DWS Extra

Seriously, running a site like DanceWithShadows without a proper CMS is a pain. It has been bothering me for a long time. I have been exploring how to integrate the site into a CMS for a while - and that quest still goes on! But occasionally, looking at Magazine -style themes for the WordPress blogging platform, I feel I should blindly go for one of them, customise a bit, and have a super-easy life.

Yea, I know that’s not so easy. Wordpress, with or without a magazine theme, offers a lot of conveniences and some challenges. Convenience? Every blogger knows what they are, considering the number of mature bloggers who have had it with Blogger and have moved over to WordPress.

Problem 1: The WordPress Magazine themes available are still not as flexible as I want them to be, and this is likely to be so - they are meant for structured blogging, and my site is a pretty wild beast. It will not be tamed easily to fit into the WordPress cage. Not that this would be a problem for 99 % of you who will be more than thrilled with WP and its millions of themes.

Problem 2: Internal linking. I don’t know where I read this, but WordPress’ internal linking structure slowly hits older, archived pages which tend to lose PR transferred through internal linking. This is pretty insurmountable, without some serious hacking of the WP code, adding nofollows and suchlike. Not for the faint of heart.

Now that we have got those two issues out of the way, here are my favourite WordPress magazines themes that have almost broken my heart.

Revolution News Wordpress magazine theme

Da best. It can’t get better than this, an that’s why its a premium, paid theme. It will set you back by $ 59.95.

Revolution is a widget-ready, customizable theme that is an ideal solution for online magazines, online newspapers, and other websites that wish to use WordPress as a content management system.

Extremely well designed, this one will fit the needs of most publishers who have a magazine of news website. Like every theme, you will need to do a bit of customisation, add your own logo and change the colours to suit your liking and all that, but for most purposes, this is all you need.

Revolution News magazine theme

Can you beat the Revolution theme? You can, perhaps, with the Revolution News theme. For one, it looks better. Two, if you have a news outlet of some sort, this will fit you like a glove. Costs a bit more - we are talking $ 99.95 here for this magazine theme.

So if you are a normal blogger and want a cool theme, the first one is for you - and if you are a professional blogger willing to invest, the News theme would serve you better.

Moving on, what else do we have?

Darren Hoyt’s Mimbo Magazine theme for WP

If you do not have the bucks to shell out for the Revolution themes, here is one that comes real close. The Mimbo magazine theme is a clean, good looking magazine theme, and most of you would be happy with it. The right sidebar is still a big blog-like, but customise it a bit, and you have something that is pretty much in the same territory as the Revolution theme.

For me, if the problem was entirely about choosing a magazine style theme, I would have definitely gone for one of these.

But as of now, I have the little problem of internal linking to solve. Once that is fixed, I would probably take another look at them.

There, I said it.

The scale may be smaller in the case of Nandigram. But the basic fact is the same. There was violence by a large group against a much smaller group. There were deaths, more on the side of the smaller group. There was looting, there was rape. No one knows the details; Buddhadeb, or his party and government, made sure the media did not manage to enter the war zone. So there were no devastating TV visuals that would convery the horror of what was going on.

But essentially, the West Bengal government did what the BJP government did in Gujarat. Closed its eyes, thus giving a free run to the goons. Moral support too, by its statements at the time. And delayed deployment of central forces so its cadre could ‘recapture’ Nandigram.

I am sorry that I end up calling Buddha a Modi. Buddhadeb has generally been good for the state, good for bringing in a good dose of realism into the party, a good dose of capitalism too. But you are judged by your worst performance. So live with it. It was the same in the case of Modi too. Modi has been good for the economy of Gujarat pre-riots, he was good for it post-riots. But he will always be judged by his one big error. Same for you, Buddha, no mercy for you here.

Oh, and I came across this post rightly attacking Buddhadeb, but also playing apologist to Modi.

If the BJP’s Narendra Modi who responds to riots within 48hours is called a “Modern Day Nero”. what title will the sanctimonious conscience keepers confer on this Chief Minister of Bengal who has slept over the complete breakdown of government and constitution in Nandigram ?

