In India, Shammi Kapoor, introduced the rock culture as a youth icon and in one of his films - 'China Town' a 1962 Hindi film and had mesmerising songs from the Great music composer Ravi and WONDERFULLY sung by Indian Jewel Legendary classic Mohd Rafi.
One such song of shammi is picturized with Jailhouse rock and another elvis video to stretch to the full Hindi songs. Also due to attempt to stretch to full song, repeated clippages may appear.
And here is Kishore Kumar with his 'playback' for Elvis
Well, why leave it here? Here is yet another "Indian" channeling Elvis' Jail House Rock
A student wrapping up her studies will, along with her husband, soon head out to Sierra Leone as a Peace Corps Volunteer couple. What a wonderful experience that will be!
As I was driving home back from work, I kept thinking about it.
I was a kid, perhaps not even ten years old, when I first heard about a country named "Sierra Leone."
In the early and late 1970s, a number of Indian professionals headed to various African countries that were newly independent and beginning to put together their own plans for economic development. One day, dad said that he was seriously considering an opportunity in Sierra Leone. I bet I was only eight or nine then and had no idea about this country. In a rather primitive atlas, I located Sierra Leone and ... I think this was the beginning of what has become a life long fascination to understand different places on the planet, and to also learn about them by visiting them.
For various reasons, dad didn't follow-up on that. Those were also the years, I recall, that Manian wrote about his travels in African countries in the Anantha Vikatan. It was exciting for me as a kid to realize that there was one huge world outside the small little town where I lived. A couple of years later, a student joined our class--Belliappa had some interesting stories about Kenya thanks to the couple of years of living there because of his dad's job. Hmmm... I wonder where Belliappa is now. Anyway, it was in Manian's travelogues that I read that he got a certificate from the airline for having gone to the other side of the equator. Travel to far away places was such a rarity then, I suppose.
After all those exciting childhood years, and a few more in the US, I had in one of my classes, when I taught in Bakersfield. a student from Sierra Leone. Crispin was one good looking guy. How good looking? One day Crispin came to my office to plan out his academic schedule. Less than a minute after he left, the department secretary rushed in to my office. This good humored middle aged White woman said something like this: "Sriram, I noticed all these days that every girl who comes to meet you is beautiful. But, I didn't know you had extremely handsome male students too" and pretended to fan herself!
Crispin was more than merely good looking. Well built, with ample hair on his head, he had an intensity about him and a deep voice to go with that. And, in the classroom, a very quiet and no-nonsense guy.
It was a class where I had quite a few foreign students, which was rather a unique experience. From Russia, Jamaica, and a few more that I don't recall now. Given that there were so many foreigners, I invited them to talk about their countries to the class.
The girls came all prepared with their Powerpoint files full of photos and information. Of course! Crispin was the only male student. He slowly and confidently walked up to the front and had the students all attentive simply through his presence and his voice.
He said he didn't have any photos, but wanted to talk to the class, particularly the females, about diamonds. And then he briefed them about "conflict diamonds" and the chaos in Sierra Leone. As he started talking, his eyes became redder and redder, and tears started rolling down his cheeks. Here was this guy, tall and well chiseled, with a voice to match as well, and in tears over the mad conflict and the destruction of lives and property. One of the very few emotional moments that I have experienced in the classroom.
Not too long after that, I relocated to where I am now. All these years later, I now run into a student who will soon leave for Sierra Leone--a country that was quite a catalyst in my life. Very dramatic is this long running connection with a country that I hope to visit some day.
Of course, I yell and scream about how messed up the American democracy is. But then I am not stupid enough to suggest that these democratic processes--the checks and balances, in particular--that we have are the worst form of democracy.
Yet, that is what both Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman do. Friedman I can understand--over the last few years the guy has been wandering off on his own and sometimes I even wonder why the NY Times has him on the payroll. Well, he is better than Maureen Dowd :)
In my travels lately, I’ve been trying to explain to Libyans, Egyptians, Bahrainis, Chinese and others the benefits of a democratic system. But if Congressional Republicans actually shut down the government this weekend, they will be making a powerful argument for autocracy. Chinese television will be all over the story.
