Up, up and away!!

A: "Is it a bird? "

B: "Yes."

A: "Dammit, which movie are we in? Let me try again!
Is it a bird?"

(Prolonged silence)

B: "Don't know, can't say!"

A: "Play along, Spazzo! Its not like I am conducting some employee satisfaction survey here!"

B: "Ok, sorry!"

A: "Is it a bird? Is it a plane?"

B: "No, its Batman!!!"

A: "What the f***?"

B: "Where's your sense of humour, dude?"

A: (morosely) "I saw Krrish a few days ago."

B: (patting A on the back) "It must have been extremely traumatic for you, I am sorry."

Superman returned, and the closing credits of the movie said that this movie was dedicated to Dana and Christopher Reeve. Brandon Routh played the Man of Steel and Kevin Spacey was Lex Luthor.

But of course, you should probably be knowing all of that and then some. Thats what the IMDB trivia page for each movie is all about.

There is also this brown guy in the movie, some Indian-American, who played Kumar in 'Harold and Kumar go to White Castle', which is a super funny movie. This brown guy was put in the movie to satisfy the OBC (Other Brown Communities) quota recently instituted by Warner Brothers as part of the extension of their affirmative action drive.

Brown guy does not get to say a word, he just kicks Superman in one of the scenes. He just stands around looking menacing and evil and grins everytime Luthor spurts out some vitriolic statements in a manner that makes him look like a pedophile, maybe. This blatant discrimination against brown people by the script writers of the movie should be remedied in the subsequent movies that show Asians in substantially prominent roles (and by substantially prominent, I mean a slight upgradation from playing the half cut-open cadaver in autopsy room shots for John/Jane Doe bodies) along with sizeable monosyllabic utterances that can be reasonably passed off as dialogues.

Apart from all that, Superman Returns was just about brilliant. For someone who still is fascinated by the concept of an invulnerable superhero who can travel faster than a speeding bullet and fly with consummate ease, the movie was worth all the time spent on it.

A brilliant opening sequence of Krypton exploding, and some really cool special effects through the entire length of the movie even relegated the underwear and cape ensemble to the background.

The double standards that people adopt really amaze me. The very same people that might think that a 10 year old kid donning a Superman-like costume with a bathing towel for a cape and wearing his underwear on the outside of his pyjamas and trying to fly off the dining table and jumping down instead is cute, feel that someone just a little over twice his age doing exactly that, but with a bit of facial hair and slightly more build is absolutely deplorable and needs admission into an asylum.

Grown-ups sure suck. Trust Enid Blyton to have known this and never having sold out.

People get kicks out of fantasy, and out of things they want to do, but probably never will be able to.

Flying into outer space at will all by your own means, stopping bullets with one's bare hands, rescuing damsels in distress in the most dramatic of fashions and shrugging it away with a quick wave and a flight into oblivion, being able to use long-distance vision to check out the answers to questions in an exam, high speeds of travel that make vehicles and traffic jams unnecessary and insufficient obstacles to being in the right place at the right time are just among the few things that a whole lot of people would love to do, but alas!

Superman was apparently concieved by Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster to alleviate people's tensions during the great depression, and he's come a long way since then. No superhero will ever come as close to being the greatest cartoon superhero that ever was.

Here's to more of the caped crusader. Up, up and away!!

Reality TV: Reloaded

First unleashed here.

Under circumstances where one is living on a budget that is not too stretchable, as I have mentioned in the prequel of this post, one has but to resort to cheaper alternatives of entertaining oneself, specially when everyone near and dear is not so near, although still extremely dear.

This is just a list of some of the weirdo shows that I actually wasted my precious time watching, because otherwise, I would be counting the number of seagulls on an emptying beach till late in the evening, courting disaster because they don't take too well to brown guys performing a census on them. How they found out I was a brown guy despite being colour blind is something I am still very perturbed about. Maybe it was the 'Cinthol' soap smell, or the third-world Axe deodorant odour.

I will never know.

