I have a HN/FoB collage as my desktop wallpaper. Quite a work of art courtesy Picasa, if I say so myself!
Seeing the storyline on the desktop nearly everyday, it's got me wondering - so it's all right that the Chameleon Arch began transforming the Doctor to John Smith, but what actually happened once the conversion was done?
Did the TARDIS magically integrate them into the village? One minute, in the TARDIS, poof, next moment John Smith is teaching history?
Or did John Smith get up in the TARDIS and look around and say 'Where am I?', leaving Martha (in what must have still been an inprobable dress for John Smith) to improvise?
As part of my big-slobout-on-first-free-weekend-in-weeks, have lined up a slew of movies to catch up on.
Last night was the so-acclaimed Bollywood thriller, 'A Wednesday' - a story about the Mumbai Commissioner of Police trying to stop an unknown terrorist from blowing Mumbai up.
For fear of spoilers, shall avoid direct references, but really, while the script may be good, I thought the execution was shoddy and without detail.
Here are some: - The Commissioner of Police promptly moves from his typical government-style office, through the corridors lined with portly middle-aged constables with air guns, to the next room which looks like a mini-NASA room, and orders that no word of the threat leaves the room. Shortly after, he meets the Chief Minister's aide and a news reporter outside in the same corridor and proceeds to inform them of the threat at hand in front of the same portly middle-aged constables. - Jai Singh's wife is ostensibly leaving on a long train journey to meet her mom. Within the four hour period of the movie, she is already on the way back - probably so we empathise with Jai Singh as he embarks on what could be a suicidal mission. - it's very cool to have the 'terrorist' HQ on the terrace of an abandoned building under construction, but really, in a movie that claims to be reflective of grim reality, how practical is that? - The mystery of Arif. The Commissioner pulls Jai Singh aside to say something 'secret' about Arif before they leave, and there's enough background music for us to sit up and notice, but till the end we never get to know what that is. I suspect it was the director / writer's attempt at inserting a red herring, but it looks instead like an end they forgot to tie up. - You're telling me that if the cops went all the way to have that mini-NASA room, they didn't have a hacker on immediate call? And that hacker, well, alright if he's a kid, but again, you think it's practical to show him that flippant?
In any case, the twist in the tale was interesting - might not have guessed it if I hadn't read about vigilantism in the reviews.
However, in Bollywood, one needs to make a clear choice in whether one wants the movie to looks realistic, or take off on a typical Bollywood flight of fancy. Bollywood does not mind the latter, even welcomes it with open arms, but when you're sitting on the fence, you have a slightly 'meh' product. Can see how it can't have been our submission to the Oscars.
Fourth in the nationals, best ever average then, and then off to HK as of the India team to the Asian Bowling championships, to post higher averages and my highest score!
Quite a good high, that trip...
Lots to do though..... speed, speed, and more speed... weight, weight, and less weight...
Basic plot – There’s a new cure to obesity. Invented just so Donna can meet the Doctor again.
The details of what happened (Spoilers!):
Donna’s realized post-Runaway bride that it was silly to pass up the Doctor’s invite to travel with him (really Donna, how daft were you then!?), and has been looking for him ever since. How does she look for him? She looks for trouble. Alien trouble. Chances are, the Doctor’ll turn up.
So she chances upon Adipose Industries, where Ms. Foster has just announced a new pill-cure for obesity. Pop it once a day and ‘the fat just walks away’.
Obviously, Donna isn’t buying it and decides to do a little investigation of her own. She poses as a Health and Safety officer and manages to get hold of the client list and a pendant that Adipose offers as free gift.
From the client list she visits Stacy Campbell. She’s lost 11 pounds in 5 days and is now all set to dump her current boyfriend because she can ‘do better than him now’. She excuses herself to get ready for the ‘dump-date’. Donna, waiting, starts to look at the pendant she whacked from Adipose Industries, and does a little fiddle with it.
And that’s when the alien stuff starts.
With every fiddle from Donna, we see Stacy give a little lurch, till the latter checks her tummy and finds her flesh squeezing out a fatty little… little… well, I don’t know what to call it… baby being. Fatty little baby alien being, obviously. Ah, we’ll call it Fatty Little Alien Baby, or FLAB, in short. (And that’s original, RTD, mind you)
Ms. Foster senses the FLAB’s ‘birth’ ( ‘We have an unscheduled parthenogenesis’), but also realizes that the birth has been witnessed (by Stacy). Now she can’t have witnesses now, can she? So she ‘activates full parthenogenesis’ which causes the now panicking Stacy to ‘burst up’ into multiple FLABs. When Donna gets there, there’s nowt of Stacy and just one FLAB who gives her a cheery wave before it ‘walks away’.
