old blogs has been to also revisit the links in the blogroll. Many blogs, as expected, have not been updated in 2-3 years. But more interesting are the ones that continued to be written on during the extended period I hadn't visited them, and how the person writing at these blogs seems like a different person now from what I perceived him or her to be the last time I was there.

One such blog is now in the blogroll on the left. It is by a classmate from school. We were in the same class from Class V to Class XII, after which we went on to different streams. She got married about a year or so back, and though I visit her Orkut profile once in a while and exchange scraps with even less frequency, I have not really known much about her after school. Not that I claim to have known much when we were in the same class. I was reading some recent posts from her blog in the morning before leaving for office today and, as I said, I found a person different from what I had imagined.

What also made me feel strange - and I don't even know if it's good strange or bad strange - is that she is one of the rare people from my school who write really well. Here is another one, but she was in my school for just two years, so does not count.

The thing is that most people I know from my school really suck at writing in English, and not completely unexpectedly. Our school was a really small place, where we rarely, if ever, conversed with each other in English. Maybe with the English teachers and the Principal, but that was it. The size of a school does not necessarily have to to do anything with that, but it was like that at our place. Most of the students were from our own small colony, and the culture of speaking and writing properly in English never developed. In fact, even though I had always been confident of being able to write decently in English, I used to be extremely conscious of speaking in English, almost petrified of it. It gradually improved only after I joined college in Delhi.

Recently, my parents got posted again at the place I went to school at. During my visit home at New Year's, I visited the school too. Not much had changed. It just felt really small. Again, the person who had been to this place for 8 long, and at times painful, years, seemed like a different person from me. I used to wonder very often what I would be doing 10 years from then. I could never have guessed.

I also met three teachers teaching there now, who had been there during my time too. It's very rare for people to stay in that school that long. We had gotten used to teachers leaving in the middle of the session and we coping on our own for a few weeks. Used to hurt particularly bad in Board classes.

So, it was nice seeing them after such a long time. Since my father has stayed in the same firm all along, they surely kept hearing of my movement after graduating from the school. They didn't seem exactly enthused by the fact that I was working in an investment bank, especially one that they hadn't even heard the name of, but the names of the colleges I have been to should have been enough to make them understand that I haven't exactly sucked since I left school. One of them showed me around the school excitedly, including the honour boards. Another enlisted names of other (illustrious) alumni, many of whom I didn't remember.

I also had this thought then - does a teacher actually feel happy when he sees his student doing better in life, at least monetarily, than him? I have read stories and come across adages that suggest that the greatest proof of a teacher's success is when the disciple surpasses him. I wonder if that's actually true. Doesn't a tinge of envy color that supposed feeling of selflessness? Doesn't the teacher feel cheated for the opportunities he might have had to forgo because of the times, the conditions he was born in?

Skeletons From The Past

I spent almost the entire 3-day weekend at home, watching films and reading. Had a lot of catching up to do, and I am happy I am slightly more up to speed with all the stuff I had been accumulating.

I was watching the 1st season of The Wonder Years, and it somehow made me think of my recent life. I mean, it's been quite a while since I crossed the age group that Kevin Arnold belonged to, but nostalgia is a bitch.

I have been blogging since end-2003. December 3rd, 2003, to be exact. Yep, a little over five years now. I was here to begin with.

Then some shit happened, and I felt like moving here. Well, not exactly at the same url, but the old one has been taken over by some perv. I wrote some crazy stuff at this one. I had way too much time on my hands those days.

I was here for a short while too. I had completely forgotten about it actually.

And, finally, in 2006, I moved here. It's been over 2 years at Blogger now. And I can't predict how long this will last. But, it's been fun.

I am a bit of a narcissist when it comes to my writing. And one of my guilty pleasures is to read stuff I have/had written. And, often, read it out loud. If only I didn't have a job to go to tomorrow morning, I would have spent the night reading all these posts from my past.

