Passionate About India

And Indian politicians remain as shameless as ever! The Oscars have been won – as expected! And it sure was a pleasure to hear Resul Pookutty speak about the power of silence and Om, and give Hollywood a chalk-talk lesson or two about Indian philosophy. It was also a great feeling to see the Indian living legend – A R Rahman – get something he more than deserved (though he has done far better work as well). The Indian film fraternity has some amazing green thumb talent; and some of them surely are at par with the world’s best. Thus, although only these two (Rahman and Resul) got the Oscar, I am sure there are many more deserving Indians out there who are no inferior. The only unfortunate thing is that the Oscars for them were awarded for a film that has been made clearly with one callow intention in mind – to draw up a caricature of every possible negative side that is there to India, for the sole viewing pleasure of western audiences – as I wrote in my editorial on the same issue a fe...

The vote on account budget is a very tricky budget. If the ruling party gives too many freebies in it, it will immediately be rapped for using the budget as a tool to unfairly influence the coming elections. Yet, never before perhaps, in the name of Parliamentary propriety, was such a brain dead, irrelevant and unimaginative budget presented... that too when the entire nation was looking up to the Finance Minister for some relief from the seemingly unending woes of economic slowdown! For two hours, the Finance Minister spoke about what the Manmohan Singh regime achieved; but didn’t give anything new on a real time concrete plan to deal with the present crisis of recession. A day before the budget, when it was made clear that it would be Mr. Pranab Mukherjee who would be presenting the budget speech, I had mixed feelings. On one hand, I was extremely appalled at the scarcity of quality people in the Congress. In the last one year or so, it has always been Pranab Mukherjee who has come t...

On 20th of January, 2009, when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of United States of America, delivering one of the most outstanding speeches ever, many would have thought it to be a tokenism, as reversing the economic fortune of the current order is easier said than done. Only time would perhaps prove how much he would succeed eventually. But if one has to go by the precedence being set on each passing day, Obama is perhaps not just on the right track, but is also indicating why he is the only person who deserved to be there in these times. By announcing his intentions in clear cut terms of curbing the salaries of top executives of companies to a ‘maximum’ of $500,000, which have been seeking bailout packages from the US government to remain afloat (under the Troubled Asset Relief Program), Obama has made it clear that the much needed change of fortune of the US would not happen unless the highly skewed income disparity is arrested and the culture of carrying on with obs...

In our previous issue of The Sunday Indian, after my editorial, we had carried a special feature by Mr. Lasantha Wickrematunge, the late Editor of the Sri Lankan newspaper, The Sunday Leader. We carried this as a special feature just because Mr.Lasantha almost knew that he was going to be assassinated, before he actually was! He also knew that his assassinator was already known very well to none other than his long time ‘friend’ and the current President of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who strangely (or perhaps, not so strangely, given his clear complicity) refused to take any action. In fact, the civil war in Sri Lanka between LTTE and government forces is reaching its culmination with a decisive victory for the Sri Lankan army. While the defeat of LTTE, one of the world’s deadliest terror organizations and the one which pioneered the concept of suicide bombings, is no doubt great news (all the greater, because of the fact that it was this LTTE that has been responsible for the assas...

A phony poseur that has been made only to mock India for the viewing pleasure of the First World!! The emperor’s new clothes! That’s “Slumdog Millionaire” for you… Five minutes into this celebrated patchwork of illogical clichés and you are struck by the jarring dialogues. The cumbersome delivery in a language which doesn’t come naturally to most of the actors sounds like someone scratching on walls with one’s finger nails; it ruins the possibility of a connection… Had this film been made by an Indian director, it would’ve been trashed as a rotting old hat, which literally stands out only because of its stench, but since the man making it happens to be from the West, we’re all left celebrating the emperor’s new clothes. The film borrows an undoubtedly interesting narrative style – from films like “City of God” – but then uses it to weave in a collection of clichés from the Third World’s underbelly for the viewing pleasure of a First World audience. The real slumdog in the movie is not ...

I still remember the early morning of November 4, 2008, as the US Presidential election results started pouring in, I realized that something unbelievably historic was happening in America. I just couldn’t stop wondering how a Black – African American (since so many mails and messages have told me!) – could become the President of the United States of America; the same country that had earlier re-elected George Bush as the President! The whole experience was so tumultuous! I couldn’t help recall old books about America that I had read. Books about the Civil War that President Abraham Lincoln had presided over; the war that eventually resulted in the emancipation of blacks. As I wrote in my editorial in The Sunday Indian on November 9, 2008, my favourite book, of course, was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book – which passionately documented the immense pain of black slaves – is perhaps the greatest read for any human wishing to understand the meaning of the term ‘depth of character’, and is gu...

For the last few days, since the beginning of the Israeli military operations in Gaza, media – both print and television – has been riddled with scores of pictures of Palestinian kids, grievously injured in the air attacks by Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF. And every time I have seen those pictures, I have felt revulsion towards the blitzkrieg that has been launched by Israel to take the fangs out of Hamas. Yet, ironically, when I tried to think a little deeper about it, I was left wondering why the global media has not put forward the pictures of even Israeli kids who have got killed, injured or hit with impunity in the past due to a barrage of rockets and missiles, and even suicide attacks, that Hamas has made a habit of targeting on Israel. In hindsight, if one looks at the happenings in Gaza in isolation, it goes without saying that every newly initiated observer would easily term Israel a bloodthirsty chauvinist country that knows nothing more than just blowing apart probably anyt...