gavin's blog

Do you love watching Amazing Animal Videos on Animal Planet?

Here's a page full of funny and cute pics of animals - such as this one - that I enjoyed, and hope you do too.

This one is my favorite, which is yours?

Sorry for that bad link. They've taken down the page it seems. In the meantime enjoy some Human Acts that are even funnier than animal ones, but not nearly cute enough!

...is what I thought, when I came across this new story Report Finds Negative Image of U.S. Abroad

From the story: 'Based on their own travels to the Persian Gulf, Egypt and Britain, a nine-member advisory committee headed by former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff found widespread hostility toward the United States and its policies, especially the U.S. occupation of Iraq'

 
Really? Who would have guessed??????? :-)

From this story titled Fear Exceeded Crime's Reality in New Orleans at NY Times:

'After the storm came the siege. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, terror from crimes seen and unseen, real and rumored, gripped New Orleans. The fears changed troop deployments, delayed medical evacuations, drove police officers to quit, grounded helicopters. Edwin P. Compass III, the police superintendent, said that tourists - the core of the city's economy - were being robbed and raped on streets that had slid into anarchy.'

I remember after 26/7's massive cloudburst in mumbai, there were rampant rumors that powai lake had been breached .....local stampedes took place that increased injuries and may have taken lives.

These are now very insecure times and we fear everything including ourselves.

which you can read about in this story.

Those of you who know me know of my love for this dude, to the extent of using his Vitruvian man drawing as my yahoo messenger image, so you know how happy this story makes me feel!

 
Way to go, Da Vinci!

Read about it here

..............was evident yesterday in Head Faculty Ila Arun’s strident and immensely embarrassing defense of her utterly stupid choices to save Qazi (and earlier Sandip) which were in large part responsible for the elimination of Arijit & Shamit, the two best male contestants (or 2 out of 3 – the other being Rex). She kept saying that what she did was ‘protsahan’, which she had full right to do, without once acknowledging that her choice to choose the less meritorious contestant was inherently flawed.

 
Fame Gurukul is a reality show and in this lies its strange fascination for me (and for others too I think) as we watch riveted, and horrified at the same time – at the disgusting truth of the nature of our own identity.

 
In Ila Arun’s refusal to acknowledge that the true criterion of her choice must be merit and not need lies the fatal flaw that cost our nation half a century of growth post independence – the period when our systems and minds and spirit ossified and during which fatalism became institutionalized on such a massive scale it became almost indistinguishable from our very being. Fame Gurukul’s strange dynamics of letting the best contestants fall by the wayside while celebrating those clearly less talented (who are themselves left non-plussed!) shows us who we are……

 
….and it ain’t pretty at all.

………or why Black did well domestically whereas Paheli didn’t

I know I’m going to be in the minority here, Black being considered one of the greatest Indian films, and Paheli a debacle. And there's now going to be the usual hoo-haa that Black was the more deserving film to be sent for the Oscars and Paheli won out because of favoritism. While I thought Black was superb, I couldn’t see it as brilliant, especially because of its lack of originality, once I knew it was an adaptation of the classic The Miracle Worker. Paheli, however, I found amazingly original, especially because of its post-modern blending of truth and fiction, the real and the unreal.

Paheli was not without its failings. It may not have gone all the way that a tale (a statement) needs to go to be a story (an argument), and in that it felt somewhat flat in the end. It didn’t however fall flat, at least for me. Black ended on a higher note, a triumphant one for both of its tragic protagonists as well as for us in witnessing their symbiotic coupling. Yet, what in Black was Indian?

Let’s not forget that the category we are talking of is the foreign film one. Which means there must be something ethnic beyond location of the story itself to make for an indigenous entry. Paheli rooted firmly in rustic Rajasthan fits this criterion way more than Black does. Yet Paheli is more contemporary in its concern than is Black – it asks what is more important – an unreality that loves, or a reality that is absent? While Black asks – how much faith can we have of the feeble in body but strong in heart and mind – a laudable concern to be sure, but not a contemporary one.

A film that strikes a chord internationally must be both timeless and contemporary – and in this sense both Paheli and Black score. Yet I believe that Paheli will have more international appeal than Black just as Black had more domestic appeal than Paheli – because they fall on opposite ends of the spectrum. Black is way more contemporary on style than Paheli is, which is great domestically, but no competition internationally. Paheli on the other hand is way more contemporary on substance internationally (it overshoots the Indian audience’s comprehension), mirroring concerns of the twining of reality and unreality echoed in recently acclaimed films such as The Matrix, American Beauty, A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky etc.

All I’m saying is…..I think Paheli is a better choice to be sent for the Oscars than Black……not that it matters all that much :-)

....is a good article (requires registration) at NY Times about the wave of hurricanes in the US and their impending impact on various sectors.

From the article:

There was a time when the cloud as an icon of destruction was shaped like a mushroom.

And a time when the cloud as a portent of fleeing populations gave off the buzz of locusts.

And a time when the cloud that symbolized unexpected death was the ashen plume shooting out of twin towers pancaking down.

Now the cloud we track across our television screens as a harbinger of all those things is touched with the ancient and divine: a vast, swirling eye. An unblinking thing that could have floated off an Egyptian cartouche, a Huichol ornament or the back of a dollar bill.

In a sense, we are back to a more innocent age. The dark eyes whirling ever closer are "natural" disasters, though they pack the force of thousands of Hiroshimas.

Today's TOI sports page has only one story entitled: Indian Cricket R.I.P. which you can read a bit about here.

 
The level of infighting within the BCCI at its AGM, the jockeying for power by individuals and parties, and the shamelessness of it, has left everyone stunned.

 
Earlier it was the antipathy between Saurav Ganguly and Greg Chappell.

 
And this is only about cricket.

 
On Fame Gurukul we were all put off first by the antagonism between judge Javed Akhtar and Head Faculty Ila Arun.

 
Then by Arijit voting 'best friend' Shamit out, for reasons he has still not been able to articulate clearly.

 
Then other contestants voting him out despite their belief that he was the 'best singer', for that action of his.

 
And before that there were the Ambani brothers. What a shock that was.

 
And what about the strange stuff that's been happening within the BJP? And nowadays within the Shiv Sena, famed for its cohesion?

 
Am I missing other examples of infighting? Please add a comment below if u come up with some more.

 
All this INFIGHTING, remember, is happening within 'families', groups within which there is an expectation of differences but which have an even greater responsibility to stick to the same side of the table. And the infighting is happening in full public view.

 
What is with India and Indians? Why all this infighting all of a sudden? Or is it something endemic to our nature?

 
When Amartya Sen titled his book on the Indian nature 'The Argumentative Indian' did he strike upon not just a quaint expression but a quintessential trait?

 
Questions, Questions, Questions..........

Came across this just released free blogging handbook released by the group Reporters without Borders.

I'm going to be looking carefully at the techniques laid out there - much of what I think and say is subversive and I've thought an underground blog would be the way to go - but I didn't know how to go about ensuring anonymity, and one of the primary purposes of this book is to teach how to do just that.

What the site says about the Handbook:

Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents

Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. Because they allow and encourage ordinary people to speak up, they’re tremendous tools of freedom of expression.
Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.
Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation. It also explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicise it (getting it picked up efficiently by search-engines) and to establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles.