Monthly Archives: May 2009

The Indian P League Roundup

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[Big post]

Lalit Modi, in a mood of justifiable self-congratulation, gets into an Oscar acceptance speech mode. The South African president drones on and on, putting our neta-log to shame. And just when you decide to doze off, in comes mega-star Akon (unnecessary trivia: thrice married) singing “Smack that”, a romantic tribute to ethereal love that summarizes the spirit of IPL in a way no other song can.

Smack that, all on the floor
Smack that, give me some more
Smack that, ’til you get sore
Smack that, oh ooh
I’ma call her then I put the mack down
Money? No problem, pocket full of that now

Yes. The IPL has smacked “that” all on the floor. So much so that many of us have gotten sore but as the song says, we still want more.

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A Quiz Annoucement (Updated)

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Event: Asha For Education Quiz 2009
Time:   5.30pm, May 30, 2009
Location: Busch Campus Center Multipurpose Room,
Rutgers University, 604 Bartholomew Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854
Entry fee: USD 5 for non-Rutgers students.
Team size=2
Quizmaster: Me.
[website]

I will be at Rutgers, New Brunswick on 30th May from around 5pm as the quiz-master of the Asha For Education quiz, an event I have participated in when I was a student at Stonybrook.

It is going to be a masala quiz, kind of in the spirit of RTDM. No vague connections. A lot of pop culture. An almost exclusive focus on India.

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A Few Thoughts On the Elections

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Some thoughts on the Indian Lok Sabha Elections 2009: [long long post]

Thought 1: It is inevitable that the significance of something as complicated as the Indian elections gets reduced to simple sentences for the sake of comprehension. The one that I have heard being repeated several times is that Lok Sabha elections 2009 are a decisive verdict against region-based politics—that somehow the Indian electorate , as a whole, has sent out a strong message against the “Give my state (and us politicians of course) a special package in exchange for the ten MPs I have and screw the national interest” wheel-dealing that has characterized the rise of the regional parties. And that “all India” parties, and more specifically the grand-daddy of them, the Congress has secured a decisive mandate for “national politics”.

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Beammie Up Scotty

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[Long post]

The early 80s. On a Sunday morning, they came into my life. The pointy-eared man. The original serial kisser. The sardonic doctor. The Aye Aye captain engineer. The adventures of the star-ship Enterprise.

Strange creatures. New planets. The transporter. Tractor beams. Red alert. All hands to deck. Incoming Incoming !!! Sparks flying. Warp factor. Fire photon torpedoes.

I was too young then to understand everything about Star Trek. But I fell in love with the idea of space explorers, facing the most extreme of challenges  jumping from one planet to another.

Then in 1985 I came to Canada. Where I saw more of Star Trek. And started reading Star Trek fiction, which the local library had enormous quantities of. At the age of ten, a bit more mature than when I first saw Star Trek, I was able to look beyond the alien masks and the explosions and the “thrills” and became drawn to the themes of friendship ,trust and universal co-existence that Star Trek embodied. I enjoyed thoroughly the verbal jousts about logic and emotion between Kirk and the Doctor on one side and Spock on the other.

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Sugar Sweet

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Many people blame calories which are actually not the real culprit. Had that been the case, sugar would have never been considered fattening since it contains only 15-20 calories per teaspoon. Says dietician Honey Shah, “Going by the calorie count of sugar, people having sweets should never be fat. So it’s not the calorie count, but the ingredients present in the food (carbohydrates, fat, protein etc) that really matters.

[Link]

A dietitian who disses sugar —her name is Honey Shah. And that my friends is what is known as “irony”.

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Cricket Jockeys

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Muralidharan, one of the greatest bowlers of the modern game, tosses up a doosra. With the match over for all intents and purposes and with an asking rate of 20.00 per over, the tail-ender swings across the line. The shot flies straight down mid-wicket’s throat. Murali looks tired and bored as he trudges to the boundary line noiselessly.

Bored and tired.

I am sorry did I say that?

No of course not.

Commentator 1 (in an voice shaking with excitement): That is a Citi moment of success…..Muralidharan tells the batsman Hasta La Vista

Commentator 2 (doubly excited and adding his own smart touch) :  I think “baby” goes at the end of that.

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The Middle Finger

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Amitabh shows his middle finger to the nation. Dhoni shows his middle finger to Amitabh. And urban India shows its middle finger to participatory democracy by rocking the vote with abysmal attendance. (Bombay does 43%, Bangalore does 46%, Lucknow does 35% [link])

While there are some arguments (a collection of them here)why this number is deflated (the actual proportion of people voting is claimed to be higher), this is still a rather abysmal.  As an aside, if we had the figures, you would probably find that the proportion of people with high-school degrees who voted in urban areas would be much much lesser than even the 40%]

The real reason most educated urbanites are reluctant to vote is , I believe,  it takes way too much effort to get out of bed and stand in a long line on a hot day. Having spent much of one’s adult life standing in various sorts of queues— electric bill, motor vehicles, LPG—this is one queue where one’s presence is optional. Hence it is avoided.

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