Fuck Earth Hour.

Earth Hour.  One hour out of 24, one day out of 365.  Lights out!  Fans on, stoves on, air conditioners on, trains running, buses running, factories running, planes flying, ships chugging on crude oil, power plants still burning dirty coal, but lights out.  The man who started this movement called it just "symbolic".  Problem is, it's the wrong symbol.

Not only does it send the message out that putting out lights somehow helps the earth, it also eases some guilt out of our collective ecological consciousness.  It somehow sends out the message that by just putting ourselves in darkness, we are somehow, symbolically, at the very least, reflecting upon how life would be if we didn't have to burn any energy at all.  All this, while a lot of people lit candles to show their ubiquitous support of anything these days, ostensibly however, leaving a bigger carbon deposit into the atmosphere from burning wax!

The message going out has more to do with becoming unproductive than becoming efficient.  Cutting off power to devices doesn't stop thermal power plants, which are the majority in the world today, from burning fuel.  Lights are a very small percentage of our power consumption anyway, and indeed a very, very small percentage of our energy consumption.  What we actually achieved is a whole bunch of people in the world were less productive for an hour than they would normally be. 

Why do we love the symbols more than making actual lifestyle changes?  For example - one acre of land can support twenty vegetarians but only one and a half meat eating humans.  Bottomline, being vegetarian is enormously beneficial to the planet - by a factor of 5 at the very least, over being non-vegetarian.  Why aren't we giving up meat eating for the right reasons?  Because there is no convenience factor there!  There is no lazy gesture that we can sign on to, like the new fancy hogwash of buying carbon credits.  How it makes a difference to the atmosphere if money exchanges hands is mind boggling!

If we want a symbolic ritual, we could give up meat for a week.  Call it Earth Week.  No meat.  God, that ought to send some businesses scrambling for cover!  Imagine the animals that won't have to be killed, the meat that won't have to be refrigerated, or transported.  Oh, wait a minute!  What about the animals having to be fed until the feast the week after?  See?  If it isn't long term, it isn't going to work at all.

Let's look at this from a very Indian perspective.  Where I live, we've had a regular two hour power outage for over two years, so we're already way, way ahead of all the clowns out there celebrating this stupid Earth Day.  If I took the symbol seriously, I'd say I wouldn't have to participate in this Earth Day for another two generations and I'd still have less guilt!  So, let's leave the symbolism aside and consider what the real messages going out are.

This Earth Day was first thought about and started in Australia - today the single largest exporter of coal to the single largest consumer, China.  In other words, the one country that is going to feed the energy hungry beast called China, with the most polluting of all fuels, is the one that came up with this retarded idea of an Earth Day!  And why the heck are we celebrating this, when we are already much more environmentally friendly with hours of power outage all over the country?  Shouldn't we emulate perhaps Nepal, which has 16 hours of power outage a day?  What kind of environmentally conservative mindset wants to emulate countries that have reliable (read overproduced) power supplies?

The USA and China have the two biggest carbon footprints in the world.  India is languishing way behind in that department, and for once, we can be thankful.  But there are fashionable idiots all over the world who are busy sending out wrong messages.  And our idiots are grabbing them and really thinking it makes a bloody difference!  We apparently saved 916 megawatts of power during the Earth Hour according to some estimate.  With just lights, if we managed so much of a saving, how come this will never reflect in any power production budget?  It won't because we didn't produce any less, we just consumed less!  If we actually produced less, the environmental ministry simply has to cut a deal with the energy ministry!  India would shut everything down and be the most environmentally friendly.... yuk, India would be the "most green" country in the world!

If this doesn't make sense, think about this - our power plants, mostly coal fired thermal units cannot run below capacity just because we anticipate all our fashionable clowns switching off their lights for an hour.  Hydroelectric plants never run below capacity, for there is nothing to save except stored water, in some cases.  Lights are less than 15% of our power consumption, remember?  So, we continue to pump out as much electricity through the generators at the thermal power plants, and we'll be damned if some idiot downstream switches off his lights or not!  Now, let's look at the numbers this symbol actually stands for - 1 hour out of 24 is 4.16% of a day's consumption.  Assuming we had ALL lights off during this period across the country, that is, that would be 15% of 4.16% of a day's consumption - or 0.625% in a day.  Divided over the number of hours in a year, that was a royal saving of 0.0000171% of our annual production.  When was the last time you were happy saving 0.0000171% of anything?  No wonder no power plant around the world takes this Earth Day with even a symbolic reduction in production.

Saving the environment must be the same as saving money - not until we figure out how to do this, do we actually have any chance of building a lasting interest in saving anything.  Coal and oil are doing very well, because they are still very cheap, considering how much it costs for us to mine as a percentage of how much money we can make from the mining.  Until solar power and wind power and all the other sources of energy come down in cost, we don't have any chance of realistically bringing about a change in usage habits.

For some reason, it was fashionable for the White Man to destroy entire continents in his search for a comfortable life.  It was okay for him to dig out all the world's resources and burn as he wished.  Now, all of a sudden, he wants to sell us new technologies since he realizes he ultimately doesn't control too much of the world's oil.  Up came this great suggestion from none other than the foxes in the USA - let's bring all the world's forests under a global management system.  Well sorry White Massa!  In fact, fuck you.  That didn't work out very well, so now we have this widespread media onslaught that the environment is really important and that we cannot poke holes in the ozone layer, but only since the White Man is the one who is first going to get skin cancer by the dozen!

Sadly for Whitey, the rest of the world is pretty savvy when it comes to alternative technologies - there is no breakthrough infinite energy source for whitey or anybody to control.  And a very brown Arab community still has plenty of oil, and the Venezuelans aren't likely to hand over their big oil resources to the Yanks or the Brits either.  Nor are the Kazakhs or the Iranians. And many OPEC countries are considering switching from the US Dollar to the Euro to peg their oil and gas on!  Not the British Pound!  With so many countries in the EU, we don't have to worry about any controlling interest in the currency itself.  In other words, Whitey's control of oil has eroded bloody fast.  So he's looking for something new to control, but we must first be made to fear that shit that looms in the unknown future.  Disaster is easy to subscribe to.  Well guess what?  If we had no power and no oil, we in India will simply ride our bullock carts and ride out the disaster.  Whitey cannot.