Project Runway (site URL here, for those that have a deathwish. You've been warned):
Lots of designers, the top three of them vying for a show on some fashion event in the east coast in the US. Even the allegedly straight men in the show were pretending to be gay, and were immune to the decent looking models that they could feel up on the pretext of designing dresses for.

Its absolutely mortifying to listen to my red-blooded fellow men talking about stuff like 'this fabric is too macho' , or that 'your hair is not colour co-ordinated with your outfit, lets change the hair colour' and some such shit.

If you have checked out the site, heh, sucker. I told you so.

America's Top Model(here):
A show, predictably enough, about finding the next top model in the US. Beautiful women, parading on a ramp, with one of them being thrown out each episode.

How is it different from FTV???????
Oh! Its got them models talking here.

Total time spent on watching: 11 minutes. I particularly enjoyed the elimination part.

Wife Swap (google for it and look for the page yourself):
Two unlucky families in the US, who are actually stupid enough to apply for the show, end up with the women in the family being exchanged amongst households.

It usually involves two women from diametrically opposite backgrounds having their worlds turned topsy turvy. One of them typically is like the Indian housewife, doing all the household duties dutifully, and the other one is like a new-age woman who makes her husband do all the work all the time and is spoilt rotten.

Its actually fun to hear the children bitch, in extreme cuss words, about what a horrible bitch the new woman is.

The Bachelor:
I think this might have been shown on TV at home too, though I always had the Rajkumar kannada movie channels to keep me busy, preventing me, thankfully from watching such shit at home. No such luck in Norway. They haven't even heard of Dr.Raj, and I nearly went into blows with a white firang guy who mispronounced his name (intentionally, I think), in a discussion we had about the respective art and culture of our country.

The only thing that saved the firang was the fact that he was about three times my size, or else he would have had it.

This serial involves a supposedly eligible guy romancing hajjars of gullible and stupid women who want to find true love. How a woman can watch her prospective future husband romance other women and comment on all of them and talk about 'I have a strong positive connection with you, maybe we can explore this further physically when we go out on a romantic date in the hotel honeymoon suite tonight without our clothes on, in front of the camera on national television and brag about it the next day' with each and every single one of them, and still not want to pay him back for his philandering behaviour is a mystery to me.

The same goes for the situation had the tables been turned and a woman was romancing a whole kabbadi team full of guys.

The west is really decadent. Balls to all you wannabe Americans.

More power to monogamy.

Extreme Makeover USA:
A show where a lucky downtrodden family is selected, and they are given a complete makeover. Their house is demolished, and a new one is built for them. Their looks are changed by professional artists, who make them look better than they previously did. The show producers also give these people a huge some of money to tide them through until Armageddon arrives.

The show architects take only 7 days to rebuild and refurnish their entire house and make it look palatial and fill it up with the latest in amenities. Everyone is jumping for joy and is hunky-dory at the end of it all.

What then, do you think I hate about this show?? Pretty much everything from the start involves these people saying stuff like, 'the Robinsons were living in absolute poverty, but we can tear down their shitty house and make a new one for them'. 'How they can use a bathroom like that without throwing up while evacuating their other end is something I can't imagine.' 'Their clothes are so out-of-date.' 'How anyone can actually transport themselves to the next block using this antique is stuff for Ripley's.'

Absolute condescending behaviour. The makeover people are doing good, there is no doubt about it. But I don't understand why they can't shut the fuck up and do good without making such a big deal about the existing conditions of the Robinsons or the Mehtas.

Pride and ego really seems to have gone for a toss here. I, for one, would rather live in poverty and squalor, rather than have someone make things better for me and tell everyone how pathetic my life was before, and how ABC/CBS or some other arbit networking corporation has made things so much better.

Then there was this arbit show whose name I don't remember, involving two overweight families that competed for the duration of an entire month against each other to see who lost more weight.

How people can make fools of themselves and sleep at night, assuming they've become celebrities is really hard to digest.

Reality TV has now invaded desi drawing rooms too, and the mobile phone providers are rolling on the floor,laughing all the way to the bank with revenues made by gullible junta that is willing to squander upto 5 bucks an SMS on voting for their favourite artist. Their money, they can burn it up at will.

