Dilli-6

A few questions about Dilli-6:

1). Why does Abhishek Bachchan not speak Hindi in the first half hour of the movie, and later in the movie (2 weeks later timewise!) sound like a born and bred Delhi-ite? He even speaks chaste Urdu at some point. How? When?

2). AB can't rant about the futility of blind faith in one scene and deliver a heartfelt "God is in everyone" speech in the next. It doesn't make sense. Either he likes God, or he doesn't. He needs to make up his mind and pick a side. Or he can be ambivalent, but he still needs to make sense. This way, he sounds like a blithering idiot.

3). What kind of a name is Masakalli? Even for a pigeon. I ask you.

4). Does the symbolism have to be so completely overdone? We get stuff, you know. We're not complete nincompoops. I enjoyed the Ram Leela analogies in the beginning. Later, I just sighed wearily. I think I threw up a little when Masakalli was set free, and Bittu was running away. An unfettering of hearts, so to speak. Why so corny?

5). If I live to be a 100, I will never understand why a cow picked the middle of a crowded Delhi street to give birth. Cows don't do that. They find a nice quiet place to calve. I think.

6). Why wasn't this movie named Kale Bandar ki anhoni kanhaani? It might as well have been.

7). Rahman rocks. Rehna Tu and Genda Phool have been humming in my brain for the last 10 days. No questions here. Also, Waheeda Rehman is gorgeous as ever. She still looks radiant.

NB: I was just watching Pres.Obama's address..how much these people clap! Baap re. He cleared his throat and they clapped for 10 minutes. He said hello..there they went. He addressed his wife...that set them off again. I think they canned the sound of the clapping. To drown out whatever platitudes he was mouthing. All I know is, they gave 7 billion in research funding to the NIH..which has to be spent in 2 years. In other words, they just created another problem. People are going to be employed now, and then 2 years later, when their project is probably just taking off, and the funding dries up, they'll be kicked out. Fools!

In the news

So, Andrew Wakefield falsified data. The whole vaccine-autism thing has stunk royally since the very beginning. Nobody could ever replicate his data. Good reason why. He made it up. He made it up, and did such a good job of it that people decided against vaccinating their kids, leading to Measles becoming endemic in the UK again, and the UK losing herd immunity against the disease.

Another interesting article this week comes from Stanley Fish at the New York Times. He cites the case of one Prof.Rancourt, a physicist at the U of Ottawa who is clearly loony. And then proceeds to use this as an example of the misuse of academic freedom by tenured faculty in North America.

I really, really dislike straw man arguments. Pick a certified nutjob who is disliked by faculty and students alike, and make an example out of him. And then say academic freedom is misused to a great degree by tenured professors. So, the question is, can you run a university like you run a business? If so, then I think if you make a 55 billion dollar loss for your university, you should be handed out several hundred billion more to save it. That seems to be the current policy anyway. And judging from the NIH funding crisis..that is not the case. It is only the corporate fatcats who get rescued for screwing up bigtime.

Mood music

So I read that Bach is now being used to scare rowdy youth away. Its so sad that its not funny. What a topsy-turvy world we live in. Australia just lost 5 ODIs in a row, and we won our 9th. Nadal has Federer looking pedestrian. Whales gave birth on land! The world's upside down alright.

Moving on...I just discovered Joaquin Rodrigo. I absolutely love this piece. I'm totally in love with the Spanish guitar.



Beautiful. More on the deliciously named Fantasia para un gentilhombre here.

Most excellent link of the week

Would that I could explain my world view with such eloquence. Never mind. Tim Minchin does a brilliant job. Ekdum jhakaas!