Force, Freedom and French Fries...

This is in response to my friend, Jam's post about the recently back-in-force Kashmir agitations..

I choose the 'simple yet straight-forward' reasoning.. "anything that is forced will give away, sooner or later.... ".. And after a point, people just forget the good things... they only have the lingering bad taste of 'force'.

Even though my (our) ego would not agree so easily, we should give away J&K to its own people. After all, every sane individual has a right to self-determination. And if that is what they (the entire state) wants, let them have it. (Well, the truth is that we did not deal with things the past 20 years - so, we are responsible if Kashmiri public opinion turned against India)

Ten days of curfew straight out.. what a waste!! There is so much of money spent on Siachen and in maintaining 'law & order' in J&K.. not to forget the huge amounts of military presence and resources burnt every day.

All in all, let us not waste our energy, prode, fervor, armed forces, resources and money on people that are thankless...

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To quote Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar of Swaminomics fame, "India has sought integration with Kashmir, not colonial rule. But Kashmiris nevertheless demand azaadi. And ruling over those who resent it so strongly for so long is quasi-colonialism, regardless of our intentions.

We promised Kashmiris a plebiscite six decades ago. Let us hold one now, and give them three choices: independence, union with Pakistan, and union with India. Almost certainly the Valley will opt for independence. Jammu will opt to stay with India, and probably Ladakh too. Let Kashmiris decide the outcome, not the politicians and armies of India and Pakistan."

Set them free, if they really want - let them win their way back to being Indians.

Bhaskar

PS: Read the rest of Swami's article here

PPS: Read the Vir Sanghvi's article too to understand how Kashmir is taking advantage of its special status and over the rest of India.

PPPS: Oh.. the french fries? do you remember how US forcefully changed the name of french fries to freedom fries?? well.. that has nothin' to do with the topic... anyway... I just added the fries 'cos it seemed to get the zing into the title ;-)

Bolt from the Yellow and Green!

This guy Usain was just another guy from Jamaica... and then, he was spotted as a blip in the global radar early this year.. when he ran the 100m in 9.72sec at the Reebok Grand Prix.

Until just over a year ago, Bolt had not run in a senior 100 metres race. A few days earlier at Beijing, Bolt set the world record in 100m - running it in a 'more gas to burn' 9.69sec. (You could see this guy celebrating some 15m from the finish line).

And then, yesterday, he broke the world record in 200m sprint as well.

Watch him run the 200m in 19.30sec!!!!


Here is his 'zero to hero' story, in the words of the Sports Illustrated.... "On a sweltering August night 12 years ago, Michael Johnson lashed the 200-meter world record to his back and seemed to drag it deep into the future. He ran 19.32 seconds, so fast that young men accepted that they would not see the record broken again in their lifetimes.

Usain Bolt was 9 years old on that night, growing up tall and skinny -- "I was tall when I was little,'' says Bolt -- in Trelawny Parish on the north shore of Jamaica, an hour's drive from the vacation resorts of Montego Bay and Ocho Rios. He loved to play cricket with his friends, and if he was talented, he was also a little lazy.

But one afternoon two years later, he ran too fast at a school field day and found himself on the track team, because Jamaica will compel a sprinter to sprint. Somewhere a clock began ticking, counting down the life of Johnson's record, unseen and unknown, but inexorable.

At the age of 12, Bolt ran 52 seconds flat for 400 meters on a grass track in Manchester, Jamaica. He won the world junior 400-meter title at age 16, beating athletes who were four years older. He was impossibly precocious. "We knew what was coming,'' said Bert Cameron, a Jamaican national coach who was also the 400-meter world champion in 1983.

On Wednesday night in the Olympic Stadium called the Bird's Nest, Bolt ran 19.30 seconds to take down Johnson's world record. (In 1996 Johnson broke the previous record by .34.) Four days after celebrating 15 meters from the finish while winning the 100-meter gold medal in a world record 9.69 seconds, Bolt tore all the way through the line -- even dipping his chest slightly -- to win his second gold medal. He became the eighth man in history to complete the Olympic 100/200 double and the first to do it with two world records; not since Don Quarrie (also a Jamaican) in 1976 has one man simultaneously held both sprint records."

To catch the rest of the story.... click here!

