Every Vada Pav has its Day

The ubiquitous Vada Pav celebrates its own day today and the small piece of non-nutritious oily vada, full of trans-fat, crushed between two halves of a pav, coated with green chutney, accompanied by a fried green chilly and sometimes hot red chilly powder with a garlic flavour is in many ways emblematic of the city which has made it famous. All through my years in Mumbai and ever since, I have always wondered why Mumbaikars vouch by the not-so-special Vada Pav. The reasons I’ve got is that it is a poor man’s food (costs anywhere between three to five rupees), it symbolises the unity in diversity of Mumbai, that it is a wholesome (read stomach-filling) food etc. I do agree that it is a cheap snack but if Mumbaikars are filling their stomachs by eating Vada Pavs for lunch and dinner, we are looking at a catastrophical case of mass malnutrition.

The vada pav, though a tasty snack at times, never appealed to me in comparison with its “more affluent” cousins, the Missal Pav and the Pav Bhaji. Though they rate the same as the vada pav on the nutrition scale, if not worse, they make a more substantial meal and provide more pleasure to the taste-buds. Time and again, in Mumbai, I’ve heard how the Pav of Portuguese-origin is made mostly by Muslims in a Parsi or Irani bakery (and to think it is the Christians who are called Pav-wallas) to be consumed by a Hindu majority. Despite the fact that this makes for a nice analogy to the cultural divergence of the people who have made Mumbai what it is today, it still is a sad reminder of what Mumbai is today – a overblown population, most of them living in the hundreds of slums that dot the city, struggling to make ends meet in an unforgiving and an expensive city which is pretty much the same case in any major Indian city, but is more conspicuous in Mumbai.

Though the "Vada Pav Day" is just another marketing gimmick by some clever enterprising restaurant, it brings about memories of my days in Mumbai, when a Vada Pav was a daily indulgence along with a cutting chai either under an umbrella in the pouring monsoon rain or sweating in the october heat. I am happy that I've finally gotten out of Mumbai and I hope that I would never have anything to do with that despicable city anymore.

Sick of Spam & Sick Spammers

Nupur Upadhyay has invited me to Desktopdating. I don't know what Desktopdating is and for that matter who the heck is this female fiend, Nupur Upadhyay? It just gets worst - with strangers “Tagging” me, unsolicited mails offering me Viagra and similar sounding substitutes at a discount, mails informing me that my “application” for a loan has been processed or that I had won something in a contest that I swear I never took part in, a more recent trend of marriage portals of a particular community inviting me to join in the hunt, friends inviting me to join some obscure sites with names like “Jaxtr” and “Glitchcast” or the more notorious “Facebook” or “My Space” and the usual dose of pornographic link sites and penis enlargement offers – it has become quite a chore of putting my inbox through a sieve to look for meaningful mails.

The next level of nuisance is now on my mobile phone. In addition to the pesky tele-marketers, I now have spam messages promoting loans and redundant offers, most of them from my own service provider, Hutch, now called as Vodaphone. If changing my mobile number wasn't such a pain in the neck involving the tedious process of informing all my friends, relatives, superiors, relatives and countless other service providers like my bank, I would have given Hutch (Vodaphone) the boot long ago. A sizable chunk of the tele-marketing calls and most of the spam messages I receive come from Hutch. Not only do they pester their customers with unwanted offers, their network coverage must be one of the worst and most of my friends concur with me on this. Hutch probably has the most stupid people on the customer support (though I’ve never talked to the customer support staff of other mobile service providers). When the National Do Not Call registry or some such thing came about, I saw the report in the newspaper asking Hutch subscribers to send a message “DND” to “111”. I promptly did, only to receive a message back saying this service was not available presently. At about 2 a.m, I called up their customer service and got through to a male with an IQ of a dodo. I explained my predicament only to be reminded that I have to send the same darned message to the same darned number. I somehow managed to convince him that it was not working on my number and got an assurance that within 48 hours, the calls and messages would stop. Weeks later, I’m still waiting for redemption from this menace. Hutch (Vodaphone) still sends me messages promoting caller tunes and other services and the others still call me up and I have made myself a promise that Hutch (Vodaphone)will not have the pleasure of annoying me for long.