// Got it wrong, pal. The line should have been: If Narendra Modi who did not respond to riots for 48 hours…! Buddhadeb’s screw-up does not absolve Modi’s screw-up, you guys are as sad as commies. //

It is easy for the leaders to sit back while their followers unleash violence, and talk only in terms of general ideas and motives, while the dirty work is being done on their behalf. It is important for them to keep that mental distance with what really goes on at the grassroot level, while, they spout philosophies and principles. But those very principles are translated into blood and gore and systematic looting and violence as we just saw in Bengal, before in Gujarat, even before in Delhi…

Buddhadeb, you would like think that this was inevitable, when worker power meets anti-state elements, this is exactly what would happen and all that blah. The same way a Modi would tell himself that the anger of a hurt community was pushed beyond a point and it lashed out, and it was inevitable. Like an Advani would tell himself that the Rath Yatra was critical for the self-respect of the nation, and some unfortunate incidents happened in its wake. Like a Rajiv Gandhi thought that the ground shook when a big tree falls.

Fact is, all of you are liars. And all of you are responsible for blood on the streets, violence, rape and mayhem. No court may ever punish you, but there are some saving graces.

Like never being able to wash the stigma away. The curse of spending the rest of your political life wringing and wiping your hands. The curse of being the Lady MacBeths of politics. Hopefully your worst judge will, one day, be your own mind.

Or purchased his own one-way ticket out of the country?

I am really disappointed in this man. And also in Pakistanis. Musharraf squandered his big opportunity to finally turn Pakistan into a modern democratic nation, and Pakistanis squandered away their chance to decide the direction their country should take.

Musharraf, after he got rid of Navaz Sharif in a coup, had a bit of goodwill for some time. Some thought he was a hero - appealed to their macho instincts. Others thought him a great guy for the freedom he gave the media.

And then the problem started. He was forced to align with the US - and despite all the benefits he got from that, could not convince his country that it was a good idea. His intelligences services never came under his control completely. He could not abandon, nor support, the Kashmiri militants. He could not control the media nor the judiciary. Big shit indeed he was in.

And what about the country? For some, he was the middle-class messiah, scourge of the fundamentalists. For others, he was the enemy of Islam and friend of US. Many others just thought he was a pain and just wanted to get rid of him. The people who wanted democracy and modernity wanted to get rid of him towards the last year or so, but they had no idea how it would all hang together if he was not on the scene. So everyone focused on the little issues - make Musiarraf’s life miserable so he is under pressure, ask him to get rid of Lal Masjid Mullas, then ask him to uphold Islam, ask him to get rid of the Americans, bring Bhutto back, hold elections, anything anyone could think about.

Fact is, Pakistan is a divided country in what it stands for - people have not made up their minds on what they want. Some want a certain objective achieved, and nothing but that.No one - neither Musharraf, Bhutto, Sharif or the Supreme Court of Pakistan - has a roadmap for the future of the country.

And then this is what you get.

The only option for Musharraf was to somehow bring everyone together. The toughest task ever. But his basic confrontational nature - and the confrontational nature of most of the participants in the Pakistan political theatre - killed off that idea before it could ever take wing.

Now what? This is not even an Emergency but martial law. Now the man would bring the country together?

The only way out is a flight out of the country. Better start planning that soon, Musharraf.

Disclaimer: I am no cricket expert. Not even a cricket enthusiast. So kindly forgive, if you can, the crimes I commit in this post.

So Rahul Dravid has been dropped from the Indian ODI team - at least for two matches as I understand it. What I don’t get are the accusations of this being unfair, disrespectful, ungrateful, graceless etc. etc.

I have always liked Dravid - and I still do. He has always been there for the team. Sometimes singlehandedly fighting losing battles. Sometimes taking the attack to the attackers. Always self-controlled, disciplined.

For all that, I think he should be out of the team for the time being.

I was watching his body language during the last series against Australia. Not good at all.

This is a man who looks harried when everything is going his way. He was looking even worse, if such a thing is even possible.

His performance recently has been bad any way you look at it.

Therefore, he should be dropped - and if he regains his form, and if he really is performing better than any member of the team then, he should be brought back.

Being the logical, rational person that he is, I am sure he would understand that. At least, that is Rahul Dravid for me.

In fact, I would be thrilled if Dravid comes out with a statement that says, “Obviously I have been underperforming recently, and in that state, I would be a burden on the team - and it would be grossly unfair to keep me in the team unless I can improve my performance.”

Is that likely? Somehow I don’t think so and it makes me sad.

Yes, there is a lot more to selection and dropping - we all know that.

