DWS Extra

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.

Had to share this. Friend came on chat; said he has received a press release in some strange .lwp format. Does not open in MS Word. What next?

I offered to do it. Was sure there would be some online converter for converting anything to anything. First I managed to find what .lwp meant - it is Lotus Word Pro. Why the hell would someone mail him a press release in that format? If you end up with one, best option is to tell the person to Save As the file again as a .doc, and mail it to you again.

But my search proved fruitless. Too many people are facing the same problem, and it seems there was some Lotus utility available for conversion on some FTP URL earlier, but its not there anymore.

Try again. Experts-Exchange, that most irritating of all sites when you are searching for a solution seems to have some answer, but it is a paid site, and you can’t get in. You think I am going to take a membership so I can go there and read ‘experts’? Nuts.

Next I came across ABC Amber Lotus 1-2-3 Converter. I did not have a clue, but I downloaded it and tried it out. No luck. Seems this is a tool to convert into MS Excel.

Next attempt worked. Found a PDF converter site  that looked promising. Easy process, they asked for my email - don’t like that, but I suppose its a fair deal for a free service. Uploaded the file there, and conversion happened in 1 minute! Super. The file is now in PDF, not in MS Word. But at least now we can read it.

Mission partially accomplished.

If you know of a a proper converter for Lotus WordPro to MS Word, please leave a comment below. Others, either try the PDF converter linked above, and then see if you can convert the PDF to MS Word somewhere else. Ta da!

You know, her fall from grace and general carelessness with underwear is kind of sad. But when performance on-stage suffers, it is no good reacting by trying to go on binge-drinking. Hope poor Britney Spears does not get any worse. After all, people my age grew up with her, though we found the songs definitely silly.

But sympathy or not, this picture is too hilarious for me not to put up here. I hope this is the last.

So I watched it - first day, second show. Because I was sure this is gonna be a super duper flop. What else could you think, after watching the ridiculous promos on TV?

In the promos, there was Ajay Devgan trying to romance a play-acting Nisha Kothari in small pieces of clothing. There was the Yuvraj Singh-like (but dumber looking) Prashant Raj. There was pretty much nothing else, but that was enough for me to judge the movie. This was going to be the biggest bomb of the year, and I shall be there to watch it, come what may.

Also, I am not a Sholay-lover. See, I was born in Kerala, and came across Sholay much after I was used to Malayalam movies, Hollywood action movies and several Westerns. Frankly, if you end up Sholay after you have already watched Mad Max, there is pretty much nothing in it. The silent Amitabh Bachchan was a bore for me. Gabbar was just another daku. Much much later, when I came in touch with the culture of North India and Bollywood, I could appreciate it a bit better. Now it is a tolerable movie for me - but all that has impressed my North Indian friends, wife and Mumbaikars just wash over.

I have sort of developed a theory. All these people watched Sholay for the first time when they were kids. My wife says she was so young, and cowering in fear of Gabbar for weeks after she saw the movie. Obviously, if you are a native Hindi-speaker and watched a movie that was path-breaking by Bollywood standards, you would be mighty impressedl I guess.

A friend, over much whiskey and beer, said that Adoor Gopalakrishnan once spoke approvingly of Sholay. Did he? I wish someone could confirm that. If he did, that might mean I am wrong, and it is just a matter of different tastes. On the other hand, my friend has a habit of coming up with stuff which he wouldn’t remember the next day morning, so I am taking it with a pile of salt.

Through most of the movie, I sat there with dumb-struck friends. The seats were cramped. The visuals looked dull, brown and dusty. The camerawork was maddening, flying down into arses and coming out of their zippers! Swinging everywhere. Somewhere I had read that Ram Gopal Varma’s camera is still excellent. Not so. There was nothing creative about a camera lurching all over the place.

Ajay Devgan and Prashant Raj were boring. They kept saying “yes..” to each other meaningfully. Some attempt at creating a cult of “yes”? Didn’t work, if that was what RGV attempted. Bachchan was alright. I was not sitting there comparing him with Gabbar, but there was pretty much nothing wrong with his over-acting. Mohanlal looked like he was making a valiant attempt, but even for a mallu, so much of a terrible mallu accent for an entire movie was overwhelming. What was Ram Gopal Varma trying to do? The southie cop character of Mohanlal’s in Company worked because there was not much of Mohanlal talking, and it was understated. Mohanlal did not have to stand there and get into lengthy monologues. Not the case here.

Nisha Kothari. Ah, this one is a classic. You know, I see a bit of Urmila Matondkar in her face - but not her acting. What acting, anyway? Her acting skills are way those of below amateur school plays. Some of them might even be better. Yes, she can writhe and wiggle like Urmila. But there are nothing but a few over-the-top expressions that I could see on her face. Over-the-top by Bollywood standards. That’s something. Remember that I am not comparing her to Hema Malini at all - someone who was mildly irritating for me in the original Sholay. And I can understand the shock that those who hold Sholay dear feel when they see this one.

In fact, my friends forced me to leave the cinema hall half-way. They could not take it anymore. Not that I wanted to watch the rest of the movie, but I was prepared for a really super-duper flop . They were too, but it was still too much for them. So we all left together.

A few days later, my brother in Mumbai went to watch it. When he reached there, they told him that due to technical problems, they were not having a show and would refund his ticket. More likely, there were only around 10-15 people who had turned up, says my bro. Just brilliant. After I described the movie to him, he was really forlorn. Will this ever make it to the TV screens, he asked. Unlikely, I replied, looking at the overall negativity around about Aag.

So that’s about it. A Sholay non-lover’s experience of the first half of Aag. Here is a full review of Aag you if you haven’t been deluged by them already.