60 years of Independence

We are celebrating 60 years of freedom; freedom from the British rule & I have finished my patriotic duty in the only ways I could, by wishing my friends through SMS and Orkut scraps and have even changed my display picture to a photo of NASDAQ draped in the Indian tri-colour. I have always regretted the fact that I was not born decades earlier when I could have contributed my mite for my country’s struggle for freedom, maybe by pulling down the Union Jack from the local government office and getting a few lathi blows in the bargain. I’ve grown up idolising the people who really fought for our freedom, not a Gandhi or a Nehru, but those nameless thousands of common people, a vast majority of them illiterate, who followed Gandhi as he walked for 23 days from Sabarmathi Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi to make salt leaving behind their daily routines, who selflessly picketed the local British government centres taking in the lathi blows, who gave up their present-days for India’s future, who spent years locked away in prisons so that we can call ourselves a free nation today and who, after India got a hard-fought freedom, rather gullibly but optimistically sided themselves with the Nehruvian class of socialism only to be cruelly betrayed.

Sixty years later on, Nehru’s mistakes have ensured that one tyrannical administration has been replaced by another that is also a highly dysfunctional one. Today, corruption and nepotism are the norms rather than the exceptions. A woman as India’s president, a woman as the leader of the country’s largest political party and a woman as the chief minister of India’s largest populous state have done nothing to further the cause of women’s rights when we have one of the worst rural health-care systems in the world and one of the highest rates of infant mortality. “Politics” today, is a dirty word, more obnoxious than any four-letter word and the “politician” is someone who ranks lower than a tapeworm in terms of people’s respect. Scams after scams have been unearthed and the guilty rich and powerful have exploited every existent and non-existent loophole in the law to avoid being prosecuted. But, today it is the same people, albeit a bit more literate, who are taking up the cudgels against another regime not much different from the one they fought sixty years ago. Whether it was a candle-light vigil to get justice in the Jessica Lal case, or the sting operations of a hyper-active media or the great efforts to get the right-to-information act passed in the parliament, I know that the persons who were my childhood heroes still live on in different avatars and as long as they live on, we still have the upper hand in this fresh freedom struggle and this time I can finally be a part of it.

He, who will not be named...

It was yet another classic case of media overkill, the media reporting that he was served four chapattis, brinjal sabzi, dal and rice on an aluminium plate, that he slept on a concrete bed without an air-conditioner, quilt or a mosquito repellent, obviously, since he was in jail, that he was first locked up in Barrack No. 10, but was later shifted to Barrack No. 1 for security reasons, that he was getting no special treatment from the authorities of the Arthur Road Jail except for his toiletry and cigarettes (how much of a 'treatment' were the jail authorities getting for allowing him the cigarettes?), that he has been finally moved to Pune’s Yerawada Jail, that he would be attending a course on Gandhian philosophy called ‘Gandhi Darshan’ in Yerawada Jail and would also write an exam or ‘Gandhi Vichar Pariksha’, which is scheduled for October 02. Meanwhile his sister, an MP, has met the Congress chief to discuss her brother’s case. The Information and Broadcasting minister, Priyaranjan Dasmunsi, has expressed “shock and surprise” on the six year jail term that was awarded to him… Well, I’m not doing a PhD on the real life persona of the much-loved Munnabhai nor am I joining the celebs faction in condemning his jail term. All I’m doing is expressing my anguish over the battery of news that is heaped on me. Every one of his sneezes and farts since he went to jail has been reported by the overzealous media and I’ve been subjected to so much news reports of his on every news channel, newspaper and the net that I’m almost in a transcendent state of Nirvana at the amount of knowledge I’ve gained about him in the last few days and that is the prime reason why I'm not naming him here.