But Whitey can scare the shit out of us.  Because we have idiots who believe everything Whitey tells us.  Their freaking press looks so classy, they can't possibly lie, can they?  Yes, they can.  And we're falling like ninepins for the bullshit they spin out.  Their lies are all geared towards feeding some industry or the other.  They've even invented diseases and told the whole world to get vaccinations for diseases that don't even exist!  Look at our poultry industry!  Crushed by thousands of vested interests.  Luckily we have realized that broiler chicken is no good and are back to raising free range chicken.  Same with genetically modified foods and brand new diseases like ADD!  How come the new generation suddenly has a disease, a disorder, that none of our ancestors had, well up into this century, this generation of parents!?  Whitey lies.

So fuck Whitey when he tells us to use resources carefully.  All of a sudden, those are global resources, huh?  Every culture uses whatever it can afford to use.  We don't have to sacrifice anything for anybody.  We are already very judicious with our decisions and look at how well our regulated banking system did not flinch with this global crisis Whitey had to endure with crashing, burning and pain!  We may be terrible in many ways, but we know how to take care of our shit when we really have to.  We don't need to add to the pain we already have without enough electric power.  We have done enough.  To hell with Whitey.  Fuck Earth Hour.

BSK.

The Tiger in the Woods.

The image of a phenomenal shot by Tiger Woods, followed by the claim
of consulting firm Accenture - "High Performance, Delivered", won't
leave us for some time. Because it is high performance and Tiger
Woods has almost always delivered it. But now, Accenture is pulling
out of all endorsements of the golfing legend, because he "no longer
represents" the image they want to portray.

Question is - did they hire him for being a phenomenal golfer who can
personify high performance, of did they use him to make Accenture look
like a saintly company? I tend to think his golfing abilities were of
paramount importance and I have no reason to believe he is any less of
a golfer now after these scandals have broken out about his
extramarital affairs. In other words, his "high performance" could
very easily remain unaffected, but for some reason, his image as a
squeaky clean "person" is more important to a company that wanted to
associate with him when the going was good, and has readily dumped him
for reasons having nothing to do with their business with him. That
sounds like pure betrayal to me.

How come we don't care about squeaky clean people who can't perform
like Tiger Woods? There are never any prizes for being morally in the
best league, are there? So, what's the big deal when a high performer
in one area doesn't hold the same standards elsewhere? This is by no
means an endorsement of Tiger Woods' behaviour, but why is it that we
find it hard to accept the disruption of this image of sainthood that
we the world conferred upon him? Why're we so deeply invested in our
own stupidity, in an assumption that worked for such a long time for
everyone? Because we hate being told we are wrong. Much like the
flat earthers must have felt centuries ago.

The media is as much of an infidel when it comes to scandals. Not one
media outlet that has so far ooohed and aahed every Tiger Woods
achievement has thrown out the other perspective - "So what if Tiger
Woods had affairs outside of his marriage? He continues to be a
golfing legend we can continue to celebrate. We hope he comes out of
his problems and his self imposed exile and starts thrilling us on the
golf course again".

I'll tell you why this won't happen. The biggest
consumers of popular American media are white people, and they are all
feeling bad that a white woman, namely Mrs. Woods, has been "wronged".
How can they lose the entire population of white women from their
viewership by taking this perspective? Especially when Tiger Woods is
kind of black. The "See, we told you they're all bad" perspective,
even while unspoken, is the easiest nonsense to sell.

So, instead of being faithful to the phenomenal athlete for his
abilities and the number of times he has helped sell television time,
the media has shamelessly now jumped on the scandal bandwagaon to make
a mockery of him and get more of what they have got from him up until
now - popular viewership! That is what this pimping business is all
about. It doesn't matter who gets fucked as long as we can promise
more mindless sex.

There is nothing worse than an "average" mindset. The people who are
all outraged by Tiger Woods aren't by any means the people who will
ever belong in his high performance bracket. Tiger has simply
demonstrated that yes, one can have it all - a secure marriage, a lot
of money and goodwill, and affairs on the side! A lot of men would
love to have all of this, but would hate the consequences in case it
turned out like this. The big difference is, Tiger went for it. The
rest of us didn't.

None of us ever heard any of those damsels he had affairs with
complain until this scandal "broke out" did we? Now, why are they all
coming out of the woodwork? Because now, they can make money out of
the scandal! The frenzy is on, and the media is here to fuel their
fire. One of those paragons of virtue even said she feels really
sorry for Mrs. Woods. Oh, yes, we totally believe you my dear Mother
Teresa. I bet you never knew who you were being divinely uplifted by.
This nonsense is endless. I wonder how in her poetic conscience it
never occured to her that she could pick up the phone and called Mrs.
Woods to apologize to her quietly. Indiscretions are as common as
discretions. Get that, people.

Tiger Woods never claimed not to be anything he is being found out to
be. All of us slapped that clean image on him, because we wanted him
to be that way for our own limited minds to have something like that
to look up to, because we stupidly believe that being "good" brings us
all the good things in life! Sure, it can make us feel good, but
Tiger Woods wouldn't have a billion dollars if he hit the golf ball
into the ditch and went to church every Sunday.

Other people's fidelity, their sexuality, their choices should all be
strictly in their personal domain. None of us have any moral
authority to judge what other people do in their personal lives. We
have public figures for one reason only - to take the risks we would
like to take, without us having to bear the consequences. We're
willing to make them rich and famous to put up with this incredible
demand from us, but we forget to allow them one thing - flaws.

It is clear what a high performer can achieve. Tiger had it all. He
still has it all, and can have most of it all. That's what the world
cannot stand. That's what the media can never sell to the masses.
Tiger's highest performance is being able to keep a straight face to
his wife after having all these affairs. Kudos, Tiger! Now, the
reason she couldn't find out what kind of a man she was marrying was
because she is clearly not a high performer - she couldn't see beyond
the image. In other words, she is stupid like most of the fools
lapping up all the media sleaze.

Oh yes, she is a victim of marital infidelity, but she has always been
a victim of her own inability to tell what kind of a man Tiger Woods
really was. She still has a life much better than 99% of the women in
the world. How many women in the world would give an arm to be in her
place with the kind of wealth she has enjoyed without having to work
for a cent of it! Oh, tell me now, that she is shattered, and that
wealth doesn't mean much to someone who has to undergo the kind of
pain she is undergoing now, and I'll bet she doesn't ask for anything
less than a hundred million dollars in her divorce settlement.

If Tiger is the predator on the prowl and feels good about that, then
the mistake he has made is not having affairs, it is getting married!
He should divorce this woman he is married to, stop meowing like a stupid felis domestica and completely embrace being the Tiger in the Woods. It would make the world a much more interesting place, and leave a lot of people wondering why they lead such dishonest lives! Now that would be high performance, delivered.