Hello? This is one fantastic example of democracy in action. I disagree with the stupidity of both the GOP and the Dems, but this is what representative democracy means. In fact, I wish they had argued like this every time any President felt that penile urge to bomb the shit out of some country or the other.
The more I think about it, Kristof can do us all a great service by showcasing this political show(down) as a classic example of representative democracy.
The only consolation is that Kristof at least did not lead towards a conclusion that Friedman wrote a few months ago:
There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
Really, Mr. Friedman? I can think a lot more worse things before I get anywhere near the messy system we have in place. And that was not even the worst line; he added:
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.
Look away and puke, dear reader. Don't mess up your keyboard!
When American politicians hype up the "competition" from China and India to the extent of praising the Indian schooling system and the number of graduates the country produces every year, I feel the urge to yell back at them that they are doing the American public a great disservice with such propaganda.
The reality is far from this, because sheer number of high school and college graduates is not the same as being employment-ready, or being entrepreneurial, or being innovative. It is also a great disservice to India because it then precludes Americans from understanding and appreciating the enormous scale of the development problems that the country has been relatively successfully dealing with.
India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges.
Yet 24/7 Customer's experience tells a very different story. Its increasing difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside of India.
In the nation that made offshoring a household word, 24/7 finds itself so short of talent that it is having to offshore.
Imagine any American politician saying all these at a rally!
75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India's high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests administered by the group.
Another survey, conducted annually by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization that aims to improve education for the poor, looked at grade-school performance at 13,000 schools across India. It found that about half of the country's fifth graders can't read at a second-grade level.
Just terrible, the situation of schools in India is, particularly in the rural areas. The anecdotal information I have is worrisome enough for me. And then to think that the youth and their families are investing their precious resources on more and more education with the supreme belief that it will be rewarded with that ticket to a successful middle class life, or more, only to find that they are not ready for employment at the end of it all!
"My family has invested so much money in my education, and they don't understand why I am still not finding a job," says Mr. Shivanand. "They are hoping very, very much that I get a job soon, so after all of their investment, I will finally support them."
Awful!
Maybe I should send this piece to the President, eh!
The social sciences eagerly became more and more quantitative, in order to stand up against the folks across the street in the natural sciences. However, even as the "quants" took over, it became increasingly clear that the "science" in the social sciences does not mean the "science" that the real world understands it to be. While the world of science is full of the equivalents of 2+2=4, well, we will be lucky to have even a couple of universally applicable scientific stuff to strut across in the social sciences.
The question one might then ask is why such a ponzi scheme continues? Why do more and more people line up to get their doctorates in the social sciences?
Today's edition of this ponzi-buster comes from Princeton; a graduate student writes about the "quant" focus in political science (yeah, where is the science there, right?) (ht):
Princeton’s Department of Politics is no Lehman Brothers. Alas. The autonomy granted to academia will be ritually abused to protect it from real-world pressure. If asked to produce something “relevant,” political scientists will shrug that this is the job of public policy or journalism. Our job, they will condescendingly argue, is to get tenure at top universities. And when we do, we will hire students who will be shaped in our own image. This decadently self-indulgent world will also self-perpetuate.
This column is hardly the first such criticism. The Perestroika movement within political science in the early 2000s was a reasoned rebellion advocating methodological pluralism. Look where that got us. Meanwhile, those of us who assumed that a political science Ph.D. would help us understand how power works in the real world — the horror, the horror! — must hide behind the few professors who fight the good fight or type feral howls in hope of inciting debate.
An Ivy Leaguer will be guaranteed of employment, which will be to get intelligent undergraduate students excited about political science, who will then go on to do their doctorates only to find out that they will:
choose narrow questions backed by the certainty of clinical data sets — parcels of reality that can be reduced to something to which they can apply their peculiar methods. Even better, why choose regions, why travel to places, why learn the language? Politics, after all, fits into grand narratives that can be woven by cross national regressions sitting in Firestone basement. Why deal with the vagaries of power when generalizable truths are only a click away?
The system will perpetuate itself!
