We don't need no India Shining

thats probably what the IIMs want to be singing after the govt slashed their fee structure..... i am actually confused, and have very ambivalent thoughts on the issue...on one hand, i dont like the govt sticking its hands into something thats an established brand, and has shown thats its perfectly capable of handling its business, it looks like they wanna have a share of a good thing, maybe even use that in the 'india shining' campaign.... on the other hand, i also feel that a govt influence might make the IIMs more accessible....

btw, the election commission has warned the govt not to spend the revenue from taxes for the campaign, so we might get a breather.. :-)

speaking of IIMs, i just had a thought, humankind protests against all kinds of disparities - race, sex, age etc..but arent institutions like IIMs promoting discrimination based on intellectual aptitude.... at every level of academic life, we strive to take tests and pass, arent we therefore subjecting ourselves to a screening for checking our levels of intellect....they are just standards that suit the majority... i get admission in a good college coz i performed well in school, i get a good job coz i did well in college, the list goes on....but what gives us the right to discriminate against those who arent as bright?? ... is it right to condemn them to a life of misery, self doubt and frustration just because they cant utilise their brains to the extent we can?? but we do, coz if we dont, a lot of existing systems would crash!!

saw "plan" during the weekend, expectations were close to nil coz of the reviews, but surprise, surprise, it wasnt that bad, which goes to show that you cant trust reviews all the time....sanjay dutt seems to be perfecting the 'comic don' character.... the movie has some corny shayari, courtesy, dutt and mahesh manjrekar, who has also done a good job..think this one takes the cake "sher ke saamne sher bolne se chooha sher nahi banta; bache paida karne hote hain, god lene se koi baap nahi banta"....... :-)

been reading a whole cartload of articles on 'outsourcing', am actually wondering whether He has outsourced sustenance to someone, that would answer a lot of questions regarding the way humankind is evolving, the 'quality' issues....btw, have a look at this link, a good read.which brings me to

manuscrypts triviadont remember where i got it from, but its good

In The Adventures of Griswald Gnome: A Fairy Tale for Children of all Ages, the magician gnome starts by saying, "I am a Peristaltic Basaltic Cabalist.""A reformed deformer, searcher for research, a regrind grinder, one who once faltered, but reflated and did rejoin as a joiner. If I might presume, I'm going to lecture you. This statement is my testament: my supreme objective is to preserve the perverse,"and the usual quotes

"To a large degree reality is whatever the people who are around at the time agree to."~ Milton Miller

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. ~ Einstein

Guest appearances on my own blog

Thats what it has come to, as the time between each post gets longer...once upon a time, it was a daily ritual.... but i cant bring myself to write something everyday just for the heck of writing it, i dont think i can be the 'daily writing' kinda guy anymore...the interim budget is likely to add more gloss to the 'shining india'... inspite of everything, i still believe that the shine should happen in my mind, and not stare back at me each time a i pick a newspaper or watch television.....by the way, read this and this if you are interested in the topic

i watched "LoC" and "Khakee".. for the guys who said 'whats that", they are just two movies, extra special because the former has more than a dozen stars, and the latter has four.... judging by the number of "behen****" and "ma*******" in LoC , it is fair to say that the censor board has become more lenient, not a very 'must see' movie , if you discount the stars..but it did convey to me the kind of life a soldier leads, just so that me and my countrymen sleep in peace....."

khakee' was good, trashed a whole lot of bollywood cliches, showed the characters as raw human beings, not even the 'shades of grey' that bollywood usually says it has now, but normal human beings....

i am not a follower of Superbowl but this image certainly caught my attention :-)....intentional or not is still being debated, but what the hell, theres nothing called bad publicity!!Some kind soul needs to give me tips on my blog's aesthetics, no cash here, only good publicity and loads of appreciation..hehe

now, i know it isnt a burning question, but this is a good article on whether you have a journal or blog....will leave you with

manuscrypts trivia

will continue with three good quotes , first two by Einstein and the last by Gandhi

"The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives. "

"Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for insects as well as for the stars. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance. "

"There is more to life than increasing its speed."