BSK.

Nationalism Misplaced

The nationalists are out in force, demanding a safer India, a stronger India, a more accountable India. The attacks in Mumbai have turned on a fervour that hasn't yet subsided. India is suddenly inflamed and angry, and want results. Our politicians are fair game, and a few heads have already rolled.

But what are our nationalists achieving now that they couldn't have fought for before a bunch of no good, gun toting terrorist pigs decided to attack Mumbai's soft targets? Surprise, surprise! By bringing out their patriotic emotions to the fore, they have given the terrorists exactly the satisfaction they would love to have - the feeling that they are fighting against an entire nation!

Imagine being part of a group that trains to kill and maim, destroy and burn - all in remote hiding places, under the tutelage of shadowy characters with no intellect to understand anything more than violence, and then suddenly being promoted to receive the attention of the world, and the reward of fighting againt a powerful "nation"! That should be a real high in their low lives. What is worse, it will induce them into a delusion of being equal to the task of fighting a nation, and spur them to greater and more spectacular attacks on an enemy that everybody knows is way too powerful, but now seems eligible for attack.

Why nationalist sentiments come out in the wake of a terrorist attack is beyond me. Attack on India? Please! These are rogues and freak murderers on the loose, causing mayhem. Should these elements really call for anything in reaction that is nationalistic? Do they deserve that exalted emotion in reaction to their ugly schemes? I don't think so, and I don't think our fashionable nationalists who woke up in Mumbai and other cities quite realize how many things there are to fight for that will actually make our lives better and make our nation progress faster.

The reason is - this kind of incident is simple enough for a lot of people to come out of their indifferent existences, and easy enough to collect groups to go let off some steam and have some impassioned conversations. The incidents we have on a daily basis that are highly anti-national like bribery, extortion, corruption, pollution, rank incompetence, rape, and murder are definitely more within touching distance of the common Indian and most certainly within the powers of politicians to fix, but these aren't "sexy" enough for our nationalists. We want bombs, fire, media attention, foreigners talking of support, comparisons to other events worldwide - spectacle! Without these, our nationalism is confined to accepting status quo as "normal". The truth is bribery, extortion, corruption, pollution, rank incompetence, rape and murder aren't bloody normal either, but they happen often enough that we have accepted them as such.

The monotony in statements that come out of Mumbai's residents in massive numbers is numbing. Everybody wants to stand united, everybody thinks this is not just an attack on Mumbai, and everybody thinks our politicians are responsible. We all know our politicians have never been responsible. The rest of the world has sung the same tune, that they must stand shoulder to shoulder with India in this hour of crisis. So, we stand shoulder to shoulder and do what? Watch over the dead bodies? Give the terrorists more to cheer about?

The worst insult to Mother India was Sanjay Dutt on TV saying he was angry! Isn't this the son of a thrice born b&^%h who bought weapons from the underworld? And now, suddenly he is a nationalist? I am all for reformation, and I am proud of this rank idiot for shedding some of his stupidity over the years, but has he earned the right to talk for a nation? Come on, India. Surely we can do better than this.

How about the crisis of character that we have all been marinated in? From the fools who ignore no smoking signs, to the politician who sneers and sniggers when cornered with a straight question, from the trader who demands a price well above maximum retail price to the teacher who doesn't know his subject, we know we have failed as a nation and are decaying on the inside faster than we are shining on the outside. Do we really need a tea company telling us to wake up and vote, when we should be lynching the rascals we voted for the last time who haven't delivered anything they were supposed to?

We have been dumbed down, and we are loving it. We are coccooned in the constant barrage of hype and commercialism that tells us we are doing great when we are not. Being sensitive about our country is not a good substitute for being ignorant and indifferent about what we should be doing as citizens. We are being led like sheep by the "system" that allows a few people to take advantage of weaknesses, loopholes, and distractions, all leading to enormous gain, while the welfare of the nation is systematically destroyed.

The "bulletproof" vests supplied to the men in uniform at the Chatrapati Shivaji Station allowed bullets to pass through them. That is how some of our "heroes" died. Further investigation on dummies with the same vests ended up with smashed dummies - categorically showing that these vests did not do the job they were supposed to! Shouldn't this be big on TV? What a symbolic example of how India has been let down for many, many years and exploited and raped and pillaged by our own selfish people. This won't make news because we don't have the conscience to think of this as being important or sexy enough to be nationalistic.

On the ground, the reality is that we have a failure on many fronts. We were not a great nation to start with and we are not getting there in a hurry. A great nation has people who do their duty as citizens, on all fronts, at all times, not just people who wake up when politically attractive. A great nation does not put up with mediocre performance. A great nation has conscientious people, with a highly developed sense of duty and compassion. We do not have any of the above, and most Indians I know would never put the cause of the nation above a cause of personal betterment. A great nation would never have bowed to the will of hijackers and turned over prisoners to secure the release of an aeroplane and its passengers. India did. So, what the bloody hell are we suddenly so nationalistic about? It really took a bunch of terrorists to wake us up? We should be ashamed of that very fact.

Terrified into Stupidity!

Through the last 40 hours, the drama of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai have occupied Indian media focus, but have also served to highlight a dangerous trend - pandering to America's way of doing things, starting with a full subscription to thoughtlessness.

According to Ravi Shankar Prasad, National Spokesperson, BJP, "As you (Barkha Dutt) rightly pointed out this is a replica of Nine Eleven in India". http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/video/video.aspx?id=45516. According to this fool, "It is time that India responded in the same way as America responded"! America responded by attacking the wrong country, pissing away its economic well being, and stands empty handed seven years later, with Osama Bin Laden roaming free and Americans mad about phone tapping and torture that led nowhere. America's image took a beating worldwide and is now on the precipice of a massive economic downturn. Is this the example we want to follow, you bloody jerk? Why can't you set higher standards, and why can't these standards be our own?

Barkha Dutt started this nonsense, despite being a Padma Shri, asking if this is India's Nine Eleven! What a mockery she is making of this prestigious award by being so cluelessly glued to the way America does things! I had enough of this looney bin when she was brimming with emotion for Barack Obama and never got beyond the dumbed down versions of everything she saw and reported on from the east cost of the USA. Now, she is here, canvassing the emotion of the situation instead of presenting the facts in a clear light and causing a mature debate.