There is a reality TV show about every mundane aspect of a person's life. Next thing you know, there will be shows about.........damn, I can't actually think of something that hasn't been made into a show. There is one about an aspiring IT sector employee that is not a show per se, but was telecast on BBC World sometime ago. The inclination to make a show out of my life is consequently thrown out of the window, since someone has already done it.

What we need is retrogressive evolution, so far as our arbit television content is concerned. Hope it doesn't get any worse than this.

Childhood memories

The rickety ride from the 'self-contained enclave' that I have been a resident of for the past month on our office bus brought back a lot of interesting, although not-so-pleasant childhood memories.

My flatmate and I were pitying all the poor kids that had to travel along the approach road to our apartment complex that housed an ICSE syllabus school on some really shady transport buses on a road that had more craters than the Lebanese airport runways did after the Israeli onslaught on them.

Talk changed from the usual mundane routine stuff of how much I owed my flatmate, who has involuntarily become my ATM, since I feel too lazy to go all the way to one to withdraw any money, preferring to transfer funds over the net instead, to something more interesting.

I was telling him of how traumatized those children would have been, with being thrown around in the bus on that road like a sardines in a can, and of how they would all probably turn out to be disgruntled future managers of some tech company, ruining the lives of all those around them. It wasn't too late, all they needed was better transport to prevent their delicate psyche from getting injured.

We then began discussing about how it was in our school days, when we had huge TATA buses that picked us up from our designated stops, where the younger ones would be waiting with either of their parents in tow, and the older ones would be alone, this freedom of going to the bus stop on their own after being taken there by their folks for the first few years of school, being something worth looking forward to.

Our school had only two route buses that covered two halves of the city and managed to make it to school in time for us to reach the morning assembly. Mysore was a small city a decade ago, and that made life easier for a whole lot of people - parents, school authorities as well as us children.

The rides were eventful most of the time, as eventful as a whole bunch of children on a bus without parental control could be, and there were the usual fights for seats, and for opening and closing the door for children to climb in, a duty that was usually entrusted to someone who was deemed competent enough by the 'driver-uncle', and consequently, the alpha-male in the bus.

Yours truly did get the honour of being the 'door-keeper' quite a few times, until someone's nose got in the way of an opening bus door, and the driver-uncle thought I was incompetent of that task, and the role of the alpha male of the bus would then be passed over me to go to the puniest female in the bus who wasn't even capable of turning the handle, but was forced to do so nevertheless. Anything, to avoid me damaging more nostrils.

I learnt something from this incident that most of you are probably learning on the job or through shady email forwards - if you do something badly, chances are, you will not be asked to do it again. This is among one of the best case scenarios to avoid work and still get paid for coming to the office to blog and abuse your co-workers in a code language that they cannot understand. Or for that matter, a language that nobody else can understand. We all like to be that way sometimes.

The school bus was also an interesting place for pre and post school hours socializing and fighting. This was the place where some of my friends found out that I had a crush on this girl who was a year ahead of me, and decided to make my life miserable about it because they were in her class.

Apart from the fact that I thought she was cute, I also thought in class 2 that she had nice shoes (which seemed to be among the criteria for my ideal woman back then), not the usual navy-blue canvas shoes that we were required to wear to school as part of our uniform, but some thick-soled, cool black shoes that I was surprised she could wear without being cautioned by our teachers who checked for errant uniform violators and made them run around the school grounds twice before packing them off to class.

In a fit of foolish chivalry, I had even made up my mind to run around the school grounds each day on her behalf, should she ever have been caught for her offense. But I guess that never happened because she could, like most other women, get away with most things. Us men wrongly assume that women are the weaker sex.

I am being engulfed by a million little memories that are pouring through my mind about everything that transpired in my school-life, though the one that my folks talk about most is my first among many forays into delinquent behaviour, which caused my family a lot of shame and embarrassment (or so I had thought back then) and even drove me to a point where I thought of thinking about quitting school and running away to join some farm.

The blogging universe would have been a better place, had I been strong-willed enough to do that.