‘The fat just walks away’. Get it?
Now that’s good enough trouble, so the Doctor can’t be far away. He’s been doing some investigating of his own at Adipose Industries as ‘John Smith – Health and Safety’. Interestingly, he was doing his investigating at the same time as Donna, but thanks to some excellent camerawork, missed bumping into her.
(All those bobbing heads, looked like it was a Hammer Heads game in there for a while!)
Anyway, back to the Doctor’s investigation. The Doctor also gets hold of the client list and a pendant, and in addition, fends off a flirty invite. (‘You be Health, I’ll be Safety’.) From the client list, the Doctor now goes to meet Roger Davy, who claims he’s lost a kilo every night by 1:10 am. Why the time? Because that’s when Roger’s burglar alarm keeps beeping off for no reason, and he checks his weight before going back to bed. That gets our good Doctor thinking, and he asks Roger whether he has a cat flap. Which he does, but Roger insists he is ‘not a cat person’. The Doctor reminds Roger that one can not only enter through a cat flap, but also exit through a cat flap, and muses ‘The fat just walks away…’
And then, just as the Doctor's leaving and advising Roger to lay off the pills, his… his… (oh dear, what do you call that thing)… Fatty-Watty Detector (?) starts beeping. That’s the same time that Ms Foster got the ‘unscheduled parthenogenesis’ alarm, so now you can place the Doctor’s time in the story.
The Doctor tries following the signal and runs around. Since the Doctor is following the signal from Stacy’s parthenogenesis, we see that the Doctor and Donna are running around in the same neighbourhood, but do not meet just yet –that’s reserved for some excellent acting and probably the lone brilliant screenplay in this epsiode.
Time to call it a day, for both the Doctor and Donna. We’re now given tidbits to what Donna’s life is and has been about: She’s unemployed at the moment, was employed with Health & Safety for all of three days before she walked out (probably realized the Doctor wasn’t going to drop in. Or she whacked the ID card), stays with her chattering mother, has a granddad she dotes on, and her granddad likes looking out into the sky. She tells her granddad (Gramps) that she’s looking for a man in a blue box.
Meanwhile, Ms Foster has figured out that the only way an unscheduled parthenogenesis could take place was if someone had stolen an extra pendant out of the Adipose building. She checks the security camera and thinks she’s found the infiltrating lady.
Next day- time to infiltrate the Adipose building. The Doctor sonics his way into the building and hides in a basement closet. Donna walks in with her Health & Safety card and proceeds to while the rest of the working day away hiding in the washroom. When the rest of the office leaves in the evening, the Doctor pops out to do his probing. Donna is about to step out when her mother calls her on her mobile, nagging her to get her car back home. Just then she hears Ms Foster from outside and cuts the call.
Ms Foster threateningly advises the infiltrator to come out, but Donna stays put. Foster’s men-in-command begin knocking down the door of each cubicle, and Donna nearly resigns herself to being caught. But Donna wasn’t the only investigating human, there was also Penny Carter, a reporter, who’d found that Adipose’s research claims were fake. Penny was the one Ms Foster was looking for, and they found her before they got to Donna’s cubicle.
The Doctor uses the window cleaning platform to descend and peek into Ms Foster’s cabin. Donna follows Penny and Foster as they enter the latter’s cabin, and peeks in to the room through the glass panel the door has. Penny gets tied up in Ms Foster’s office, where Foster eventually informs her that the FLABs are called Adipose, that they are proper beings. Ms Foster’s a wet nurse (Matron Cofelia in her world), whose role is to birth an entire new generation for the Adiposian First Family.
The Doctor eventually turns his peek away to across the room, where he finds a door, and through the glass panel (Murray Gold’s music reaching crescendo), DONNA.