Just this afternoon, she asked a gentleman who was tensely waiting for news about a relative stuck inside one of the hotels under siege, "How are you feeling? You probably have no words to describe it"! and immediately stuck a microphone to his face! What a tinhead!

I have been hearing the word "hostages" over and over again on all the news channels, and frankly, how can so many people be hostages if most of them didn't even see the attackers? They were just trapped guests who floundered out somehow. The word "hostage" is defined in the dictionary as "a person seized or held as security for the fulfillment of a condition". Clearly this was never a hostage crisis anymore than a snake dance. But what does it do to the image of India, when we take pride in rescuing 100 or more "hostages" but build this picture in people's minds that security is so lax that 100 or more hostages can be taken in one sweeping move over public exposed areas!? The FACT is that none of the people who came out were hostages but our media loves the sexiness of that term. Multiples of morons.

Now, onto the dance of the diplomats - "We stand strongly behind the people of India" - clearly means we are the ones taking the bullets, while everybody else hides behind us. Can we really see Bush running into the building shooting at terrorists? Can we hear any nation offering to offset the compensation being paid to the victims' families? This has reached a point where the same stupid, meaningless noises are made by leaders of every nation exactly like the noises others made when their assets were attacked. Only the Israelis had the sense to say something truthful like "We have full faith in India's security operations".

"We strongly condemn..." is another one that has done its rounds for a long time and obviously the stupidity tank never runs dry. Where is the condemnation? I wonder if I would have listened to my parents if they had said, "We strongly scold you for your mischief" instead of "Come here you little rascal. You're grounded for a week! Now, apologize!" Oh, this one's richer than a single criticism. If a condemnation wasn't a strong one, wouldn't it automatically be downgraded to a criticism? So, what's up with a strong condemnation? Can we hear something like "These f@#$ing terrorist motherf@#$ers should be roasted on a slow fire!"? Please, so the terrorists may actually get the message their minds can comprehend?

Clearly, terrorism unleashes a lot of people's stupidity. It is amazing how there is still a player who can set a higher standard. BBC. The BBC report has all about going deeper, unemotionally, and finding information that nobody else has paid attention to, like talking about a person who was arrested in London with a connection to an earlier attack in Mumbai and how he is being held by the authorities in London to question about this one. None of the heavy breathing emotional nonsense here. How do they do it? By actually doing it, I would say. Can we stoop a little less and copy them instead of stupid Americans? That might be really hard, yes? Maybe one of these days I will take Barkha Dutt hostage to teach her the ropes or whip her with one.

Barack Obama and America's coming of age.

Today, it has been all celebration, and rightfully so. Barack Obama today became the first person of African American heritage to be elected President of the USA. The significance of this shouldn't be lost on anyone following this exciting news. In over 200 years of the USA existing as a nation, and 389 years since the first Africans were brought to America as slaves to work on British colonies, this is the first time any person of colour has been bestowed the rare honour of being the country's leader and indeed occupy the seat of one of the most powerful people in the world.

Not only were the odds heavily stacked against him, he was also fighting to be elected in a time of strife for the USA, with two wars and a looming recession that the whole world has felt and reacted to, not too positively. But Obama, being the brilliant leader he is, ran a campaign that was so sophisticated and so inclusive that all the traditional Republicans and their think tanks were reduced to sideshows with no substance at all. The Obama campaign outthought, outmotivated, outspent, and completely outplayed the republican campaign and made them look like amateurs in a world of phenomenal professionals.

The romance of all this is indeed beautiful, and the whole world has waxed eloquent about the significance of this historic moment, emotional for a lot of people, and amazing for the ideals upon which America has always said it stands upon. Indian media has been very sharp, as representatives of the world's largest democracy, to present this spectacle in its colour, although largely positioning their reporters in liberal bastions where the story was juiciest, particularly after it became obvious that Obama was going to win and win big.

If there is one thing that is totally missing from all media so far, it is the mention that America the adolescent of 200 years of age has finally shown symptoms of becoming an adult, officially getting past puberty and coming of legal adult age. For all its greatness, America has always been a sum of its various interesting parts, and never a grown up as a whole. Now, finally, with this emphatic expression, thanks to youngsters and people who chose to stay awake, America has shown that it is not genetically flawed and is capable of adulthood and adult behaviour.

The greatest progress in America in any sphere has taken place in Blue states - those that traditionally vote Democrat. In fact, Blue states overwhelmingly overshadow the productivity of Red states, who sometimes seem to produce nothing but voting blocks and religious zealots who clearly should have no place in the twenty first century. Sarah Palin, scarily is from one such state, and this right wing nutcase who wants to legalize aerial hunting and thinks Putin is going to attack America over Alaskan airspace, did come perilously close to having her chance to be President!

At the time when India was getting its independence from the British empire, won with a non violent movement that still baffles humanity, segregation was legal in the USA! It was perfectly normal to expect a black person to be hanged without trial if charged with a crime, and the likelihood of a black person ever getting the same treatment as a white person was almost nil. To this day, there is a significantly larger percentage of black people in America's jails in comparison to their percentage of the nation's population, and there are still many, many places you can visit in the United States of America where if you are not white, you will be looked upon like a parasite fully worthy of nothing but suspicion.

Racism is as American as apple pie, and it exists in its ugliest forms in American people's minds. This is not to define the whole country by the actions of a few, but it is worth remembering as we celebrate and join in America's greatest political step forward. There are American parents today who are busy warning their children that their country is doomed to be taken over by Muslim terrorists because Obama became president. Earlier today, when John McCain was delivering his concession speech and congratulated Obama, his supporters were booing! Booing! That's how retarded some of these people can be. There are Americans who are scared to their bones by Obama being president, and for reasons that are uniquely American - usually prejudiced, baseless, and conditioned by an upbringing of ignorance and intolerance. That is not about to change anytime soon.

The balance may have shifted for now in favour of a more progressive America, but that doesn't provide the grounds for us to assume that America has done anything more than somehow endure its coming of age. To be fair, America has had in place for a while the framework for greatness, the structure to provide the opportunity for anyone to step up and take up enormously ambitious dreams. It provides for great checks and balances that carefully prevent the hijacking of a democratic system, and yet, it watched helplessly as Bush and co. systematically ran into the ground America's surplus economy, waged a war based on lies and treachery, gave no bid contracts worth billions of dollars to companies in which their politicians had vested interests, and ruined the country's reputation to the point where Eritrea and Solomon Islands might well be the most celebrated members of the Coalition of the Willing that the supermoron from Texas put together.

