My Orkut account has been hacked in the most unusual manner.
I cannot glean any untoward activity that has been performed through my account, but the hacker has as of now, made me a member of two Brittney Spears' fan clubs, and one of Amrita Arora, Shakira, Mandy Moore, Angelina Jolie, Hermione Granger, and Hansika Motwani, the latter being the one with the exciting privilege of starring across Himesh R in his debut movie. I have also been made a member of "I love my Mom". Much as I value all these women, be it Britney or my Mom, I am not sure I would have honored them extra by becoming their fans.
Other fan clubs that I have joined are devoted to Saurav Ganguly, Shahrukh Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, Indian Premier League, and something eerily called "Born to Make you Happy". Err...
Probably the hacker felt bad at some point because as special concession, s/he has made me a member of Harry Potter, and Brain Teasers and Puzzles. Or maybe in spite of everything, Hansika Motwani is a puzzle solver, and as her fan, I am expected to hone those skills myself.
But the one community that makes me want to throw up is titled, "Love At First Sight." The last time I believed in that concept was when I was an embryo.
In all likelihood, I will delete my Orkut account in the next few days unless the problem solves itself. Even after repeated attempts, I cannot seem to be able to get rid of my membership to these questionable fan communities. See you all on Facebook!
Monday, May 19, 2008
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
When Iron Rusts
I am just back from seeing the finest movie of my life. It’s called Iron Man. No, please don’t dismiss the movie based on its name. Read the review at least. Please, I insist.
Iron Man is originally a Marvel comic hero and his real name, that is when he steps out of his red and gold platinum-something glitzy costume, is Tony Stark.
The movie unfolds like this: Stark is a multimillionaire because his father had founded a weapons manufacturing company, which he has perfected and taken to even greater heights. He has a sense of humor that I think Hollywood (bless its heart) had intended to be irreverent, but which to me seemed painfully annoying. He is a playboy like all good multimillionaires should be, and he has a huge mansion hanging from a cliff that overlooks the Pacific Ocean in Malibu, California. The house itself has every imaginable and unimaginable automated device, and a pretty housekeeper cum office assistant cum “I am so in love with my boss that you can see it in every flap of my eyelash and every simper of my smiling mouth” jackass, who in non-reel life goes by the name Gwyneth Paltrow.
So back to Stark: Two days after winning a fancy award from the United States government for his contribution to technology, Stark flies to (where else but) Afghanistan. He gives a demonstration of a weapon called Jericho which first flies out from its casing and then reproduces itself into many mini baby missiles while in flight. Incidentally, Jericho literally means “moon” in Hebrew and is at present a town in West Bank, Palestine.
After the successful demonstration, Stark is moving out of the zone in military jeeps when his convoy gets attacked, every good American soldier is killed, and he himself is knocked out. Upon waking up, Stark realizes that he has been kidnapped by brutal Afghanis who speak impeccable Urdu, and that in the little battle that had led to his capture, some shrapnel got buried in his chest and those are now threatening to pierce his heart. Enter weird Swiss doctor who saves Stark’s life, and constructs a magnetic chest plate that needs to be attached to a car battery so that his heart can pump blood normally. Yes, you are supposed to read on without questioning.
Now the Afghanis know who Stark is and they tell him to make Jericho for them. In return they shall release him. Stark and Swiss weirdo get down to work. It takes a long time before the whole camp of brown men realize that the two white men are making something else than what they were supposed to. Finally, Stark is able to fool /frighten them and he escapes because all this while he had actually been making an ugly body suit for himself which will let him hop/fly, shoot fire from his elbows (yeah baby!), and just scare the hell out of anyone he wants to.
Within some quick, mind-numbing scenes, Stark manages to escape, and then he is flown out of Afghanistan and into America by his best friend in the American army. Best friend is African American, by the way, just in case you were wondering. No, of course not, there ARE no stereotypes in Hollywood. Everything is darn original and absolutely new.