But Dravid was also someone who operated within the boundaries of the ridiculous selection system that we have in India for as long as he was the Captain. He has benefited from the system when he was in charge, and now he is being whipped. That is the way of things. Nothing to complain about, is there? The same as Ganguly. Ganguly had everything going his way for a very long time - he too benefited from the system, and later was whacked hard. What is there to complain about? Better have a philosophical view of the entire drama.

Forget what the current and ex-selectors have to say about it all. They all have used the system to the best of their skills - and there are many instances when you could have said they were unfair to players. Every single word any selector says, in support of Dravid or against, should be ignored. They do not have the credibility to say anything at all.

We, as people who love cricket, also should make up our minds. If we go by gratitude towards players, we should never ever ask Sachin, Ganguly or Dravid to step down. If we go by performance, we should always ask them to step down if they don’t perform well for one series, or two or three.

OK, our system is not professional that way. Too bad. It is Dravid who is losing out today, and a Sehwag who is gaining. Tomorrow, the roles may be reversed. What’s new, though?

Some people seem to have a problem with dear Sreesanth. He is psycho (in the comments), boorish, hands over the moral high ground to the Aussies… You know what, I don’t care!

And why is all this? Because he eyeballs the opposition batsmen, appeals excessively, is childish, bowls beamers… All valid points indeed.

But he gives me one thing I want to see on TV. A guy who is half the size of Matthew Hayden taking panga with him, and upsetting the opposition. Gilchrist does not seem to approve, as do much of the Indian media.

The Indian media, but then, are wimps. As wimpy as most of our cricket team. Goody two shoes.

The Indian media knows a lot about what really went on in the dressing room during the Chappell days. They would not speak about it openly. Because that would cause them to lose their valuable contacts. Not a single journalist is willing to take an honest assessment of the Indian cricket team, or its members. The journos, they travel with the Indian team abroad, know exactly how they prepare for the matches, which are the camps within the team, who is trying to undercut who - and they would do nothing more than hint at it.

When a Yuvraj plays badly, they would have the guts to criticise him. When a Sachin does that, its all love and understanding the milk of human kindness all around. And gratitude. Ganguly - he is now fair game except in Bengal. Dravid, keep hinting at how such a decent guy is not entirely good for the team.

When the team wins a T20 World Cup, praise them to the heavens. Not a word about how unstable our team is. It is all Chak de! and Indian Tigers then.

This is where Sreesanth comes in. He is India’s Andre Nel, or Shoaib Akhtar. The same antics, sometimes worse. But they got wickets when they are in form, and so does Sreesanth.

Agreed, it is all a bit un-Indian. The things that Sreesanth says and does, the aggression and anger, this is all so unlike what we followers of Mahatma Gandhi are like. Isn’t it?

Tell you what. I have had a dozen years of watching Indian cricketers act like labs to the slaughter in the field. Saurav Ganguly’s hangdog expression when thigns are not going his way; Rahul Dravid who has the weight of the world on his shoulders from the first ball he faces; Sachin who has not looked as confident as a Ramesh Powar in a long time - even when he is in form! I have seen the Indian cricket team standing around the field like a bunch of beggars who got kicked in their teeth when they take a pounding from the Australian batsmen.

And I have had enough.

For me, Sreesanth is proof that Indians have balls. I was beginning to suspect we did not.

I would say the same about a Dhoni, Yuvraj, Uthappa, Gambhir.. even Pathan.

Noticed the way these guys were walking around on the field? They were laughing, smiling, occasionally looking tense but definitely not as beggarly as the seniors.

I would even say that the seniors are great players. They are. But in their own minds, they have lost. Even before the match has started. They look like they have lost any hope, and are just waiting to be whacked about by Brett Lee and Hayden.

Compared to them, give me a Sreesanth any day. As long as he is not removed from the grounds by the umpire, let him do what he wants. When he does not take wickets, remove him. When he does, bring him in.

This is not a gentleman’s game where good boys compete with other good boys. Sreesanth is one of the few guys who can upset the Australians. Yuvraj can, and so can RP Singh or Harbhajan on their days. But consistently, every time, to ruin their rhythm and get them all riled up, that is Sreesanth’s job. Let him do it.

Have to say this about the Malayalees on the Net - much, much classier than the non-Netted Malayalees! I am a prime example, of course. People like Venugopal… smart and witty, yes. Cool, no. Not worthy to untie my sandals, so to speak.

The best I have found so far is Anjali, blogging as Silverine. My North Indian friends who have entirely the wrong ideas about mallus, do read her. She is from somewhere near my district in Kerala, I think. Connoisseurs of beer, her family is. True-blue Achayan variety.

