Celebrity Musings

Next thing we might read about Bachan family's trips to the water closet or toilet. The bahu rani goes around flaunting her body in France and the moment they return to India she acts like this sati-savitri head to toe covered bahu. What people wouldn't do for publicity and limelight after aging????????????????? Aishwarya bounced from one boyfriend to another and finally tied the knot to someone who's got a famous last name. That's one way to ensure fame and popularity after she stops working. (She is not a good actress) Amir Khan wants to be in the news because he's been out of the acting circuit for a while. I am sick and tired of watching remakes of Hollywood movies, Hindi remakes of South Indian films. Priyadarshan thinks casting Akshay Kumar or Paresh Rawal in a comic role in a South Indian remake would make a hit film. Just because some things sound funny in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam or Kannada doesn't mean it would have the same effect in Hindi. Filmmakers argue they chose exotic locations to entice the slum dwellers in India. How many Hindi movies were filmed in Switzerland or Canada in the sixties or seventies? Those movies with their melodious, ear-pleasing songs were entertaining to Indians. So why this shift to women in scanty clothing, flaunting their bodies, singing ridiculous songs running around in navel-displaying sarees in snowy locales while the males are bundled up head to toe in the Hindi movies? How many folks in India walk around in their houses dressed in expensive clothes, lots of jewelry and lots of make-up and drive a new car every day of the week? How many people live in palatial homes in India? There are people in India who were poor in 1947 and are still living in poverty without access to electricity, clean water, medical care. The affluent people have a servant to clean their unmentionables in India but there are people who still live not knowing where their next meal is coming from or where they will sleep for the night. There is palm greasing going on at each and every level of government and non-government agencies. Every so often an actor or actress will try to publicise the plight of so called disadvantaged people but after that day no one pays any attention to the disadvantaged folks. Everyone from stewards in Jet Airways to desk crew at airports, office employees to people riding overcrowded buses and trains have nothing to offer but RUDENESS. Those who can afford to send their kids to expensive schools in hopes of making them doctors and engineers even though they might be employing child laborers in their houses to do jobs they are too lazy to do. Try looking at India beyond the sarees and vehicles and opulent houses. Try getting an LPG connection, phone lines repaired, electricity restored to your house, getting a street lamp installed near the house, navigating through knee deep rain water through the muddy roads near big houses. There are people still burning wood and charcoal to cook and clean and pollute the environment. There are still people who think boys are better than girls. There might be boys and girls dating but caste, skin color, status, money rule Indian society today as much as it did several years ago. Indians go abroad, live in shanties and save and send money to family in India. We are a nation full of intelligent doctors and engineers and yet our very own democractic nation does nothing for its down-trodden population. Everyone sets out to make money and politics and acting become their means of livelihood. How many actors and politicians do you think actually help Indians? They might make donations here and there to get tax breaks or for publicity when their movies are about to be released. How many Aishwaryas, Jayas, Amitabhs, Shabanas, Prietys, Ambanis, Mittals, Julias, Pitts or Katrinas do you see going around wiping snot off kids living in slums, getting them a proper place to live, providing education for however long the kids want to. Should we teach our kids to be bullies just so they can get ahead in life under the pretense of competition? Should we teach our kids to be generous when it befits them? Should we teach our kids to put themselves first before thinking about others. All of us are selfish one way or another. We all have lunches and dinners to network, use ourselves. Should we teach our kids to be narrow minded geeks who get used by their own parents? We are always trying to please someone. Who is that..................................

SPARE A THOUGHT!!!!!

In the new India , everything is shiny , new , sleek and costly especially our cars , till they stop at the Red light and you find so many eager faces begging for money !! There will be a couple of boys , all around 8-10 years old , one pregnant woman with a child , one small girl with hands that remain wet somehow in the heat of the afternoon and in a distance , if you are sharp , you can see a man lounging or watching with keen eyes the goings-on !! Familier discription ? It is the same sight all over India in its metros , almost as if there were a common script to it all !! probably it is . India , with its teeming millions is a place ripe for business , of all sorts and begging is BIG , if big it can be !! But finally , just spare a thought for the poor boy or girl forced to become a part of this mafia for no fault of his.


We pay taxes , social cess , road cess , kargil cess and so many taxes that the government is overflowing with funds , so much so that it is able to take , many a time impractical decisions at our cost !! Why cant Poor houses be made in our cities , why cant the poor , forced to beg , be made to work in our infrastructure projects that are so woefully short of manpower of all sorts !! lets spare a thought and let us ask our representatives what will they do about this ?? Lets spare a thought a give a brighter future to such kids !!

JUST MY RAMBLINGS!!!!!

Ah’m back! I can’t help sounding like Arnold Schwarzenegger. The absence from the blog space was not particularly because of any x, y or z reason. Nothing has kept me overtly occupied.

I remain partially employed, footloose, contemplating what to do, how to become a cleave cat with a fat bank balance, still looking for direction, chasing dreams. With another birthday hovering on my head these words (looking for direction) sound feeble and trite, as if they have been plucked out of from the thought process of a moronic child. Sometime things seem to be closing in on me.

Why should I come to terms with the whole world and meet the standards?

Quite a few like me would understand what I’m trying to say and others can call me a clueless goof.