Our boy flies back home, and upon returning he demands the first thing that will endear him to every viewer. He wants to eat a grilled cheeseburger. Aw…I nearly got sentimental in this scene and delicately grabbed the end of my shirt to wipe the tear that had been threatening to spill over my cheek for a while.
Then Stark goes about perfecting his model for Iron Man suit. In the ensuing ride, he proves he has a heart and a conscience, and that he is a man of principles. The real villain of the piece is also revealed to the viewer and by this time we have been bombarded with enough technological tosh to believe anything. In fact, if they had even showed my grandmother smirking in the corner as the grand villainess of the piece I would have believed them.
Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man or superhero or mortal man with a glowing cyclical heart is painful. Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane/ Iron Monger is entertaining. (You have to see the movie to understand what this is about.) Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper, the housekeeper, is wonderful considering her histrionics in this movie required that she not eat for twenty months prior to signing on the dotted line, and practice wearing sky-scraper-high heels for thirty-six months before shooting actually began.
Give me a Govinda-Karisma Kapoor-Kader Khan-David Dhawan combination any day.
Iron Man is originally a Marvel comic hero and his real name, that is when he steps out of his red and gold platinum-something glitzy costume, is Tony Stark.
The movie unfolds like this: Stark is a multimillionaire because his father had founded a weapons manufacturing company, which he has perfected and taken to even greater heights. He has a sense of humor that I think Hollywood (bless its heart) had intended to be irreverent, but which to me seemed painfully annoying. He is a playboy like all good multimillionaires should be, and he has a huge mansion hanging from a cliff that overlooks the Pacific Ocean in Malibu, California. The house itself has every imaginable and unimaginable automated device, and a pretty housekeeper cum office assistant cum “I am so in love with my boss that you can see it in every flap of my eyelash and every simper of my smiling mouth” jackass, who in non-reel life goes by the name Gwyneth Paltrow.
So back to Stark: Two days after winning a fancy award from the United States government for his contribution to technology, Stark flies to (where else but) Afghanistan. He gives a demonstration of a weapon called Jericho which first flies out from its casing and then reproduces itself into many mini baby missiles while in flight. Incidentally, Jericho literally means “moon” in Hebrew and is at present a town in West Bank, Palestine.
After the successful demonstration, Stark is moving out of the zone in military jeeps when his convoy gets attacked, every good American soldier is killed, and he himself is knocked out. Upon waking up, Stark realizes that he has been kidnapped by brutal Afghanis who speak impeccable Urdu, and that in the little battle that had led to his capture, some shrapnel got buried in his chest and those are now threatening to pierce his heart. Enter weird Swiss doctor who saves Stark’s life, and constructs a magnetic chest plate that needs to be attached to a car battery so that his heart can pump blood normally. Yes, you are supposed to read on without questioning.
Now the Afghanis know who Stark is and they tell him to make Jericho for them. In return they shall release him. Stark and Swiss weirdo get down to work. It takes a long time before the whole camp of brown men realize that the two white men are making something else than what they were supposed to. Finally, Stark is able to fool /frighten them and he escapes because all this while he had actually been making an ugly body suit for himself which will let him hop/fly, shoot fire from his elbows (yeah baby!), and just scare the hell out of anyone he wants to.
Within some quick, mind-numbing scenes, Stark manages to escape, and then he is flown out of Afghanistan and into America by his best friend in the American army. Best friend is African American, by the way, just in case you were wondering. No, of course not, there ARE no stereotypes in Hollywood. Everything is darn original and absolutely new.
Our boy flies back home, and upon returning he demands the first thing that will endear him to every viewer. He wants to eat a grilled cheeseburger. Aw…I nearly got sentimental in this scene and delicately grabbed the end of my shirt to wipe the tear that had been threatening to spill over my cheek for a while.
Then Stark goes about perfecting his model for Iron Man suit. In the ensuing ride, he proves he has a heart and a conscience, and that he is a man of principles. The real villain of the piece is also revealed to the viewer and by this time we have been bombarded with enough technological tosh to believe anything. In fact, if they had even showed my grandmother smirking in the corner as the grand villainess of the piece I would have believed them.
Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man or superhero or mortal man with a glowing cyclical heart is painful. Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane/ Iron Monger is entertaining. (You have to see the movie to understand what this is about.) Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper, the housekeeper, is wonderful considering her histrionics in this movie required that she not eat for twenty months prior to signing on the dotted line, and practice wearing sky-scraper-high heels for thirty-six months before shooting actually began.
Give me a Govinda-Karisma Kapoor-Kader Khan-David Dhawan combination any day.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Verses
Two almost back-to-back posts! I must have rediscovered my blog!
Today's post is about two poems of Vikram Seth that I particularly like. This semester I had taken a poetry workshop, as a result, not only did I have to write twelve poems of my own, I had to read a similar number of poems of my classmates, plus nearly a hundred others.
These two have been particularly interesting, mostly because of their simplicity.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All You who Sleep Tonight
All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hand to left or right
And emptiness above -
Know that you aren't alone
The whole world shares your tears,
Some for two nights or one,
And some for all their years.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How Rarely These Few Years
How rarely these few years, as work keeps us aloof,
Or fares, or one thing or another,
Have we had days to spend under our parents’ roof:
Myself, my sister, and my brother.
All five of us will die; to reckon from the past
This flesh and blood is unforgiving.
What’s hard is that just one of us will be the last
To bear it all and go on living.
Today's post is about two poems of Vikram Seth that I particularly like. This semester I had taken a poetry workshop, as a result, not only did I have to write twelve poems of my own, I had to read a similar number of poems of my classmates, plus nearly a hundred others.
These two have been particularly interesting, mostly because of their simplicity.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All You who Sleep Tonight
All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hand to left or right
And emptiness above -
Know that you aren't alone
The whole world shares your tears,
Some for two nights or one,
And some for all their years.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How Rarely These Few Years
How rarely these few years, as work keeps us aloof,
Or fares, or one thing or another,
Have we had days to spend under our parents’ roof:
Myself, my sister, and my brother.
All five of us will die; to reckon from the past
This flesh and blood is unforgiving.
What’s hard is that just one of us will be the last
To bear it all and go on living.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Being on Cloud 1556-1605
Yesterday was one of the most rewarding days of my life. Initially, I had constructed the sentence as “one of the most rewarding days of my professional life.” But that didn’t say much, whereas I wanted to say it all...
As a five-year-old, all that I wanted to do upon growing up was become a teacher. There was nothing particularly remarkable about that dream because almost every other five-year-old around me wanted the same thing. That dream lasted only a few years, and eventually got buried under other ambitions and plans for life. Eventually, perceptions – whether mine or of those around– convinced me that teaching was not for me. It demanded too much patience, and that was an area where I certainly lacked. Over time, I also grew interested in fitting into offices, surrounded by the paraphernalia and peculiarities of “regular, nine-to-five” jobs, and that’s what I did for four continuous years.
Upon coming to America though, teaching became practically the only professional option. As an international student, I am not allowed to work off-campus, and on campus, there are odd jobs, but those I am not keen about. Moreover, it was wonderful to get back to academics, and be in a university again, and full-time teaching seemed like something I could get interested in.
It was only in my third semester (second year) here that I received my first teaching assignment—a course on world religions for freshmen (first year students). It was an interesting process to teach students who seemed different in ways that were both good and bad from how I remembered my first year in college to be. In the next semester, which will conclude in a week’s time, I landed up teaching two courses—in addition to world religions, I began teaching the history of the Mughal Empire. I was asked to design it for upper division (final year) students of History.
Now I have always maintained that no one loves the Mughals more than I do, yet the first day of this class was particularly nerve-racking. These were serious students, they knew how social sciences worked, how movements progressed, and most importantly, this was the first time in the record of this campus that a course on Indian history was being offered. And I was saddled with that responsibility. I cautioned my students, I told them that this was my first time teaching something like this, and that I hoped to do a fair job because otherwise I could potentially end up messing up their perception and understanding of a country with over a billion people. They laughed, and with that we began the whole process of understanding the Indian subcontinent and the Mughals: how Babur—the military genius—loved fruits and hated Agra, why Humayun loved opium and pursued astrology, how Akbar was both a compassionate genius as well as a sexual predator, how Jahangir was creative enough to design his own clothes yet ruthless enough to blind his own son, how Shahjahan was almost effeminate because of his love for white marble, and how Aurangzeb can be is so easily and greatly misunderstood.
