Its my Indyeah!!!

TV has become boring off late. Most of the time I'll be surfing music channels and news channels. And I do miss VH1, what with V and MTV ruled by the likes of Himesh. The only show I watch regularly is 'My India Report[MIR]' in V. Its a really cool concept with 6 youngsters selected from various parts of India travelling all over India. During this journey they discover different cultures, path breaking thoughts, shocking truths and share it all with us. As far as i think, this show is conceived as an amalgamation of the themes of 2 popular films-'motorcycle diaries[MD]' and 'rang de basanti[RDB]'. The idea of a country round trip from 'MD' and the idea of the nation awakening from 'RDB'. There were so many interesting thoughts that came out from their visits to various cities.

The team comprises of an interesting mix of people including a lady bartender and an artist based in Canada. Every episode, they'll be posing some questions to some random people they see on the road. In Varanasi[India at its religious best], they surveyed about belief in God among the youngsters there and found that most of them were god fearing but not mad about the religion they follow. This should serve as an eye opener for some 'religiously' political parties in India. One taxi driver gave an interesting discourse which would put even well known philosophers to shame. These are the things which tell you that you should never underestimate anyone. In Kolkata, the team found out that Che guevera is more popular than sourav ganguly. Is it the 'MD' effect or the good old love for communism? Yesterday, they went to Shillong, India's rock music capital. This city was in the news recently for showcasing the largest guitar ensemble in the world as 1730 guitarists strummed together for the Bob Dylan classic "knocking on heaven's door". Its told that almost everyone you meet on the road is a musician. There are more than 100 rock bands in the city alone. After meeting up with some bands and musicians, the team went to an NGO. There they met a woman who suffered a lot in her life. She was a servent in a household and her master sold her to other men. She somehow rescued herself from a brothel and helped the police to bust a big racket which specialised in human trafficking. According to her, more than 300 girls were rescued from there. She and other women like her are being given a chance to live a new life by the NGO.

Besides these interesting and sometimes touching anecdotes and opinions, what I found interesting about MIR is the nice camera work. Wherever they go, we are treated to some amazing visuals which really make us wonder whether there are such places in India. These visuals sometimes remind me of the great BBC documentary 'The story Of India'. I downloaded this documentary running close to 7 hours some months back. I would recommend it to those who want to see some unseen but breath takingkly beautiful visuals of India. Coming back to MIR, there are still some more episodes to go. Those who have missed it, try to catch it at 7.30pm on thursdays. Am not telling that all of what is shown on MIR makes sense. Sometimes they do sound absurd. But most of the time its really good and shows us some little known but interesting things about our motherland

PS- In MIR, there is so much talk on the lack of values and too much of skin show on television. It might be an irony that all this happens in a channel which has shows like Pia's beach diaries, where you have an anchor wearing just a bikini and strolling along the beach and 'India's hottest' which awards people based on how hot they are.

your crusader Praveen

Faceless...
Here's another song.. wrote this during today's class on infosys quality standards...These are my thoughts on terrorism in the heavenly kashmir valley.

**********Faceless*************
Shrouded by the dark cloth,
Is it the veil of ignorance?
Fighting for the devil's cause
Yours is a venomous death dance.

Snowy fields in the divine valley
turning red time and again.
Unholy flags of your holy jihad
fluttering like vulture wings.

Brainwashed morons on a killing spree
dreaming of a better morrow
throw their lives away for the dirty work
taking lives for a final ride.

Life's a full metal jacket
burning away inside the barrel.
Faceless u came,faceless u go
as your ashes pollute the serene lake.

22/11/2007

your crusader Praveen

Superhuman

Indian filmdom has a long history of stories of normal men producing superheroic acts onscreen. Most of the time we are left scratching our head or banging our fist on a nearby hard object, after such an onscreen assault. Rajnikanth is credited with pioneering this exotic art form of executing actions of unimaginable impossibility. But long before that, the great malayali actor Nazir have done some awesome tricks on screen. Its a little known fact that the bullet dodging trick that the whole world watched with gaping mouth in matrix was actually done years before by our very own Nazir. That too, without the help of slow motion, wire trick or stop motion cameras. In the original bullet dodging scene starring nazir, he comes off cooler than the one and only Neo. Our hero sees the villian firing the bullet from a distance. He raises his head and with his trademark doubtful look with the hands on his chin mouthes the dialogue-''vediyunda aanennu thonnunnu. Maarikkalayaam"[seems like a bullet.Let me move aside]. And he moves aside. Whereas poor neo had to bend backwards within milliseconds of the firing and couldn't even speak a single word eventhough the bullet was coming in slow motion.

