aditya kumar's weblog

The middle-class man movie maker is no more with us. Growing up on his brand of movies, I try to find the everyday middle class man in movies of today but I can’t.

It was the 1970s, the golden age of Indian Cinema that made movies for the society. Amol Palekar, wearing a tailor made full sleeve shirt with similar trousers, taking a walk on marine drive of Bombay and having peanuts was the hero of yesterday. But he looked more like me, for I don’t look like the Khans wearing Tommy Hilfiger shirts and driving imported cars. Thats what the hero of today does.

That is why, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, the man who gave us the seedha-saadha Amol Palekar in Golmaal, the funny Dharmendra in Chupke Chupke, the confused, egoist Amitabh in Abhimaan and the funny, yet simply philosophical Rajesh Khanna in Bawarchi, will be missed.

Amol Palekar as Ram Prasad Sharma in Golmaal (image courtesy Wikipedia)

…And who says KANK is a hit? None of the people I know have liked it so far. People are coming out of the cinema hall halfway through the movie. You call that a hit?

The last few days have been sad for international cricket. The events that unfolded, Starting with the South African pull out from the tournament in Sri Lanka followed by the uncertainty over the cricket to be played in the island nation ending with the madness that happened in London, at the Oval. It has been a tough week for the Game.

The two hours of madness in The Oval has left the cricketing community and even the media, stunned. What happened there is yet to sink in and for sure there is more to it than what has met the eye so far.

Umpire Hair and The Pakistan team, both, have been involved in a fair amount of controversies in the past. If Darrel Hair has been the most controversial umpire since the 1990s, The Pakistan Cricket team have too had their share of ball tampering stories associated with them. (Remember, Imran Khan and the bottle top?).

As I said, we are yet to know what actually happened in the middle. In the days to come, we shall have experts and their opinions. The players involved will speak up and the media will decipher their quotes. Layer by layer, it will come out.

But there are a few things that are clear and are not jumped upon conclusions.
Umpires like Hair play their own game. We all know, he is not much of a fan of Asian teams (and vice versa). Does it take too much to keep him away from standing in test matches involving the teams he, kind of, loves to hate?

Racist or not, Hair loves controversies. Especially the ones he gets involved in.

Inzamam did what any conscious captain should have. I have often felt, he is just the right man for Pakistan. The PCB has showed tremendous faith in him and one can see why. The captain was well within his rights to protest and what he did was the most obvious thing to do. For a cricketer, that is the only way to protest there and then. But maybe he got a little carried away. Frankly, I don’t blame the Pakistan captain.

There is no denying this fact that things could have been handled better. If not by Inzamam then at least by the ICC. It is surprising, there was no third party involved to settle the dispute that went on for two hours. It was only Hair, Inzamam and the cricket rules book. And who else could this third party be, if not The ICC?

This is bad for cricket. Crowds are booing more often, doesn’t the ICC see that? Twenty20 is coming up and most of the cricket boards have a hard time filling in seats for test match cricket. And then this happens.

It is indeed ironical, that the cricket ground where England played it’s first ever Test more than 120 years ago, had to witness this circus.

Don’t send cricket to Malaysia or exhibit it in the Americas. ICC has work to do in places like England, the home of the game.

For all we know, the ICC could be the weakest sports body on this planet. Only under ICC can the viewers of the game get to wait for a good two hours in a state of bewilderment, confusion and chaos. And when it happens in football crazy England, you know which way the cricket game is heading to.

The Oval, with a urdu sign that says, “Do not enter the field” — Image from Cricinfo.com)

(This article, cross-posted at desicritics.org)

Switched to this new theme, “the journalist”. I love this plain, simple theme.

The previous one (Sajiv, you asked for this) was a two column version of the style, “Dots”. It was customised heavily. Feel free to ask me for it.

But if you ask my opinion, I still think “journalised sand” is one of the best WordPress themes ever, if you like the three column layout that is.

Happy Independence Day to everyone. To every Indian, and to every non-Indian who is a little bit Indian at heart.

Last week on friendship’s day, I had a terrible time managing the text messages I got on my cellphone. They were so many, I simply could not keep a track of them. What interesting would be, I said to myself, the number of messages I get on Independence day. Be still my wandering mind, now I say, the number of messages throughout the day has not exceeded one. Trust me.