It is possible today to lead a life in America where you can do well financially without much of an education, you can buy enough insulation to never have to deal with a human being too much unlike yourself, and live a life of complete ignorance of the rest of the world. There are many pockets in the USA where people have chosen to do exactly these things and their vote could still decide which country gets bombed next. Driven by belief above knowledge, they have an icon in Sarah Palin who believes that dinosaurs and humans co-existed at some point, and these are the people that constitute 48% of the popular vote that Barack Obama did not win! (Imagining T-rex on Noah's ark still makes me smile in abject resignation!)

There was more negativity and cheapness from the republican campaign against Obama than there was any substance and dignity. Sarah Palin's attempts at linking Obama to a well known fear psychosis of terror, knowing fully well that this domestic terrorist is a university professor, should give us enough insight on the kind of people she knew she was addressing. These are the people who continue to pull the USA down to the stone age, and her "folksy appeal" is hardly directed towards any good folks who believe in hard work, abundance, and wonderfully universal concepts of brotherhood. Indeed, the biggest believers in Palin politics are more likely to be fear mongers and religious creationists who want to reject all scientific education, who do not mind being ruled by trepidation and suspicion of those "big city liberals"!

The fact that Republicans lost this election doesn't mean that America has gone beyond extremely conservative, narrow minded, fear driven, ignorant and prejudiced thought processes. America is by no means setting a great example for the rest of the democratic world to follow. Countries like India should smile and congratulate America for its bold step forward, like a special needs child of enormous physical power that has just uttered its first word.

The lesson for India from Barack Obama's success should not be the romantic, unsophisticated views that our Padma Shri winning journalists like Barkha Dutt seem to be so enamoured with inflicting upon us with Disney like sweetness. (The funny sideshow - the immature joy on Mira Nair's face last night as she spoke to Barkha Dutt to demonstrate exactly the limit of her understanding of American politics - nothing surprising coming from a filmmaker who makes a living out of trashing India for the viewing pleasure of white people.) The lesson for us is to trust our fundamentals and put more faith into our democratic processes. We never condoned racism, we never legalized segregation, and we threw enough clout around to kick South Africa out of the cricketing fraternity for practising apartheid, and we led the Non Alligned Movement. We are not an ideologically compromised nation to need to look up to "America" for any kind of direction.

We as a nation still occupy moral high ground, and we're only sixty one years old. Still, we should see the intelligence of Barack Obama in having to fight through mentalities that are centuries behind our people's. His positivity should be an inspiration to us. His unwavering energy and calmness should encourage some of us to get engaged in our democratic processes. We should exercise our rights more, and grow up with awareness and courage, in much the way Swami Vivekananda has long since told us. It wouldn't take much to note that America still wants to be one nation "Under God", but India's founding fathers got way beyond human constructs and concepts of belief, while putting "Truth" as our highest ideal. Satyameva Jayate!

Stupid ads and outright lies!

"Thousands of pixels being chased by festive looking dancers. When they are about to catch up, the marauding pixels fly into a giant screen and arrange themselves to make the colourful face of a Kathakali dancer who makes facial gestures on the giant screen" - the brief for the Sony Bravia commercial couldn't have been very different from this yawn inducing, uninspiring idea meltdown. I hardly have a question about the uncreative nonsense that Indian ad. agencies almost always come up with. But if the brilliant colour of the Bravia TV is clearly visible on my existing TV, why would I want to buy the Bravia?

The latest ad for Timesjobs.com on television tells you you will find a better paying job on their site, and then goes on to explain in great detail, on the same site, how they are not responsible for anything in an "as is" presentation of information! http://www.timesjobs.com/popuphtml/Terms.htm#link14 In other words, there is absolutely no effort put forward by Timesjobs.com to ensure the jobs there are indeed the better paying jobs. Stretch that a little, and you will easily infer you could get the lowest paying job and Timesjobs.com will still not be responsible for their own advertisement in any way. How can a service that shouts - "Because you are worth more" completely absolve itself of that claim, after "better paying job" is the the only reason for you to consider their service? Absolutely nefarious.

This advertisement sells you an alternative to an employment agency, without any of the responsibilities you would come to expect. It is just a cheap reference, where the attempt is to cut out the percentage commissions of the employment agency and nothing more. Therefore it is an outright lie that you will find "better paying jobs" there. With subjective claims like "The tastiest Sambar in the world", you can let it go, but when there is something measurable like a person's salary, how can the media planners of Timesjobs.com be so stupid and assuming of people who end up visiting their site? Clearly they can, and I hope the recession causes some of these fools to be kicked out.

By now, even if you are a fairly occasional TV watcher, you must have seen the enormous disclaimers at the end of some ads. that flash for about a second, which nobody in the world can read, for two reasons - the print is too small, and there is just too much to read in one second. So, what is the point of showing the disclaimer at all, especially when everyone in their right mind should know the disclaimer is for dissing all claims made so far by the advertisement that a normal person can understand and trust.

Communication, the very point of advertising, is sometimes lost on me. Especially with car advertisements where the car flies through the air, skids all over the road, spins, and just about manages to find a grip of safety before vanishing into the horizon. I would think a car that throws itself about so easily would be the most unsafe thing to buy and the most unsound investment. Especially if the car is tiny like a Swift, I'd go all out singing its praise on how roomy it is and how solid on the road it can be. If it is all over the place, I kind of begin to feel it is flimsy and untrustworthy. Am I the only one who has this problem?

The ridiculous advertisement also has its place somewhere, except when you begin to wonder why a motorcyclist would hire a helicopter to throw him from several hundred feet high onto the top of a building. Motorcycles are not aircraft, and if you landed on the top of a building in one, and survived the fall, you'd pretty much have nowhere to go. Now if the building itself was your destination, what do you need the motorcycle for? Stupidity at its bleeding worst.

Then comes the sexuality crutch. Why would you think of sex when you are drinking a bottle of Slice, for heavens' sake? Aamsutra, my flaming arse! When I am thirsty I might reach for some Slice, and if I love mangoes, great! But sex is not something I associate with a fruit drink, no matter how much Katrina Kaif seems to be turned on by the thought of humping a mango or a Slice drinker. Jittu Krishnamurthy was right when he said, "In lieu of creativity there is sexuality". Most of the time, sexuality is what seems to be easily on tap for most of our ad. makers, and they don't even bat an eyelid about what the product is! If the fools working in advertising agencies are so bereft of ideas, why don't they just quit? Maybe we should make a Kaam Sutra ad. for them to get the hint? "Make way, not ads."