A search on Google for news articles relating to his jail term gives out 338 articles from only the Times of India. Why is the media trying to make a martyr out of an oaf who has confessed to hobnobbing with the erstwhile kingpins of the Mumbai underworld? Justice P.D.Kode, probably a fan of his – his undeserving comparison to Gregory Peck establishing it - executed his duties quite impartially. But, is the over-the-top reaction reviling the six-year jail term justified? The justification of his crimes being the result of inanities of youth and a difficult childhood are as nonsensical as they can be. He had celebrated his 48th birthday a couple of days before he was sentenced and was about 34 when committed the misdemeanour. If 34 is youthful senselessness, then he must be in the record books for having the longest ever teenage life. As for his difficult childhood, it is no secret that he was a junkie right from his teens and if every criminal claimed reprieve due to a difficult childhood, our jails would be as empty as George Bush’s personal library. He is not a terrorist, say his supporters. I’m not saying he is. He is a dim-witted fool who couldn’t even properly pick his friends, who, after getting a reprieve due to his late father’s political connections, still continued his association with the same bunch of gangsters, glorifying them in his movies, trying to deify them as individuals who were wronged and later scorned by the society.

“Pray for me”, were the words the media ascribed as his last for some time to come. I just might; not for his release or his realization of his follies, for I know he is incapable of it, but for his continued incarceration and his exit from the media glare and spotlight so that I can get a much needed relief.

POTTER-mania

Too much of a good thing is probably the best way to make it seem bad. I am not espousing Oshoism but conveying my feelings over the current Harry Potter obsession even though I would be the first person to have misgivings about whether the Harry Potter books can be called as a good thing. The Harry Potter phenomenon was touted as the best thing to happen to Children’s books since Charles Dickens and the typical media hype about the number of copies that were being sold, the amount of money the films were raking in and the author going on to be the richest woman in UK gave it just the right publicity it needed. There were exalting reports of how the Potter had infused the kids with an enthusiasm to read books and weaned them away from TV and the net. But then, as the Harry Potter series swelled in number, the books got thicker and the subject matter became heavier, the ennui kicked in. Recent reports have suggested that the books may not have pulled out the young readers as was thought before. The New York Times even reported that “According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of federal tests administered every few years to a sample of students in grades 4, 8 and 12, the percentage of kids who said they read for fun almost every day dropped from 43 percent in fourth grade to 19 percent in eighth grade in 1998, the year “Sorcerer’s Stone” was published in the United States. In 2005, when “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth book, was published, the results were identical.”

I do not hate Harry Potter. In fact I have to admit I did enjoy reading them – all the six books as e-books. With the final book of the Harry Potter series set to be released in less than a day, I’m sort of relieved that I didn't fall for the temptation of pre-booking it. I’ll wait until someone converts it into an e-book and uploads it on the net. I was never a big fan of fantasy and even though I did dabble with reading fantasy novels like one of the Malazan Book of the Fallen recently and the Grimm Fairy tales many years ago, I could never really relate to the hype surrounding the young wizard and his gang of friends. Afterall, I grew up reading Dickens and Enid Blyton at a time when the term “Gay” could be used to describe the carefree kids without having any sexual innuendoes, and their depiction of school life in the English countryside and other adventures gave me more pleasure than reading about a boy wizard and his gaffes at Hogwarts. Even after so many years I still prefer the Rilloby Fair or the Ragamuffin Mystery to the Quidditch nonsense. J.K.Rowling can never measure up to the understanding that Enid Blyton had of children but, to her credit, she was quick to understand the futility of trying to draw the kids away from their Playstations and their TV cartoons for, with the Goblet of Fire, the Harry Potter series ceased to be solely for the Children and probably found its niche among the young and not-so-young adults. With all the buildup to the Harry Potter finale, which is a corroboration of how smart and aggressive media marketing can turn an unremarkable book into a bestseller, I am getting sick of Harry Potter, sick of all the websites, online forums, news articles debating if Potter would die, sick of people who try to find non-existent morals in an ordinary book, sick of people who actually do find morals in it and sick of people who find no morals in it and raise spurious allegations on religious grounds. I know I have to grin and bear it over the next few days and maybe after things quieten down, I can read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows leisurely at some obscure website after knowing how it is all going to end.

Mediocre Mika

A poll on the Queen community, touting someone called Mika as the next Freddie Mercury, got me searching on the net for more information about this new kid. After repeatedly listening to Mika’s music (both on YouTube and on VH1) and hours of wading through the comments columns of the various online Mika forums, I have to admit I’m Laughing My Fuckin’ Ass Off. I’m LMAO not as much by Mika’s music but by his being so undeservedly compared to someone as awesome as Freddie Mercury. Their Asian origins apart, their childhood spent as emigrants, introverted childhoods, their interests in opera, their love of the piano and similar voice modulations in their songs may all be suggestive of both being cast in the same mold, but it would be plain common sense to see that Mika has modeled himself on Freddie. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Mika is the “sincerest” singer I’ve come across. But, to pass a judgement that Mika is the next Freddie is pure misinformation, not just for the simple fact that there just cannot be another Freddie Mercury - ever, but because Mika is still a one album wonder and still has a long way to go to merit any comparison with any decent musician let alone the Queen great.

As for Mika's songs, “Grace Kelly” has a freshness associated with it, something I haven’t seen for a long time (11 million plus views on YouTube and still counting). It is No.1 on the billboards, maybe a deserving position, but I feel that the rating is something it owes to the lack of more appropriate contenders than its own merit. “Love Today” has a nice video and is a bubbly song with a good guitar work in the background and is bearing the brunt of overkill on VH1 of late. “Relax, Take It Easy” (horrible video) and the others are typical pop songs predominantly inspired by Queen though I could detect other influences as well. Just hearing “Lollipop” was almost enough to make me, as Monica Geller of Friends would say, “Laugh So Hard That A Little Pee Came Out.” No, I’m not a Homophobic Bigot, but if you still want to compare Mika with Freddie after hearing such a catastrophical song as “Lollipop”, you need to see a shrink at the earliest. Mika has been very lucky to have a hit like “Grace Kelly” so earlier in his career unlike the long struggle Freddie had before “Killer Queen” came along. Freddie had his inspirations in Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin and Led Zeppelin too, but he never modeled himself or his songs on them and nor was he ever compared with them. Freddie's originality, in his songwritings and his onstage antics, was what made him what he is today, a legend. Freddie, as a performer, was what other singers strived to be, a fact enviously acknowledged by even Kurt Cobain in his suicide note.

Mika’s genre is Pop, maybe too much of a pop for my tastes, and even the inkling of a comparison of him with the multi-facetious predominantly rock star like Freddie Mercury would seriously put the question of ones sanity in jeopardy. Whatever little similarity that exists between them, ends with their voices, unless one wants to include Mika’s Sexual ambiguity as something common with Freddie’s open Bi-sexuality. Mika may have been the best Pop artist to come out in the UK after the Spice Girls, but he merits no comparison with Freddie even in his wildest dreams; he just doesn’t have the versatility or the personality of Freddie Mercury especially on-stage. If Mika can bring about songs that are even half the class of “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “We Are The Champions” or “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”, I’ll not only eat my words but, give up listening to Queen, for ever.

God's Own Controversy

Two recent asinine controversies vis-à-vis two of the most holy places in God’s Own Country have yet again brought out the rift between the conventional and the progressive thinking populace; the reasons for all the hullabaloo created being neither new nor novel.