Though we all dismiss these kind of tricks on screen as crap and all, these very scenes turn out to be the most viewed in video sharing websites like youtube. Its a debatable fact whether this popularity can be attributed more to the heroism or the comic element in it. It makes me laugh my head off to think that the directors are actually making such scenes with some serious situation in mind. Still, they are doing us a great service. After doing lots of assignments or sitting through boring sessions, these type of scenes can lighten you up like anything. The most popular one here at present seems to be another bullet trick scene, but of a kind which even neo would find hard to reproduce on screen. This stars Vijaykanth, another tamil actor who is popular for his superhuman scenes. The villian fires the bullet at Vijaykanth and he bravely shows his chest to the bullet. The next moment we see the bullet going in the opposite direction with double speed and it hits the villian who fired the bullet and he dies on the spot. Now the frame shifts back to vijaykanth and the great secret is revealed. He opens the top button of his shirt and removes a steel plate[the same thing we use to eat dosas from wayside eateries]. Its time the government gave a steel plate to all politicians and make it mandatory to place it inside their shirts. We can save millions of money that we spent on security for the politicians every year.

Another very popular man on youtube is telegu actor Balayya. His scenes ranges from moving a train just by pointing his finger to singlehandedly fighting and killing a whole building of pakistani terrorists in pakistan. Though I have watched all these scenes many time before, I still laugh real hard when I see it again. Most of the time in discussions on such scenes, the blame always fall on south indian films. But to tell the truth, Hindi films have produced a long list of such movies, right from Amitabh bachchan through Mithun chakraborthy to shakhrukh khan. Not many would've forgot shahrukh's action scenes in dumb movies like 'main hoon na'. Though the general advice for those who are going to watch such movies is to leave their brains at home, its real hard for even a no-brainer to tolerate such scenes for a whole movie, which happens mostly in the case of tamil superhero movies starring vijay,ajith,Rajnikanth etc. But, these small clippings can really cheer u up. So, enjoy with these no-brainer dumbos until my next dumbo post...

your crusader praveen

Here is the song i wrote in class today...

LOST IN TIME
Tracing back the footsteps
that I first took as a child.
Racing forward on my mindscape
with a blissful world to recapture.

Breeze brushes my time-worn face
blowing away the maple leaves
that line my way back home
rushing into me the times of old.

Cradled by the innocence
that i lost somewhere back in time.
Its time for reminiscence of the days
when the clock stood still.

I never cared to look back
on my all conquering selfish march.
Until this day, when i lost everything
with just the memories to fall back on.

20/11/07

your crusader praveen

I AM BACK

So atlast the hiatus ends long before than expected. Its been more than one month since my last post and supposedly the last one in about 4 months. But, here I am much before that to bore you with more of my thoughts. The last one month been exciting having joined my job at a really wonderful campus at infosys, Mysore. The sheer enormity and elegance of the buildings and the greenery all around mesmerised all of us. Though the training is a bit hectic, we do enjoy every moment of our life here. The activity that we spend most time on is sleeping. The air conditioned classes and the boring powerpoint slides are an added bonus to sleep starved people like me. After many years of constant bunking, sitting everyday in class is a little hard. And after years of experience as a regular late comer, reaching class at 9'O clock is also a tough task. So, last week reminded me of my college days as i scored a hatrick in late coming and was thrown out of class for 3 consecutive days. The attendance tracking system is also a tough nut to crack. On any given day, you have to swipe in and swipe out your id card in the morning and evening. Then, there is an attendance client installed on our computer which has to be operated with your four fingers pressed on specific letters on the keyboard, all at the same time, four times a day. And the thing is active only for 30 seconds, to prevent proxy attendance. And then there are the daily assignments,module tests and projects. STILLL...we r enjoying...

Today, the assignment load is much less. So i found time to write this bit of nonsense. And surprisingly, the boring slides didn't put me to sleep in the morning. So i found time to scribble a song too. Am posting that too. Am missing the newspaper here. I only have the news channels to catch up with the latest news. But most of the time I end up watching endless clippings of the same news on every other channels in the 30 odd minutes I sit before the tv everyday. Rest of the time is spent in roaming around the enormous campus, playing one game or the other, eating at one of the food courts or just sitting somewhere and watching everybody. My walkman phone is a constant company without which I'd already've gone mad. So, life here is like a box of chocolates[forrest gump style]....

Hopefully, i'd soon find sometime to write on some serious issue[which is the purpose of this blog]...

Your crusader Praveen