Apparently Ramu has shouldered all the blame. He should. For casting Ajay Devgan in a role which he is just not cut out for; for thinking that Nisha Kothari is anything more than a singing-dancing extra; for embarrassing Bachchan and Mohanlal. But most of all for not caring enough to come up with a decent script.

My wife says it is a salvage job. Looking at the poor chemistry between all the pairs - Devgan and Raj, Sushmita and Raj, Devgan and Kothari - Ramu probably decided halfway through the shooting that it was not working at all. And he changed it into a Babban vs Narasmiha movie. That was the only chance, two actors who really tried hard to do justice to a bad script. But the script - if there was one - was not written for that, and Ramu ended up with a lot of footage to chop off from their scenes. And he ended up with the footage of Bachchan and Mohanlal - and compensated by not editing them tightly. So when Bachchan sneers into the camera, he keeps sneering. Forever. When Mohanlal cries in pain, his face fills the screen and does not go away till you start giggling. And that is how Ramu turned Sholay into a King Kong vs Godzilla!

I am halfway through The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 by William Dalrymple. So far it has struck me as a book that’s written quite like a novel. And so easy to read. For someone like me who would rather spend the nights reading science fiction, this makes it a bit easier. Even then it drags in some portions - but I suppose that is my own laziness to get into the details much. But I have so far resisted the temptation to flip through pages.

The most interesting, and surprising fact revealed in the book is the entire religious angle to the 1857 uprising. I suppose it should have occured to me - but the strong anti-Christian aspect of the First War of Independence never occured to me at all so far. I guess it was my own shallow thinking. It is common to demonise everything about the enemy during times of revolt. And the British were obviously Christian, so the anger turned towards Christianity too.

Of course that is not the entire story, as Dalrymple explains. In The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857, there are detailed descriptions on how religious fundamentalism was on the rise among the British, as well as among Hindus and Muslims. What comes across to me is a country where people form alliances of convenience - so even if the Muslim and the Hindu were suspicious of each other, they looked at the Christian as even worse. The one who was out to destroy your religion and caste. Padre Jennings and friends in Delhi gave them all the more reason to think so. People would join hands with anyone who would help in the war against the latest great enemy.

Somehow I think that ambivalence of communities towards each other
continues even now in India. Are we really tolerant of each other? I am not sure. There are historical insecurities that still exist, caste and religious prejudices - the ones that existed during the times of the Last Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar.

And the rioting. And looting. How the criminals of Delhi quickly attached themselves to the sepoys and the overall mayhem. The moment law and order breaks down, an antagonistic society goes to pieces. That happened in 1857, that happens in 1947 and 1984, in Gujarat, and it can even now. We have antagonistic societies across the country, and all you need is a little spark to light the fire.

One thought that occurred to me was, say the cops vanish for a day from Delhi. Or Mumbai. What would happen?

I suspect instant mayhem, nothing much different from the rioting that happened during those days. I am sure the area where I live, relatively upper class and posh, would be instantly targeted. The rewards are huge, in wealth and women, to be had. And have it they will. That is what happens when there is simmering anger.

Somehow I don’t think that would happen in my native state of Kerala, though. This widespread anger is not there. The frustration is directed towards USA and imperialism! The upper middle class guy next door went to school with the lower class man, and they understand each other.

I might be wrong though. This is only a quick post, as this blog says, and I have not thought this through.

Back to Dalrymple and the Last Mughal. Someone told me that the historian Mushirul Hasan rubbished the book. Said that Dalrymple’s version of what happened during the 1857 mutiny was wrong. Did he? If anyone has any idea, and could point me somewhere where I can find out about what he said, I would be really grateful.

All that in the morning papers.

In the case of the unfortunate eve teaser who had the bad luck to try and grope a 24-year old Karate coach in a Blueline bus, I can’t help feeling thrilled. Tough babes are da sexy!

The jerks tried their stuff in the bus, and the young Karate coach caught hold of one of them and slapped hm and did not let go. They took out a blade and slashed her. Turned out they were pickpockets. Definitely gutsy. First you are in the bus to try and pick a few pockets, and if that does not work, a bit of touchy-feely stuff can compensate. Super.

Long back I had written a piece in the site Purple Parka about how women need to toughen themselves up to handle the attacks on the street. That article I think will explain my feeing of triumph.

Then there was the standard story of a Blueline bus mowing down someone, and two kids on a motorcycle running into a divider with one losing his life.

The Blueline accidents are so routine it is scary. But I suspect it is not entirely the bus drivers’ fault. See, the average Delhiite is absolutely careless on the road. You can see auto drivers trying to browbeat buses and trucks, truck drivers who have no sense, CR-Vs and Swifts overtaking on the wrong side, scooters carrying an entire family of five, motorcycles cruising at 40 on a 3-lane road where everyone drives at 60-80kmph…

And of course the jaywalkers and the utterly careless.

Considering the risks they take every day, accidents are just waiting to happen.

From my personal experience, not once in the last one year has a Blueline bus scared the shit out of me: But two wheelers, cars and SUVs do that to me on the daily basis. They are the really dangerous ones. The sheer confidence of the motorcycle riders make you think they are riding Hummers!

Asking for trouble, really.

It’s 1.45 am, and for a second I wasn’t sure what I saw. The desipundit.com site seems to be suspended by the web host.

This is the message I saw:

This Account Has Been Suspended Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.

Hope its a small payment issue, not some tech mess which might take time fix. Not making the payment on time is something that happens to me often. A static site I operate was suspended recently by my host, and I did not notice it for almost 20 days!

What happens with MidPhase (which is the desipundit host) when its  payment not made on time? In the case of my site, I contacted the host and made a CC payment - and the site was back online in a couple of hours..