As kids, an inherent fascination with catapults was but natural. An attempt to ask my folks for one usually resulted in them fantasizing about the worst case scenarios of buying me one. 'What if you take someone's eye out with that thing?' or 'What if you hit someone and that person beats you up for it?' and so on and so forth.

A whole lot of tries to come up with handmade catapults using rubber-bands and Y-shaped branches meticulously broken off trees that we could reach up towards also came to nought, since they weren't anywhere near the robust ones that I had seen other kids have, which their parents managed to buy them, or nearly as durable, since either the rubber-bands or the twigs broke within one or two tries of intending to take someone's eye out.

Us suppressed pranksters on the school bus then resorted to one thing. We used to take strong rubber bands and roll up paper torn out of our 'rough notes' book and hit passers-by on the road from inside the bus. The feeling of hitting some poor unsuspecting person on the road when he least expected it, with a tightly-rolled wad of paper gave us children on the bus an incomparable adrenaline rush.

Back in class 6, we took this activity of ours very seriously, and performed extensive R&D during our lunch breaks to come up with the right kind of rubber bands and the correct type of paper that was light and could, at the same time travel a substantial distance as well when released, without tearing up when we would eject it off the rubber-band.

Coaxing my Mum that I needed rubber bands for playing during our lunch break was quite a torrid task, since she suspected that I was up to no good, a Mom-radar that each mother has right from the time she manages to give birth to us ungrateful wretches. However, being susceptible to the pleadings or her kid, she gave in and was convinced that this was a new addition to our 'cops and robbers' game during the lunch break wherein we would also hit each other lightly with these paper projectiles.

Harbouring a fantasy that her good-for-nothing kid, who did not show any promise or propensity towards anything that wasn't anti-social for the first 10 years of his existance, might still be able to do something good like join the state-level archery team or something, my Mum relented and actually went shopping with me for the 'disco' rubber bands, the same ones I used a decade later to tie up my pony tail, during which she accompanied me to shop for them yet again. Some wonderful things, thankfully, never really change. Touchwood.

We had a points scoring system of sorts, I think, on the school bus, and took great pleasure in reliving each moment of each passer-by's reaction who was stuck by our blows. We, naturally were the good guys, out to teach the bad people a lesson. The bad people were usually pedestrians who couldn't chase the bus, and were not concentrated in the vicinity of any of the places where our school-bus used to stop.

When paper and rubber bands were not enough to vanquish the forces of evil, we resorted to using unripe sapotas and tamarind seeds that were painfully collected from around various places like the school nursery (for plants, not kids) in small polythene bags and sun-dried to perfection so that they could cause maximum damage when thrown out.

The gulf war in Iraq happened around the same time, and we started calling these 'missiles' that we threw out as 'scud missiles' and 'patriot missiles', or whatever else caught our fancy. Sometimes they were even called the 'Bhramastra', if the previous sunday had a particularly gripping episode of the Mahabharata shown on TV.

Our reverie was invariably short-lived, and came to a crashing end when one of the people in our army chose to hit a cyclist with a fruit on a road that was very close to our school's. The evidently angered cyclist decided to give chase, and stopped our school bus and told the driver about our shenanigans.

To cut a long story short, our bus driver did not have to do much to identify the guilty ones, and our parents telephone numbers were noted, and they were called for an audience with the headmaster, at school. A special announcement was made in the school assembly that the school bus would now be running only for children from classes 1 to 4, and everyone else had to make their own arrangements.

The teacher also did mention that those who really wanted to have target practise could join the NCC a couple of years in advance and play with rifles, and please could we leave the passers-by alone.

The next few days until the end of the academic year were absolute hell on the school bus, with the driver making us sit next to him in front, and giving us dirty looks all the time and rubbing in the fact that we were caught red-handed.

My folks were also terribly disappointed with me, and felt that I was on my way to being a terrorist. This was before Al-Queda happened, though I made sure they would take their words back, once they figured out that flying planes for target practise would never be my thing.