Normally when it comes to writing, I have an odd sense of compulsion to write about certain scruffy villains, the recent one being religious fundamentalism, mob molestation, social snobbery, Modi and the Moditva. I don’t want to talk about them. Why should I bullshit the bullshitter? Enough egg has been scrambled on the face of the squalor of Indian Politics. Mob molesters once again proved how unsafe and underpowered women are. The religious fundamentalist were woefully wrong in their prognostication. Democracy did not die with Benazir in Pakistan.

On my scattered desk I can see the picture of an activist of Samajwadi Party, who set himself ablaze during his party's protest in Delhi against Uttar Pradesh chief minister. I do not want to go into the rights and wrongs of the particular case but I feel sorry for the family of this gentleman whose existence has been reduced to few lines on a national daily newspaper and had 60 seconds slot on the national channel. What good has he done to his party or the sobbing family he left behind? Arrant Nonsense. I do not want to discuss this either.

From the window of my study, the sunshine paves it way. The orange rays flirt with my face. I wonder how all my fears dissolve in the sunlight. A brighter day is all that i pray for. I can hear tweaking of a child’s balloon and flap of pigeon’s wing. Everything looks fine. There is peace inside me. God has been fairly kind. In life some things that happen are at times beyond us, we don’t have an answer. There are many scores of faces I have added to my existence in all these years. There are people, I wish to meet again and thankfully there is no one I feel I should have never met.

I presume this is life. Why we tend to ignore small pleasures and hunt for the jackpot. Does one need to put life on hold and search for happiness outside the confines of daily existence? Why people like me run amok in the pursuit of elusive happiness. Life is meant to be lived in phases. Kabhi khushi kabhi gham. The forthcoming khushi is my cousin’s wedding. The imminent gham is her leaving home.

What’s bothering me is that there would be no one to disturb me from deep slumber, with whom I would bicker about creating mess in the room and I wouldn’t be sending the standard text message “ when will you reach home” in the evening.

I am absorbed in my own thoughts, and the view outside somehow enters my absorptions. The 100 watt smile frame on the screensaver catches my attention. In the 19 sheltered years of my life, I have never known anything remotely resembling tragedy. Last year in October when my dog died, it stuck me hard. She did everything ordinary with an extraordinary effect. It takes merely few minutes to fade away. What leaves behind is the impression we create and the human lives we touch.

Why hacks like me still wonder what to do with their existence ?

MyopicThoughts

I’ve been short-sighted since my early teens. My parents didn’t take me seriously when I first complained about not being able to read the blackboard in the classroom,or the numbers on the public buses. They refused to believe that I couldn’t see clearly- firstly they themselves had a 20-20 vision and secondly because nobody in my family had any problems with the vision and because my parents are strong believers in genes and their potency to hand down traits, both physical and mental. And then as a child I loved trying on other people’s glasses. They assumed that I was angling to get my own set of glasses. I admit that there was some truth to their belief , because as a child I genuinely thought ( acually even now I do……..!)that people who wore glasses looked intelligent,scholarly and other-worldly.

I finally got my own pair after a couple of mishaps due to poor vision. As I was growing up I was dismayed at the associations in the English languague that people with my kind of vision problems encounter. I bristled when I realised that to be labelled ‘short sighted’ is a pejorative term and to be myopic is equally bad. The implications are that me and my ilk are bad at planning and donot think ahead.

In contrast people who have a similar but opposite medical condition of poor eyesight due to a refractive error –far-sightedness or hyperopia- are sitting pretty because the associations are laudatory and positive. Far-sighted people are by definition, well…far-sighted and good at planning, looking ahead and such things.

In india 7% of the total population (largely due to paucity of funds leading to not testing of optical disorders ,I suspect) to a high of 67% in Australia. Studies show that the incidence of short sightedness increases with the level of education with doctoral students reporting the highest levels-above 80%.

So it turns out that I was right about my correlation between intelligence and myopia!!!!!
Short sighted and myopic people of the world-lets unite and insist on a change in the phrase used to describe our condition in English languague. We have nothing to lose.

The innocence I have lost

I see the girl, she has a handsome boy on her side, caressing her like a baby............
I might not have anyone to wipe off my tears when am sad but am not jealous of her.........

I see the girl; she has all the money by her side to get her every creature comfort he may ever want.....
I might not have enough to buy me a pair of reputed jeans or shoes but am not jealous of him either........

I see the girlwho looks as if god carved her when he thought of creating a master piece......
I don’t not like seeing my lifeless impression casted in the mirror everyday but still am not jealous...........

And then I see little children’s playing in the rain in the streets wide opened, stretching their hands to feel the pouring rain...........
I can’t feel the rain as they do because I have to bear the price of being grown up and for the first time I feel jealous.........

I see them playing the games of childhood which splashes their innocent hearts with the rain of joy in the same way when I was innocent like them........
Greed, jealousy, lust, anger play wicked games in my mind now. Am not innocent anymore and am jealous of the innocence they have in them........

I look at their faces filled with feelings and emotions so rare and genuine like gems which I myself treasured when i was like them..........
But the mask I wear daily now to hide the ugly face I have inside has made the gems disappear and I am jealous for loosing those gems.........

I see them and I just keep on seeing them, playing in the little paradise they have created around themselves.......
And they don’t bother about dark forces of life which would inevitably turn the paradise in to hell one day like
It changed mine and I am jealous of the paradise they still have.................
And then I go near them and say to them "be like this forever and ever"................
They don’t seem to understand me and they keep playing................

And then I walk away from the magical world of innocence they rule to the sinful world of which am a slave............
And I realize that the most sinful act god can ever do to you, is not that he made u a human but is the curse that u will have to grow up one day...............