The first case of whether women (more specifically pre-menopausal women) can be allowed to enter the sanctum sanctorum at Lord Ayyappa temple at Sabarimala is the more hotly debated of the two and the one argument for which I see no immediate or rational conclusion. The main basis of the controversy, the 41 day vow of celibacy, cleanliness and self-discipline being observed prior to undertaking the pilgrimage, is anyways shirked by most people nowadays. This also negates the argument against allowing women. Why would a woman’s periods cause her to become impure (sic) and lose her cleanliness status? How can a religion which considers fertility to be a blessing, look down upon the menstrual periods which are the very symbols of fertility? I feel it is time the Temple authorities and the religious heads looked into the relevance of such religious practices (incidentally most of them biased against women) if they want to ensure the continued existence of the Hindu way of life. The other counter arguments to allowing women like Lord Ayyappa being a Bachelor God and women being unable to make the tedious journey to the temple are as frivolous as they can be. Lord Ayyappa is a God, for Heaven’s sake and to say that He can be distracted by the entry of a woman who has come to worship him is nothing short of sacrilege.

The second controversy is the existing ban on the entry of non-Hindus in the Guruvayur temple. My take on it is very simple… Everybody, irrespective of their Religion, Caste, Creed or Gender should be allowed entry into Hindu temples as long as their intentions are noble. Hinduism is more a way of life than a religion. A Hindu doesn’t have to live by a strict code of conduct as set by other religions. Yes, there are scriptures, traditional beliefs and practices but whether they are followed is left to the individual’s choice. Also, there were no other organised religions in existence when Hinduism first came into being (I don’t believe in the All Religions Are Equal Bullshit) and I can’t understand why people, whose ancestors were lured away by unscrupulous theories, and who still want to retain the link with their erstwhile way of life, are being discriminated against. The ban on non-Hindus entering the Guruvayur temple is also futile because there is no way of identifying a non-Hindu from a Hindu more so if he is following the temple practice of being shirtless and wearing a dhoti. The Tirupati Temple authorities have devised a better approach towards avoiding such controversies by allowing non-Hindus into the Tirumala-Tirupati temple if they sign in a register stating their faith in the Hindu God. Maybe the Guruvayur Devaswom Authorities can consider such an arrangement. I only hope the Guruvayur Devaswom board realizes that such a magnanimous gesture will certainly do no harm to the Temple’s sanctity or growth of its popularity.

These indifferences of the two temples (and many more temples all across the length of Kerala) make me wonder if God still consents to residing at such places where Man discriminates against his fellow Man. For a state which boasts of the highest literacy rate in the country, these religious intolerances do not bode well and the sobriquet of “God’s Own Country” may very well be a misnomer and I’m pretty sure that for once God will agree with me.

To all the people who have been or claim to have been at the receiving end of either of the two temples’ bigotry, I cannot understand why you cannot worship Lord Ayyappa at any of the dozens of other Ayyappa temples all around you which do not discriminate between genders and why you need to visit only Guruvayur and not the other Hindu temples where there is no religious discrimination. Could it be that you people are publicity crazy or just a bunch of communists trying to find a credulous cause to further your personal welfare or indulge in the now popular game of Hindu-bashing???

Life in a Metro

The products of the Hindi film industry are mostly mediocre stuff, run of the mill love stories or rehashes of long forgotten films with ideas and stunts which are directly copied from Hollywood movies. But, once in a while comes a film from the Bollywood Stables, which breaks out of the typical Hindi film industry mould. It is this kind of a film which comes to pass as a breath of fresh air in an otherwise pungently predictable production progression of poor pictures. I usually have to wait for months for such a film, a film without lovers running around trees or parents conspiring to separate their lovelorn children or lovers sacrificing (sic) their love for the sake of their parents/friends or corrupt politicians and cops and a super-hero who wins against all odds, bashing up hundreds of goons in the process.