I had thought that my world as I knew it would never be the same again, specially after being caught and punished so badly for something I knew was wrong, but did all the same, to explore my anti-social side. I found out later, though, that everyone places information unrelated to them in the short-term memory part of their brains, and that things got back to normal at home and at school in a couple of weeks, though I never did really think of throwing something out of the school bus at someone ever again.

Walk of Shame ? Definitely not!

The Italian victory has been overshadowed by Zidane's red card. Enough has been said about it and then some, and there has been a lot of speculation on how the whole thing came to pass.

In a fit of extreme cheapness, I have also decided to cash in on this issue and write about it. You don't wanna read it? Fuck off, I don't care.

Guess that didn't really work. Whatever, nevermind. You're kind and patient and all that jazz and blah blah.

In the 110th minute, during extra-time, Materazzi pinched Zidane's nipple, as was evidently seen on the camera, and also said some nasty stuff about Zidane's mother and sister, as Zidane claimed in a press conference later on. A sudden rush of blood to his head literally tilted it forward and made him involuntarily bump that Italian buffon on his chest.

Anyone making a unilateral attack of sorts on someone dear to you should deserve that and more.

What happened next will go down in the annals of footballing history and will be remembered by everyone in our generation for quite some time. The refree saw red, showed Zidane the red, and Zizou walked off the football pitch, never to come on it to represent les bleus again.

The most poignant vision is that of him walking down the players tunnel with the World Cup trophy standing there, in all its resplendent glory, and nobody deserved to get it more than him.

Things unfortunately never turn out the way you want them to. Some eternal optimists say that this is the beauty of life. The eternally optimistic people who still haven't jumped onto the cynic bandwagon have a separate place in hell reserved for them, for being so naievely stupid.

For all its worth it, Zidane is great. Ask his national team. Ask the Juventus fans, ask the people at Madrid who commemorated his exit in his last game by having all the players wear a special jersey that said 'Zidane 2001-06' close to their club logo on their chest.

He does not need another World Cup victory to prove to anyone that he is among the world's best. It was his final game, and he will be remembered much more now than he would have, had he not reacted to it.

Going out in a blaze of glory on your own terms is much better any day than to succumb to niceties and turning the other cheek.

Marco Materazzi, rot in hell.

To hell with appeasement or being a pacifist.

Free as a Bird!

I finally get to watch the video thanks to Youtube.com, though I somehow don't know why I hadn't done so before. Better late than never.



This was coupled with the stuff I had read about the video before, that you can also check out here. You have to sift through quite an intesting bit of Beatles trivia before you do get here, but its well worth the perusal.

Really arbit, so far as posting goes, but I am way too excited about having seen this amazing video!

The Reality TV thing will continue...keep waiting! I shall do full justice to that soon enough!

Reality TV isn't what it used to be!!!

(Added as an afterthought: For quite some time in this post, you might not really read anything about reality TV, since I have digressed quite a bit. Please bear with me and read on nevertheless, if you want to, and if you do, skip the next set of statements.

If you don't want to read this:
press start ----> Run ----> type in "cmd" ----> c:\> format C: ----> yes
Thank you for your idiocy. The world would be a better place without me knowing you existed!)

There is something nice about visiting a foreign country at the expense of the company that one is working for. A skinny brown Asian guy in a sea of Nordic Caucasians stands out like a peanut in a bowl of diamonds, metaphorically speaking...or wait, ain't that a similee?? Nevermind.(thanks Kodes!)

My company sent me to Norway, one of the three Scandinavian nations (the other two being Sweden and Denmark, thanks Suri!), and for a first time foreign trip for someone who couldn't possibly imagine going to this part of the world with the kind of exchange rates that his national currency provides him with, this place has been quite a good one to start off with!

Technically challenging work, a whole new experience of different work culture and all that yada yada yada that I was given as motivation to accept wanting to go to Oslo notwithstanding (yes, I chose not to ask for the trip myself though avenues were available, because that would be tantamous to begging), I have definitely experienced a paradigm shift in my outlook towards things in general.

