The Royal Wedding Bash.

What's so great about two people getting married?

What's so great about two people getting married that attracts the attention of a lot of people?  The pomp?  The kissing style?  The media attention?

What the heck is a duke?  And how does one become a duchess by getting married to the duke who also doesn't have any power over any territory?  What is the bridegroom the duke of?  Nothing.  What is that old hag the queen of?  Nothing.  And what are all the fools, the bridegroom's relatives princes and kings of?  Absolutely nothing.  The UK (God knows why the fuck it is still called a kingdom when the king NEVER had any power!) is a democratic country with elections and haggling and corruption and issues, much like most democracies are.  So why they even keep the queen and her stupid, underachieving, royal family is beyond me.  Maybe that is all that is left of their glorious past? 

Their glorious past by the way primarily involves invading other countries, colonizing people, raping their wealth and carrying it home, while creating an atmosphere of progress and change that confused the hell out of other civilizations for long.  It wasn't built on military might, since there was no military might to talk about.  It was built on deceit, on pitting one against the other, playing wicked games of politics and power, and all their ships were not called the UK's ships, they were called Her Majesty's ships!  In other words, all the raping, looting and pillaging went on in HER name!  So, why the fuck are we even celebrating anything that goes on in that thieving family's life?

The UK has not, ever before, since the heady days of the British Empire, or recently, contributed anything to the world in terms of inventions, service to mankind, or anything else worthy of mention.  It is a conniving little shit nation ready to tag along with the US on any misadventure those clowns in the West can conjure up.  The educational institutions of the UK are great, got to give them that.  But what does it serve?  No research has taken place there any time in the last one hundred years that has yielded any wisdom to change anybody's life.

This clown who calls himself the Prince of Wales is the "prince" of a piece of land that is as big as 20,777 square kilometres - roughly one sixth the size of Tamilnadu.  And he doesn't have any power over that tiny piece of land either.  So, why the fuck does he even show up in the news?  ANSWER - That is ALL he does!  Show up and look good!  Charlie boy never had any power, not even over the woman he married and later arranged killed.  Sure enough, this is just an allegation, but what rotten history even with such a lovely Diana involved!  Then, he marries his "long term" friend, who I'm sure played no role in Charlie breaking up with Diana.  Sordid enough?  Not really, and actually fun when you think about an Arab banging the crown princess who is still unhappily married to the clown who thinks he owns that piece of land one sixth the size of Tamilnadu!  May those two murdered lovers rest in peace.

The real story is in how, after so many years since relinquishing all "royal" power, they are still being paid so much attention.  ANSWER - it is ALL the culture the UK ever had!  Their literature was great, but their art sucked when compared to the French.  Their food was abominable, which is why they needed Indian spices in the first place.  Their technology was no big shakes and the rest of the world didn't need any of it the last century.  Their market wasn't big enough for the rest of the world to want to sell anything to them.  Their sports teams aren't dominant in any discipline, their movies cannot compete with American and Indian produce, and nobody ever sees any product "Made in the UK" anymore.  But they still have the fucking flag and their stupid palaces and the dumb royal family!

After all these years, we have another descendant of this useless clan marry a none too flashy girl, who he's been in love with for a while.  So, girl marries boy.  Great.  Anything beyond that?  For the media to attach words like "romance" to an ordinary affair is already a fair stretch.  For the world to be expected to wait for this stupid event like it is a spectacle of their lifetimes is a holler and a hoot.  Who gives a fuck?

Here's the reason we're being asked to give a fuck - White countries, namely the USA, UK and Australia (because of Rupert Murdoch alone), control the popular English language media around the world.  There is very little "white" audience specific programming that is sustainable any more.  This royal wedding is one of the last bastions of events that silly white people still control.  The Olympics have moved on to China in a rank of importance, cricket is owned by India, and in terms of sheer strategic interest - almost all the oil of the world is in the hands of Arabs and non-western powers.  So, how else can the white race still stand up to be counted?  By SHOWING UP!  They are very good at that and they will show up.

It is the same white mentality that never bothered to even nominate Mahatma Gandhi for a Nobel Peace Prize, (while this half white Obama gets it just before agreeing to bomb Libya), and Hitler was Time Magazine's "Man of the Year"!  I am sure thankful Gandhi is not in such lousy company.