The attempt at the abstract - this is the genre that gets me really laughing. Like the ad. for the Tata Safari Dicor, that starts of about "lines", and how you can make your own "lines" with the ugly beast called the Tata Safari! What an idea, Sirji! How many customers actually think about buying a car as the same as buying a paintbrush to make lines with?! If I wanted to make lines, I'd find a thousand different ways without having to buy an SUV. Give me a f$#@%ing break. The abstract should be left to geniuses who can present some weird connection in a sane way, not to half drunk dopey eyed wanna be rebels turned washout creatives.

There aren't that many professions in which anything goes! Most of our India centric ads. are all about filling up the airwaves with noise. Speaking of noise, why does the volume jump up as soon as it is time for an advertisement? Right in the middle of a cricket match, which itself is fairly well controlled in terms of noise during a broadcast, the ad. will just blare its way into your life. My hand is invariably on the Mute button as soon as it is time for a commercial. So, I get to watch most ads. without sound anyway. No TRP machine will report this fact, and some advertiser somewhere is losing money and not getting value!

"See what happens when a CD begins to dream"??? Since when did inanimate objects start dreaming and we found out what they dreamt about? This offering is from Moser Baer, with ugly black wires morphing out of nowhere and hitting the roof, the floor, the model's hands, and what not, before becoming all kinds of electronic goods - simply unimaginative, uncommunicative rubbish presented with the finesse of a snake devouring a rat. I wonder how this gets past the brainstorming stage - assuming there are actually coherent stages to the process of unleashing a commercial on unsuspecting masses. Scarily, this commercial is a computer graphics lift from a science fiction movie. Maybe that is why we are asked to imagine what happens when a CD begin to dream? I'd like to see what miracles happen when our ad executives begin to think.

The Axe deodorant commercials seemed to be rather well put together until they came up with the latest one with the chocolate flavoured temptations. Apparently, only women fall for the smell of chocolate and will stick themselves to glass in pure longing, even when they cannot smell the spray! How retarded can things get? If a deodorant smelt anything like chocolate or reminded me of something to eat, I'd be completely turned off. Watch this product vanish off the shelves for being absolutely idiotic in conception, ad or no ad.

The stupid, stressed out woman who thinks her husband is dead when she finds him snoozing and is shocked when he wakes up, leads me to think she was hoping he was dead! After all, presumably, she would be the beneficiary of her husband's life insurance policy! Knowing fully well that "Life Insurance" is actually "Death Insurance", they don't really have to tell us how happy we can be just because we bought insurance, do they? I mean seriously, what the heck do we care once we are dead? Sure it must be the hardest thing to sell, but in all seriousness, if you needed Kal Par Control (whatever the crap this means, especially to those of us who cannot read English and end up understanding in Hindi), you'd work to make more money today, not spend a little more on an insurance plan! Moreover, if there is another company selling the same thing, telling you to let tomorrow lie and just enjoy today, what are you supposed to do? Very confusing, and might be better if someone would just tell us, "Look, someone is going to need this money if you croak". After all, how many of us are fooled by insurance ads anyway?

Now we have the very stylish PSAs, like "Save the girl child" that comes to us in the middle of a cricket match on Ten Sports. Hello? It isn't as if we are all about killing the girl child, and it certainly isn't those of us who understands English and can see the point of a poignant message that needs the message. So, what is the point of this PSA as opposed to the crude ones made by the same ministries? The direct ones in Hindi, that treat the viewer like a stupid villager are actually much more effective in communicating the point. Check out the one where the girl child in the womb talks to her father through a stethescope! Then there is the really thought provoking one that asks us to imagine a world without women. I thought about it, honestly and deeply, and really came to this - I'd definitely hate seeing fewer women around, but... Wow, wouldn't that be a good way to control human population?

Remember the Intex commercial, extolling the virtues of their speakers, especially the drop of the pin you can hear clearly while the older gentleman is clearing his ears? Well, if I can hear it on my existing set of speakers, I sure don't have any reason to buy Intex, do I? Am I the only one thinking out loud on this really base level of stupidity exhibited by fools who are paid to precisely not do this kind of work?

The heady smell of failure

Most good stories come full circle. The adventurers who return to their village, the hero who comes back to his roots, richer for the ride and wiser for the experience, but essentially coming back to starting point after victory to share it with his tribe. The sense of belonging is one we can all identify with, and is used in no small measure by good story tellers. But for that, we must identify with the characters, the journey they chose to go on, and the ordeals on the way that made them better. In the very least, we must care.

Of late, Americans have shown up to be the drunks who went to the party, trashed the palace, and puked on the lawn and let it flow down the street called Wall Street. That's no hero's journey - it is a fool's parade and isn't funny when it takes 700 billion dollars to begin to fix, and most of the people who paid this in taxes weren't even invited to the party. But some people have such a hangover that they still don't realize the palace stinks to high heaven, and the neighbourhood is sick of the scene.

There was a segment today on NDTV called "A view from Wharton", which had a bunch of Indian clowns studying at Wharton Business School, offering their views on the financial crisis. The puppies all had rather optimistic views about them finding jobs and I wondered how and why any of us would give a rat's arse if any of them got jobs or not! When none of them was talking about getting jobs in India, how could this possibly be relevant to us here, apart from paying bored attention to some specimens from a well known tribe of Indians wanting to study and work abroad. Who cares if some Indian guy graduating from some school in the USA gets a job or not?

More than anything, I'd be worried if we're celebrating those who have chosen to learn from a failed system! I really don't want to hear from the losers on how it is done! I have always believed that you get expert opinions from people who are reasonably successful at what they do. If you want to talk about a formula one racing, you try and get Michael Schumacher, or if you have to settle for someone less, maybe Narain Karthikeyan has some insights. You most certainly do not ask the village idiot who crashed his bullock cart into the train you can hear two miles away.

But the amusement value, priceless! One of these puppies thought they had the best ringside view of this crisis, and it helped them learn first hand from their faculty how exactly these things came about and they were interested in seeing how this kind of crisis could be prevented from spilling over to the rest of the world, and affect countries like India that might be more vulnerable to this kind of situation! I can usually smell stupidity coming round the corner at full speed, and even the geniuses at Wharton did not disappoint!