The Indian Conundrum

Thanks to Rajeev for this poem on Olympics and the Indian Conundrum

The Indian Conundrum

E pluribus unum
That ought to be OUR motto say some.
A billion plus people we are,
Yet we have but one Olympic star.

Brimming with pride we get excited,
Make oaths and promises unrequited.
Every four years repeated, it is a disease,
A swear, a promise then back into deep freeze.

A committee will certainly be formed,
Of which a sub-committee will deform.
Money apportioned will surely go astray,
Ah! Satyameva Jayate.

Easy fix we have, on cricket let's put the blame,
In Europe, isn't soccer just the same?
They make Olympic gold in spite or despite it,
While we lay blame, shake our heads and sit.

Infrastructure will come once perceptions change,
When sports and academics are in the same range…
Your young ones, when inspired by your running feat,
Out of one will rise many with glory replete.

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A saying goes that you have to be the change, not just want it...by running you inspire and when you inspire your bring change...so keep at it - in our own small way we do what we have to.

Rajeev

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cross-posted on my running blog

Gold dream....!!

India wins its first Gold medal in an individual event at the Olympics....!!!!

Finally, after 60 years of her existence, Abhinav Bindra won her the first gold in 10 metres air rifle event in the ongoing Beijing olympics. Read more...

Been a long wait... Still, its a great achievement by this young lad.. Time to shine!!!


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I am gonna kill my downstairs' neighbor... His snores are keeping me awake.... Anyways, I took some time to blog.... Pray for me guys...

High Fidelity

I saw this John Cusack movie a couple of days ago.... It was highly recommended by a like-minded friend... And it did live up to the name...

Its a movie on the music scene... romance in the times of Bruce Springsteen... If you appreciate music (new-age) or appreciate those that appreciate music, you should definitely watch the movie... (If you know it all, stay away... ;-) I have been exposed to quite some music through my colleagues and friends... I enjoyed the peek into the vast sonic world....

And I found a post that echoed some of my after-thoughts.... And he has penned it long and interesting... So, here you are...
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From this other blog

When I first saw the film High Fidelity I knew of the book and I knew it was about music, but I didn't know what it was actually about. I spent much of the preceeding day singing the chorus from The Kids From Fame song under my breath 'High Fidelity ... high ... ha ... high .. ha ha .. high high ... ' (I do this sometimes when I'm working up to see a film - Jane Campion's masterpiece was reduced to 'La, la, la, la Piano, Piano ...'). But once it was over it went straight into my all time top five films about people like me.

I immediately went out and read the book, loved everything about it despite being incredibly difficult to follow at times because the film characters were in my head and some of them are wildly different on the printed page. Then somewhere along the line the two experiences merged and I imagined that some of the scenes from the book had actually been in the film and vice-versa. Marie De Salle didn't sing at Championship Vinyl in the film any more than that version of Sarah Kendrew appeared in the novel. So buying the DVD the day it came out was something of a culture shock as the gates of filmic reality came crashing down.

As always, DVD solidifies all the reasons I loved the film at the cinema but also offers the chance to see all the details that I'd missed then. So we come to the top five list of things I missed when seeing High Fidelity at the cinema and which make me love the film even more. In ascending order ...

Number five ... lip liner. In the scene were Rob gets Laura to admit to a full 9% chance that they could get back together, I spend a lot of the scene looking at Laura's lips and the fragments of liner at the edges. In a film which is filled with unrealistic elements it feels like a moment of realism. I'm not sure if it's a mistake or a really attentive make up artist creating character details. If it is the latter it ties into comfortably into the speech with Rob gives at the end of the film about how he's sick of fantasy women and he wants to settle for the realism. Laura doesn't have perfect make up and that's why he loves her.

Number four. It's the editing, or rather the editing of the to-camera narration. If all this was edited into chronological order it would make less sense than 21 Grams. Taking the Marie De Salle incident, having found out Laura hasn't slept with Ray, he turns to the camera and says 'I feel good ... I feel great ... I feel like a new man ... I feel so much better in fact ... that I go straight out ... and sleep with Marie De Salle.' Cut to a post coital De Salle, and Rob pointing to camera from the bed 'How could this have happened you ask?' He's giving a voice over straight to camera like someone relating a story around a camp fire or over a beer in the past tense while the action is happening. He's telling the story to us while its happening to him, showing us what happened. It should be confusing but it really works. It's an unbelievably trixy thing to be doing in a Touchstone film and one of the early signs that mainstream film was wising up to the indie ethic.

