From the past

• Life - Lines

  December 21, 2006, 10:30
  Many a times, I feel life is a straight line. It goes on and on and on. No change in direction. Just keeps going on in a monotonous manner. Then one day a change comes by. You are no longer seeing things you saw yesterday. Today everything looks new. You wish you could get back to the safe yesterday. But it is too late. Some one has decided to draw a new line. You have no choice but look in the new direction and get used to things. You fight it out and in due course manage to get back to normalcy, which soon degrades into monoton-ity. These changes are too abrupt. Why can’t life be more evenly spread out with lesser number of peaks and troughs?
• Interviews with Gen Musharraf

  December 11, 2006, 17:18
  This was one more of those weekends when Gen. Musharraf gave a piece of his mind to us Indians. I am so tired of this man expounding his imaginative theories on the Kashmir issue and improvement of Indo-Pak ties. Of course, I can not blame the General for this. The problem lies with all our channels (or is it just NDTV?) who go up to him every two months and ask for a piece of his mind. Over the past years, this friendly neighborhood leader has let out suggestion, theories and other whatevers, which we in India either find obnoxious or worse still these are usually diametrically opposite to what the General does in practice. To top it, General's recent book (a wonderful book that is usually stacked under the fiction section, I hear) was filled with "facts" on Indo-Pak relations that would have fit very well into any episode of X-files. So why the hell is Prannoy Roy spending so much time airing interviews with Gen. Musharraf? Worse still, he forgot to put in the laugh track.
• Reservations - What the hell!

  June 12, 2006, 11:25
  A man is lost in a desert. He has not eaten for the past two weeks and hunger is driving him nuts. He is desperately searching for food. Suddenly in the horizon he sees an approaching caravan. The man rejoices; he runs towards the caravan with all his remaining strength. As the caravan closes in, he is amazed by its richness. “I am saved” he thinks. Soon the caravan stops. Its fat master steps out and tells the starving man “My god! How weak and worn out you look? You seem to have starved for years. Take this bag and eat its contents.” The master steps back in and the caravan leaves.
  
  The man is flabbergasted. He had expected a ride with the caravan to the next town, but the caravan master did not bother to listen to him. Once again he was stranded in the big bad desert. The man opened the bag. It contained another bag. Inside the second bag he found a box, which he opened hungrily. At the bottom of the box, lay a small object. The man picked up the object. It felt cold. He tore open the paper cover and found a cup of ice cream. The disappointment was enough to kill him immediately.
  
  Sukhi woke up early in the morning. Like every other day, he and his four young sons had very little time to reach his master fields. There he toiled till late in the evening. This ensured that his family could fill half their stomachs one time a day. Sukhi did not realize that today was a special day for him and his caste-mates. The Government had reserved another 27% seats for his caste members for post graduate courses at different institutes and colleges in India. So now he could educate his sons at IIT.
  
  The doors of IIT were always open for Sukhi’s sons and for every other person in India. The only problem was that you had to study hard and needed to have a flair for problem solving to get into this premier institute. But now the Government has decided that the years of oppression faced by forefathers of many of the “lower castes” can be made up by just lowering the marks required in the entrance examinations to these institutes. The problem is that Sukhi’s sons and many others belonging to his caste (and many other castes) will still not be able to make it into these prestigious institutes (or any other institute or college for that matter) anyway.
  
  Sukhi and his sons live in utter poverty. They continue to be oppressed by their higher caste masters. They are forced to work all the time to stay alive. Education, school, college and IIT are the last things they care for. They are fighting hard for their meal everyday. The Government and its reservations make no difference to him. If he could wish, he would want a better mean of livelihood. To start with he would want one full meal a day, then the removal of oppression from his masters and many other such wishes. Somewhere in the middle would be the wish to educate his sons. If at all he gets to that point, he would have realized that there are no schools anyplace close to send his sons to. There are many barriers between Sukhi’s sons and IIT. It is obvious but the “by the people, for the people” Governments turn a blind eye towards the problem. What the hell is the point giving a tiny dessert to a man dying of hunger?
  
  What the hell were you thinking Caravan master?
• Why I hate Dan Brown!

  June 08, 2006, 13:18
  Some years back, I am not sure how many though, the title “Da Vinci Code” came into my notice. The papers had something about a book by this title, but some how it never interested me. I associated it with that dumb book on how the Bible has hidden messages for anyone who reads the fifth, eighteenth, thirty fifth and ninety ninth words or letters or something of that sort. So it came as a surprise when I saw in the news papers that “The Da Vinci Code” will be made as a movie. That is when I decided to find out more on the book. My initial idea, based entirely on a Mona Lisa cover of the book I saw some place, was that the book messed around with Christianity using Mona Lisa and Da Vinci.
  
  A month before the release of the movie I saw this book at my sister’s place. So I grabbed the book and started to read. I finished it off in a week, which by my one book in two months standard, was a record. My reactions on the books were mixed. It was like reading a Grisham novel – The book grips you as long as you read it but at the end you end up feeling “is that all? Why were all those pages, chases, murderer, murders, dead bodies and words required for such a tepid ending”. The other problem with the book, it seemed like a not so good take on Robert Ludlum’s novels. Ludlum’s novels go at a break neck speed and you ending panting for breath by the end of it. “Parsifal Mosaic” (my first Ludlum) and “Bourne Identity” are my favorite thrillers. But “Da Vinci code” does not ever reach those heights.
  
  The problems with “Da Vinci” were many; at times the clues and riddles seem silly. Most of the times, the going seem quite easy for the lead pair. To give you an instance, the first escape from Louvre is almost ridiculous – both the persons have enough time to go and forth in the Louvre. To top it they escape from there quite easily. Almost every other dangerous situation gets resolved easily. Right down to the confrontation with the villain. The villain it self remains in the shadows for long and is one of the suspenseful elements of the story. But by the end I got an inkling of who it is and by the time of revelation and the eventual confrontation I was past my biggest disappointment with the book. As I mentioned earlier, it is all too very convenient for the lead pair.
  
  All this does not make this a bad book; it is a decent thriller and has tons of historical data that should pick ones curiosity to know more. It is precisely for these reasons that I picked up Dan Brown’s earlier book “Angels and Demons”. But at the end of the first few pages I realized that both these books follow the same pattern. Late night visit/phone call and dragging an uninvolved Professor into a messy historical affair seem too similar. Anyway, I continue to read “Angels and Demons”.
  
  But of course, all these are not the reasons for my hating Dan Brown. I was waiting quite eagerly to watch the movie. I thought it will be interesting to see many of these cool historical concepts. And then watching Tom Hanks is always great. But the morons who sit in the chair of power have other ideas. Many of them have gone ahead and banned this movie. Dan Brown, all these problems would not have risen if you had not written this book. I hate you, Dan Brown.