Sense And Sensibilities

so why should I title my blog with Jane Austen's signature line.. I have no intention of writing about romance and happiness..and I dont intend to write an ending that would convey a choice between "sense" or "sensibility"..But I opened the blog and this was the title that struck me....So I will go with it..

Yes...Its about sense and sensibilities though...and I have been thinking about it the past couple of days....It all started when I asked one of my colleagues whether she was a Obama or a Hillary supporter...Evidently thats taboo in the States...Political affilitations cannot be discussed so openly.....

I think that is pretty interesting ..And inspite of working in a global economy and taking a couple of mandatory courses on "respecting diversity", this one really intrigues me..Not the "respect" bit..But the "diversity" bit....

So i thought I understood "diversity"....That I had made sense out of it....That I was sensible enough to recognize, acknowledge and adjust acccording to it....Evidently I had not...

This is definitely one of the more subtle socio-cultural difference that I have been exposed to till date (3 years) in the US....To me this is a difference in the thought process...A full stop where you would expect a comma or a semi colon.........A deviation from what I thought was a "culturally & socially accepted behavior" and a chasm where I had expected a praire grassland (do these exist???)....

Of course, my assumptions about "expected behavior" are not right....But where did I go wrong???...The answer that I was given to the "taboo" question was, in many ways, very simple..People take political affilitations seriously in the US....People get personal with issues and those discussions can become ugly...So best avoid them..Makes perfect sense to me....But why did I not see it??..Why could not I put sense and sensibility together in the first place??..Especially since the reasoning is so universal and should apply across societies...Yeah, I know I am not a socio-politial expert, but as Descartes said - "I think"..(How do you know he did not say that??)...


So I continue my thinking...How would people in India react to the same question? Not "Obama" versus "Hillary"..but maybe "Vajpayee versus Advani" or "Sonia versus Manmohan" (this one has other connotations)..So i wil replace it with "Maya versus Mamta"...Or to make it simpler "Congress versus BJP"...

Yes, the discussions might still go personal...People might still be uncomfortable answering it...But I think it wont be tabboo..Or may be it is..May be I have met/worked with poeple who are not afraid to voice their opinions..I dont know...

But to hazard a guess... The approach to politics and the public reaction to the political system is probably different in the US and India..I think, being a two party system and with the process of primaries, poeple in the US are more likely to be more vocal and sensitive about individuals (maybe this year is an exception and this hypothesis is wrong)...On the other hand, as an Indian, I am more sensitive (in a manner of speaking) to which party I would support rather than individuals within the party.....

Probably because there are so many colorful characters in Indian politics that we can do nothing better than ignore them...But the lesson, I think, for me is simple...It is still about "sense and sensibilities"...And what is sensible and what makes sense is not dictated by reason or logic alone.....It is about the collective thought process and the conformance to that collective thought process......

Amen...!!!

and Cheers!!

:))

Maan Gaye Mughal E Azam

so u watch a film on a sunday night expecting to be entertained.....especially if u ve watched the cast nd crew create some magic b4..well not the crew..but the cast at least..so i was expecting somethin like a sequel to "Pyaar ke side effcts"...somethin which woud not probably be a smash hit at the Box Office but be perfect for a sunday night viewing .....nd i simply love my hindi films.....from rajnikanth to amitabh and mithun in between, i simply love them...

Powered by: Chakpak.com	Maan Gaye Mughal-E-Azam

but when somethin lets u down so much...especially on a sunday night when I cud ve been watchin scorpion king 2...ur bound to become a critic...

so we all watched "Janne Bhi Do Yaaron"..nd loved it.....just like so many other films of tht era....But it does not seem a great idea to think that 1 scene from JBDY can sustain a full movie....so I get it..its that tribute thing......but clearly the "tribute thing" is not working in this movie.....

back to being a critic...Have seen paresh rawal do everythin before in priyadarshan movies. so I guess he is fine..even made me smile on a couple of occassions...but Kay Kay is a waste...nd so is Pawan Malhotra (who is BTW not featured in the cast in IMDB)..but it is Rahul Bose tht kills me....I will now not struggle to remember a movie, few though may be, where RB was awful.....But I have to end up luvin Mallika.....She is so convincing as a married indian woman attracted to a paraya male and juggling between both of them with both of those guys staring at each other..

I get it..its a comedy...and i am not even a critic.....i ve not acted, know nothing about direction and Mallika wont look at me even once...

but I have to mourn my sunday evening/night that is lost.....scorpion king 2 has to wait for another 7 days...SK2 wont mind....but i will miss that entertainment....MGME or SK2...I guess both are mindless entertainment....the least we can expect is to be entertained......

cheers!!!

:))

Bolt from the Blue!!

so its olympics time...and post the hysteria of AB followed by the diasppointment of Saina and Lee-hesh, i was very excited by the most hyped event of the Beijing Olympics....the mens 100 m dash...Bolt Vs Powell vs the american sprinter whose name I forget (Tyson Gay, followin a google search )..the fastest human being on the planet title...it was already assumed that the woman who would win the 100 m would run it slower than the man/men..and I agree this is probably true for this olympics.....but I guess we may yet live to see the day when in another Olympics the fastest human being on the planet wont be a descendant of Bolt....

