Monkey with its head in a bucket

My friend Rahul Bhatia sends me an SMS which I reproduce, with his permission, below:

If you’d care to turn on your television, India TV is broadcasting live pictures of a baby monkey with its head stuck in a bucket. There’s commentary and everything. If they can keep this up all day, I doubt we’ll ever choose real news over this.

Happiness overflows. Our nation needs monkeys!

Posted by Amit Varma on 21 April, 2007 in India | Journalism

Abhishek and Aishwarya: Bollywood material

I think there is much material for Bollywood films in the marriage between Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai.

There’s a Sooraj Barjatya film right here.

And here, there’s meat for Madhur Bhandarkar.

Mani Kaul please excuse.

Posted by Amit Varma on 20 April, 2007 in Arts and entertainment

Emptiness

In response to this post, and previous discussions of Tristesse, Sanjeev send me this magnificent poem by Stephen Dunn:

Emptiness

I’ve learned mine can’t be filled,
only alchemized. Many times
it’s become a paragraph or a page.
But usually I’ve hidden it,
not knowing until too late
how enormous it grows in its dark.
Or how obvious it gets
when I’ve donned, say, my good
cordovans and my fine tweed vest
and walked into a room with a smile.
I might as well have been a man
with a fez and a faux silver cane.

Better, I know now, to dress it plain,
to say out loud
to some right person
in some right place
that there’s something not there
in me, something I can’t name.
That some right person
has just lit a fire under the kettle.
She hasn’t said a word.
Beneath her blue shawl
she, too, conceals a world.

But she’s amazed
how much I seem to need my emptiness,
amazed I won’t let it go.

© Stephen Dunn.
Everything Else In The World.

Ah, alchemy…

Posted by Amit Varma on 20 April, 2007 in Arts and entertainment | Personal

Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky

The next time some self-righteous gentleman rants about Bill Clinton’s blowjob, kindly send him to this page.

Sure, perjury was the problem with Clinton, not the sex. But still, his deception was a lot less harmful than the self-deception of some others. And he only deceived us about matters that were no business of ours anyway.

(Link via email from Prabhu.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 20 April, 2007 in Politics

Diego Maradona 1986. Lionel Messi 2007.

Everybody’s comparing the two goals you see below. And yes, Messi’s goal is beautiful. There is one reason, though, why Maradona’s was far more special: Context.

Still, beauty is beauty, no?

Posted by Amit Varma on 20 April, 2007 in Sport

“I don’t care! Take me home. I’m done”

Why do the sad stories of other people make us cry?

Could it be because they snap us out of our self-delusion, and show us that death is inevitable and happiness is always fleeting? Nah, let’s not be negative.

Anyway, do check these pictures out, sequentially. It’s brilliant work, and Renée C. Byer got a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for it.

(Link via email from Gautam John.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 20 April, 2007 in Arts and entertainment | Journalism | Small thoughts

Times of India hypocrisy

Nitin Pai, via email, points me to the Times of India‘s explanation for why they have redesigned their new website. I have two questions:

1] Why could it not have been written by a proper journalist instead of a PR/marketing man? Do its readers not deserve to hear from the editor himself?

2] Is the excerpt quoted below supposed to be some sort of sick joke?

We have also tried to address your constant complaint on juxtaposition of ads and content. These now appear in clearly demarcated zones. (My emphasis.)

I’ve just made a quick phone call and verified that Medianet is still thriving, and ToI‘s practice of cheating readers by selling editorial space, without any indication that a piece or photograph has been paid for, continues unabated. So isn’t the hypocrisy stunning?

Sudden insight: Maybe Bhaskar Das wrote that press release!

Update: Sanjay Sipahimalani writes in to point me to ”The You Decade” by Christopher Hitchens, in which he writes:

A room-service menu ... now almost always offers “your choice” of oatmeal versus cornflakes or fruit juice as opposed to vegetable juice. Well, who else’s choice could it be? Except perhaps that of the people who decide that this is the range of what the menu will feature. Fox TV famously and fatuously claims, “We report. You decide.” Decide on what? On what Fox reports? Online polls promise to register what “you” think about the pressing issues of the moment, whereas what’s being presented is an operation whereby someone says, “Let’s give them the idea that they are a part of the decision-making process.”

Immensely pertinent when you read that ToI release!

Posted by Amit Varma on 20 April, 2007 in India | Journalism

Indian Idolatry

This piece of mine has been published today in the Wall Street Journal Asia. (Subscription link.) It was written on Monday, before Sanjaya Malakar got voted off American Idol.

By the time you read this, Sanjaya Malakar might well have been voted off of American Idol. If so, you won’t hear many groans of disappointment from India. Mr. Malakar, a 17-year-old of Indian and Italian descent, has mostly slipped below the radar here. But if he continues to capture the attention of millions of Americans the Indian media will change its tune, and not out of a newfound appreciation of Mr. Malakar’s singing ability. More likely, the local press will celebrate him as an Indian talent applauded by the West.

Hardly anyone here watches the American Idol singing competion, which is telecast on Star World, an English-language channel that, in India at least, caters to the elite. The domestic media have mentioned Mr. Malakar, now a finalist in the competition, just a handful of times, and that too in the context of the derision he has received in America. The dearth of media chatter here almost certainly results from the fact that the American press doesn’t have too many good things to say about him.

Of course, India has plenty of its own celebrities to gush over, some of them even less talented than the young Sanjaya. India produces more films than any other country in the world. Products from Bollywood (the Hindi film industry), Kollywood (the Tamil film industry) and Tollywood (the Telugu and Bengali film industries both claim that title) have audiences many orders of magnitude larger than those of the few Hollywood films that actually get released here. Successful music albums in local languages, mainly film soundtracks, sell in the millions, while the best a Western album can achieve is a few thousand. Indian Idol, the local version of the American show (which is itself an import to the U.S. from the U.K.), inspires national debate and heartbreak, while most people have probably not seen American Idol even once.

But even with this flourishing pop culture, many Indians still crave validation from the West. We see this every year before the Oscars, when a national soap opera unfolds surrounding which film will be chosen to be India’s entry for the foreign-language film category. (Only three Indian entries have ever been nominated, and none has won.)

Read more...

Posted by Amit Varma on 20 April, 2007 in Arts and entertainment | Essays and Op-Eds | India | Journalism | WSJ Pieces

On men who scratch

Q. Why do men scratch themselves in public.

A. Because it’s impolite to scratch other people.

A friend insisted I post on this subject because a man she happened to meet somewhere kept scratching his balls in public. For some reason, she found this objectionable, and felt that I should write a post advising men against such behaviour if they want to impress women. My response: If you give men a choice between scratching themselves and impressing women, they will scratch. Some things are non-negotiable. Deal with it, dude.

Posted by Amit Varma on 20 April, 2007 in Personal | Small thoughts

Shhh, China’s got a secret for you

There are terrorist camps in Pakistan, it seems.

Who would have guessed?

Posted by Amit Varma on 19 April, 2007 in Miscellaneous