What exactly are these idiots learning at Wharton? This financial crisis isn't a nuclear bomb that somehow spills over the border with the wind carrying deadly radiation to other countries. It simply isn't going to be felt in areas that are not vested and dependent on the American economy. It most certainly isn't going to affect countries that have long since insulated themselves from this kind of fly and crash cycle by keeping their economies slow and steady. We in India certainly know what slow is even if we may forget steady once in a while, so who exactly has been affected in our "vulnerable" country? We don't know yet, but we are not the country pissing off billions in a war with no end in sight, and we certainly aren't going ga-ga lending to people who can never pay back.

The professor at Wharton had a better view of Indian economic experts - he said they had a mindset quite different from those of their American counterparts and while they thought about building their companies, they also thought about building their countries. Quite a fascinating viewpoint, and timely. When America was trying its best to bully us to open our markets some more in the 90s, nobody quite thought about India as being correctly cautious. Our own "financial experts" were busy comparing us to the rapid growth of the Far East and wanted more and more deregulation right away. Are we in the same planet today?

So, why are we supposed to take Wharton seriously? Apparently, there is a Wharton business school alumnus who is in charge of Bush's $700 billion bailout package, which he must dispense with in the next two months. All right genius. What about the thousands of idiots schools like Wharton must have unleashed over the years to cause this mess in the first place?

The pursuit of sadness!

My mother cannot get away from Tamil serials on television. It is an addiction and a fairly harmless one, apparently. All her "great" movies are from an era of abject sadness and misery. Some works of art, no doubt, but the central tone of most of those stories is sadness. Sadness told, sadness sold, sadness left behind, and sadness appreciated!

How does that whole generation consume so much sadness? Now, what is unbelievable is that this doesn't stop with consumption of entertainment on the idiot box. It overflows into real life as well. My mother would rather choose to emotionally blackmail me into a decision of the smallest consequence rather than weigh a rational alternative. I have to think this has something to do with media influence that somehow sadness is valid, and must be given importance!

At the theatrical box office, thankfully sadness doesn't do very well. The recently flopped "Kuselan" being a case in point, despite the presence of SuperStar Rajinikanth! It was also a badly crafted movie, and that probably led to its demise, but abjectly sad movies don't do well. People don't want to pay for sadness. The Kamal Hassan starrer "Mahanadi" was another rather remarkable film that didn't go anywhere in the box office because it was sad all the way. It was much more than that, it was depressing.

It is the stories that beg for the sympathy of the audiences that I really hate to be sucked into. For, once they get my sympathy, I'd like to see them get my interest as well. More often than not, they don't. Hollywood is no less guilty of this crime. Bruce Willis just cannot be happy, can he? One of my friends said he has a "million dollar grimace" that never leaves him. When the rascal has to walk into a room and kill a bad guy, why does he have to get cramps in the stomach?

On Tamil television, sadness is being pushed through like hot cakes! Watch our soap! Our women cry more than the rest! I really don't know what mindset gets people to watch so much depressing negativity on television. Now, maybe this is the generation used to sad movies and they're just not going to the theatres anymore. The funny stuff comes from cinematic material edited for television, but none of the made for television productions touch anything funny.

Why so much sadness on TV? Because convincing sadness is easier to create than convincing comedy and convincing drama. It is a lame excuse, but people wallowing is brought about more easily than people making us laugh. We would imagine the reason sadness doesn't do well theatrically is because people don't want to go to the theatre and spend money to see sadness. That apart, the more accurate reason is that the people who do go to the theatre and spend money these days are not people who buy into sadness at all! We have a whole new demographic of happy Indian cinema consumers!

Years ago, somebody up north decided to inflict us with "Hum Log" and "Buniyaad" - some of the most depressing long running fare on television. Good lord! A competition to depress the masses! It is almost as if the government had a propaganda machine with the mandate - "Unleash sadness upon the nation! We don't want anybody to be happy or upbeat!". Indeed there were some brilliant comedies that came from those times of Doordarshan monopoly, but they didn't run as long.

Mumbai cinema seems to have hit the "happy" trail rather well. Some of the comedy that comes out of there is no laughing matter at all, but for most part, you can expect to not get hammered these days if you chose to watch a popular Hindi language film. As long as you avoid Star Plus, you can stay away from Hindi language sadness too.

It is strange that we go to theatres to find escape from our rather drab lives, and we go to television to see more of it! If media product has any influence on how people actually think and act, I would like to see much more upbeat television. Thank God we now have so much choice in television that we don't have to be subjected to mindless sadness. Not only has the nation's psyche become more positive in the last few years, thanks to the opportunities and the economy, we have also become a little more open minded and able to reject and stay away from negativity a little bit more. It hasn't worked on my mother yet, but I have hope.

I wonder why the rating system of any film industry cannot come up with a sadness index. Since violence and sex and everything else goes into determining the rating of a movie, why not have a rating that can potentially warn us about how sad a movie is. After all I would think if sex and violence can have a negative impact on our minds, sadness can do as much damage. If this rating system were put in place, Kuselan would be up there in the 8 out of 10 range. Mahanadi would walk away with a 9. And you and I could save a 100!

Mumbai Selling

The new ad. for "Khatron Ki Khiladi" on the new channel to come - Colors (notice the missing U?), warns that all the stunts are being performed under expert supervision in South Africa according to applicable regulations (Sounding very much like the Americans who love to write "This is not a toy" on plastic bags), and extends itself, huffing and puffing, to say "Viewers shouldn't try these stunts, especially children".

Now, either that means the stunts are really child's play and even children will want to try them, or our children would really listen to their parents yelling "Pinky! Leave the helicopter alone. You really shouldn't be following Akshay! No Chotu, you can't take the speedboat either!"

Are we hapless masses in India supposed to enjoy something being performed in South Africa with an American idea? How about talking in Polish with Korean subtitles, idiots? Oh, you want this to be a Hindi show? So, why isn't the show's name ever written in Hindi? Could it be because the people who can read Hindi would never watch this show? Or could it be you couldn't really come up with another name for "Fear Factor" that isn't equally dumb?

This is supposed to impress those of us who read in English, hear in Hindi, relate to American culture, and are willing to put up with South African regulations? Why not just show us the original show if we are this international in our taste?

It takes a bevy of beauties to go on some dangerous missions with Akshay Kumar? Fair enough. Television courting titillation is nothing new, but I would rather watch no TV at all than being forced to watch these unathletic acting career dropouts trying to hitch a ride to South Africa under some idea of "cool" invented last night. And these chicks telling us who they are - why? Who cares? To me, they all look the same, sound the same, and act the same. There is a serious business opportunity for a company that can invent and sell new types of giggles. And it can be called "Giggles for Dummies".

