You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2009.
This is a 3-part series of post election thoughts. At the India, Maharashtra and Pune level. You can find the remaining parts here.
The verdict : The MNS is here.
Love it or hate it, it is here to stay. We all knew this, the elections just confirmed it.
The positives being Raj Thackeray has an opportunity here to go further right or towards the center. I have said earlier and will say it again. He is the best leader we have in Maharashtra. The others look like a bunch of baboons in front of his oratory and political skills.
But I really hope he is constructive in his approach to not scare away voters, and needs to push this message across to the voter. A glorious career then awaits him.
On the negative side, the people of Maharashtra will not be getting a non-Congress/NCP government for a quite some time. The arrival of the MNS pushed this further by a decade or two.
The Shiv Sena is going down. Bal Thackeray has a few days to meet the riot victims while Uddhav Thackeray isn’t helping the cause. Once the MNS leaves a large enough footprint in Maharashtra, do not be surprised if the BJP tries to woo it. If I read Raj Thackeray correctly, he would know his best chance is in being alone.
As for the Congress/NCP in Maharashtra, their gameplan is similar. Do not shoot yourself in the foot. The others will do the rest. This tenet should hold good for them for now. The upcoming assembly elections would confirm this, I am sure.
Strangely, apart from Sharad Pawar, who has graduated on to national politics, there isn’t a single leader with the charisma and appeal that is noteworthy. This is bad news for Maharashtra. So for citizens of Maharashtra, it might take longer than expected to get a government that actually works, a non-Congress/NCP government that is.
This is a 3-part series of post election thoughts. At the India, Maharashtra and Pune level. You can find the remaining parts here.
This post appears here just because I belong to Pune and no other reason.
The verdict : It is going to take more than a bunch of wannabe MP’s and fractured electorate to overthrow Suresh Kalmadi.
If not for the MNS, the Congress would have lost for certain. But with the MNS creating a tripolar political scenario in Pune, with other minor poles being the BSP candidate D.S. Kulkarni and independent Arun Bhatia, the Congress did not have to do anything special to win this seat.
With a record low turnout of 40% in Pune and a record high number of candidates (36), it was undoubtedly going in favour of the incumbent. Same idea again, do not shoot yourself, which was arguably the mantra of the Congress this time. And they almost did it, with the NCP not supporting Suresh Kalmadi for a large part of the campaign, but even that wasn’t enough to lose the seat. You get the idea now.
As for the other factions like Arun Bhatia, I hope they do not abandon politics only to resurface the next time, but actively participate in local and assembly elections too. It can only help the cause.
As for Suresh Kalmadi, I cannot wait to see what his next maverick idea is going to be after the BRTS.
How about making roads only open to pedestrians while vehicles drive on the footpath ? Think about it.
Manmohan Singh has been receiving congratulatory messages from all over the world. The one that takes the cake is :
Bhutan King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck and his father Jigme Singye Wangchuck wrote a letter to the prime minister, congratulating him on the victory.
Letter ? Seriously ? Have you not heard of something called the telephone ? Or e-mail ? How about an SMS “Cngrts, c u l8r” ? Or even a tweet “@manmohansingh You rock man ^:)^” ?
It is pretty damn tough to even sympathize with the Kolkata Knight Riders now.
Deccan Chargers need 21 off the last over.
The first ball, captain McCullum forgets to place 4 fielders in the circle, so it is called a no-ball. Oh and it is also hit for a boundary. 16 off 6.
Then one leg bye, one single. 14 off 4.
Simple slower ball full-toss. Trust Rohit Sharma to take care of that. Six.
Then a wide. Then a couple. Then another boundary. 1 off 1.
Six.
DC need 21, they get 26.
And the bowler ? The one whom KKR bought especially for season 2 of the IPL at a whopping $ 600,000, and didn’t play him in most matches. He gets a chance today, and how he returns the favour. Mashrafe Mortaza.
Fake IPL player is having a field day because of their successive string of losses. The blog would have been half as successful if the team was winning. We, as Indians, love to hear the dirt, and there is plenty to make up in a losing side.
India needs educated and the non-stereotypical politician, but more than that, it needs politicians who rethink the whole idea of politics. Shashi Tharoor sets a fine example of the latter :
After conducting a high-profile campaign in Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha seat, former UN diplomat and Congress candidate Shashi Tharoor is back on the streets again, this time to give the Kerala capital a clean look by removing his election posters off the city’s walls.
Quite heartening to read.
Now that the elections are over and counting begins tomorrow, everyone’s eyes are on the one person who might get to decide the fate of a country of more than a billion people. She is President Pratibha Patil, who would get the opportunity to invite coalitions to stake their claim in forming a government. But what do we know about this great lady ? This is my humble attempt at introducing her to the people of India.
First things first, yes, she does exist.
A recent survey revealed that over 90% of Indians did not know who President Patil was and only 40% knew. It is obvious this survey is not very trustworthy since it was carried out in Pakistan and most surveyors are not alive to verify the data since they were women. But you get the idea.
President Patil shares her first name with President Obama and last name with Pratibha Patil. She was born as a girl in an affluent family in Maharashtra. Very little is known about her childhood or the nicknames she had, so let’s just assume her nickname was Pinky. She always had great love for her family and it has continued till today, as can be judged from the fact that she allegedly gave loans to relatives leading to her bank license being revoked by the RBI. In these times of nuclear families and estranged relationships, we can see how important her virtues are.
She is mainly known in India for her foreign trips and addresses in foreign parliaments, which are not well attended. She is also a non-vocal environmentalist and loves trees, evidenced from the fact that 500 trees were felled during her visit to Andaman to give her a clear view of the sea. When confronted that this was not too environmentalist, she said, “Lekin dooriyan pyaar badhati hai“. She also likes to watch Hindi movies.
While most elites have criticized the fact that she speaks to ghosts, I think it is just a case of sour grapes. The sexist and sensible people also say that A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was a better president, but it is generally agreed upon that she is the greatest woman president India has ever had. Among her other achievements, she is also the first woman president of India.
It is suspected that she is the most intelligent woman in India at this moment, except for almost all other women in India. She is also one of the very few women who play sports, the others being Sania Mirza and S. Sreesanth. She was voted “College Queen” of M.J. College when she was in school. She is one of the few people whose Controversies stub on Wikipedia is larger than her whole profile. She also has a Wikipedia page.
She had once gone to the Bureau of Names to change her last name after her wedding. The office was quite messy with rats and cockroaches. Since she is afraid of rats, she ran back home and never got to changing her name. That is why we still know her as President Patil. As she is forgetful, there are fears that she might altogether forget to invite a coalition to form the government leading to complete anarchy in India.
Let us all hope this doesn’t happen.
Disclaimer : None of the above mentioned facts is true. If you are Pratibha Patil, please take it in good humour and also subscribe to the RSS feeds.
I usually resist from posting geeky stuff but this was just too good to leave out.
Here is a list of tips and tricks you can use while embedding YouTube videos in your blog. Sample an excerpt :
3. Cut the chase and link to the interesting part
Linking to a video where the real action starts at 3 minutes 22 seconds, wondered if you could make it start at 03:22? You are in luck. All you have to do is add #t=03m22s (#t=XXmYYs for XX mins and YY seconds) to the end of the URL.
[via Addy S]
I hadn’t seen any good movies in the last 4 months and the ones I saw, Barah Aana and Firaaq, weren’t good enough to merit a review.
Barah Aana was a clean attempt and inspite of some great acting by Vijay Raaz, the story suffered from being one-dimensional and treatment suffered from slow pace. Firaaq, I still have no clue why it is getting rave reviews and winning awards. Maybe I missed something. But from the things I understood, it was a pointless and slow movie with unrelated, unlinked (which is fine to some extent) and stories without a logical closure. Of course, being slow doesn’t make a movie bad, but being slow with no food for thought does affect the movie’s chances.
Thankfully, things have changed for me with Flavors. Well, it was released in 2003, but I just caught it.
If you haven’t seen it, you could as well skip the review and watch it here.
We have seen loads of crossover movies, a trend started by American Desi and continued by Indian Fish in American Waters, Outsourced and The Other End of the Line amongst others. Each of the movies were characterized by caricatures, something that Flavors stays clear of. Arguably its winning point is that most characters are kept quite real, from the just-married housewife to the visiting Indian parents to the guys on bench.
But for Anjan Srivastava and Bharti Achrekar, the actors are relatively unknown, but do very well in their well-defined roles. There are more than just a few moments where you laugh aloud. Inspite of its low production values, it has a very well-written script, crisp editing, apt music (by Mahesh Shankar and Leslie Lewis) and good storytelling from the director duo. The manner in which the stories are linked make you watch it again. So it has a good repeat value too.
I have already seen it a few times and this movie is on its way to replace American Desi in my list of favourites. Surely not worth missing.
This is as WTF as it gets.
If Pfizer’s dreams come true, we might just have another Baby Boomer Generation :
Pfizer Inc is unveiling a new program on Thursday that will let people who have lost their jobs and health insurance keep taking some widely prescribed Pfizer medications — including Lipitor and Viagra — for free for up to a year.
So before you yell at someone, “Get a room !! “, remember they might not have a home.
What better image can sum up the Indian media than this ?
The Slumdog actor, Azharuddin Mohammed, has his hut demolished by the BMC, while cameramen click away to glory. After all, what is a more effective news item thanthe rags to riches to rags story ?
One thing is certain, Slumdog Millionaire was a far more pious script than this.
Image Courtesy : IBNLive.com