And this is exactly the process that Ken Robinson described--that right from the first days of school, the system seems to be designed to create professors who will ultimately be good for nothing. Well, ok, I am taking a lot of liberty with his now famous TED talk :)
I checked in with The Hindu, as I do almost everyday, and there was this news report that "Actor Sujatha, who made waves in the south Indian film industry in the Seventies and Eighties, passed away here on Wednesday."
I suppose we are all mortals, with our respective expiration dates. But, this young? She was 58!
Sujatha came on to the scene as I was beginning to understand movies, above and beyond the simple fights, comedy, and the song-dance numbers. She was one of the many actors--male and female--in the South who made the characters on the screen believable enough (at that time. well, it has been decades since I watched an Indian movie anyway. Well, except Peepli Live, which came close.)
The following video has a song that was immensely popular then and, thanks to how it is presented in the movie, practically comes across as a homage to Sujatha.
The following video brings back a lot of memories:
Unemployment plummeted and stocks soared Tuesday after Republican leaders fulfilled their promise to cut funding for National Public Radio, a budgetary move that has completely rejuvenated the flagging U.S. economy. "Since eliminating federal spending for NPR, America's economic outlook is brighter than it's been in decades, with manufacturing on the rise and† millions of jobs once sent overseas now returning to our shores," said Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), adding that by eliminating funds for NPR, the deficit has been slashed by 0.000004 percent and a newly thriving middle class once again has cause to believe in the American dream. "Pulling funding for Car Talk and Planet Money alone has created 4.2 million jobs and generated a $2 trillion budget surplus." Republicans announced Thursday they will now turn their attention to cutting the National Park Service, a move that should ensure Social Security's solvency for the next 350 years.
So, Obama has backtracked, yet again. It is getting difficult to keep count anymore!
This time, with the decision not to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the criminal justice system, as he said he would. Instead, Obama is going the Bush route of military trials in Guantanamo. I understand that a "principled politician" is an oxymoron, but still ...
Compare the American situation with the horrendous acts of terrorism in India. The world was stunned by the events that unfolded in Mumbai on November 26, 2008, and the images of a terrorist methodically killing innocent civilians were simply surreal. While nothing can be done with the terrorists who died, the survivor is a parallel to 9/11's KSM, right?
So, how was that lone surviving terrorist, Ajmal Kasab, handled?
On 3 May 2010, an Indian court convicted him of murder, waging war on India, possessing explosives, and other charges.[5] On 6 May 2010, the same trial court sentenced him to death on four counts and to a life sentence on five other counts. Bombay high court has upheld the death sentence on 21 Feb 2011
No special military trials. And, wrapped up in a little over two years. Despite all the potential for all kinds of fallout, given the high levels of tensions between India and Pakistan. India's government and politics were confident and secure enough to carry out the trial.
Not so, here in the US. What a shame! It is now almost ten years since 9/11, and we are still fumbling around because we are afraid of how to work this through the criminal justice system? Dahlia Lithwick puts it bluntly: "Cowardly, Stupid, and Tragically Wrong"
Every argument advanced to scuttle the Manhattan trial for KSM was false or feeble: Open trials are too dangerous; major trials are too expensive; too many secrets will be spilled; public trials will radicalize the enemy; the public doesn't want it.
What the heck has happened to the US, eh!
Lithwick writes:
The only lesson learned is that Obama's hand can be forced. That there is no principle he can't be bullied into abandoning. In the future, when seeking to pass laws that treat different people differently for purely political reasons, Congress need only fear-monger and fabricate to get the president to cave. Nobody claims that this was a legal decision. It was a political triumph or loss, depending on your viewpoint. The rule of law is an afterthought, either way.
Isn't it awful, pathetic, and scary too, that the rule of law has become an afterthought?
The more I kept looking at the wonderful photos at this collection, the more I had a tough time selecting my favorite of all.
At the end, I went with the following one:
It is sheer joy expressed all around--even the older women who might not have even held a cricket bat in their lives, and might not know a gully from a square leg. And the Communist juxtaposition is essentially how India is--rarely a consistent story, and eternally filled with contradictory narratives. Or, as Pankaj Mishra described it,
India not only lives, as the cliché goes, in several centuries at once; it is also a land of multiple narratives, which continuously and often painfully overlap.
