Self Destruction Made easy...

An Indian urban youth with access to his needs, and with a bit of money and feeling of financial security inevitably falls into satan's most lethal plot. the last bit abt financial security is an optional condition...
Invariably he believes there is some one who was manufactured "customised to suit his requirements" and was hidden from his eyes for so long...and God deemed it appropriate to show the girl of his dreams at a juncture when he basically has nothing else to think about...;) Love is an Idle mind's greatest creation.... And a weapon of mass destruction which bull dozes many a budding career and truncates the stretch of imagination of many more....in a few cases it does manage to titillate and inspire though shortly...If god were to ever create a balance sheet of the good and the bad experienced by the head over heels lover....it would be ridiculously lopsided...and an idle mind and a young mind which otherwise unleashes great ideas also wastes hours thinking about bull crap...The key to the great indian institutions being great are that they load the student's with so much work that the mind wanders less and the careers hence meander less...
All the ABC College of arts and science devdasses bunk classes to make passes at lasses...Ofcourse the Five point someones from the IITs also are "Love Girl", she aint after me...so i want Grass" types...but the link among all these guys are they possess an idle mind which is an ideal environ for hell to break loose...
The movies glorifying the art of using the great young mind to generate trash and bull crap...are key players in the Catch them young..throw them down the drain phenomenon..
The great Indian college goer needs a better deal... India is lost in the trance that the internet and cable television has created...Our youth rarely have burning ambition and most achievers are products of the rat race and peer pressure phenomenon...The only burning ambition in the minds of most are to WOO an opposite sex human being....
Harmones rather than grey cells drive the youth.....That is god's mistake...But someone somewhere in power can do something to reduce the extent and frequency of the
havoc created...

India needs to grow as a country...for that the youth need to grow up and fast....

Chennai Weekend...

Well, Thanks to TCS, my friend and quiz partner Chaitanya, and a lot of other associates, I had the luck of travellin to chennai, fully sponsored by my company...well..to attend the regional finals of a tcs wide quiz;) that the quiz turned out to be a not so great event is another story...;) but flyin to chn and back is worth a mention....yours "fool"ly has travelled by air on only 2 other occasions...so LAGEY RAHO;) i said to myself...
Comin to the chn trip...it was not a great trip and all;) but VOKEY...and most importantly...I had the privilege of listenin to a gr8 mimicry session by RR...the next Balamurali Krishna or even more...Absolute senseless stuff..but who cares...fun is at a premium these days...
Two sessions of cricket are worth a cursory mention....my batting is not as bad as i thot it was....
and my left arm spin is surprisingly DECENT;) i managed to pitch the ball most times and thats an achievement;)
Black the movie was also part of the two day package and so was a 4 hr chat session discussin somethin that has no solution;) some people see no problem to find a solution...but one's eye sees a problem where another sees opportunities...so lets keep things complex and leave it at that....
Finally my frnd from hyd came home and we proceeded to fly back to andhra pradhesam...in the flight I met one GOOD OLD man with classical views on Globalization and merger of nationalized banks,....it was at the end of a 30 min conversation that bordered between enlightening and fascinating that I found out thro' his visiting card and a brochure that he casually gave me that...He was the Gen Secretary of the All India BankEmployees Association..Mr Venkatachalam..or CHV...Big man, great knowledge,....Humble nature..Well, humility is a commonality that links all great ppl aint it;)

Well, after an expensive auto journey I reached home in Hyd to sign off a not so great but not so non descript either weekend....

PS: this was inspired by a long and earth shattering account at inbetweengap.blogspot.com;)

Page 3...

Well, this is the third consecuitive movie review type of article in this blog and not much of a surprise cus i dont write blog entries until somethin or someone impresses me..so Again it was a case of an off beat movie throwing me in raptures...and set my mind thinking and for a fleeting while my heart racing towards the reformist path...ofcourse the mind took over and postponed any reformist streak for later cus it had more pressing demands to be met in the next month..
Ok goin to the movie review....
Outstanding Treatment of a topic which has not been seen in Indian cinema, about a Page 3 journalist and her journey seeking meaning in her profession....The movie is a parody on the lifestyles of the rich and famous and how hollow their lives are...How values take a backseat on the pretext of doing "business" and how some journalists ARE meaningful....
Man, the scenes are bound to create a lasting impact on the viewer and some disturbing incidents shown in the movie set me thinking on whether a few of our own people mite bite the perilous path to fame and slip on the road to so called success...
Well, if you got 2 hrs time jus rush and watch the movie...u wont be disappointed...
Man, This Madhur Bandharkar rocks...so too Atul Kulkarni....short but a memorable role...

Hope I see quite a few happy viewers of Page 3 in this blog....Once I get some more views on this...I plan to write a long post on the crux of the movie..and my comments on the same...

Swades....A ray of hope for Indian cinema

Yesterday, I just realized how much my priorities are screwed up, I was doing things that border on mundaneness at best...and eventually missed out on something, which as a film buff , I should have done without any intellectual effort whatsoever from my side....How the hell did I miss Swades for so long..
Hats off to Ashutosh for reiterating the power of simplicity...the depth of emotion and the profound it can convey...A classic specimen for those who need a lesson on keeping things simple..
ARR clearly has scored the best bgm of his career in Swades...The title music is unconventional and addictive...typical ARR stuff,...The "village house scenes" are elevated to a higher plane by the BGM...i haven't seen any ARR movie Packed with so much bgm that too so many different moods....The highlight being the BGM that creates a sense of expectation and excitement when the turbine generates power...
Yeh Taara gave me goose pimples and had me crying in the middle...And Shahrukh tellin the class "Main chalta hoon" was a leaf from the mani book...
Understated,Simple,Honest,Purposeful,Clear....A movie Ashutosh has made at his own terms with none of the cliches that continually pull down mainstream cinema from Great to good...The length is a clear indicator of the director's intent and his "no compromises" delivery...Lakshya and now Swades are cases in point of the ineptness of the Indian audience...A dangerous trend that should be bucked at the earliest...Murder,Khwahish...Well..the indian youth prefer lip service of a different kind...but thankfully Ashutosh and Farhan still exist...there lies the hope for indian cinema...