The show promises lizards and snakes licking these desirable nubiles - are we supposed to be scared of these creatures? We are still a nation where a large number of people are bitten by snakes on a regular basis, and yet, we do have any mortal fear of the creatures. We even have seven year old girls chasing away leopards with sticks and winning bravery awards from the President. Sweep all this under the carpet while watching another Whitey show ranking snakes for how deadly they are, and you are the perfect candidate to welcome the new White invasion of our culture, this time the mindsets.

Right on the heels of this one, we have BIG BOSS! A bunch of people in a house. So? The ads make this out to be some sort of macabre, extremely menacing proposition and we are supposed to be interested in who survives the rest of the loonybins in the house? Are we supposed to wait in trepidation to see where this next experiment in social engineering will take us? Or will we be spared the end of the season and have some actress cry foul and make news for herself while the show tops every toilet in viewerland?

What kind of Mumbai morons come up with these ideas to copy shows that are boring to start with? What kind of braindead, drugged out dopes are getting paid to come up with these ideas, and what kind of mediocrity marinated lunatic bosses okay these ideas?

We as Indians, have a long tradition of notions, as long as our history itself. These notions are complex and sophisticated, and we have never cared to explain or analyze any of these, because... we don't really care! It takes a lot to dumb us down, and while we might buy into a bit of dumbness once in a while, Mumbai trying to sell us the whole whale is out of the question.

Bottomline - we are not American, and none of the doped out foreign culture sucking assholes in Mumbai, from the uncreative bowels of their below mediocre television culture needs to tell us what we should like and what is cool. We're already cool and we don't really care about that either.

Which one of those dickheads is running Star TV in India? Somebody tell that knucklehead that we don't need to be told what is coming in the "Sizzling Summer" like the Asia Cup and Wimbledon, when it is pouring cats and dogs. Maybe these people are snorting dope all day long and don't even notice that summer is long gone for the 16 percent of the world's population that is keeping one of these sports alive!

That idiot on AXN who's been pronouncing Maruti as "Muhroodee" for ages - can someone other than the RSS tell this fool to get names right(especially those of Hindu Gods!), before letting his voice travel over the airwaves? I really wouldn't mind slitting the throat of the fool who approved this idiot's work, just for the incompetence it shows, or the indifference to Indian viewers who are being subjected to this nonsense.

It isn't as if a foreign culture has never made it to the shores of India. For thousand of years, we have been bombarded by things foreign. But this new phenomenon, of Indians telling other Indians how we must ape others, is new. And it is being fostered in Mumbai, squarely.

It neither begins nor ends with this arbid fiction film world called Bollywood (oh, what a coincidence it has taken to this name with love!). It spreads rather unceremoniously to news channels as well. The 11th of July bombings in Mumbai were shamelessly referred to as the "Seven Eleven" bombings, just so it rhymes with the white man's violent castration of sorts caused on "Nine eleven". When in India did we ever use the month before the day in mentioning a date?

I have heard we have monkeys in Hyderabad, who celebrate Halloween! Halloween, for heavens' sake! What does India have to do with Halloween? One can understand Valentine's day as an opportune moment to woo someone who has already fallen for that one, but Halloween!? I can only say to those who celebrate Halloween in India - to borrow from Mumbai cinema - that they really mustn't have drunk their mother's milk!

The number of advertisements in India, especially for high end clothing, that carry white faces - yet another disgusting low. Why ever should we wear something made here because a white man is ready to wear it? And the number of corporate websites that have pictures of very unproductive but cute looking white faces will give you an idea where India really doesn't want to let go of imperialism, even if we were not the imperialists to start with.

Just so we are not perceived as being racist in our blindness, look at how many avatars Abhishek Bachchan has taken up where he wears clothes like black rappers and moves his hands like he was a tattooed, just released from jail black man expressing himself on the streets of Chicago? I wonder if he would love to get sodomized in an all black jail in the USA, just so he can boast of having "been there, done that".

It isn't as if all copies are incapable of merit and success in our own context. Kaun Banega Crorepati is a much better show than its original, impersonal American version, but it was Big B that made the wonderful warm difference. Indian Idol is indeed a good opportunity for young talent to get picked up to good futures in the entertainment industry although I wonder how many people would recognize Prashant Tamang here than they would in Nepal!

The biggest question to ask is - why doesn't Mumbai copy the best of others' work? The master film makers today, in unabashed open view and in the greatest truth of the marketplace, are mostly white and from Hollywood. India has no Clint Eastwood, no Spielberg, no Terrence Malick, and no Scorsese. Mumbai doesn't have a Leonardo DiCaprio, and we most certainly don't have a Denzel Washington. (India has a Kamal Haasan, but he doesn't work in Mumbai)

The answer is - it's hard work being good. So, if you're not willing to work hard to create something original, and if you have no cultural roots to give you a sense of who you really are, if you are willing to take little crumbs of copied semi-original material and leave it to the marketing machine to make you, then you would do well in Mumbai. But if you are one of these, keep your shit to yourself and don't unleash it on the rest of us who can still tell the difference.

There are many actors and actor wannabes in Mumbai who can swear by the amazing actors Hollywood produces. Great actors come from great material. No screenwriters since the days of Salim-Javed have produced tight screenplays in commercial Mumbai. We will forgive the exceptions like Govind Nihalani for now. There simply is no respect for great writing, and indeed no demand for it. Some of the scripts that get approved for production have absolutely no potential to be "great" in any context, except maybe as recycled paper. All that Mumbai cares about now is "packaging" and as long as that sort of "packaging" has worked in the West, it is happy to ape, rape, and expect us to gape.

Deserving mention are the actress wannabes that show up in Mumbai, dressing and making themselves up like Western women, slimming themselves down, and throwing themselves about just like the women they watch on TV. The same mannerisms, the same attitudes, and the same level of fake confidence. All good, till they come to pronounce "sandvich" or having to understand the interviewer who asks a question longer than five words. Then, in one instance, all the glam falls away, and the villager is exposed. God bless them for their dreams, but what animal are they trying to ape? White western women, of course!

Salma Hayek doesn't hide her native English accent, and no European stars really worry about their identities while having to operate in a foreign language like English. So, what is wrong with us? A really deep inferiority complex? Just hating being Indian? Both? Pathetic.

And what's up with rampantly using the Indian flag and patriotic rubbish to sell products? Do you rascals really have to be that much of a sell out? Mind and body, heart and soul, your creativy is up the pole.