As one might hypothesize from the huge hammer-and-sickle murals in the photo, this is in Kolkata. The caption at the source is:
Indian cricket fans celebrate a boundary as they sit outside and watch the second semi-final of the ICC Cricket world Cup between India and Pakistan in Kolkata on March 30, 2011.
While the television set itself is obscured in this photo, I can imagine that it sits delicately on a very shaky furniture, supported by everything from newspapers to bricks.
Another photo depicts a comparable scene across the border, in Pakistan:
The source notes:
Members of Pakistani gypsy families watch the Pakistan-India cricket match in their makeshift tent in the slums of Hyderabad, near Karachi, Pakistan on Wednesday, March 30, 2011
The challenge for all these countries, where cricket is practically a religion, is to ensure (and to follow-up on the Communist visuals) that this religion does not become the new opium of the masses. I am afraid though that it is indeed becoming the case, unfortunately.
All these are a long way from "A Village Cricket Match" that we read, perhaps in the ninth grade.
That was one hilarious piece of writing. The village characters were fantastically crazy and comical. The description of the game is a must-read.
This village cricket match itself ends in a tie, and the piece ends thus:
The match was a tie. And hardly anyone on the field knew it except Mr. Hodge, the youth in the blue jumper, and Mr. Pollock himself. For the two batsmen and the runner, undaunted to the last, had picked themselves up and were bent on completing the single that was to give Fordenden the crown of victory. Unfortunately, dazed with their falls, with excitement, and with the noise, they all three ran for the same wicket, simultaneously realised their error, and all three turned and ran for the other the blacksmith, ankle and all, in the centre and leading by a yard, so that they looked like pictures of the Russian troika. But their effort was in vain, for Mr. Pollock had grabbed the ball and the match was a tie.
And both teams spent the evening at the Three Horseshoes, and Mr. Harcourt made a speech in Italian about the glories of England and afterwards fell asleep in a corner, and Donald got home to Royal Avenue at one o'clock in the morning, feeling that he had not learnt very much about the English from his experience of their national game.
So, what could go wrong with the US getting into the middle of a civil war in a country, right?
Obama has been working off an awful script right from the first day of protests in Libya. As he did with Egypt, Obama chose caution and didn't want to express support for those opposing tyranny. That was a major goof--as the leader of the free world, Obama ought to have publicly stated his support for the rebels. Such a stand early on would have been pressure enough on Gaddafi to have fled to Saudi Arabia or Venezuela.
At least Obama's sidekick, Joe Biden, didn't assert that Gaddafi is no dictator, as he did in the case of Egypt's Mubarak. Hey, we have to count our blessings!
And then when the Libyan protests started getting bloody, Obama continued to exercise caution, when many of us--yes, including me--thought he and the West ought to have enforced a no-fly zone.
All this passivity made Gaddafi one bold and confident guy and he upped the ante.
And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Obama goes way above and beyond the idea of a no-fly zone and starts firing missiles into Libya. Why such unilateral moves without talking to us people, or Congress?
Despite all my posts on this topic, I continue to be shocked and awed by his presidential audacity. As Mickey Edwards notes (ht)
Obama has made not one but two disturbing choices. The first was to decide that he, not Congress, would make the call to intervene, despite clear language in the Constitution designating the president as the commander but the Congress as the only branch entitled to decide whether to engage militarily. Obama donned the crown even more brazenly than either of the two George Bushes. The first asked Congress to authorize the first Gulf War and the second asked Congress to authorize the use of military force -- meaning that both the first Gulf War and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan proceeded with congressional authorization. Obama, in sending American ships and planes to Libya, simply claimed the right to act on his own. And then did so.
The "I'm King" scenario is bad enough, but Obama also has a second story available if we're not ready to buy that one. In this tale, Obama acted not as a king, but under the authority granted to him by the United Nations Security Council. But while the Founders had their disagreements, none ever envisioned that the question of whether or not to send Americans on a military mission would be left up to other nations. Obama assumed authority for the Libyan adventure on two false premises, not one.
Oh well ... now that we are bombing, we can only hope and wish for success without any major screw-ups.
