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translated as : (to another fellow being) Why should I get punished if I don’t obey you ?
After the last two posts about intolerance, what better time to post a link to this superb song from the final episode of Coke Studio : Season Two.
Sung by Ali Zafar, this is in my humble opinion, the best song of this season.
Some excerpts of the lyrics :
Tune kya banayi
Tune kya sajayi
Sab kiya hai usne tune
Baatein banayi…
Jo tera khuda hai
Woh mera khuda hai
Tera kahan na manu toh
Kyon mujhe saza hai
What can I say. Superb. The timing of this song is perfect not just for Pakistan, but for so many in India, for every fundamentalist who doesn’t realize he is one, for every person who believes religion is anything but personal.
Anywho, here’s the song :
I liked the fact that the song was written in lower scales. A messenger sounds so much more humble in lower scales. That is why a the title track of Swades works so much better than Rahman’s Vande Mataram.
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I urge you to listen to all the songs of the final episode. I haven’t seen such fine songs in a single set for a long long time. I hope to post a music review of the final episode sometime .. Insha’allah.
With the Sikh board drawing first blood, how can others be left behind.
The offencees this time around are from the Jagannath temple. The movie in question, Kaminey.
The part that offended them was that in the film there was the well-known Hindi phrase, Apna haath Jagannath written on a toilet door alongside a scantily clad woman. They found that it vandalizes the pure image of their God.
I wouldn’t have ever related that phrase to the temple, if not for their reasoning. If anything, they shouldn’t be offended by the scantily clad woman; they should be offended that the phrase is a very common reference to .. ahem .. certain self-help strategies.
If you don’t know what the phrase means, too bad.
Guess what is keeping the Punjab Cultural and Heritage Board busy these days ?
Watching movie trailers and getting agitated. Quotes their President Charan Singh Sapra :
The problem in Dil Bole Hadippa is that in the promo, instead of a dot on the letter I in the word Haddippa they have shown a small Sikh boy’s turban falling on it. That is our main objection.
I, for one, am completely with the Sikh body in this. The Sikhs have been stereotyped as silly and stupid for too long. So what if they were the most endearing characters, no one should assume they are not intelligent.
Which is why this guy needs to get off the mike.
My favourite line :
Yes we are also getting a lot of phone calls for the film Kisaan, in which there is a scene where the turban has been thrown on the floor.
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I don’t want to rant about creativity and free speech here. Even seemingly normal people are strangely conservative on such issues. I am sure more than half the readers who agree that the above reaction was unwarranted will have something different to say if I invoke the name of artist M.F. Hussain.
So, instead, let’s sit back and have fun.
Quick post, just to inform you that one of my favourite bloggers is back with new stuff. The guy is called Sundar Srinivasan: if there’s one blog I’d want to read before you die, it would be this person’s timepass section.
Some classic pages you shouldn’t miss : The art of tactfully changing the subject, the Asha Parekh fan page and death scenes that leave nothing to be desired.
The archives should keep you busy for atleast a week and leave your cubicle mates doubting your sanity.
With rains lesser than normal (which, thankfully, also means no one lost their life in floods) and everyone clueless, some priests in Mumbai have shown us the right way out :
With the rainfall not being up to the mark this season, people are trying every possible way to please the rain gods. Keeping up with the effort, on Wednesday, 11 priests sat neck-deep in water in three-foot wide drums for over three hours, chanting sutras from the Vedas at the Sri Sankara Mattham in Matunga.
“We do this to gain the goodwill of the rain god Varuna for abundant rains in the city and the country,” said 65-year-old Venkataraman Shastri, the head priest of the temple and one of the priests who sat inside the drum.
I am so speechless that I have just one thing to say. Could you please stop wasting water ?
Oh and unless you are Megan Fox or the Hindu equivalent of her, I don’t think god wants to see you wet.
Remember the age old saying, “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubts”.
Sample this hilarious piece.
The gist of the story is :
Farah made a statement in the media that she rated Manoj Kumar’s film, Clerk as “a treasure chest of ham scenes”.
And Manoj Kumar replies he isn’t a pig :
Reacting angrily to Farah’s statement, Manoj Kumar said, “Ham means pig. I am still a student of …..
For Mr. Kumar, hamming is defined thus :
ham – overact: exaggerate one’s acting
To be fair, I think it was Sajid Khan who popularized the use of the word hamming while referring to old Hindi films on his show Kehne Mein Kya Harz Hai. Thanks to him, today I have a word in my vocabulary to describe every second performance I see in Hindi films. And yes, the list includes many stars who are considered great actors. Surely there are two sides to every argument, my side and the wrong side.
Okay enough Colbertism.
Read TOI’s quite silly and outright stupid take on the Daily Show’s piece on the SRK incident.
Gaurav S. has put it better than I could ever. Do check it out.
To add to the fun, Aasif Mandvi was initially mentioned as “an Indian American journalist”. Thankfully, that bit has now changed to “Indian American stand-up comedian and actor”.
The long holiday has finally ended with the trip to India. It also ends the ‘globetrotting’, as someone put it. Aside from visiting home and meeting people, I also managed to do the things I really wanted to :
* Escape from the swine flu virus hype. The virus, I was confident of evading, the hype, I wasn’t so sure.
* Have a Sujata mango mastani – For non-Punekars, a mastani is a combination of mango milkshake with mango ice-cream, and for Punekars, don’t ever call a mastani a combination of milkshake and ice-cream. Sujata is a popular chain that offers mastani, and the only one that is worth existing, IMHO. If you disagree, I don’t think we’ll meet to debate, since I’m going to heaven. (P.S. : The best fun is had if you spend an hour having it.)
* A jamming session : I managed to squeeze in a jamming session at my undergrad college with a bunch of very talented passouts with whom I used to play long ago. After this one, and another session when I was in Washington DC, I am really looking forward to get together a group here in California. I hope my extended hiatus of 2 long years from music will end and I get back my touch on atleast a couple of instruments. I managed to sneak in a sarod this time which I hope to continue picking up.
* Trek in the Sahyadris – The Sahyadris (as the western ghats are known in Maharashtra) are like my home ground in trekking and a trek is usually a ritual whenever I visit home. Incessant rains and the fact that most of my usual trekking partners were at their jobs and I was visiting during the week meant that I had to summit Rajgad at night in the rains, climb down the slippery trail at night earning a few bruises to show off and return home a few hours before leaving for the airport.
Now that the long holiday is almost over, I can safely say it’s been anything but relaxing. With around six-seven thousand odd miles of travelling and 50,000 ft. of climbing at last count (The Mt. Everest from sea level as around 29,000 ft., so it was like climbing Everest more than one and a half times. Hikers would know that this is actually a very misleading statistic and it just shows how stupid statistics can be. Kindly note, Mr. P. Sainath) this season, I think I just like to be on the run, however tiring or demanding it may be, how much ever I realize that I need to stop and rest.
The icing on the cake is that I join my new job tomorrow. I have been interested in the agricultural sector since India is a largely agrarian nation, and have always wanted to contribute to the industry in my capacity. So I’ll be working for a fruit company hoping to help them boost their sales through some innovation.
Over the last three 24-hour periods, my locations look like : summit of Ragjad fort, Mumbai airport, apartment in San Jose, first day of job.
I guess I just like it this way.
P.S. : This doesn’t mean I’ll not write about trips and hikes. This weekend’s plan is already in place.
My friend Salil emailed a link to this video, the original Dhan Te Nan composed by Vishal Bharadwaj for the tele-serial Gubbare. A few changes here and there, a rock and roll rhythm, and the song totally rules now. The original is quite good too. But enough blading, here you go :
