You dare call me a Servant?!

A cop abuses a witness trying to help identify a perpetrator.

An American of Indian descent who is new to India tells the cop "You are a public servant. How can you do this?"

The cop replies, "You called me a servant? Do I look like a servant to you?" and slaps the guy.

Guy slaps the cop back and ends up in jail.

When his uncle bails him out the cop tells the uncle "inform this kid that this is how things work in India"

This is just one of the scenes that caught my attention early on in "Delhi -6", a really well made movie that shows India for what it is, a place that is defined by a really large mass of people, a tangled web of interactions from every perspective, a potpourri of emotions, something so complex yet simple, something so simple yet complex, an everlasting absurdity of sorts that can be explained one way or another, a place where at times everything goes and at times nothing moves!

The greatness of this movie is the attention to detail. Every little piece of the jigsaw puzzle comes together so smoothly and you come out shaking your head, not because you saw something fantastic, but you saw something that happens for real, something that you know is true, because you have experienced most of these bits and pieces firsthand!

The only surprise is that a kid born and raised in America is even accepted as India's own in the earlier parts of the movie while his religious identity is questioned later because his dad is Hindu and mom is a Muslim. If there is one thing consistant about Bigotry, it is that bigotry is absolute. A real crowd would have equally questioned his "Indian-ness" or "his right to ask questions about things Indian or about India" because he is an American Citizen, but somehow they miss that part and it seemed weird.

But for that small deviation from reality, the movie does a fantastic job of painting the masses in everything from gory red, dove white, purple hues, monkey black, holy green to religious saffron!

The human mind is an amazing thing. The ability to live and let live is a quality of the mind that is not universal. Considering ,my recent frame of mind Delhi-6 offers a rare glimpse into the collective human psyche that makes or breaks a society. It also tells you in the nicest of ways to look for answers within!

Nicely done. Strongly recommended!

ps. Hope this movie wins international recognition for Cinematography. Simply fantastic. The music was great, but the visuals were simply breathtaking!

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Dear Mr. President

From

Sundar Narayanan
Just another dude

To

The Honorable Barak Obama
President
United States of America

Subject : Simple requests to do things that meet green standards, improve quality of life and make Americans happy

Dearest Sir,

Congratulations on your new position. Looks like you are slowly getting the handle of Washington. My expectations from your presidency are high. With that said, I request you to do some minor things that would make life easy for techno folks. Stuff that may not be as big or as important as the bailouts of various folks, but things that might get people to say "Bless that man!" and people who are blessed by one and all get to do greater things for the greater many. You know it already!

So here is my list:

1. Could you kindly mandate that all cell phone, electronic handheld devices adopt a single charger. It would greatly benefit the nation and its people if said charger were to just plug into a USB type interface. You have a PDA! You have a cell phone. Why do you keep lugging two different chargers? I am sure your bluetooth gizmo has a charger of its own! Please get all this in the same format. While the cell phone lobbyists will vehemently protest this by saying "We give the damn phones for free because we make money by selling spare batteries, spare chargers, car chargers, cables etc. How are we to make money?" I am sure you will find a way to justify that the environmental impact of all the chargers a single "dude" throws in the garbage every year justifies the cost of a single charger for which said "dude" will gladly pay! You can quote me if you want. Go ahead. This alone will save the USA tons of money, just in garbage disposal!

2. Please subsidize the development of a cheap bio-degradable diaper. I know shit and shit related things are usually the last on any President's list, but you could be different! I know you are. Think of stacking up all the diapers that you changed (okay okay, Michelle and her mom changed) for Sasha and Malia. I am sure that would fill a few rooms in the white house. Imagine if you could have just burried those diapers in your backyard and planted some saplings on top! Free fertilizer the way nature intended! I know you could always tell me to use cloth diapers. We will get there. People have already been hooked to the commercial machinery of Huggies and Pampers. You have to do this one step at a time. You might encounter a lot of resistance from the diaper lobby in DC. Again, this "dude" is counting on you to come up with a way to justify this to those guys.

