Changed to this!

Directing you to some blog posts with interesting opinions on the Dadagiri Indians are now demonstrating a tad too frequently:

Pritish Nandy: The indiscreet art of Dadagiri

Amit Varma: You Gotta do Sach Ka Saamna

Salil Tripathi: My mother’s fault

Amit Varma: Fighting against censorship in India

Mull on them!

“For someone who has never been bothered by bouncers and beamers hurled at him by rival fast bowlers, Gavaskar is very scared of dogs. Every time he come across my pets, ‘Bouncer and Beamer’, he breaks out in a sweat,” Ravi Shastri has written in a new book Sunil Gavaskar: Cricket’s Little Master, a tribute to mark his 60th birthday.

Former England all-rounder Ian Botham seconds Shastri on this count.
“One day he went to a phone booth outside Taunton. As he entered the booth, I kept a dog outside… Sunny was so scared of dogs that he stayed inside the booth for two hours,” reveals Botham .

The Bench ruled that the Sikh minority quota could be restricted to candidates maintaining “Sikhi Swarup” or keeping their hair unshorn.

It said “the Sikh rehat-maryada (religious sanctity) requires Sikhs to keep their hair unshorn and even an act of dishonouring hair is taken as a taboo. An act of dyeing one’s hair is treated as an act of dishonouring hair.” Maintaining that “hair unshorn is a part of the religious consciousness of the Sikh faith”, the Court said if the religious community wishes to enforce the aforesaid norm as a pre-condition for admission, there is nothing wrong in this.

This is another case of carrying a simple issue too far. And worse still, our courts endorsing such primitive views. I understand the importance of unshorn hair in the Sikh religion and have the greatest regard for it. All religions preach truth, righteousness and tolerance. Appearance is but a minor issue.

I do not understand how the SGPC will implement their rules. What next? You mean to say all those pretty Sikh girls will have to have bushy underarms and hairy legs? And this is the criteria for a MBBS admission. Anybody will tell you that a surgery requires the operative site to be shaved before the procedure. Does this hospital not follow this procedure? And is it wrong to dye your hair to look younger? I do wish people thought logically instead of being blinded by fanatical views.

It shows us in such a poor light to the world. Of course, it didn’t take too long for the Sydney Morning Herald to pick it up and highlight our narrow mindedness. And we can go on screaming from the rooftops about discrimination. We need to set our house in order first.

Racism is not a recent phenomenon, nor is it confined to one country or region. Racism is a global attitude, which strangely seems to be raising its head, at a time when the borders between nations seems to be disappearing. Sports, workplaces, schools, homes- all seem to be afflicted with this curse.

A Sivanandan, political activist and writer, in his article “Poverty is the new black” in the journal Race and Class says:

Racism has always been both an instrument of discrimination and a tool of exploitation. But it manifests itself as a cultural phenomenon, susceptible to cultural solutions, such as multicultural education and the promotion of ethnic identities.

Tackling the problem of cultural inequality, however, does not by itself redress the problem of economic inequality. Racism is conditioned by economic imperatives, but negotiated through culture: religion, literature, art, science and the media.

… Once, they demonised the blacks to justify slavery. Then they demonised the “coloureds” to justify colonialism. Today, they demonise asylum seekers to justify the ways of globalism. And, in the age of the media, of spin, demonisation sets out the parameters of popular culture within which such exclusion finds its own rationale — usually under the guise of xenophobia, the fear of strangers.

In times when people migrate to other shores in search of better living, education or work more than before, cultures cannot remain isolated. This blending of diversities can bring about fear of losing one’s own identity. This fear manifests in varied forms of abuse- sometimes subtly, sometimes assuming gory manisfestations.

Sivanandan, Director of the Institute of Race Relations writes:

It is a racism that is not just directed at those with darker skins, from the former colonial territories, but at the newer categories of the displaced, the dispossessed and the uprooted, who are beating at western Europe’s doors, the Europe that helped to displace them in the first place. It is a racism, that is, that cannot be colour-coded, directed as it is at poor whites as well, and is therefore passed off as xenophobia, a “natural” fear of strangers. But in the way it denigrates and reifies people before segregating and/or expelling them, it is a xenophobia that bears all the marks of the old racism. It is racism in substance, but “xeno” in form. It is a racism that is meted out to impoverished strangers even if they are white. It is xeno-racism.

Discrimination exists in many forms in nations across the globe. In the West being dark skinned invites racial abuse. It is the same slur we attach to the white skinned when we call them goras. The sad fact remains that people are learning to mistrust and be phobic of anybody and anything which isn’t like themselves.

