Race in America…

... isn’t a social issue, but a political one, writes Sumit Dahiya.

And caste in India?

(Link via email from reader Sid Wade.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 19 April, 2007 in India | Politics | Small thoughts

The only star of American Idol

You see a beautiful girl, you want to look at it, and talk to it.

- Simon Cowell, in The Fabulous Life of Simon Cowell, VH1 documentary. Such a charmer.

Posted by Amit Varma on 18 April, 2007 in Arts and entertainment

Vinod Khanna and Savita Jangam

Two incidents involving cops. One:

Close to 2,000 cops spent the entire Sunday night hunting for a cabbie who had stolen an expensive mobile phone belonging to member of Parliament and yesteryear actor Vinod Khanna’s son, Saakshi. Nakabandis were put in place across south Mumbai and the suburbs and a message was flashed to all police stations and patrolling vehicles. The taxi’s owner was traced in no time and the mobile was recovered from the cabbie’s house in Behrampada, Bandra (east) on Monday afternoon.

Two:

Thirty-five-year Savita Jangam, a resident of Worli Village, lives in constant fear. She can hardly sleep. Savita was like another normal woman till a few days ago, but an incident on April 8 made her lose her mental balance. She was stripped, beaten and paraded half-naked by villagers and hung on a tree for nine hours at her native village in Bhor, Pune, before being rescued by her husband.

[...]

“We approached the local police station in Bhor on the same day, but initially, the officials refused to register our complaint,” [her husband] Gopal said.

Needless to say, the location of the above incidents is irrelevant. In this country, if you’re rich and influential, the police are like your personal servants. If you’re poor, you don’t exist. That’s all there is to it.

Posted by Amit Varma on 18 April, 2007 in India | News

Orkut doesn’t die

Maybe it’s because I’ve been low for a couple of days, but I find Minal Panchal’s scrapbook on Orkut heartbreaking.

Minal, as you’d probably know, died on Monday.

(Orkut link via email from Gautam John.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 18 April, 2007 in Small thoughts

The poignancy of kurtas

There is nothing as sad as seeing an Indian man wear a kurta so that his paunch doesn’t show, and still fail miserably. No?

Posted by Amit Varma on 18 April, 2007 in Small thoughts

Akhilesh Yadav on Rahul Gandhi

Remember how Rahul Gandhi shot his mouth off a couple of days ago? Well, Akhilesh Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s son, has responded in an interview:

Q: What do you think about Rahul Gandhi’s comment that his family divided Pakistan?

A: See, our socialist values do not encourage division of society. In fact, we encourage a European Union model where everyone can live together. Rahul, who the Congress says is its prime ministerial candidate of the future doesn’t know anything.

Heh. Such options we have when it comes to political leadership, no?

Anyway, I was informed by Mint that my column last week, ”The Nehru-Gandhi Legacy of Shame,” got large amounts of appreciative mail. Here’s a cross-section of them. I thought N Bala Ganesan made a great point:

Ill-conceived policies and callousness can be as deadly as tyranny.

Indeed. The only difference is that you can’t count the lives lost due to the former.

Posted by Amit Varma on 18 April, 2007 in Economics | India | Politics

Self-delusion…

... is a feature, not a bug.

Isn’t that depressing? And isn’t depression a bug? Huh?

Posted by Amit Varma on 18 April, 2007 in Small thoughts

Music Video 2.0: “Voice” by Pentagram

It seems like a gimmick, but how it worked. Sometime back, the Indian rock band Pentagram got together with VH1 and announced that they were going to ask their fans to make a music video for their next release, “Voice.” Making a video takes a lot of effort: listening to the song dozens of times, coming up with a concept, getting together cast and crew and props and so on, shooting the thing, editing the thing, and so on. You’d have imagined a handful of nuts would enter.

Pentagram got 991 entries.

Yes, that’s right, 991 music videos. A decade ago, when I worked in first Channel [V] and then MTV and wrote for Rock Street Journal, many of us thought that Indian rock was just about to take off in a big way. We were wrong then—there wasn’t much of a following for it outside the college circuit. But if 991 people make music videos for a song, you’ve got to imagine that the number of actual Pentagram fans out there must be many multiples of that. Who knows where this could go?

Anyway, Pentagram eventually used a composite of the 26 best videos as their official video release. But the rest are available on YouTube. One that Pentagram vocalist Vishal Dadlani especially likes, and that Mohit brought to my attention, is an anti-reservation video by Varun Agarwal from Bangalore. Here it is:

I’ve articulated my opposition to reservations in these posts: ”It’s the thought that counts, right?”, ”Protesting the politics of reservations”, ”The calculus of reservation” and ”Don’t think in categories” (last two paras).

And now, below the fold, the final video of “Voice,” putting together shots from the 26 best videos they received:

Read more...

Posted by Amit Varma on 17 April, 2007 in Arts and entertainment | India | Politics

Mughal entitlement

The Telegraph reports:

[S]he has blue blood running in her veins, no mixes anywhere. Her name is Sultana Begum and she is the great granddaughter-in-law of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Neither the Bengal government nor the Centre has — in her own words — bothered to help her or shown any respect to her bloodline.

Well, why should they? I can’t think of a good reason why our tax money should go towards helping someone purely because she is the heir of a former emperor. Her sense of entitlement is baffling. She is welcome to private charity dispensed willingly, but to demand that the hard-earned money I pay as taxes go to her upkeep is outrageous. Such shamelessness.

On the other hand, if I was Bahadur Shah Zafar’s descendant, I’d want the Kohinoor back. “That’s mah stone,” I’d yell. “Give me mah stone, and mah throne while you’re at it. And where’s the harem? I want an harem. Organise!”

Posted by Amit Varma on 17 April, 2007 in Freedom | India | News

If there were a sex Olympics…

... India would win the gold medal in all the sprints. The Times of India reports:

A new global sex survey reveals that when it comes to time devoted to the sexual act, Indians get done the fastest — averaging just 13 minutes, foreplay and all. The global average is 18 minutes.

[...]

Sexologist Prakash Kothari is not surprised with the survey’s 13-minute finding. “Most Indian men use their wives as sleeping pills. They have never devoted enough time to foreplay, or the act itself.”

You will remember, of course, that Indian men have rather small organs as well. Immense sympathy comes for Indian women. If only they could know the pleasures of being with men such as, um, me. Poor things.

(Link via email from the worried Gautam John. And while searching for my previous post, I had to go through these two pages: 1, 2. Such things I wrote!)

Posted by Amit Varma on 17 April, 2007 in India | Personal