The Rathore and Bindra Problem

Till four years back, it was easy to pretend that we didn't actually want medals. We could be like those kids at school who said that they don't have that iPod/Sneakers/IIT admission or whatever because they didn't want them. Now, that positioning is getting exposed because of these unseemly celebrations at Bindra's medal.

If we didn't get any medal at all, people around the world would have assumed that we weren't into this sort of stuff. They could have assumed that the whole sodding billion of us are on a spiritual plane far above this worldliness. But a billion people getting just one medal and then going wild with joy is just so embarrassing.

Renegades like Rathore and Bindra must be stopped before they do more serious damage to India's Olympic positioning.

Clearly, these two have manipulated the system and managed to bye-pass the foolproof arrangements made by our sports establishment. Rathore came in under the radar by being in the Army and this Bindra guy's father apparently spent crores getting him trained in Texas and Baghdad and places like that.

And it just occurred to me that the next time could be worse. The 2012 Olympics are in London! Which means that if an Indian wins a medal, then the bloody NRIs will start celebrating right there! On the streets of London! And then everyone will know!

I do hope the Indian Olympic Association will wake up in good time and prevent a recurrence. And it's not as if the IOA doesn't know what to do. Just be a little selective and avoid getting involved with outsiders like these two. Just stick to the contestants produced by our official system and all will be well.

Deadheading at archive.org

The wonderful archive.org has heaps of Grateful Dead concert recordings.

I'm through with downloading one concert (Madison Square Garden 1987-09-18) that was about 210MB. Seventeen tracks: Mississippi Half Step, It's All Over Now, High Time, Mexicali Blues, Big River, When Push Comes To Shove, Box Of Rain, Don't Ease Me In, Crazy Fingers, Uncle John's Band, Playin' In The Band, jam, I Need A Miracle, Maggie's Farm, Black Peter, Around & Around, Turn On Your Love Light.

Very sweet stuff.

Smells like Teen Spirit

So the London blasts were the work of suicide bombers. And they were boys-next-door, 'clean-skins', cricket lovers, had girlfriends etc etc. The media insists on treating this as real news, but I don't think anyone is surprised. Of course they were what they were.

Once you channel normal teen rebellion into martyrdom, you have a good supply of human beings who can simply be substituted for electronic timers. For unlike, say, the killing of Rajiv Gandhi, there was no operational need for the bombs to be human in London (like Madrid, where there were no suicides) The suicides were there simply to make the point that there are people willing to die for this cause.

People who believe in the next world more than this one have surely made more trouble than almost anything else in the history of the world. The world is full of boys willing to carry backpacks that are their tickets to heaven on to crowded trains.

I take the schoolbooks from your pack
Plastics, wire and your kiss
The breath of eternity on your lips
In the crowded marketplace
I drift from face to face
I hold my breath and close my eyes
And I wait for paradise

--Bruce Springsteen, 'Paradise'

Update (July 20, 2005)

Got this link on Bruce Schneier's blog. Robert Pape is an acedemic who has studied suicide terrorism for a long time. Here's what he says in an interview:

Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
This is a Marxist group, a completely secular group that draws from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of the country. They invented the famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers.

Link to complete interview.

Free/Inexpensive Classical Music

I can't quite figure out why I never looked for it earlier, but there's a good amount of free or very inexpensive classical music available on the net. I vaguely remember looking for classical music back in the Golden Age of Napster but giving up because there was nothing much there.

Last month, BBC's Radio 3 celebrated 'The Beethoven Experience', broadcasting each of Beethoven's nine symphonies. These were performed by the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda. Best part was that they also made available MP3 recordings for free downloading for a week after each broadcast.

Looking around, I found the amazing eClassical, which has a huge library at amazing prices.
Will update this …

The Beethoven page on Wikipedia has free recordings of Moonlight Sonata and the Fifth (what else?)

A Deeper Shade of Green

Wikipedia's featured article of the day is on Norman Borlaug, the 'Father of the Green Revolution'. This is a part of modern Indian history that people of my generation (and later) really need to know at least something about.

Definitely worth a read, specially by those who follow the fundamentalist party line on the Green Revolution.

'Business Language' and Potter Fans

The word on alt.fans.harry-potter is that the 'Consense Estimate' of the group was correct (i.e. Dumbledore dies, Snape is the half-blood prince, Weasley and Granger become a couple and so on). CONSENSUS ESTIMATE. Oh my god!

Rough Love for Punjabis?

At www.punjabisingles.com, there's a hilarious one page about a singles site dedicated to Punjabis. The site isn't up and running yet but claims to be 'will born soon', which is at least different from boring old 'under construction'.

The best part of the page is this cheerful promise: 'Thus every maddest dream may come true thanks to the simple user friendly only site which provides world class dating, marriage, travel companion and other activities partnerships and least but not last the punjabisingles forum - and the thing is - that it is literally filled with those who want to feel violence.'

Well, I've been a Punjabi since I was born but never figured out that the breed had any special liking for rough love. Have I missed something?

Update (11 June, 2005): Just checked and found that the Net has lost one of its classic lines.

Hazaron Khwahishein vs Swades

Ended up seeing Swades a day after HKA. What a load of crap Swades is. I mean you can make an unrealistic, mushy, chocolate-coated love story and that's perfectly fine because it serves a purpose in this world but a chocolate-coated social reform story is just ridiculous.

I wouldn't normally care but the general branding of Swades as 'good' cinema is just so irritating.

