Nothing profound or preachy today just some profound examples of logic, South Style.

Four very interesting examples of audience gullibility... Rajnikant style.

Movie 1) Rajanikanth has a Brain Tumor which, according to the doctors can't be cured and his death is imminent. During one of the fights in the movie, Rajani is shot in the head. To everybody's surprise, the bullet passes through his ears taking away the tumor along with it and he is cured!

Movie 2) Rajanikanth is confronted with 3 gangsters. Rajanikanth has a gun but unfortunately only one bullet and a knife. Guess, what he does?He throws the knife at the middle gangster & shoots the bullet towards the knife. The knife cuts the bullet into 2 pieces, which kills both the gangsters on each side of the middle gangster & the knife kills the middle one.

Movie 3) Rajanikanth is chased by a gangster. Rajanikanth has a revolver but no bullets in it. Guess, what he does. Nah? not even in your remotest imaginations.He waits for the gangster to shoot. As soon as the gangster shoots, Rajanikanth opens the bullet compartment of his revolver and catches the bullet. Then, he closes the bullet compartment and fires his gun. Bang... the gangster dies.

Movie 4) The 'climax' finally arrives. Rajanikanth gets to know that the villain is on the other side of a very high wall. Rajanikanth has to desperately kill the villain because it's the climax. Rajanikanth suddenly pulls two guns from his pockets. He throws one gun in the air and when the gun has reached above the height of the wall, he uses the second gun and shoots at the trigger of the first gun in air. The first gun fires off and the villain is dead.

SORRY, BUT I'M BACK AGAIN.

Dear All,

Hi,

I just got back from a hectic but wonderful holiday in Darjeeling.

Fortunately I will not bore you with my personal adventures suffice it to say that I have come back with what Ms. Streisand once called “misty water coloured memories”.

The impossibly green and lush hillside, crisp fresh pine scented air, walking along narrow lanes enveloped in layers of mist…. I’ll just post the amateur pics taken during the trip for you.

On the way up the hills

However 3 things stood out from this trip that I am going to share with you.

1) Bang in the middle of the bazaar, besides one of the busiest roads in Darjeeling is a makeshift stand where a group of Lepchas (an ethnic community originating in northern Sikkim) are staging a protest against a huge hydro-project that is being built in neighbouring Sikkim on sacred Lepcha land. The protest was in the form of a relay hunger strike where one group would fast for 24 hours and be replaced by another group of volunteers the next morning. I don’t know about you but the whole "relay" thing rather defeats the whole purpose of the fast for me but anyway moving on….

It had been going on for 55 days (as of 24th Oct) and maybe it was the fact that the people on “fast” were chirpy, alert and chatty or that they did not look tired or hungry but anyway the whole protest was not really attracting any attention or sympathy from the local people in Darjeeling.
This is sad but the whole absurdity of it became clear only in the evening.

After 7pm once the shops have downed their shutters, the deserted road around the bazaar comes alive in a wonderful example of local economic endeavor.
Dozens of small carts open shop as mini-mobile-fast-food-stalls selling hot steaming egg rolls and spicy chilly sauce covered noodles. Throngs of locals gather in the cold with their woollies and fleece jackets sharing the day's news and gossip in misty breaths that meld together to form a familiar atmosphere which seems to be so inherent to hill stations.

However the funny thing was that one of these stalls happened to be parked right beside the fasting Lepchas

The 'Fasting' Protesters.....

....and the fast food near by

What was even more astonishing was that the volunteers inside didn’t seem to mind or be affected by the fragrant aromas floating about.
I don’t claim to be in possession of great will-power myself but I know that people who are really fasting would be traumatized by the temptation/distraction of hot food so close by.
In such a case can the locals be blamed for not taking them seriously.

When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.
Saint Jerome (374 AD - 419 AD),

Stopping for tea and momos on the way beside a gurgling stream

2) Before I narrate the second story let me give you a brief background. Tashi is a good friend of my sister and very intelligent too (I don’t know why I mentioned both in the same sentence). She is very outspoken, moral and has just passed the magistrate exams and will be taking the oath of a Judge soon (Lord bless the convicts who come to her court). Her boyfriend Wangchuck (a wonderfully polite and cultured person as only an alum of my Alma Mater can be) has a 15 year old boy who works in one of his shops. The boy, Sam-phel (don’t ask me for the origin or meaning of the name) has been with the family for decades (which in his case is almost his entire life) and is almost like a member of the family. Hailing from an impoverished family from the remote hills of Nepal he never had any formal education. He picked up bits of spoken English from the tourists and customers who frequent the shop and bits from Wangchuck.
However in the last year Tashi has taken to tutoring him for 2 hours every morning. She is doing a great job but however this is where I differ with her. She teaches him the full school curriculum while I felt that she should concentrate on lessons that he would be able to use in practical life. Since he only has 2 hours a day and just a couple of months before she goes off on her judicial duties, I felt it was a waste of valuable time to dwell on topics like ‘photosynthesis’ or ‘columbus clouds’ and the ‘spanish inquisition’ . Anyway that’s not the point of the story. The “point” is that Sam-phel speaks English better than many others who have been blessed with English medium education. I know countless others his age who cant speak English half as clearly as he can. He has acquired not just fluency in language and grammar but also diction and pronunciation.