In fact my northie friends were quite surprised by a friend of mine, who could drink them under the table anyday. Seems the northies do not know about the drinking prowess of the Malayalees. For them Punjabis are the ultimate boozers. Not so - per capital alcohol consumption is still the highest in Kerala, and by God, it shall remain so! Anyway, this friend of mine managed to earn substantial respect for Malayalees among my northie friends.

The secret of the malayalee drinking prowess is easy to understand. We drink to get drunk. More the merrier. So, pretty little self control is exercised while drinking. The rest of India, I suspect, drink socially. For them, alcohol is a great companion for a great evening. For the mallu, alcohol IS the evening.

That’s it for now. Here are my list of the malayalee bloggers I have found on the Net. Do leave a comment if you know more of us.

Nikhil Narayanan

http://aradicalwolverine.blogspot.com/

Binu Ninan

Thomas Jay Cubb - Thomas Jacob!

Mathew - Van kalippu Payyan

Adukkala 

Shall keep adding to this list of bloggers from Kerala. Cheers for now!

Just saw this - a spammer has added his rubbish to BusinessWorld site’s About Us Page.

Hope someone there sees it and deletes the links to ‘inappropriate’ sites!

This is one problem with everyone who runs a site. If you allow unmoderated commenting, sooner or later it becomes a bloody nuisance. And moderation can be pretty taxing. Most of the popular CMSs have built in spam prevention, to identify spam by submitted text or links, or by IP addresses. WordPress has Akismet spam protection built in. Or you can always opt for comment moderation.

BW was caught out here because:

1) Their comments section allowed HTML  - if it is not, most spammers would go away.

2)  No moderation. No moderation, along with HTML capability, is asking for trouble.

There’s a lesson there, guys. (And someone please tell BW!)

I am not surprised by these two news items at all:

Delhi cops suspended

Delhi Police commissioner Y S Dadwal on Wednesday suspended the three cops who had allegedly refused to come to the aid of girl students, after they were molested by aspiring policemen at North Campus on Saturday night. A separate FIR in another case, where a girl was pulled inside a lift outside the Vishwavidyalaya Metro station and molested by seven-eight men on Sunday, has also been lodged.

Delhi cop arrested for molesting woman

A Delhi Police constable was arrested on Saturday on the charges of sexually harassing a young woman after she alleged a police station in south Delhi initially refused to even register her complaint.

There is nothing surprising about them - you know it, and I know it.

Why? Because the cops are also part of this society, and this society condones rape except when it happens to someone they know and care about. How many times have you heard about men who grope women in buses and trains fuming when they hear someone did it to their sister or cousin? This is standard behavior for Indian men, and their own families or friends will call them on it.

There is the mob mentality. If you look back, you will remember how gangs of male college students whistled and hooted at girls walking by. You will remember tales of how your own classmates, managed to touch up someone in a crowded bus or train. Girls, who are honest or mentally strong enough will describe instances that happened to them in lonely alleyways. We are all part of this, to some extent or the other.

There is the class conflict. Men, who have historically been the more powerful gender, see that it is not the case anymore with some classes of the society. Examples are the auto rickshaw driver who would refuse to follow the instructions of the female passenger, or the sulky gardener who doesn’t like the lady of the house ordering him about. These are just the tip of the iceberg. The resentment of the males of lower economic classes towards females of the upper classes who - in their eyes - have broken free of the shackles is much higher than most of us can imagine. In the case of the IP College molestation attempts, both these factors came together.

Who in the end, are the cops, socially? Policing is not the first profession that comes to the mind of even a lower-middle class student. Like it or not, our cops belong at the low end of the economic and cultural ladder. This is a class for whom things have not changed much for a long time. Not their fault. People, for whom life is a battle for day-to-day survival, operate by ancient laws of power. From the perspective of a cop aspirant - like the ones who turned up at IP College - the women he sees around are an insult to his manliness. They belong to a class which he can’t aspire to, and by God, if he can’t get what he wants, he will take it.

That is all the men who were there did. That is exactly what they would do once they become cops. Rule of law, discipline, and a sense of right and wrong does not come to him just because he wears khaki.

What are we going to do about this? Pretty much nothing. Because some of us do not accept the seriousness of the problem. And because a large number of us would behave like those molesters given a chance and the motivation.

I am sorry, but we are animals still.