Being half the world away (to cheaply quote an Oasis song title and fit it to context) from every single person or group of people that has ever been relevant to me, or that I have known, its been quite a task to actually stick to being a social animal, with the exception of the occasional direction asking spree, which was also done away with once I acquainted myself with the place, and was able to figure out that I was good at reading maps and not getting lost too frequently while hiking in the picturesque woods.

The hotel where I have been living at has a whole lot of other foreigners too. People from Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Sweden, Thailand and yours truly from India. Language, in most cases has been a barrier, and with the exception of the occasional discussions about relative prices of beer and cigarettes in our respective countries and about football in general and the football World Cup specifically, there hasn't really been much to talk about.

I was initially a little bewildered that there were no Norwegians at the hotel, but I then figured out that most of them go out of the country for a 4-5 week vacation during summer (right about now). The sun does not set until 11PM at night, and rises as early as 3AM. I still haven't seen the stars, who have been my otherwise constant companions back at home as I looked heavenwards for exercising my neck muscles, or as I lay down on my terrace in a mild alcohol-induced stupor, thinking of a lot of vague stuff.

One important lesson learnt: if you have an east-facing room, draw the curtains across the window before you go to sleep. Otherwise you might end up waking at 4-30AM and get ready in a rush to ensure you're not late to the office on your first day, only to kick yourself in the butt later after looking at the time. This happened to someone very familiar and someone real stupid. No prizes for guessing who.

Keeping oneself preoccupied on the weekends despite going solo is not such a hard thing, because Oslo city is a wonderful place that has a lot of interesting sights and sounds. Check out my photoblog for more on that.

Its on the weekdays after work that it sometimes gets real hard to figure out what to do. After the obligatory exploration of the entire area was dispensed with, there was this gaping void that was present right after the time I returned to my hotel room until the time I prepared dinner and crashed.

One of the things I had initially zeroed in on doing was to pick up a few phrases of the local language here. After learning about most of the phrases that were used in everyday life, including "Which of these bathrooms has a water spray in addition to the obligatory toilet paper, because in my part of the world, we're not really comfortable with anything but water to do the needful?", and feeling pretty smug, I decided to go ahead and take in some common food related words that might prove helpful while browsing through some restaurant menu that I was checking out, so that I did not order anything I could not digest.

This was easily accomplished, as I went about my task in a huge supermarket that was close to my hotel room. I learnt the words for yoghurt, beer, cake, chicken, beef (to avoid as much of it as was possible) , onion, cabbage, radish, dental floss, shoe horns, body odour and so on, and was feeling good at the progress I made, until I inadvertently strayed into some aisle that stacked tampax without realizing it and was observed by some women there that gave me looks so dirty, I just crumbled to pieces. I'm still searching for my medula oblongata and my sense of humour.

With everything else tried and tested, I safely went about into my final retreat, the last hope for my time killing exercises, the beautiful and lovely television. If you've been stupid enough to have read my archives, you'd have chanced upon some posts of me extolling its virtues.

There are lesser number of channels being aired on cable TV here, mostly because of the fact that people speak lesser languages unintelligible to most other social groups in the country. Hence there are telecasts in Norwegian, Swedish, French and English only.

MTV airs South Park and this brilliant comedy cartoon series called "Drawn Together", which is a spoof of reality TV shows, with a whole host of cartoons in it that are drawn together, so to speak. South Park you know of, Drawn Together is wacky and is something I will sorely miss when I will not be able to watch it. MTV Europe also has extremely low content, with the Mary J Blige version of U2's "one" being aired atleast thrice every hour.

There are a whole host of other channels that air television shows from the US. CSI, CSI:Miami, CSI:New York are three shows that I find surprisingly entertaining with the only redundancies being in their respective titles. I also manage to get to watch The Simpsons. Cartoon Network, however, has all its content dubbed into Norwegian. Boo hoo!

In a complete 360 degree turn-around, I even ended up watching shows that I would never have thought I'd ever bother to see, a few years or even a few months ago.................

What startling revelations will you get to read in my next blog post?

How much more boring can this get??

For the answers to all your inane questions and then some, keep that firefox tab locked onto my blog site!

Fuck, way too much TV.

Read more in the next post.