Life in a Metro seemed to be a film which broke out the Bollywood mould and it did try to, but somehow fell short. It was typical in a Bollywood sense that it was a rehash of many a Hollywood movie but, they were Hollywood movies of yesteryear and to the director’s good fortune most youngsters in India wouldn’t have watched it. As far as the performances were concerned, this might be Shilpa Shetty’s best display of her measly acting skills after her performance at Big Brother. Irrfan Khan and Konkona Sen were good but, they usually are so. The surprise package for me was Kay Kay Menon. I thought he was just a singer with acting ambitions but he put in a powerful performance. Kangana Ranaut looked good in her new hair style but that was about it. The Dharmendra – Nafisa Ali track was not only very awkward but also lacked the spunk and passion of a love story. The one emotion missing in it was Anger; no woman would so easily forgive and forget her lover who stood her up and abandoned her for his own selfish reasons. And finally when Bollywood showed a couple in love, making out on the bed, it turned out to be a 70+ Dharmendra and 60+ Nafisa Ali! The tongue in cheek backdrop of a BPO/ call centre makes an attempt to play on the audience’s perception of such places as a hub of all vices. The director also apes the new Bollywood trait of introducing homosexual characters who are afraid to come out of the closet; atleast he avoided the making a mockery of the gay character. One of the main flaws was improper presentation of one central character of the movie, not the misfit Shiny Ahuja, but the city of Mumbai. Mumbai was represented by the incessant rains throughout the film with the Metro band popping out now & then to play their stuff. There was no typical hustle-bustle of the Mumbai crowds portrayed either on the streets or in the railway stations and knowing the fast capitalist life-style of Mumbai I doubt if Mumbaiites have time for an extra-marital affair in their chock-a-block lifestyles.

The film was doomed as soon as the director decided to make a film about extra-marital affairs in India, without comprehending the maturity level required for such a topic to be presented and the need for a necessary amount of skin show which would be essential to the story. If the Shilpa-Shiny situation had been shown as Shilpa giving in totally to her passion, or if in the final scene, if Shilpa had walked out on her husband, I would have got up and saluted the director. Instead, he chose to play it safe for fear of offending the moral sensibilities of the majority which still cannot digest a woman looking for and finding love outside wedlock or dumping her husband even though he is a serial-cheater. The idea was right, but all it took was yet another cowardly director to spoil the broth.

At the end of it all, I’m still waiting for a non-typical Bollywood movie this year.

Disclosure

A modern maxim goes “Never Judge a Book by Its Movie” and in keeping with this doctrine, I avoid seeing a film that has been adapted from a book until I have read the book first. This practice has stood me in good stead over the years and though I have been disappointed time and again by movies that have failed to live upto the expectations, I always take solace in the fact that I have atleast enjoyed a good book. It is incredible how such a staggering number of excellent books have been made into mediocre movies. However, after many years, I have been proved wrong (or should I say vindicated?).

I first saw the movie Disclosure in a screening at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai (Madras, back then) in 1996 and subsequently, a couple of times on television and enjoyed it each time. So, finally when I read the book a few days back, my high expectations were shattered. I can recall a lot of cases where the book and its big screen depiction have been good but this is the first incident I’ve encountered of a movie being a tad better than the book.

Michael Douglas and Demi Moore (Tom Sanders & Meredith Johnson respectively) have made such an impression on me that I picturized them mouthing the dialogues as I was reading the book. When Tom’s 4-year old daughter says, "Boys have penises, and girls have vaginas,” a dialogue which was not part of the film, I could imagine the look Michael Douglas would have given. The only reference to the Penis in the movie comes from Tom’s wife, who had a strong role as an ardent supporter of her husband but, has almost no role to play in the book. The description of the Virtual Environment System, which has been shown so impeccably in the movie is lacking in the book. Unless one had seen the movie, it would have been hard to imagine how such a system would look like. The character of Cindy, Tom’s secretary, a significant person with a meaty role in the movie is weak in the book. The mediation hearings, Cindy’s role in the hearings, Tom’s triumph and Meredith’s coup are all again depicted much better in the movie.

Personally, I don’t feel the book is that great a read (ok, the concept about Sexual Harassment being all about power and not about gender was good) and I would recommend the movie over the book any day and then, there’s always a first time for everything.