The biggest crown joke - the new couple is busy asking the media to give them some "privacy"!  Shit, whoever thought they were public?  They happen to be from a family that knows how to stay in the news.  They are all pompous "used to be"s.  Nothing else.  Let's spare the children, for they probably have some sense, but let's not forget the atrocities of their elders who had their chance to ruin the world and took it eagerly, before being thwarted.  Let's make sure no other "family" gets such notions again.

By the way, isn't there anything going on in the UK that is worth reporting?  Like any of Nehru's legacies coming down the line in the Mountbatten family, perhaps?

- BSK.

Good riddance LTTE!

Velupillai Prabhakaran is supposedly dead - according to the Sri Lankan government. There is a website being maintained in faraway Europe that claims he is alive and well and indeed in good health. In any case, he is no longer the LTTE supremo, because there is no longer an LTTE.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. The LTTE was never put together to achieve an ultimately noble goal. It was fostered to build a dictatorship and there would be only one dictator. Organizations like the TULF and the TELO, which all had the claim of fighting for a separate Tamil Eelam were crushed by Prabhakaran's power, their leaders killed and their infrastructure eliminated.

That is how power hungry zealots operate. That is how the Hitlers and the Stalins of the world operate. For a country like India, being Sri Lanka's neighbour, it would seem strange, but that is not how the LTTE has been projected, especially to the people of Tamilnadu, many of who feel a pang of sadness for Prabhakaran being eliminated.

It really wasn't our business as Indians, but we did send in a peacekeeping force, to help out the Sri Lankan Army against the LTTE. We also, as Indian Tamils, offered support to the LTTE, and it is no secret that ex-Indian army personnel helped train some cadre of the LTTE. The Tamil cause has been around for a while, and with all its noble intentions of maintaining a Tamil brotherhood around the world, ended up helping the LTTE.

To repay that gratitude, Prabhakaran decided to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi. Big mistake. Successful operation, but that one single act of terrorism on Indian soil completely eroded the sympathy the organization had amongst many Indians, and made it very easy for India to toe the EU, UN, and US line in branding the LTTE a "terrorist" organization.

To my mind, there were never any doubts that the LTTE was a terrorist organization. A fine fighting force, they perhaps were, but at the end of the day, they were a terrorist outfit. If I have a political grouse against the way the Indian government is treating me, I am hardly the person to accept a bunch of gun toting idiots as heroes if they had the same grouse. Go militant, and you're already accepting you don't know how to win an argument through peaceful means.

Besides, if Sri Lanka was treating ethnic Tamil people differently from the rest of their countrymen, that was something internal in Sri Lanka's affairs. So, why would we as Indians have any viewpoint that even remotely supports the LTTE?

Expressing solidarity with Sri Lankan Tamils is hardly reason to consider the Sri Lankan government an enemy of sorts. Today, in Tamilnadu, a lot of people harbour ill feelings about the current Sri Lankan administration, based purely on heresay that Tamils are being treated badly in that country. If the LTTE had been treating Tamils very well, there is no evidence of any of that. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence of Tamils being dictated to, forced into combat situations, and accept the hegemony of the LTTE and its supremo.

The question Tamil people in India need to ask themselves is - Am I an Indian or a Tamil first and foremost? The choices are simple if we are Indian first. The LTTE is a terrorist organization that did something on our soil we cannot forgive them for, and are automatically our enemy. So, the Sri Lankan government did something very right. If we are Tamil first, then if we are also sympathizers of the LTTE, we have a problem.

Of course it is ridiculous that the government of Tamilnadu is keeping a strict vigil on Tamil emotions that may erupt out of sympathy for the LTTE, and a resentment of their military capability being decimated. Nobody in Tamilnadu cares enough about Sri Lankan Tamils that much that we are about to let our normal lives be disrupted by our outpouring of support for people that are part of a humanitarian tragedy right now, one that is well beyond our sight, and well beyond our immediate concern.

What the Rajapaksa government has achieved is clarity. Every other government before his did not tackle the problem with the single minded devotion that his collective has been able to put together. Here is a lesson for India. Going after terrorists is a military objective first and foremost. You cannot negotiate with terrorists. If you know where they are, go after them. Forget about everything else. I hope this example is followed in Kashmir, and I hope the US does this to the Taliban and the Al Qaeda and all the other idiots around the world.