The question is HOW?
As fond as I am Tashi and as tremendous a job as she has done, the final credit can only go to the boy. He is a true example of what determination and effort can accomplish.
If any of you get a chance to go to Darjeeling, do visit Fancy Market Shopping Arcade, go to the first floor and ask for Sam-phel (everyone knows him there). You will be in the presence of a true achiever.

I don't measure a Person by his achievement but by his potential.
Shirley Chisholm (1924 - 2005)

view from my bedroom window

3) In Delhi a day before my flight to Abu Dhabi, I was invited to dinner by a friend. On the way there while I was stuck in Delhi’s famous traffic jam, a brand new Mercedes Benz drove up alongside. As the cars inched forward I could see a young boy about 18 in the back seat chatting animatedly on his mobile. After about 15 minutes in the busy crawling traffic, the boy suddenly got out and walked to the pavement on the side and began to pee. The driver stopped the car in the middle of the road while a man dressed in a safari suit and who I presume was a body guard stepped out to hold up the traffic till the boy finished relieving himself. After what seemed like an eternity he sauntered back to his car and arrogantly spat on the road before getting back into his car.
Faced with such blatant disregard for law and for others, it is miraculous that more Jessica Lal’s aren’t being shot by spoilt little rich kids.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

My friends have constantly accused my blogs of being too filmy and that too Bollywoodish so no lengthy discourses here. Just try and watch Jab We Met for 2 wonderful sweet innocent hours.

Ciao till next Time

Of Holidays and Vacations and Festivals.....

Dear Friends, Readers and all You Wonderful People,

I will be going for a short whirlwind vacation to Delhi and then to Darjeeling for a few days. I probably won't have time to blog during then so my next post will be up after i get back on 25th October.

Meanwhile to all my muslim friends here's wishing you

EID MUBARAK

And to all the others, a very Happy and Prosperous

Vijaya Dashami.

I hope you all have a lot of fun and may you be showered with a lot of blessings.

As I always say, my wish for you is very simple.....

May You Dream A Thousand Dreams

And May Every One Of Them Come True.

Salaam - Namaste

- Vish

Do You Know The Queen's English?? Or Is She French

England (not the UK), America and Australia must be the only countries where English is the mother tongue. Many other countries (including India) have English as one of the official languages but it isn’t the predominant primary language spoken there.

In this modern world however English has become the indispensable lingua franca.
Almost all business, the internet etc are all predominantly in English.

And every country speaks it with its own inflections and accents as do Indians.

Among Indian education, the convent system is not only one of the best but also produces what is inarguably the clearest form of spoken English.

And yet we can’t seem to get over our fascination with everything ‘phoren’ and unfortunately that extends to language too, or to be more specific, the Accent.

Last week I was watching two different programs on 2 different channels and somehow both the hosts were ‘Accenting” away to glory.

The first one was Urmila on Jhalak Dikhla Ja (a dance program based on BBC’s Dancing With The Stars) who tried very unsuccessfully to clip her vowels and round her consonants (or was it the other way round). She hasn’t had any convent education unlike the other star children and I have always been fairly complimentary about her grasp of English. However on JDJ she feels that just fluency in English isn’t enough and that she needs to mimic Angelina Jolie’s american drawl.

Yeah and she does the pout too.

Then of course you have Mr. Obnoxious himself. Himesh Reshamiyya. I never liked him or his music or for that matter his hats and caps but have always defended him staunchly when people said he should be a failure simply because he was not classy enough. Give the man some credit for trying against all odds and star sons, was my argument.

However with success he is getting more and more cocky and is beginning to lose his underdog status and is now instead just an accented dog. His sentences are peppered with lots of ‘I feel you are gonna win’ and ‘I wanna hug you’ and if you thought his superlative laded battle-cry of “Awesome, Fantastic, Mindblowing” wasn’t corny enough you just have to listen a little more carefully and you will notice that it has now become “Oosome, Faataaastic, Mindblowin”.

Yeah and he chews gum throughout a la Britney too.

And when we are talking about accents in India, can the biggest of them not be mentioned?

Salman Khan, unlike other star sons like Fardeen, Abhishek etc was educated primarily in India but who now speaks English with an accent so pronounced that in his debut English language flick Marigold they had to put special subtitles in English for his dialogues alone.

Meryl Streep who is arguably one of the finest actors of her generation is known for her fine grasp of accents in her movie roles. She can do Irish, South African, Zimbabwean. Southern, Jamaican, British, German….. you name it she can do it.

But even she cannot do what Salman can because he must be one of the few actors in the world who can do all of the above accents. And sometimes in the same sentence itself.

And these are just the film fraternity. I personally know many people who speak what me and my friends call Transit English.

They seem to pickup an accent just by holidaying or transiting through a country. The talented ones among them even manage to pick up the accent of a country completely different to one they are in.

So what is this fascination with accents?

Is it a leftover from the colonial days when many Indians strived to be more British than the British or is it some deep insecurity that makes us covet everything western or ‘phoren’ ? Should our bench-mark for everything be from a western point-of-view?

And all said and done, in the end does it help that with our newly acquired accents, the British, Americans and Aussies themselves dont understand us now.

There is English and there is English.

I was writing a blog but have not completed it yet, as i have to go back to conducting training now and so i will post it later. It is about Accents and the following clip is as self explanatory as it is funny.

Enjoy.