But I insist, Happy Independence day.

This, from here, language cleaned up by Dilip and posted on his blog here. Just like Dilip, I agree with this too. That is why it makes it here.

I realize that nothing I say matters to anyone else on the entire planet. My opinions are useless and unfocused. I am an expert in nothing. I know nothing. I am confused about almost everything. I cannot, as an individual, ever possibly know everything, or even enough to make editorial commentary on the vast vast majority of things that exist in my world. This is a stupid document; it is meaningless drivel that I do not expect any of the several billion people on my planet to actually read. People who do read my rambling, incoherent concertos are probably just as confused as I am, if not more so, as they are looking to me for an opinion when they should be outside playing Frisbee with their dog or serenading their life partner or getting a dog or getting a life partner. Anyone who actually takes the time to read my sonatas probably deserves to ingest my messed up and obviously mistaken opinions on whatever it is that I have written about.

Signed: Aditya Kumar, a.k.a Truman

Why did the police arrest my (north-indian) friend living in this city, at mid-night from his house for no proper reason? Why did the house owner tell the police that the people living in the house were not vacating it, when the rent-agreement stated a month long notice before asking to vacate the premises, and when no such notice had been given?

Why did the police officer ask him if in North India he wasn’t able to get a job? Why did he accuse (north indian people like) him of ‘spoiling the culture’ of Bangalore?

Punish him if he has been a nuisance but why be hostile to all north-indians working in the city?

If the Government has not made it illegal to work in another city within India, at will, then what is the problem?

So Bangalore, let me ask you, is your success, yours alone? Am I, a north-indian by birth, not a part of it? To make the case interesting, I must mention, my project team consists of a Punjabi, a Kannadiga, a Telugu, a Bengali, a couple of them from Orissa and one from Tamil Nadu. We are all programmers and we are good at what we do.

Or do you choose to accuse me and my friends (barring the kannadiga of course), of spoiling your culture.

And why does my house owner, though a very nice person, sarcastically puts forward his case of the high costs of day-today commodities in Bangalore and ends it with, ‘all because of you people’ ?

But why does he fail to say ‘all because of you people’ when I pay him a mind-boggling amount of money for a single room?

I have faced these ‘whys’ before, I think. After spending almost a decade in Bombay and Pune, when I once heard that Maharashtra is for Maharashtrians, why did it hurt me?

The Indian coffee house at MG Road offers a glimpse of the mixture of cultures that Bangalore is.

The place has its own little world and it starts opening up as I find myself a vacant table. A college couple, oblivious to the crowd around them and maybe also to the fact that their coffees are done with, continue to chat. Another guy, in his late twenties maybe, having his french fries along with the coffee. The table, full of his treasures. A latest cellphone, an Mp3 player to mention a few. He chooses to keep his sunglasses on though. One can safely claim — in the coffee house, he has travelled back in time.

Then of course, there are the people I usually manage to strike up conversations with. The middle aged men who are absorbed in their newspapers and while not at it, quietly observing around them. Quite often, their solitude is short lived for they usually find someone of their kind soon enough. Friendships are renewed, greetings exchanged. Discussions take place, politics, cricket, trigonometry and even aviation. These relationships are formed here, in the coffee house and mostly end up within these walls.

Two Tibetan monks walk in and order coffee. With them they carry an air of peculiarity. They share the table with the sunglasses guy, the gadget-man. There is a contrast of sorts. The monks, in their red robes while the gadget-man, as if almost adamant on showing off his prized but earthly possessions, still decorating the old, odd wooden table. As evident, the common thing between these two cultures, the coffee, sharing the space of whatever is left.

The big glass paned window, the biggest witness of all to the change of times, gives a view of the multicultural sea of people on the outside. Like waves, groups of people pass by.

Look at it one way and it is just a place serving coffee. Look at it another way, in fact, any other way, and there is so much going on that I start to wonder, is this really just about the coffee?

This place is stuck in another time and it wants you to oblige as well. For some, it could even get addictive. Trust me, there are people like that.

Enough for the day, I say to myself and leave.