What follows next is best watched here:
They eventually realize that Ms Foster can now see them, and run. You then get your usual Doctor Who runaround along with a little tussle with Ms Foster who’s jamming every effort through her sonic pen (and you thought there were only sonic screwdrivers.Pfft.). Typically, Donna topples over and ends up dangling for dear life on a cable. The Doctor manages to sonic Foster’s sonic pen out of her hands and into his, gets into the building, goes downstairs, and plucks dangling Donna off the cable. While they’re still running, they run headlong into Ms Foster. The Doctor now gets all Doctor-y and warns Foster that it is galactically illegal to seed a Level 5 planet (Earth, silly), but of course Foster ignores that and wants to shoot the Doctor and Donna off. To which our good Doctor simply buzzes the sonic screwdriver and the sonic pen head to head, which sets off a rather loud sonic shrill, temporarily incapacitating Foster and her minions, allowing our protagonists to make their escape.
Ms Foster now decides to expedite the birthing plan. The Doctor guesses she’ll do something like this, and goes back to the closet he hid in earlier that day, for that’s where he found a large alien machine wired up to the centre of the building. Ms Foster flicks her switch on and soon we find half of London (well, at least ‘One million in the Greater London Area’) twitching and lurching till FLABs start popping out of them, creating the panic that Doctor Who’s London is now familiar with.
The Doctor needs to swtich the machine off before it can do further harm to the human race (in a crisis, the FLABs convert all human mass into Adipose, you see), but realizes he can’t do it as he would need one more of the pendants. At which, Donna triumphantly produces the pendant she had taken from Adipose, and the Doctor does his Doctor-Woctor thing and shuts the machine off.
There’s still 10,000 Adipose FLABs roaming the streets and the Nursery Ship now arrives to take them home. However, now that the Adiposian First Family has their kids, they get rid of Ms Foster as she is a risky witness to their having broken inter-galactic law. They drop Ms Foster off mid-beam-up, and she plops flailing to the ground.
Excuse of an adventure done, now it’s time to figure what happens to Donna. The Doctor throws Ms Foster’s sonic pen into the bin, and then there’s Donna lumping all her luggage on to the Doctor, but now the Doctor has had enough of disappearing companions and is trying to talk Donna out of travelling with him. He’s worried about how close he got to Rose and then how close Martha got to him and how he really just ‘wants a mate’. Typically, Donna thinks he said he ‘wants to mate’ and gets all affronted till the Doctor clarifies, and then they’re both good and ready to go.
Now for the remaining big one for the episode: Donna remembers she has to return the car keys to her mother. She pops the keys into a bin on the street, phones her mum to pick it up, and asks a lady standing by to point the bin to her mum when she arrives. The lady turns around, and it’s Rose.
Rose, looking a bit morose, and then turning around walking away, and then fading away.
The end. (There’s some stuff about Donna walking into the TARDIS and then flying past her Gramps, but we’ll leave that.)
What I liked:
The mime when the Doctor and Donna finally met (and if you didn’t watch it then, go back up and watch it now.)
The ‘bees disappearing’: Donna rambles on to the Doctor about how she went chasing after every ET-like incident to try track him down including UFOs, signs, crop circles, and even thought that the ‘bees disappearing’ was connected. The Doctor didn’t understand what the last one was, and neither did I. A little googling showed that there are reports of bee population being decimated ‘but no one knows why’ (http://digg.com/environment/Why_are_bees_disappearing_and_what_can_be_done_to_save_them) . Oh, and apparently, Night Shyamalan’s next, The Happening, is about the bees disappearing.
(The same website that spoke of the bees disappearing also had conspiracy theories about Adipose, which explains how Donna got looking into Adipose)
Overall, taking the idea of an unhealthy populace looking to reduce weight, and turn it into a macabre alien story. I also liked how Roger Davy looked thin enough not to need any more pills, yet there he was, looking to get thinner. And Stacy, she was nowhere near glam-girl thin, and yet, vain enough to think ‘she can do better now’. Vanity, thy name is SFF fodder.
That I had to read up and remind myself what ‘parthenogenesis’ was.
That I came up with FLAB.
What I think
There’s a sonic pen loose on Earth and I wonder if that becomes significant. Me already thinks Rose must have picked up the signal on Parallel Earth and came through, looking for the Doctor. She could perhaps stay only for so long, hence the fading away, back to Parallel Earth
I think the bees will have a larger say across the series. Although, given RTD’s recent trick with Astrid, it may just be a red herring.
I wonder if Donna was the one who picked up the Master’s ring last season. One of the trailers seemed to indicate familiar red nails… Although, there was a very un-Donna like cackle...
Ugh:
Those FLABs! Really! They looked so unreal, even the music seemed to take on a Tom & Jerry tone!
Overall Rating: God, I hope the rest of the season is not as trite as this.
Much has been said in the papers about this topic (and I really like this blog post, which really sums it up very, very well). I just thought I would list down the points I really find funny, and reflective of the situation that is India:
1. This was supposed to improve Bangalore's infrastructure, and be an answer to the fact that HAL could not handle the traffic. Apparently BIAL decided to work on an estimate of 10 million passengers by 2010 (that too, as an outside estimate). Er... the catch is, it's only 2008, and it's already 10 million passengers and growing. Meaning BIAL is effectively already undercapacitized. So no goodbyes yet to circling over the airport.
2. Roads - We can all say that the new airport can handle more passengers at a time, but to be able to handle passengers, you need passengers to arrive there first. You also need them to arrive with some time in hand so that the flow is smooth, and you could milk them for additional expenditure on duty frees, cafes, etc. The thing is, the highest target audience is likely to come from South Bangalore - the city's economic hub. BIAL is diagonally opposite them, and as most newspapers have now reported, reaching BIAL can take you anywhere between 2 - 3 hours. So you can fly out of Bangalore to any national destination in less than 3 hours, but it could take you 3 hours to reach the airport! (PS: I've driven from Cambridge Layout to Yelahanka, which is before the international airport - that did take over an hour)
3. UDF - BIAL wants to charge a UDF to all domestic and international passengers. Now, I'm all for the captialist motive and paying for benefits you get, but in this case, what benefits or service would I be paying for? For having spent additional time and money to get to the airport, and then get delayed anyway? Frankly it sounds like someone did a simple financial math: Balance income needed to break even / No. of estimated users over the next few year s.
4. Magic box hoo-haa - All the rush about improving connectivity has suddenly had the Bangalore authorities trying to minimise traffic load on the main road from the city - Palace Road / Mekhri Circle area. And thus was born the mother of all quick fixes - the Magic Box. Enough has been written about how it took ten times longer than what it was supposed to, but I'm pleasantly surprised that we managed to have an underpass in less than 2 months! However, I've had the privilege of passing over the Magic Box recently. Thing is, I hardly saw anyone using the underpass! One may argue that at least the 'overpass' area is now signal free, but since you effectively have to do a U turn anyway, there's going to be a near slowdown. Coupled with the fact that there will be many drivers who will cut lanes...
5. Airport Strike - Apparently AAI employees are striking (rather, 'not cooperating'), to demand that the existing Bangalore and Hyderabad airports remain functional - apparently, in public interest. Really! How kind. Of course, you're not worried that your laziness to do quality work may put your job in danger in the capitalist BIAL economy.
6. Know your leader - It's the government's prime responsibility to act in public interest. So if connectivity is not improved, you would think the government would at least find an interim solution. But, they've also signed a agreement for exclusivity, which means that contractually, the government cannot continue with the old airports. Defying the agreement means loss of face. So, the general public pays the price for what's essentially just a lack of bloody common sense among the leaders they voted for. (Although, am willing to bet that most air travellers hardly vote, and perhaps therein lies another moral.) ... am done now (and it's 3 am. Good night!)
I last spoke rather disparagingly about the Lead India campaign. Oh no, am not about to retract anything.
RK Misra turned out to be the winner, and to be honest, maybe the TOI got it somewhat right (well, at least better than what I mentioned in that earlier post) in being able to provide a public platform to the deserving chap.
Googling for what he's up to now isn't exactly productive. His dream scheme was to implement a dairy farm (or was it something to do more with cattle?) in his village in UP. Nothing much has been heard about that (probably the legal and accounts departments sorting out the paperwork before the money is disbursed), but he has been vocal on the one thing Bangalore is currently scared of - the new International Airport.
But I digress - here's something that may actually interest you. Mr. Misra has started a site called Change India (www.changeindia.info) where he invites public participation in the implementation of new schemes as well as the suggestion of new schemes. If you suggest a new scheme, he promises that someone will get in touch with you in 30 days. I'm toying with the idea of proposing doing something about the ridiculous traffic etiquette in Bangalore.
But, guess what the lead story on the homepage of Change India is - Bangalore Airport!
Following on from my earlier post on some terrible bowling, happy to report a much better progress over February.
We had a local league wherein there was a women's section too. Didn't do myself much favours the first two weekends, but then an inspired burst (if I may say so myself!) on the third weekend with one score of 230 saw me squeeze into the next round, with a 6 block average of 175, as also with a pulled ring finger.
That next round was another heart stopper, more on account of me doing rather badly the first five games. I needed 160 in the last game to move to the top three (for the final round), and I had not scored about 155 the previous five games.
I put in a 194. Phew. Into the top three, assured of a prize. Fancied myself a shot at the second spot.
To be honest, that final round turned out to be a bit of a comedy of errors for both the second placed player and myself, both trying to outdo the other in playing badly. In the end, I remained where I was, position three. Average of 155 over 36 games. To be honest, I'll take that for now.
But that experience sure put the fun back in bowling for me. Last weekend we had another trial game of 6 games, where I managed a 174 average.
Next task - Consistency. No point letting a high of a 230 be offset by a 130 and then claim a high average!
(Oh ah, and published in the papers too! That's me on the extreme right.)
The Aussie v India contest continues, not just on the cricket field, but mostly off it. Indian television, having nothing much else to deliver, went to town yesterday on Hayden’s radio interview, where he likened Harbhajan Singh to an objectionable and undesirable plant.
I still think they’re trying to make it a bigger issue than it needs to be, but, listen to the radio interview. For one thing, it’s pretty clear that it was pretty much a pre-meditated affair rather than impulsive, but again, it’s not the weed comment that really needs to be looked at.
Here’s an excerpt:
Host 1: Were you charging Harbhajan Singh the other day and calling him 'mad boy' as you were batting? Hayden: No, 'bad boy'. 'You bad boy'. Host 1: That's offensive apparently in India? Look, folks. Either we all are mindful of what’s offensive (or heck, even rude) in each other’s country, or we all just choose to let the other say what they want. Operative word being ‘all’. You can’t have it both ways, mate.
Here’s another:
Host 2: We need to get to the root of the problem and see why they are all so sensitive? What's going on in their lives.
Oh, ha ha. Who started the brouhaha in the first place? Who was being sensitive?
And:
Host 1: Does (Ishant) Sharma come from the same school as Bhajji? Hayden: Well I think he's just young and as I have said to him many times, mate you're 19, just take it easy. He says, but "I'm playing for my country" (mimics Indian accent).
Of course, Mr. Hayden, you mimicked the accent only out of sheer deference towards international relations.
Aussies have been known for sledging for ages. Maybe it’s just a case of opposing teams now pushing back, indicating ‘enough’. And that’s new to the Aussies?
Footnote:
Hayden has since been charged by Cricket Australia (with some prodding from the Indian Board) for indulging in ‘public denigration of other players against whom they have or will play’ and was issued a reprimand. Indian TV channels will probably disagree, but that’s probably a fair result – a reprimand.
The interesting bit, though, is that Hayden is ‘disappointed’ to be found guilty. "I maintain my innocence, my intentions were never to denigrate cricket or anyone," he said. "But in the spirit of cricket I respect and accept the decision." Gee, thanks, meh.
Recently I ranted about Bangalore traffic and the need to plonk offenders up for public 'applause'.
Apparently there's a group of professionals here who had the same rant, but took a more genuine Gandhigiri-type approach. They've set up Smiling Drivers - focused on trying to avoid road rage and encouraging a more friendly driving discipline.
Have a looksee at their stuff. For now they've only got stickers and an Orkut community lamenting Bangalore traffic, but will be interesting to see if the folks can sustain this through.
Today was a busy day for prime time TV. I made it back from a hectic office day literally at the very minute Heroes Season 2 kicked off on Star World.
HEROES : ---------- I'd enjoyed most of season 1, till the damp squib of the finale, where, rather predictably, Sylar disappeared mysteriously; rather dramatically, the Petrelli brothers zoomed off to a suicidal sacrifice, Hiro Nakamura zoomed off to ancient Japan; and the rest, rather apparently, were left to pick up the pieces and move on. The start of season 2 picked up the stories of Hiro and his Takezo Kensei, Kaito Nakamura and Ando, Matt Parkman, Claire and Noah Bennet, Dr. Mohinder Suresh and the Petrellis (yeah the brothers survived, would you believe it), while introducing three new potential 'heroes'. Doubtless we'll be hearing more about the other characters from season 1, and be introduced to more new ones. While the WGA strike has affected completion of season 2, this season was apparently anyway broken down into two parts, and they finished the first part before the strike, er... struck. So hopefully we'll get to follow a full story arc.