But even a casual glance at the last posts made at each of the blogs tells me how things have changed, and how they have remained the same. A lot of stuff that was planned did not happen. A lot of things that looked unbearable once, were minor roadblocks, eventually leading to greater, better things. Some people I knew then have been forgotten. Some have remained close friends all through. And some, whose existence I had no clue of, have become incredibly important.

Presidentgate

I saw two movies today (I saw another one last night, which I would want to write about, but maybe later) that have a lot in common.

Both 2008 movies, made by directors, who have made some of the most well-known American movies in the last decade or so, who are very highly respected, but also ones who tend to go overboard at times - Ron Howard and Oliver Stone.

Both movies are about US Presidents, both Republicans - without doubt, the two most unpopular people the world has seen holding that position - Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

And both movies make us realize that even the Leader of the Free World is, all said and done, a human being.

The similarities pretty much end there.

While Howard's Frost/Nixon is a taut, thriller-like, period drama, concentrating almost completely on the run-up to and recording of the famous David Frost interviews of Richard Nixon, Stone's W. is more of a spoof, a comic retelling of the life of George, Jr.

Frost/Nixon is one of the finest movies I have seen this year, and even though my vote goes to Milk (I haven't seen The Reader yet), I think F/N could be a very strong contender for the Best Motion Picture Oscar. I don't know much about Nixon, and his entire legacy seems to be overshadowed by Watergate, but I got a pretty good idea of how painful it must have been for someone with as high an opinion of oneself as Nixon did, to the extent of almost believing that the President's chair brought him divine powers, to be the most reviled person in the country.

No one had a doubt that Nixon had committed a crime in abetting the burglars who had broken into the Watergate hotel, except maybe Nixon himself. And the interview was meant to give him a chance to confess, to apologize for letting the people of USA down. While his plan was to make use of the fact that the person interviewing him was just a talk-show host, known more for talking to starlets, and make one last attempt to revive his dead political career by coming across as a misunderstood statesman. Did he succeed?

We all know that he did not. But the movie tells us that he almost managed to. And the pain on Frank Langella's Nixon's face when he realizes that his apparently unworthy adversary has dealt a body blow, from which there is no recovery, in the last round of the sparring match that he had been winning almost by a knockout is killing. It shows that behind that smiling face, impressive built and clever conversationalist lied a somewhat delusional, weak, old man all too aware of the mistakes he had committed.

Aided by an amazing support cast including Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon and Oliver Platt, not to forget Michael Sheen (seen earlier very memorably as Tony Blair in The Queen), the film is a fairly unbiased, slightly fictionalized, account of the end of the fall of a successful politician and the beginning of the rise of an unsuccessful performer.

W., as I said, is a comedy, filled with, or at least I hope it is filled with, hyperbole. Because if all of it were true, this would be more a horror film than a comic one.

The film starts with the Oval Office meeting in the early 2000s, which gave birth to the term Axis of Evil. And 5 minutes into the meeting, you realize that this is a bunch of over-confident nincompoops, who have dangerously little concern for anything outside the US, or maybe even outside Texas.

The film keeps going back and forth between earlier instances from Bush's life - like his hazing at college, his occasional conflicts with his dad and the barbeque lunch where he met Laura - and the series of mishaps that his presidency was.

We all have heard and lived to see in gory detail everything that was wrong with the Bush years. So, instead of making me feel angry or pained at how casually they treated war (Bush's advisors were discussing the merits of the pie they were eating, at the dinner meeting to discuss the absence of any WMDs in Eye-rak, after hundreds of people on both sides had been killed) or how their policy in the Mid-East is dictated solely by their love for oil, it just made me realize how unsuited a person Bush was to handle the entire post-9/11 situation. An overgrown kid, who just wanted to run a baseball club, drink beer and eat pretzels, and who contested the Texas gubernatorial elections mainly because he was tired of his dad favoring Jeb, who was running for Florida, ended up spending 8 long years in the White House.

I have a feeling it was infinitely more painful for him than it was for any of us.