Wait, it turns out that NATO accidentally bombed the rebels it was supposed to assist! Andrew Cockburn writes that air power alone cannot do any damn thing, and cites many examples from the inaugural bombing raid in 1911 onwards:
None of these salutary qualifications appear to have had much effect on air power enthusiasts in the current administration, particularly those veterans of the Clinton years who cherish warm, if inaccurate, memories of the Kosovo campaign. So the hard lessons will have to be learned all over again: Jet fighters flying at 15,000 feet — standard altitude in these conditions — have great difficulty spotting targets such as tanks, especially when they make some effort to hide or camouflage themselves. Additionally, in the last week, forces loyal to Kadafi have reportedly taken to moving in pickups identical to those used by the rebels, rendering the task of airborne targeteers even more difficult. For even minimal success, U.S. personnel acting as ground spotters are indispensable, and they, of course, will require further troops to protect them and train local allies — a role now reportedly being delegated to the CIA.
Apparently it is big-time news--in cricket, where India beat Sri Lanka in the World Cup final.
Cricket overwhelms India, and yet despite all the passion for the game and the sheer number of people there, well, the country has not been been a cricket-winning machine by any means.
I suppose the recent track record is better than when I was a kid. But, still, when one compares Sri Lanka and India, the latter is a country that has a population that is 60 times the population of the former. Arithmetically, even India's 50th best team ought to be better than Sri Lanka's first team!
Country
Population
(in millions)
Sri Lanka
20
Pakistan
176
Australia
23
New Zealand
4
Zimbabwe
13
Canada
34
Kenya
38
India
1,200
South Africa
50
England
51
West Indies
4
Bangladesh
150
Ireland
4
Netherlands
17
So, it really does mean that demography is not destiny. How about that negation, Monsieur Comte? I explored some of these issues in the context of another world cup--when the soccer tournament was held in South Africa last summer. As I wrote then, "a sport is, thus, more than merely about the game itself. It presents yet another opportunity to begin to understand the peoples of the world, and their cultures and politics."
Maybe India ought to take the UK route in sports. The UK doesn't field, say, a soccer teaming representing the UK, but has teams from its component political entities--teams from England, Wales, ... Maybe India, too, ought to field teams from its states!
There is a good chance, however, that this Indian victory might just about establish India's permanence in the sport. As this NY Times story notes
Cricket may be, as the sociologist Ashis Nandy wrote in 1983, “an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English,” but India took a long time to take control of it. It played its first international matches in 1932, but its all-time record in five-day test matches remains well below .500, and its all-time one-day record is not far above that.
In spite of its massive population, for many years it suffered from a lack of effective pace bowling and a failure to develop talent outside the big cities. Tendulkar — the teenage prodigy who not only exceeds expectation but plays on into middle age and handles ridiculous celebrity with ego-free equanimity — has been the face of India’s transformation
Interestingly enough, Tendulkar's arrival on the international cricket scene almost exactly coincides with India's decision to get rid of its import-substituting industrialization, and to open itself to the global economy. Tendulkar arrived in international cricket in 1989, and really established himself from 1990 on. India, which was on the verge of going belly-up, opened up its economy in 1991, with Manmohan Singh as its finance minister--he is now the prime minister of the country, and has been at the helm since 2004.
Thus, what is really interesting about this World Cup victory is that it comes at a time when India is asserting itself in global economics and politics.
Cricket was among the more popular sports in America in the mid-19th century, but baseball's rapid postbellum expansion came at the expense of cricket. Some have argued that the shorter duration of a baseball game, its simpler rules (at least initially), and the fact that it didn't require dedicated fields helped kill cricket, but these claims are hard to evaluate. What's more clear is that marketing played a major role. When a sense of American national identity began to emerge in the decades following the Civil War, along with new communication and transportation technologies, baseball promoters recognized an opportunity. They stitched together some of the existing traveling clubs into the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players in 1871, and young athletes and fans flocked to the unified league. Cricket clubs, by contrast, stayed regional and let the historical moment slip. Many of the top players switched to baseball, and the fans went with them.
ESPN is finally on board with the real biggest sport in the world — or the fastest growing at least — cricket.
ESPN announced last month they have bought the US broadcast rights to future ICC events, including the 2015 World Cup.