Spiel-Bound

After 6 days at work on what was "officially" a 4 day week, I decided to treat myself with "The Terminal" after a goooood sunday lunch. What was expected to be a movie watching experience I would appreciate turned out to be an un-forgettable cupla hours...Absolutely brilliant characterization. 20 Minutes into the movie I started to wonder if the movie was a bit too laid back and slow paced...But That's where Spielberg scores...What he sketches with care in the first half hour is the back bone of the next hour and a half of absolute bliss... Most of the great directors use repetition and patterns to haunt and sink in the impact on the viewer... That is one of the high-lights of the movie...The "Napoleon-Josephine" dialogues and the Daily visits to the immigration counter of Viktor are classic examples...
Though I don't go to movies with a note pad in hand to take down the messages the director conveys to the viewer, I appreciate subtle hints at Values and an underlying message, of course, I hate it if the hero utters a 20 min dialog just to deliver the cliched "Message".... Subtlety is yet another hallmark of the great directors..
The importance of the Human Touch to business and the hidden pointers on how in-human today's workforce have become are totally of relevance to working professionals. The power of "Service with a Smile" and how you can win people to your way by just being a true honest helpful guy.....these were stuff I felt I should try and emulate if not in one month atleast over a period of time....

I have added Terminal to my list of all time faves....Strangely enough was reminded of Anbe Sivam Lots while I watched terminal....

ok....on to other stuff/..cant thank god enuf for saving my frnds from death...Oh man....20 mins....what a diff it made.....
Desply wanna see Marina and good ol' bessy in such a mess....How I miss seeing my beloved chennai go through all it has.....
I hope the new year dawns a non calamitous one for India....and the world...


p.s
Tsu-Nami - Hindu tells me is Japanese for Harbour-Wave.....

p.s

Mahesh Murthy visited this place....And a bit of CAT news

Well, Blogging certainly is "strongly connecting" this already shrunk world....Well a bit of graph theory there...
But point is....my fortnightly source of inspiration, Mahesh posted a comment in my post that showcased his article..Well, need I say more...Thanks...

Also, let me also break my CAT results here officially.
99 percentile...
2 IIM calls. From B and K...dunno what I and L need...
To B or Not To B is the question.....

Smart vs Street Smart....

The human mind never ceases to think....Well, one of the things that this non descript has been mulling over in the last few days is, smartness as in acuity or sharp thinking and good problem solving skills, a la the IIT topper or even the Class XII "Bright Student" might infact be a gift that borders on being a luxury than being a "must have"... What really matters in this time and age as the flood gates are opened for a cross cultural collage is Street Smartness....The more I think on this...the more I feel there is to learn from the Battle scarred hawkers and auto rickshaw drivers in the street...
Application and Presence of mind are more at value outside the cozy confines of the examination hall or the cramped class room. Haggling with a cantankerous vegetable seller is something that you will do more often than solving a definite integral that only ten others solved in the history of mankind. But sadly, though the two facets of one's personality are not defined anywhere as being mutually exclusive, finding a student who finishes his graduation who is a street smart smartie is something that's as difficult as it's been for India to find a Kapil Dev.
My little tryst with the corporate war room has made me all the more convinced that tackling real life situations where the complexity is introduced by human interaction , human emotions and egos are much more the key to one's climb up the ladder than being the next Ramanujan....But when one considers the kind of training and conditioning that the grey cells of the human mind undergo, their cousins- the 'presence of mind' cells are hardly given any attention in schools...Well, there is definitely an area of concern to the HRD of India because, India relies so much on its B Schools and empiricism as the sources of its managers. Indian Managers are moulded either in the two year high speed b school factory, or in the 'n-year super slow grinding mill' that the industries are... What I am looking at is the process of becoming a manager starting when the kid reaches middle school. The two Manager churning factories need pre processed inputs rather than 'raw' talents. The Mob psychology that drives Indian graduate and Post graduate education today needs a drastic shake-up. That can happen only if the students are in a position to know what they need to become to optimise their strengths by the time they leave school. This is what is to me 'Street Smartness'. Basically, 'What I need to do so that I do what I can do, well" rather than "I do what I need to do to be well to do" should be the mantra.
Also, we should deter the rat race phenomenon that competitive entrance exams have become in India. Atleast 85% of Entrance exam takers are victims of peer or parental pressure. Again, these exams test how smart you are. If we groom street smart youngsters, firstly the number of aspirants of entrance exams/ job interviews will come down, secondly we will see the job satisfaction index in the industry soar. There are a few other plus points to this...Each of that will merit an article. But that I shall reserve for later.
Kids should be encouraged to score grades in attitude, mental toughness and discretion rather than Maths,Physics and Chemistry. Not saying that these subjects are not to be there...But these other subjects need to be also there.... There has to be a curriculum upheaval. How, Its for the HRD to decide..I am not a qualified authority on this....

Well, A final confession, this article arose out of a realization of how woefully "street dumb" ,yours truly is....