At the end of the day, the LTTE is no longer in existence. They had a bloody long run, and a few of their remnants from around the world will plan some crazy attacks. No doubt about that. The Tamils and their militant ideologies are not to be underestimated. But the LTTE is no longer there to accept and nurture their militant sympathies.

I don't care how much they cared for a Tamil Eelam. Their methods were off kelter by a large margin and if they thought they could kill for their reasons, they should be ready to die for them. Good riddance, fools.

Chicks on flicks?

I wonder why I never checked out this program on Sony Pix before. After all I am fond of flicks and chicks, though not all of either.

All factors considered, I decided to stay on this program for a while, just to see if there was possibly one program I could actually endure that came out of Mumbai.

It didn't take very long for my head to scream - Fake, fake, fake!

It would be easy to rubbish this with - "Well, what did I expect when it comes out of the same sewer that produces fake rubbish all year round?" After all, one of them is an actress who went to theatre school. There are lots of theatre school alumni doing very well as waitresses. See, with actresses, you never know what they're going to dish out next. This bloody show was certainly not on my menu, and it certainly won't be on any sane person's order.

These two chicks Neha Sareen and Ira Dubey stand out as a comedy of their own, as amateurish and silly as two high school kids reading stuff their unimaginative teacher wrote for them to look good on stage. Could they please spare us the fake stuff? No, of course not! Could they at least save us from the big words that don't stick? Could someone tell them that language that looks impressive on paper doesn't necessarily work in the spoken medium? (Especially when the writers haven't received on screen credit)

How much of this can we take - "Incisively adapted", "Creating ambiguity to provoke thinking", "Minimalistic camerawork", "motifs", "Verbose screenplay", "Aesthetic framing of characters particularly in the silent scenes", "Showered in golden hues", "Visual beauty was mocking them", "milky camerawork", and lots of rubbish about art direction and editing and all the technical stuff you shouldn't have to care about when you sit down to watch a movie. On and on these chicks carry on with the same insincere, hurried, staid presentation, utterly lacking in emotional connect and constipated in delivery of every overcooked comment! God! I thought I was done cursing Mumbai and the idiots it marinates!

Somehow Mumbai can make crap out of anything. The good thing about obvious crap, however, is that one can get beyond the incompetence and really become objective about the show itself. With Chicks on Flicks, if the insincerity doesn't get you, the intellectual masturbation is sure to. You better let yourself start laughing. It doesn't take much to get merciless against this much dearth of ability.

To cap off a lousy review with something like - "Revolutionary Road makes Titanic look like Pretty Woman"! Wow! I wonder how confused people who have seen all three movies would be if they heard this.

Why the heck do these chicks have to tell us about "American suburbia", "compelling characters", and that the director allowed the "camera simply observe Leonardo and Kate feed off each other"? Yeah right! Nothing could be further from the truth. No working director employed by a major American studio shooting with expensive professional actors has the freedom to do anything as remotely organic as letting two actors feed off each other on camera. That happens in the script reading process, and that's the end of that. Now, to expect us to be morons who are still willing to join in an intellectual orgy - that's way too insulting.

The sadly funny part is - It doesn't need that much intelligence to know who the target audience for this show is - English speaking, urban Indians who watch English language movies. Simple, right? Now who in this target audience needs two fools addressing them telling them what movies to watch? They know where to get their reviews from!

If this weren't pain enough, we have to endure these chicks telling us if we should "Catch it", or "Trash it", as if these two were some sort of experts in cinema. Give us a break. According to a bit on India-forums.com - "Neha Sareen began her modelling career as a hand or leg model. He joined Lintas and would help out by being a hand or a leg model." Yes, if she could be extensively occupied being a hand or leg model, I suppose He could give its mouth a rest.

Renee Zellweger came on "The Actors' Studio" immediately after this stupid show, and there wasn't one single bit of intellectual masturbation. She spoke about her brother who would beat her up, about her father who is a very clever person, how she learned not to judge people, and how she went to school in the day, worked during the night, and how she once went to a set and pretended like she knew what she was doing! And at the end of that story, all she had to say was, "Anyway, it worked out okay!".

What a difference!

Guess what? We can tell.

Our chicks on flicks should really get themselves on a Revolutionary Road to find out who they are, what they can do, and what they can't, and not involve us in the pain of finding out.