Brothers & Sisters ------------------- Just two sentences - I can't stand Holly Harper. Calista Flockhart can do a good drunk.
House ------ Plot: Take a fistful of diseases, pop them into a young orphaned man, and have his orphaned siblings act all cute and worried. Eh, what's new. Make House's life worse by making him pine for painkillers, and having a mad cop on his tail. Feel sorry for Wilson.
MTV Imported and Non-Stop Hits ----------------------------------- To keep me company while I work on this blog.
As we celebrated our 60th year of Independence last year, most media channels and papers flouted the great history gone by and other blah. Tsk. Seen that the previous year. And the year before that, and before that....
But the Times of India did manage to come up with a new one - the Lead India initiative. Lead India played on the prevailing sentiment of the urban educated populace that ‘‘Good people don’t want to join politics" and set out to look for the one potential leader who could act as a change agent. The winner would get a lump sum amount of cash to be able to implement their dream project, as also widespread promotion across the newspaper and TV that would act as a springboard to public life.
They received a lot of applications. Initial public reception was also promising. After various interviews, discussions, debates, they came up with 8 city-level winners, who would then slog it out on national television. These eight came from various fields - lawyers, ex-venture capitalists, ex-CEO, civil services, etc., all who have been working towards some form of social or infrastructural upliftment. You'd think it would require more intellectual folks to be able to grill these contestants to find the winner.
Yeah, the Times of India found the intellectual, intelligent jury members to put the contestants to test. They found them in Bollywood.
Yes, India's favourite mind-numbing profession provides majority of the judges. It's generally belittling the whole point of it, but more importantly, my heart goes out to the contestants who are made to answer to these folks!
A sampling of the questions contestants have been quizzed on can be found in these excerpts from the Lead India site:
"...The jury was in its element in the ‘bluff round’. Each finalist picked a judge, from whom Kher asked a question. The judge would provide an answer, after which the finalist had to guess whether it was correct or a bluff. Abha Singh thought she had a sitter when Kher asked Javed Akhtar what was the only category for which Sholay won a Filmfare award. “Best dialogue,” he replied. Singh agreed. It turned out the answer was Best Editing! “We (Salim-Javed) did win Best Dialogue that year, but for Deewar,” explained Akhtar..."
"...The audio-visual round was next. One of the visual clips was from the popular Sanjay-Dutt Hrithik Roshan starrer Mission Kashmir. “I suppose you think I’ll ask you the name of the movie,” chortled Kher to Delhi’s Sanjiv Kaura. “But tell me, who played Sanjay Dutt’s wife in the movie?” “I didn’t even know the name of the movie,” admitted Kaura..."
These were from the 'first competitive episode'. Great way to start - we can't have folks who know squat about Bollywood running our country!
You walk into a deparment store, hoping to browse through all their stuff, leisurely try out the various stuff they have on display, find that one thing that really gets your fancy, and walk out having made that perfect purchase.
But, what's this? Suddenly you find yourself hurrying just that little bit, suddenly you feel something boring into the back of your head. Suddenly you feel pressure.
And then you realise, there's a shop person on your tail. Trailing you every step you take. Literally.
GRRR!
Am sure there are some guidelines somewhere on the right etiquette for shop-persons. Tailing prospective customers within less than an arm's length is just not cricket.
I participated in my first competition of the year today. As happens every time, it's been a long break, I've gained weight, and I'm out of touch.
It took a call from an enthusiastic collegiate girl to shake me out of my laziness (and specifically, window-shopping) and at least start some practice, the last weekend. There wasn't much to expect from me in terms of performance, but, it's always amazing how the game grips you once you start off.
I reached late and I missed the practice frames, but started off with a strike. Hm, not too bad. Ooh, the right side spares work too. But oh, the hook ball ain't getting off the hand so well. 133, and then a 169 and you would say, things are getting better for a first competition. Sure they did - a fantastic 98 followed. Bah!
Right, so things follow up on: - Find and make time to play - Increase right wrist and finger strength so as to be able to hold the ball - Bend! - Follow through! - Get rid of the dropping sound!