It's interesting to compare HKA with Swades. In some sense the two are about the same thing-idealistic people going out into the great backward open spaces to do good. (The NRI angle in Swades is just a marketing thing-HKA's Delhi is as far from its Bhojpur as Swades's village is from its Washington, DC.)

But the similarity ends there, and with a vengeance. HKA's woman from Delhi is raped by cops in a police station in remotest Bihar and the movie refuses to make us comfortable by bringing down any justice or revenge upon the rapists. In contrast, Swades' golden-hearted NRI manages to cure casteism by risklessly singing a song and showing the villagers an educational film about the stars above.

And why is this damn movie so long? I think Bollowood believes that any movie whose VCD release requires three disks automatically qualifies as an epic.

Hazaron Khwahishein is great

HKA is a great film. After a long time, I saw a Hindi film where the characters were so real to me that my suspension of disbelief was total. I found myself really caring about what was happening to them.

In fact I actually caught myself worrying about what happened to them after the movie ended. Did Vikram ever recover? How did Geeta cope with the rise of the Mandalian social justice crowd fifteen years later? Did she get fooled and campaign for Laloo in the '86 elections? Who'll take care of Vikram if Geeta dies before he does when they grow old? Perhaps her son will. He must be around thirty now. Does he go and meet his mother? Does he help her in what she does? It feels good to be able to connect emotionally to a movie. The fact that the college scenes were filmed in my alma mater is just an added bonus :-)

Of course, most reviewers are too focused on the politics. The politics is just a backdrop, this is really a love story. It's about three people, one of whom has just ideals, one just love but no ideals and the third has both. In the end, the movie tells you that having both is the best, but having just love is better than having just ideals. Not a political message.

Star Wars in a Long Gone Delhi

I must admit that I'm waiting for Revenge of The Sith with as much excitement as any ten year old. Regardless of what the SF snobs say, I can't help it. One day when I was twelve, I was genetically modified to forever like anything connected to Star Wars. This event took place in Delhi's now long-defunct Archana cinema. I was too young to travel across the city by myself so I saw the movie only once.

By the time Episode V released in India (1982 or 83), I was in 11th std in school and travelling on public buses by myself so I managed to see it five times. EP5 ran in Delhi only at Shiela cinema in Paharganj but since that's walking distance from New Delhi Railway Station it was actually quite easy to get to by a DTC bus. In Shiela, they used to sell fabulous Keema Kulchas from Connaught Place's Volga Restaurant during the interval, which would happen in EP5 just as the Millennium Falcon flew into the giant worm's throat during the asteroid chase. Last month, while watching EP5 (for the first time since then) on DVD, I could actually taste the keema when Solo fired his blaster into the creature's tongue. I guess that used to be just the point when I would get to the meaty part of the kulcha after the interval ended.

I can't understand this anti-Star Wars snobbery on so many SF lists. I started with SF because of Star Wars. Within months I was on to Asimov and Clarke and soon after, Ursula LeGuin and Philip K Dick. Which meant that as Gibson and Sterling started producing their masterpieces during the 80s, I was perfectly primed for them. None of this may have happened to me if I Star Wars hadn't made me fall in love with SF.

A confession: I never saw Return of the Jedi when it was released. I was in college at the time and at the height my own intellectual snob period. Truly ashamed.

Hazaron Khwahishein Kaisi?

The Opinion de Jour seems to be that Sudhir Mishra's Hazaron Khwahishein Aisi is the most politically-aware film to be made in India for a long time. The film is apparently (I haven't seen it yet) about the political movements of the early seventies. (JP's total revolution, naxalites etc) It's being praised as a film that tries to make sure that the political milieu of our time is not forgotten from cinema.

A writer in the Indian Express quotes Shyam Benegal as saying that today's Hindi Cinema doesn't tell you anything about the time it was made in. etc. etc.

There are two problems with this argument. One, there have been plenty of politically aware films in the last decade or so. Machis, Mani Ratnam's film about the Bombay riots. Kamal Haasan's Hey Ram (my personal favourite) was about … well it was about a lot of things.

The other problem is that it assumes in a somewhat patronizing way that contemporary Bollywood cinema doesn't reflect today's milieu. Actually it does. In Khwaja Ahmad Abbas's India, you had no option but to be resigned to your fate. (I mean Dharti Ke Lal, Shehar aur Sapna and films like that and not some of the stuff he wrote at the end) In Karan Johar's time, aspiring to live like his characters is an almost reasonable khwahish. The revolution is not what failed in the streets of Patna and Calcutta yesterday, the revolution is what is succeeding in the glass-walled towers of Gurgaon and Bangalore today.

What I'm saying is that it's perfectly alright if your armaan are the kind more suited to Karan Johar's cinema than to Khwaja Ahmed Abbas'.

Do I actually believe in what I've written above or am I just trying to be a contrarian? I don't really know. Part of me believes that what the other part has written above is rubbish. I truly find myself able to hold both these opinions simultaneously.

By the way, many reviewers are writing about the film without commenting on the title. Even if you have only a passing acquaintance with Urdu/Hindustani, you can't help savour Mirza Ghalib's lines:

Hazaron khwahishein aisi, ki har khwahish par dam nikle
Bahut nikle mere armaan, magar phir bhi kam nikle.

Fear of Rain

It's May in Delhi and the weather, instead of being hot, dry and dusty, is quite pleasant. It rains every day and right now, there's a mild thunderstorm outside.

Except that where once I would have enjoyed this, now every crack of thunder makes me think of Climate Change.

Only routine weather is unfrightening now.