Number three ... it's about film. Actually it's about anything that people have an obsession about. It's equally about stamp collecting, football and trainspotting. When I saw the movie, I thought I was getting bums rush because I didn't understand many of the music references. Then I tried substituting them for film references and realized that I was in the same bracket of these people. There aren't many regular people who can make a stab at putting Woody Allen's films in order by year, or the films which John Cusack and his mate Jeremy Priven haven't been in together (of which High Fidelity is one). It's about storing useless facts about nothing them looking down on people who don't know this stuff.

Number two, the track listing of the Marie De Salle album. Pause your DVD as Rob places the disc in his hifi and glory at the woman's musical range.

(1) Baby I Love Your Way [which is a given because its in the film and she sings it really well.]
(2) Patsy Cline Times Two [which later in the film she refers to as Eartha Kitt Times Two. But I'm not nitpicking in that way. There there is the rest ...]

(3) Ghostbusters
(4) Beat It
(5) Baby Got Back
(6) 911 Is A Joke
(7) I Will Survive
(8) Mmm Bop
(9) My Heart Will Go On
(10) You Can't Have It
(11) The Time Is Now

Now who wouldn't want to see her version of some of those songs. Such range. Is the joke that if she can make Peter Frampton sound good, Hanson are a walk in the park? These tracks were picked for a reason but since the DVD lacks a commentary we'll never know whose joke it was. And now for ...

... number one in the top five and the deleted scene which is the point of this new series of articles.

High Fidelity: Records For Sale

It's one of the great scenes in the book and was shocked when I read it because they hadn't included it in the film. Rob is invited around to an expensive house where a rich woman bent on revenge tries to castrate her husband musically by selling his singles collection off for peanuts. When Rob starts to delve in he realizes it's a collectors dream, a hundred items which he thought he would never see in his life. Rare pressings on original labels, that kind of thing. To buy or not to buy. It's about honour amongst collectors (even if they're shits) and fits in with one of the book's themes about how music has little to do with what you are its who you are.

So it was a revelation to see it on the dvd and its just the lovely funny thing which really does the book pages justice. It even has the well known face of Beverly D'Angelo as the scorned woman. And when you see it the first time you wonder why it wasn't included in the film - it would be one of the scenes people would be talking about when they left the cinema or years later at the pub because its one of those stories any collector has about the one that got away.

There problem is its four minutes long and to include it in the film would have slowed it to a standstill at just the wrong moment - I think it should gave gone in just after Joan Cusack calls him a 'fucking asshole'. And that would be wrong because the transition from that to Rob's revelations about why Laura broke up with him are perfect. Also it doesn't feel like the rest of the film, which takes place in roughly the one neighbourhood and for the tone of the film it's important to maintain that mood. Also it doesn't make any sense - right the way through we hear that Rob has no money and suddenly he can pull £1100 out to buy the singles - it's a capital investment but were are you getting it from? Laura's loan? Isn't that spent already?

All of which said it does have a delicious ending. He talks D'Angelo into selling him an Otis Reading for $50. She asks him if he saw The Sex Pistols (original pressing of God Save The Queen). He says he did. 'It's free ...' She says and we cut away. We never find out how scrupulous Rob actually is ... What would you do?

Pat comes the reply!

If you have been following the US presidential nominations... you might have know about the McCain campaign using the picture of Paris Hilton in an Ad - to showcase that Obama is a celebrity and that celebrities cannot run a nation... in this case, the world's only superpower (well!)

Well... that was a poorly executed campaign ad... And as with all bad marketing, this also backfired...

check out this awesomely funny retort from Paris on the 'world's oldest celebrity'!!!
If not anything, she has a great PR guy!!

"Meet you at the debate, bitches!!!"

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

SF Marathon

Some 'public' pics from the SF Marathon this Sunday, Aug 3, 2008. I did not run.. I just went to cheer my friends that did!





And for those that think I missed their picture, here is yours as a group!!! ;-)



Cross-posted on my running blog