But amazing as Bolt was (and there r comments already of doping and arrogance, this story I think will last sometime like Ben Johnson's),the bolt from the blue was not from him...it was kind of expected.....Powell or Bolt.....and inspite doubts of his injury he was always the either or option for comon folks and experts alike.....

the bolt was from NBC....so i missed the race......and when iGoogle tells you that Bolt had won..it is but natural that you would fidget on your keypads to try and retrieve the images which you could not witness live..and what better way than to use youtube..

However,the generally dead-on search of youtube seemed to falter at first..i got the results...but they were more images than the actual race......a few clicks down the line, i did manage to find the video...the entire 100 m mens final......9.69 secs and the video was ony 1.15 mins....

Brought up on the tv analysis/paralysis cricket broadcasts in India, I was left asking
for more...the slow motion replays...the analyis..the perrfect start...the burst in the middle...the powell riddle....but searched and googled as hard as I could, I found nothing..except for the images..the music and the nostalgic videos celebrating Bolt...which was fine.....

The surprise came later though........3 hours later, I decided to watch those 1:15 minutes yet again.....but the video was no longer there..NBC had claimed copyright to it..and whatever else you can find on youtube ( nd I ve never been disappointed in finding anything from the exotic to the erotic), as of 24 hours after one of the greatest performance in the Olympics, you wont find that video on you tube...

Which is kind of like a bolt from the blue......Copyright is a legal issue, I get it...and NBC is surely within its right to pull off that video...but why???..its a 1:15 mins piece......people who search and watch it on the net(highyly likely it will be on you tube and then on torrents) will all likelihood have an attention span that wont allow them to stay glued to NBC......others who watch it fwded in their e-mails, dont care much about that event anyways whether its on NBC or youtube....but I guess NBC thinks this 1:15 mins have potential....I could find Federrers last game in the doubles match where he won gold...No copy right on that video.....probably not that much potential for NBC...

But this one was obviously special.....strangely though, NBCs official site did not feature the Bolt race prominently....I would have thought it would have been right out there...but 4 clicks later ( olympics->videos->track and field->next page ) i still did not see the Bolt video..

In the coming days, I guess we will see it replayed and analyzed innumerbale times on NBC...and personally i wil love those slo mos and expert analysis ...but it is with some disappointment that I reconcile to the fact that I cannot watch Bolt now when I want to....NBC might have just upstaged Bolt by delivering a bolt from the blue in a time when the net is increasingly gaining focus (e.g.,Comcast and P2P traffic, all the talk about net neutrality), at least in the US.....

In a couple of hours I think this might well change........Bolt might still well rule youtube and the net...with or without NBCs copyright issues.....tht will be a bolt expected and well delivered....

cheers!!..:))

Dreaming of winning gold

so it took us more than 100 years....but today we have an individual gold in the Olympics...and history will bear testimony to that...Abhinav Bindra will forever be a GK question and answer from now on, replacing KD Jadhav I guess......and suprised and happy as I am like so many others....this is not about AB....there will be countless others who will write about him and I will gladly read those.....and there will be others who have already started writing about how AB succeeded inspite of the system and lament that we have had to wait 100 years for a gold.. I will read those too.....

And I will continue to dream about winning gold.....I dont know the event....I dont know the venue...but thats why we dream I guess....

Where is my opportunity to win gold........I dont want to find a pot of gold....I want to win gold...Lottery tickets???..Gold exchange???....I dont think those will do.....The question I think is not just about winning...The Chinese guy who won silver will probably go home the most dejected, I guess...Even though he won silver...The question is about winning gold...

So i have to define my event.....and i have to define my Olympics...i have to identify the venue..plan the opening ceremony....sketch my opponents...visualize the qualifiers....script the come from behind storyline..fake the composure and graciously accept a gold medal from someone eminent....Tough ask ...so i have to think of alternatives.....the obvious being stop dreaming about winning gold......

at least for tonight.....yes....but I am sure this dream will come back....and some other night I will dream it to completion.....The greatest difficulty I think is imagining the eminent personality who will present me with the gold medal..that depends on so many factors....venue, event, current affairs, availability........tht is the greatest mental block that will ever keep me from winning gold I guess.....but i will keep trying...with the Old Monk as my guide....

I hate all those silvers and bronzes that I have won.....Its time I win gold......at least in my dreams....

Cheers!!

:))

Why did i chose that name???

So I m searching "whole numbers" on google....and I land up on this blog called "7 minutes to 7th heaven"..I click on the link..and since i am logged on to gmail..I am viewing my own profile... A bog i created i dont know when..but to which I have written nothing...so i think i should rectify the fault...

for whom should i write??? what should I write?? tough questions...unless you are drunk...then these questions become obnoxiously simple....if simple things could be that.....

7 minutes to 7th heaven...i like the title..i have no clue right now why i would title my blog that way...but i can safely hazard a guess that i was probably on marijuana that night....but i like the title ..so i m not going to change it...

i will have to figure out what i am going to write in here....in all probabilities its going to be something that wont make sense to anybody....tht answers my first question that i raised earlier....i ve got to write something and hope google misleads someone else searching for "whole numbers" into this blog....

In time i guess i will find out if there is anyone reading this...but 20 years down from now, when i may be searching for "whole numbers" in google yet again, and I stumble on thise site, hopefully i will make some sense out of these words....

with this hope in mind....Amen!!!

Let the blogging, late as it has come to me, begin..

Cheers!!!

:))