The Divine brief

This is the problem when you break a routine, it is difficult to get back into it........once upon a short time ago, i used to make the blog a part of my everyday routine, but i took a break, and now i cant get back to it.....its a different issue altogether whether the constraint is ability or desire........

saw two movies this weekend, "the league of extraordinary gentlemen" and "calcutta mail"....the former was very good, though the movie was a lil bit too centred around sean connery, i dont know if i am having an indian bias when i say that naseeruddin shah was a bit sidelined, but considering that almost all the transportation of the league was taken care of by him ( there was this scene when he shows (i think) sawyer, a car, and says "i call this an automobile", and sawyer asks, 'yeah, but what is it?"..) i think part of the movie's charm was its 1899 setting......"calcutta mail" was also good...it had shades of sudhir misra's earlier movie "is raat ki subah nahi", but still i think the kolkata visuals and a good performance from anil kapoor made up for it...

i read somewhere that "kal ho na ho" is a remake of 'anand', the hrishikesh mukherjee movie with rajesh khanna and amitabh bachan, whatever i heard of the title track is good, cds release this 27th, i think i will buy it...also want to check out 'tehzeeb', since the music is by rehman...

now , if you wondering what the title was all about, for any project undertaken, theres a brief given, so before earth getting created God must have got a brief....if we could get that brief, a lot of 'why' questions about this world would be answered.....for copyrights purposes, although i had this idea some time ago, the immediate inspiration to mention it came from a site i mentioned in my last blog...............reminds me of the song by joan osborne "what if god were one of us?..........."okay, thats enuff for the day, here's

manuscrypts trivia

a good forward i got....There’s a bunch of doctors gathered together at a doctor’s convention one night. A male doctor notices a female doctor from across the room. The female doctor notices also and the next thing you know, they’re sitting next to each other by the end of dinner.After dinner, the male asks the woman if she wants to go up to his hotel room. ’’Sure,’’ the woman says. ’’Let me go wash my hands first.’’After she washes her hands, they make love. After they are finished, she washes her hands again.This is really starting to annoy the male doctor so he says, ’’You know, you must be a surgeon, because you keep washing your hands.’’Angry at this remark, the woman says, ’’Well, you must be an anesthesiologist, because I didn’t feel a thing!’’

Finally...

today's post is going to be bollywood based......the title because finally i saw a good movie, 3 dewarein by nagesh k (i dont want to spoil the guy's surname)... the plot , seems to me, is based on an old short story/joke, but i am not taking away anything from the guy, because he has made one hell of a movie..... and an absolute stunning background track, and some of the best performances, everyone's good, my fave would be jackie, then naseruddin shah, nagesh k and juhi chawla, gulshan grover is also good.... you can see many actors/tresses from hyderabad blues, ones who played the best friend, the aunty who wants to get her daughter married off to nagesh....i watched the movie twice, must be the only time i watched the same movie twice in a day....

i simply loved much of the philosophy (of the characters) in the movie, like when juhi asks naseer whether he feels any guilt after killing a person, he says, what is the point? guilt means i wont do it again, theek hai, i wont...but my feeling guilty will not bring the dead person back to life.....so , watch it, watch it, watch it!!!!

also saw hungama, it is a hindi version of priyadarshan's first mallu movie, and all i can say is that akshaye khanna is not mohanlal....and the only actor who can be compared to the malayali counterpart is paresh rawal....i honestly cant see why people rave about a. khanna, he is ok, but not spectacular....

cola bashing daemons, did you see the ads given out by both pepsi and coke regarding those test finds? results in bangalore are well and truly below the specified norms, so wonderbug, Anu...stop PESTering the poor souls who treat Pepsi as staple diet :-)

and yes, i have to address this issue, i dont think i have ever claimed originality rights to the stuff i post, it is only meant for pure entertainment ..... for me as well as others who read this...be fair to me, i always quote my sources....if i find a funny or 'food for thought' message or forward, i will just go ahead and post it, coz maybe i like making people happy and seeing them smile.....so spare me lectures on CCPs and anti plagiarism ...lemme be....and like i have quoted once, "if you want to create an apple pie from scratch, you have to create the universe first", so once and for all, i am indian, i dont believe in copyrights....

manuscrypts trivia

"my thoughts are mine

mine alone to keep,

and mine to hide

deep, deep, deep"

------- jaggu in 3 dewarein....