Bingle-bongle dingle-dangle yikkidee-do yikkidee-da ping-pong lipi-tapi-tuta (Although, I should really attribute that to David Tennant, not the Doctor)
Allons-y! (Hence the alias, Allons-y!)
Timey-Wimey! (Hence the... oh, you know!)
Dalekanium (not Dalek, Dalekanium)
The Mighty Jagrafess of the blah-bluh-tongue-twisted-blah
Pash-Pash
Ontological paradox (While the Doctor never really used that term, he nearly always creates an Ontological Paradox! What's an Ontological Paradox? Read about it here)
I had actually started out to write a post about how I worried about the Nano causing a quantum jump in traffic. Shashank and I had a very long (and turbulent) conversation where in the end we both agreed (I think!) that getting the Nano out is a great achievement, but couldn't decide on the impact.
He said: That's the government's headache. Don't blame Ratan Tata. Applaud him for now. She said: But even if the government wanted to do anything now, it will always be behind time.
He's right, of course. I'm only looking for Utopia. I still worry about the state of traffic, but I think what Shashank wanted to say is actually succinctly expressed by CK Prahlad in his article in the Sunday Times on January 13:
"I think this is the wrong starting point for debate. We should ask ourself: What if we devoted the same energy and ingenuity to solving the problems of discipline in traffic management? In energy efficiency? These problems may lead us to breakthrough innovations. But I am glad that the debate has started. That is a good sign. This innovation is serious.
But now, let us celebrate."
More representations of Shashank's views also expressed in this article in the same paper.
So the few people who have been kind enough to visit, have wondered why the blog is called Timey Wimey, and then goes on to only have posts under Rants and Raves.
Timey Wimey is from, of course, the great Doctor Who (or should I instead credit it to Steven Moffat and/or David Tennant? - and thank you, Anglosaxon, for the correction), but the thematic is that of the Time Lord who traverses time, and the thematic of this blog will hopefully be a comment of the times we traverse.
Of course, eventually we will have posts dedicated to the great Doctor (To Star Trek - all due respect, but you really were only about the initial Kirk and Spock series anyway), under the label 'Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey'. (Any other apt ideas?)
(Plus, I'd grabbed the URL as soon as I could to make sure it was mine!)
So Bangalore autowallahs want to go on a strike in demand for a higher tariff.
Now, they may have a reasonable point in that they get only Rs 6/km in a city where fuel prices are the highest, whereas autowallahs in Mumbai earn Rs 9/km.
However, where Mumbai autowallahs are industrious and earn their livelihood by taking you anywhere, near or far, their Bangalore counterparts are very... well, to put it politely, 'picky'. To start with, they must need to feel like taking passengers, and then, you have to want to go to the same area they happen to be headed towards, and the destination must be at least 10 kms away. And that's not enough, once you meet these two criteria, it is but obvious that you need to pay either a fixed premium, or a 50 - 100% premium over the meter tariff (the accuracy of which is anyway doubtful).
So commuters are anyway paying a very high premium to start with, and metered tariffs are non-existent. So, if these demands are to be met, can they also counter-agree that they will offer full service? That they will take commuters anywhere, near or far? BY METER? Or will we just see increased tariffs being the excuse for higher premiums (read: higher fleecing?)
With two wheelers thinking they have the right to the pavements over pedestrians, buses thinking they can change lanes at will, cars honking in bumper to bumper traffic (really guys, what do you achieve with that?!), it's sad to see the rapid degeneration of basic manners.
These folks quite frankly deserve a thrashing, but I suspect that will throw up no results.
I'd rather they were rounded up and displayed in a public forum for a 'mock applause'!
So a lot of people are up in arms about the Sydney Test (for those who actually haven't heard about it, here you go). Now I won't really add to the stuff already said, but, I chanced upon this article, where Mr. Waugh goes:
"Teams playing against Australia fail to understand that banter, gamesmanship, sledging or whatever anyone would like to call it is just the way Australian kids joust and play in the schoolyard and backyards."
So what does this say: Whatever they do unto others, is 'just the way they joust and play', it's 'their culture'. But whatever gets done unto them, is black-and-white racism???
There is no denying that racism needs to be dealt with severely. There is also perhaps no denying that something must have been said - if not in the Sydney Test, then at least by the spectators in Mumbai. Has someone taken a moment to think about whether the comments were actually racially inspired or 'just a joust and play'?