Yesterday was technically the last class of the semester, and we celebrated with a party at my home. I cooked an Indian dinner for all twenty-six of them, and received tremendous help from my "kitchen staff", a group of about six students who helped with driving me to buy groceries; peeling and grinding mountains of ginger and garlic; cutting little hills of potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and other miscellaneous oddities. Yet others pitched in by making desserts or bringing in drinks for the party. And finally, they justified my quitting a good job and coming to America on a whim when they presented me with a mug that read "I love Akbar." I had not laughed that hard in months.
I don’t remember if I ever did anything this nice for any of my teachers, but fifteen minutes ago when I brewed myself some cinnamon-spice tea in my new mug, my thoughts went back to several of them whose teaching styles have influenced and informed mine. To them goes my sincerest, "Thank you."
As a five-year-old, all that I wanted to do upon growing up was become a teacher. There was nothing particularly remarkable about that dream because almost every other five-year-old around me wanted the same thing. That dream lasted only a few years, and eventually got buried under other ambitions and plans for life. Eventually, perceptions – whether mine or of those around– convinced me that teaching was not for me. It demanded too much patience, and that was an area where I certainly lacked. Over time, I also grew interested in fitting into offices, surrounded by the paraphernalia and peculiarities of “regular, nine-to-five” jobs, and that’s what I did for four continuous years.
Upon coming to America though, teaching became practically the only professional option. As an international student, I am not allowed to work off-campus, and on campus, there are odd jobs, but those I am not keen about. Moreover, it was wonderful to get back to academics, and be in a university again, and full-time teaching seemed like something I could get interested in.
It was only in my third semester (second year) here that I received my first teaching assignment—a course on world religions for freshmen (first year students). It was an interesting process to teach students who seemed different in ways that were both good and bad from how I remembered my first year in college to be. In the next semester, which will conclude in a week’s time, I landed up teaching two courses—in addition to world religions, I began teaching the history of the Mughal Empire. I was asked to design it for upper division (final year) students of History.
Now I have always maintained that no one loves the Mughals more than I do, yet the first day of this class was particularly nerve-racking. These were serious students, they knew how social sciences worked, how movements progressed, and most importantly, this was the first time in the record of this campus that a course on Indian history was being offered. And I was saddled with that responsibility. I cautioned my students, I told them that this was my first time teaching something like this, and that I hoped to do a fair job because otherwise I could potentially end up messing up their perception and understanding of a country with over a billion people. They laughed, and with that we began the whole process of understanding the Indian subcontinent and the Mughals: how Babur—the military genius—loved fruits and hated Agra, why Humayun loved opium and pursued astrology, how Akbar was both a compassionate genius as well as a sexual predator, how Jahangir was creative enough to design his own clothes yet ruthless enough to blind his own son, how Shahjahan was almost effeminate because of his love for white marble, and how Aurangzeb can be is so easily and greatly misunderstood.
Yesterday was technically the last class of the semester, and we celebrated with a party at my home. I cooked an Indian dinner for all twenty-six of them, and received tremendous help from my "kitchen staff", a group of about six students who helped with driving me to buy groceries; peeling and grinding mountains of ginger and garlic; cutting little hills of potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and other miscellaneous oddities. Yet others pitched in by making desserts or bringing in drinks for the party. And finally, they justified my quitting a good job and coming to America on a whim when they presented me with a mug that read "I love Akbar." I had not laughed that hard in months.
I don’t remember if I ever did anything this nice for any of my teachers, but fifteen minutes ago when I brewed myself some cinnamon-spice tea in my new mug, my thoughts went back to several of them whose teaching styles have influenced and informed mine. To them goes my sincerest, "Thank you."
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