Sunday, March 22, 2015

The woes of Pongala

Sree wouldn't have imagined such strong repercussion when he posted his thoughts on Pongala and the innumerable difficulties it brings to the citizens. This snowballed into a barrage of abuses with him being termed as anti-national, anti-hindu, sickular etc. Sree did the wise thing by simply removing the post.

It isn't uncommon these days for the people getting more and more hyper-sensitive about religion. The people have becoe aware and identify with their religios and cultural beliefs which inturn helps them to identify with their nation and fellow citizens. In a way it may be good to prevent a slippage into anarchy, while it becomes more and more difficult to identify yourselves with a neighbour of different ideas and beliefs.

India has always been a religin f spirituality, religion and Gods. Men of power realized that the easiest way to rule is to divide. Back then, in an agrarian society where mutual co-habitation was necessary for survival certain differences were tolerated for survival. Even then the society was not free of racial tension rifling ino riots.
Today in a scenario where individuals become independent in terms of his survival, he can coin his own thoughts irrespective of neighbour. But in an urban setup where physical spaces are less and information sharing takes place in a crazy speed throughout the breadth and width of the society, impact of religion and race could be catastrophic.

A decade ago Pongala was a local festival of the city where women spread out to few kilometeres to cook in the open air. In the eveining it was a prety thing to see the women crowding on public buses to rerach home. Even before that Pogala was a festival the rich household sent their servants to celebrate
Thanks to some marketing gimmicks of the temple and adoption by  the media to develope this festival as some sort of cultural wonder plus world record fete, it got hold of public imagination. The film stars flocked into cook pongala in frnt of five star hotels. Various associations started even bigger cooking fetes  of breakfast and lunch for the poor darlings. Then the sad truth that Devi would show her displeasure if you don't cook rice for her has made this a huge exhibition of vulgarity. People has  to tolerate this show for the sake of national integration and secularism. All the shops and hotels close down. In the evenings over enthusiastic youths thrust cheap sodas into the faces of tired fat aunties. And all the garbage is cleaned out of the city by burning it all up.

Secularism is not tolerating bullshit

Thursday, March 5, 2015

The Mauka World Cup

If you ask a tamilian to pronounce 'Mauka' he will prononce it as 'Mokka' which means a total waste. Our cricket world cup is somewhat on that course with periodic jingles reminding you who will play India next.
The jingles are fierce and patriotic with the war cry- We won't give it back'. The war cry is certainly missing from real life, as I found people are not very enthusiastic about beating their arch rivals Pakistan.
I was in a hotel at Bangalore for the breakfast an I seemed to be the only guy who bothered to strain my neck as others ate their idlis peacefully. We might have learnt to be cooler than our Captain Mr Cool.

Pakistan on the other hand are least interested to vanquish their enemy as the play couple of elder citizens and rest who aen't sure whether they are good at batting or bowling. Same goes with teams like West Indies and England who might have dropped in for a paid holiday in one of the exotic places.

Many years ago cricket burst into commercial game with 8 cricket playing nations and other ássociates'. Years have passed and it seems the number of cricket playing nation have dropped down even further and only Indians are bothered to watch the game.  The governing concil have formulated such a policy that 3 top revenue generating nations would play each other the maximum. Rest can pray  for mercy from the three almghty. 

Inorder to make the game fairly attarctive, ICC came up with some strange suggestions like shortening the boundary and flatten the pitch so that he batsman can have aa field day. Today some of the worst batsman make quick 50s by simply tappng the ball away.

As wild batsmen tap away madly, all eyes are fixed on IPl whih has to start soon after the WC

About Me

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Shakespeare,Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Lincoln never saw a movie,heard a radio or looked at TV. They had loneliness and knew what to do with it. Thay were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.