Bollywood and the big picture

thats the basic premise i am going to post on today, coz i caught up with a lil of my backlog in that area, saw khwaish and qayamat...so will bore you with mini reviews....khwaish is a very down to earth movie, totally unpretentious, and if it had the right hero and good promos, instead of harping on the smooches (which werent all that good), it might just have clicked... the hero dude is way too wooden to do any good, he should audition for a terminator role (he's more deadpan that arnie), it took till the last scene to squeeze out the actor in him...the movie touched me coz of the simplicity...and i have always been a sucker for pathos...qayamat, all u have to do to make this movie work is replace arbaaz, sanjay kapoor and that chunkey pandey..(u would expect some kind of improvement when the guy has been out for years, and become a star in bangladesh, but some things never change).. oh, what the hell, qayamat is basically 'the rock' , the cage and connery hollywood flick....it seems ram gopal varma is doing a sequel of darna mana hai, to be titled darna zaroori hai...i think i can see the version 1 by next week.the national awards were announced, and ajay devgan is best actor for 'the legend of bhagat singh'...u have to see it to believe it, what a performance, he really made you feel for bhagat singh and his ideologies..'mr and mrs iyer' got 4 awards, again well deserved, another simple movie, which could have been made complicated, but thankfully was not.....hey, any budding writers out there, do check this out.

and yes michelle, the big picture, before that, i want to sidetrack, otherwise i'll forget about it, some hindus believe that you acquire the karma of the animal you eat, so its best to be vegetarian...as regards the iranian twins, for now i can only quote malcolm muggeridge(journalist/tv host/writer)' " in all the larger shaping of life, there is a plan already, into which one has no choice but to fit".....isnt death itself a part of the big picture? arent there a whole lot of people who die before 28? and maybe, just maybe, if thay had waited for some more time, we might have had a different ending??and a t-shirt for our kinda people, bloggers, here..hmm, i just might get a few "is that the first time you are seeing it" responses for that, wont i??......relax, the ranting stops with

manuscrypts trivia

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls "a butterfly" - Richard Bach

B2B on the net

No, i am not about to do any business to business (B2B) on the net, that was only an acronym for back 2 blogging, hey!, by now you must be used to my irritating play of words. And look what happened when i was gone, our very own parent site got itself a new look, i guess the new version does look a tad better than the older one.what i have also realised is that the traffic to your site is in proportion to the updating you do, quite evident from the shoutbox in my site. and vidya chose to do a dance on my shoutbox too, check out the shoutbox down below, wonder how she managed it...couldnt do much over the weekend, except buy a helmet, which i think will be a waste anyway, coz it never rains when i get out, it doesnt have to, i guess, coz i already have a vampire cough, whats a vampire cough, u ask?, my kinda cough which comes only in the cover of the night, and is afraid to venture out in the daytime, the net result being that i cough the night away, am almost reduced to chronic insomnia, and the guys at work never believe me when i say i have a cough, coz they havent seen the bloody animal!!, phew, short of typing breath, ok, bad one, but my tries never cease to amaze you, dont they?! ;-)

saw an intro of 88 antop hill on rediff, very interesting plot, but there has been such a deluge of thrillers and ghosts that i am not sure whether it will click.tried to add something to my blog, its a site where they create an acronym of your name, and you can paste a link on your blog, but i cant seem to get the graphic, have been trying from last week, thats the lil red cross that you see towards the bottom.try your luck anyway , here, actually, what got me to the site was this, u seriously have to check it out, it is so ridiculous and funny, i am too chicken to try it, but give me a feedback if you try it out...hehe

meanwhile its time for

manuscrypts trivia

a msg i got "remember the time when we were on a train, u stuck your face out and i stuck my ass out, and people thought we were twins??" grrrr