Mahalaxmi, the Goddess of Wealth

Heh.

Posted by Amit Varma on 26 February, 2010 in India | Politics

A Metric for Hotness

The WTF headline of the day comes from The Times of India:

Sherlyn gets hotter!

Note the exclamation mark. But no, it’s not the enthusiastic reporting of Sherlyn’s increased hotness that makes this headline WTF, but the metric used to measure it. She is hotter, it seems, because her “new management agency is pitching her as the face of the cover for the most read and most popular lifestyle, fashion and health magazines.” In other words, she is hotter because she has better PR.

I suppose given the state of our media, that makes some kind of perverse sense. Such it goes.

Posted by Amit Varma on 25 February, 2010 in Arts and entertainment | Journalism | Media | WTF

The Elegant Hindu

The WTF Q&A of the day comes from a WSJ interview of Sonia Dara, the first model of South Asian descent to make it to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue:

WSJ: During your shoot in Rajasthan, you posed with some local women who cover their heads, as is local tradition. Did you feel it made them uncomfortable to pose with you in a bikini?

Dara: To be completely honest, I was the one who felt the most uneasy because I thought I was putting the women in a potentially uncomfortable situation. At first glance, the concept of a Hindu girl in Sports Illustrated might seem contradictory. With that in mind, I posed as elegantly as possible, in order to never undermine my Hindu upbringing. I really hope this is made clear in my photos.

Yes, it’s clear. Her pout is Vedic, and her slim figure is surely the result of righteous fasting. Happy now, foreigners?

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And really, who finds such slimness attractive? At best I’d imagine it’s a niche taste. If I was ever to spend quality time with someone so slim, I’d want to feed her, not do naughty-naughty. This is one fad that totally befuddles me.

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On the off chance that you were wondering, this is how she looks without makeup on.

(Links via email from Arun and Madhu.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 22 February, 2010 in India | Journalism | Media | WTF

The Exploding Donkey

In his brilliant book, The Forever War, Dexter Filkins informs us that DBIED can stand for either Dog-Borne Improvised Explosive Device or Donkey-Borne Improvised Explosive Device. In a passage that I feel provides a perfect metaphor for the War on Terror, he writes:

In the fall of 2005 some marines discovered a donkey walking around Ramadi [in Iraq] with a suicide belt on. They didn’t want to kill it, of course, but every time they tried to get close enough to remove the suicide belt, the donkey scampered away. They they tried using a robot, one of those bomb-disposal things, which tried to waddle up to the donkey and defuse the payload, but the robot, too, kept scaring the donkey away. Finally the marines shot the donkey. It exploded.

And so it goes…

Posted by Amit Varma on 20 February, 2010 in Arts and entertainment | Excerpts | Small thoughts

The Three Kinds of Passion

Peter Griffin points me to an interesting post that begins:

The world seems to be split into roughly three different types of people: Those who have a passion for nothing, those who have a passion for one thing and those who have a passion for everything. This way of categorizing is not to cast a value judgement onto any particular group. My informal observation is that aspects such as intelligence, courage, moral fibre and wisdom seem roughly evenly distributed across all three of these groups although it may initially not seem that way. It’s always difficult trying to describe a group with an insider’s perspective if you’re not an insider but I’m going to give it a try… [link]

I think I fall in the second category: I have a passion for “multiple ‘one things’”. Two of them are story-telling and poker, and my passion for both could be considered, quite simply, a passion for understanding human nature. And that is so all-encompassing that maybe I fall in the third category. Whatever.

What about you?

Posted by Amit Varma on 19 February, 2010 in Miscellaneous | Personal

Scheming Brides and Underhand Tactics

The WTF news report of the day surely has to be this one:

Six in ten scheming brides force men to go down on their knees by resorting to underhand tactics, suggests a survey.

[...]

While 32 per cent bullied their partner into proposing by threatening to leave him, 17 per cent sent themselves flowers from a fake admirer to stir up their lover’s jealousy.

It seems this survey was conducted by a British TV channel called Really. See the fun.

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I can’t say why, but I suddenly remembered “The Gift”, the Velvet Underground song. Check it out.

Posted by Amit Varma on 19 February, 2010 in News | WTF

The Lady With the Handbag

Revelation of the day: All of Mayawati’s statues in UP have a handbag included.

This via my friend Anand, who loves making up stuff but insists this is true. And I believe him. It’s too far out to be made up.

Update: This one cracks me up.

Posted by Amit Varma on 18 February, 2010 in India | Politics | WTF

Sisters in the Kitchen

The Times of India reports:

Most young people may have got all romantic this Valentine’s Day, but for this technical institute it was all about brotherly and sisterly love. In what can probably be described as a celebration of V-Day in the spirit of Bhai Dooj, the Ishan Institute of Management and Technology asked its girl students to prepare food for the boys to mark the day.

The underlying motto, as institute chairman DK Garg told the media, was to promote “a culture of knowledge where brothers and sisters could stay together’’. Students said the institute, which believes in strict discipline, had warned them not to get ``carried away’’ on Valentine’s Day.

Well, full marks for being WTF in multiple ways. This is an institute of “management and technology” implying that a woman’s place is in the kitchen. Welcome to the 21st century, and all that.

On another note, given the wisdom of the old adage that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, this plan of promoting “brotherly and sisterly love” might well have backfired. I can imagine one of the boys, Romeo, eating the best mutter-paneer of his life and asking the girl who served him, Juliet, if she made it. ‘Yes,’ she admits, and blushes. He asks her out; they get married; and on the first night after they’re back from the honeymoon, he asks for mutter-paneer. She makes mutter-paneer. He tastes it, and his expression changes. ‘But this is crap,’ he says. ‘You had made it so well on that Valentine’s Day in college.’ And she says, ‘Mutter-paneer? Me? There must be a misunderstanding, I made the palak-paneer. It was Maya who made the mutter-paneer. The pretty girl with the big boobs.’

Anyway, I hope you had a good time yesterday.

(Link via email from Aparna.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 15 February, 2010 in Dialogue | India | News | WTF

How to Seduce an Indian Aunty

There is much fun to be had on Yahoo Answers—and this is as good as it gets. Gender and Women’s Studies indeed!

Posted by Amit Varma on 12 February, 2010 in Miscellaneous

Waving to Nobody

The wonderful excerpt below from “Trail Fever” by Michael Lewis illustrates beautifully the nature of politics and public life. In it, Lewis recounts his experience of travelling with then-vice president Dan Quayle during the election campaign of 1992:

It wasn’t so much what Quayle had said that hooked me. It was what he had done—what the conventions of the campaign trail required him to do. Every few hours of every day, to take a tiny example, the vice president’s campaign plane, Air Force Two, came to rest on the tarmac of a military base on the outskirts of some medium-sized city, and Quayle appeared in the open door. He waved. It was not a natural gesture of greeting but a painfully enthusiastic window-washing motion. Like everyone else in America I had watched politicians do this on the evening news a thousand times. But I had always assumed there must be someone down below to wave at. Not so! Every few hours our vice president stood there at the top of the steps of Air Force Two waving to… nobody; waving, in fact, to a field in the middle distance over the heads of the cameramen, so that the people back home in their living rooms remained comfortably assured that a crowd had turned up to celebrate his arrival.

It is my case that most politics consists of waving to nobody. Someday, as the waving is going on, I’d love to see the cameras turn around and show the empty field. But nah, that won’t happen.

Posted by Amit Varma on 11 February, 2010 in Arts and entertainment | Excerpts | Politics | Small thoughts