3. You could be the next Eisenhower. He came up with the highways to link every city to three other cities and that changed the USA forever. You could top that with a public transportation system which is something of a MRTS (mass rapid transport system). You could talk to the dudes who did this in what was Bombay in the late seventies (please do not talk to the dudes who run this today). That might free us all from oil dependence. If I had a bus that would take me from Cupertino to Alviso in 25 minutes flat, the van will be long forgotten! This "dude" alone will save 300 dollars a month in gas bills and pollute the atmosphere a lot less!

4. Please make healthy food a priority. Everywhere we see corn, potatoes, peanuts, sugary syrups from cheap corn are more prominent than more healthy stuff. Please reverse this trend. If you can make tomatoes, green veggies and onions sexier than corn and potato, we will owe our health to you. Again, this "dude" knows that you will come under intense pressure from the potato growers lobby, not to mention the corn-ethanol lobbyists, the automakers who get perks for putting a sticker on their cars which say "runs on ethanol based fuels also" knowing that it is all hype and bovine excrement. Again, Mr. President, we trust you to come up with the right words to say to these people.

5.

6.

7.

8.

There are actually a lot more requests where the first 4 came from. Kindly contact said "dude" at sundar72@gmail.com, if you care to hear some of these requests. I am sure they are all on your list already, but here is to hope that they will get higher up on the list.

Thanks in advance,

Yours truly,

Dude who one day hopes to eat healthy food grown courtesy of manure made from biodegradable diapers, on a public bus travelling to work while listening to music playing on his PDA that is charging from his laptop on a universal power adapter that is nicely plugged into the USB port!

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Tolearati

That should be a legal word in the dictionary.

We have gliterrati, technorati, etc. so why not? and maybe it should mean "a collective body of people who live and let live"!

In case you are wondering why the request for some data, some things have been bothering me, what with the gloomy weather outside and the blog reading from the last few days.

For example, transporation! A guy who writes a "travelogue" ought to be concerned about the fate of transportation the world over, right?

We have governments monopoly on road building, public transportation, transportation routes, who makes what modes of transport at what cost, the control over the transportation modes on this world economy and environment, not to mention downright apathy on the part of governmnets the world over to provide what the common man needs to navigate today's world!

(all this after reading PK and Sauvik posts within a week and an NPR piece of who is going to be transportation secretary for the USA in the new Obama administration and how he may have a tough time balancing things)

Another example is the hoopla over Valentines day, the fact that it is Saint Valentines day and therefore is a Christian thing, how therefore it is something that Indians should not celebrate, how holding hands in public or kissing is not an "Indian" thing to do, how women going to pubs is against hinduvta, the concept of "hinduvta", how liberal is liberal, how fundamentalist is fundamentalist, how secular is secular, how free is free, how pink is pink, etc. Okay, maybe that last one wasn't on my mind as much as the other questions.

Finally, the last thing that we see is a flood of articles from the Huffington post to the Tehran times and anyone else claiming to provide news, on "India launches cola made from Cow Urine". When do a few folks doing something represent a country or its people in the world. Does the western media know that a majority of the Indian population is endorsing "Gau Jal"?, is there an official press release from the Government of India stating this cola as a product of the government, somehow this is linked to policy, etc.? Similar things happen to countries and people (USA is an equally prime example) where a few people do something and the entire country is supposed to be behind it!

Obviously before some of these thoughts get cleared, there were even more simple questions like what consitutes a minority, why would a majority of people divide themselves and be so polarized over things that happen to a minority of people the world over, within countries, states, why the divisions of what makes the minorities be important in the first place, what are the odds of finding a left handed lesbian pub and god loving woman in Bangalore, etc. etc. Okay, strike that last one out. It was more of an afterhought!

This post cannot continue folks! The brain needs to slow down and work off of some real data to see if all the above questions can be explained statitstically or we just have to resort to grandma sayings, aesops fables and Jataka tales. Maybe this cannot be explained in simple terms and one just has to accept it for what it is.

So, we wait for data and a deeper understanding of what drives all the insanity in this world!

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