I met Lionnel at Not Just Jazz by the Bay, Mumbai last month. He was performing there that night. It was like, what, some two or three years after going to any kind of rock show? Maybe more.

Watching Lionnel perform - just how do they get on stage and do all that? Somehow I have never understood performers. There is something in any performer that makes him / her public property at least for that little while. I guess that is what makes them what they are - they get up on stage, or get in front of the camera, and dance on a stage - and for that time and a bit more, your audience do not think of you as an individual, but as an entertainment machine. Here we are, entertain us!

These guys somehow manage to pull of that delicate balance between being the property of an audience, and then pull themselves back from it and reclaim their own selves. Amazing how they do it - single-dimensional people like me would probably lose our souls in such a situation! Of course, some of them would say that being on stage - that’s their real identity, not off the stage. I don’t even know what that means - but that’s what you would expect from me! Not qualified to talk about all this, frankly.

A long back, I read somewhere about the distinction between performing professions and desk professions. The performing professions, precisely because they were oriented towards pleasing the audience, were looked down upon by the elite classes for a long time. And now the tables have turned. (Tables have turned! Ridiculous it sounds.) To be young now is to have the ability to perform for a market - you can’t do it, and you are worthless. No good-looking girl is going to bother with you.

Now back to the Loins of Mascarenhas.

Lionnel and friend Jaideep Kulkarni have managed to make a video for the song Kashmir Again from his debut album Wonderland. Here it is. For those who are not very sure how these things work, click on the Play button, and once you see something on the screen immediately hit Pause. Now wait till the entire video loads - you can see that dull red bar slowly progressing to the end. Once its fully loaded, click Play again.

And now here is the Kashmir Again video.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CoeUDP6Pzk[/youtube]

Update: 24 hours after I wrote this, the requested DVDs reached me.

On Sunday, a friend visited. While talking, she asked me how my experience with the online DVD/ VCD rental service seventymm was. Told her it was not great.

The reason was two-fold: One, I find their range of movies just not enough. When you want to order a movie online, you expect quite a bit of choice. It was not happening in my case. I am a science fiction fan, and after a month (some 20 or 25 DVDs), I just could not find more interesting stuff. Two,after adding 8 movies in my queue, I called up customer service only to find out that they did not have any DVDs of any of the 8 movies! That really is sad. They seriously need more spare DVDs. The girl on the phone offered me VCDs, and I said no thanks. I am a bit of a visual guy, and the widescreen TV was not bought for watching 3:4 VCDs. I was already considering cancelling the account.

She had another point of view. That the guy delivering the DVDs at their home just never lands up. She recently shifted to a new place in Delhi, and after the address was changed and confirmed with seventymm customer service online, no more movies reached her at all. A few calls later, she was told that the delivery man reported that they were never home. She says that was impossible, even when they stayed home and waited for the package, it never arrived.

I told her that was not the case with me. True, I had stopped ordering DVDs or VCDs for a while (a couple of months). Reason, not enough choice for me. But delivery was not an issue for me, I told her. The guys were pretty prompt, and they used to land up regularly at my place around 3 PM.

I spoke too early.

Then someone from seventymm called up to enquire about my payment. I said I did not want to pay, that I was considering canceling the account. “Sir, don’t do that,” he said, “we shall definitely send you two DVDs on Monday.” Super. I agreed. On Monday morning, I received an email telling me my DVDs were sent.

Nothing came. By 4 PM, a tired man landed up - with no DVD, and asking for my payment. I said nothing doing, DVDs first, payment later. He sat down, called up someone, who assured me that the DVDs were sent with another guy who would be landing up any minute. I was fooled again. I made the payment, and no one landed up the entire Monday.

Fine. On Tuesday morning, I signed into my seventymm.com account and saw that I could now request return pickup for the two DVDs which I never received! Heh heh. Really funny. Would have been real fun to see how their systems would handle someone requesting pickup for DVDs which were never sent!

I called up customer service. As always, a female voice which has the accent right but can’t say more than two lines in English picked up the phone. Poor thing. Why can’t they get one who can speak a bit of English? These guys have received some major VC funding, haven’t they? Why not two on the phone - one to speak in English, and one to speak in Hindi?

She told me that the DVDs were not delivered to me - great. And they would definitely be delivered today. By 7 latest.

Nobody came.

On Monday night, I had used the feedback form on their site to demand an explanation on why those two DVD movies were not delivered. It is more than 24 hours now, and no reply at all.

Poor show, guys.