Tolerance is a disappearing trait. And this racism that we face outside the boundaries of our nation is no different from what we face within it. Political parties and organizations which inflame tempers, teaching us to raise our walls and treat other with mistrust deserve the same disdain that we give racists. It is time we learnt to accept people different from ourselves. It would make life a lot more beautiful, as it ought to be.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, who is the founder of the ‘Art of Living’ professes to be a modern day humanitarian and spiritual leader. But the real face of the ambitious man behind the white garb and saintly halo emerges during the election time.

They say you cannot have a better brand ambassador than God. And so, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) is enlisting Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Baba Ramdev, Morari Bapu and Asaram Bapu to create an alliance marrying political, religious and environmental causes.

All over the country, small meetings are being held where his chosen ones are carrying a message from ‘guruji’. And while the professionals and the moderates are being lured with stories of Swiss bank accounts and conversions, what enrages me is the covert nature of the campaign. A man who claims to “teach love, practical wisdom, and service”, who claims to “promote harmony among people, and encourage individuals to follow their chosen spiritual path, while honoring other paths” is now telling people to ‘vote for change‘. This because “Hinduism is going to the dogs and we need more people with enthusiasm”. Now now his volunteers go around the country evoking images of Malegaon, telling us how Muslims and Christians are diverting ‘Hindu funds’ for their terror attacks and all sorts of other divisive speeches. So this is the real story of spreading harmony? Ravi Shankar… the Sris are off your name. The halo has disappeared.

If this man has guts, let him come into the election fray and openly say that he is campaigning for the Hindutva cause. Why these hidden agendas under the garb of religion? Either stay in religion, or get into politics. And yes, we have enough of such unholy alliances.

Uncover the real faces of these Godmen and saints! India has much better sense than to get swayed by those who evoke images of terror and play on our fears to merely get a few votes more.

Got it? Well, this is more commonly known as the ‘clbuttic error’. This is the end result of a weird computer programme designed to filter out profanity from the internet. It replaces ‘ass’ with ‘butt’, ‘tit’ with ‘breast’ and so forth.

A famous goof up occurred when the American Family Association programmed its filter to replace the word “gay” with “homosexual”, causing an article about sprinter Tyson Gay’s triumph at the US Olympic trials to begin: “Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has.”

Anti-obscenity filters do have some smart-butted nerds designing them. You never know when bad language users will buttert themselves and manage to pbutt these well-designed filters!

The film revolves around the life of Jamal Malik (Dev Malik), a young lad from the slums of Mumbai, his brother Salim and his sweetheart, Latika (Freida Pinto). He’s on the verge of winning the Indian version of ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire’. And his antecedents are being investigated in the hope that the scam behind his knowing the answers is revealed. Irrfan Khan and Saurabh Shukla play the investigating policemen rather disinterestedly. The film ebbs and flows with the trials and tribulations of Jamal.

Yes, India has poverty, slums, child prostitution, riots, thieves, child exploitation rackets and all that— but is that all of India? The movie is told entirely with a white man’s perspective of India. The glee of discovery is inherent with the director’s moves as if India is that exotic land where the dark, dingy and drudgery all co-exist. And there are places where he carries it a bit too far. That jump into a pool of shit only to get an autograph from a famous left-handed superstar was far-fetched. Expecting children on top of a running train to trapeze on a rope to steal food— Boyle was certainly imagining things too far. And indeed, which slum municipal school teaches The Three Musketeers?

If it wasn’t nominated for the Oscars, I would have called it an ‘OK chalta hai’ movie. Dev Patel is adept in his role. Anil Kapoor is just about OK. The rest are wasted. If there are any actors to be lauded they are the slum children who play the childhood versions of Jamal, Salim and Latika. They are real- and people you can identify with. And who’s silly idea was it to make the main protoganists dance to ‘Jai Ho’ at CST? At least the children would have done a better job of Bollywood dancing than these two rookies.

To be fair to AR Rehman, the work he has done so far deserves more than ten Oscars. But even he will know that Slumdog’s music has nothing to sing about. His previous compositions- Roja, Bombay, and the rest of them—- are par excellence, compared to this watered down insipid fare.

I am proud to see India represented at the Oscars. But it makes me aware that we have had much much better movies which have all been neglected. Simply because a white man didn’t make them. Why- TZP, Black, RDB and why, even Dil Chahta Hai were far better than this one! Let’s face it.