Bits and pieces

- The worst books in the world are chick-lits. Take my word. I have been through only 50 pages of You are here, and it has already shown me hell. 

- Saw Bombay this afternoon. What a movie! It makes SlumDog Millionaire look puerile. And anyways, I am not a big fan of Slumdog Millionaire. It is a good movie but not one of those great ones that I will want to list. Does it deserve an Oscar? Honestly, no! Oscar for the Rehman’s music? Of course! 

- Have you ever wondered how boring Bangalore’s skyline is? I was standing on the terrace of a building in Ulsoor yesterday and all I could see was Manipal Centre, the Visweshwaraya tower, Chinnaswamy stadium’s flood lights and the Utility building. (If you are wondering why I didnt get to see the UB city towers, they were directly behind Manipal Centre.) Thats all for a great city? I tried hard to think of reasons for the lack of vertical growth. Are our architects, engineers and planners afraid of taking risks, if at all building such high ones are risky? Are they unwilling to shell out money? Are they not adventurous? Its certainly befuddling. 

- Sometime back, almost a month ago, there was a Kannada Rakshana Vedike function in Shivajinagar. It was a small ceremony to honour some poet, whose name I am sure nobody has heard of. Anyways, the function hadn’t begun as yet and they were playing some old kannada songs on the loudspeaker. Since I had no other work, I decided to be a bystander and check out the event. They had a small stage and may be, around 20 – 25 chairs for the audience to sit. All chairs were empty even though the guy at the mic kept on asking people to be seated before the chief guest arrived. I was the first person to sit down and then people followed me. The function went on for an hour. Some local politician gave a speech about how dutifully he worshipped kannada. The poet also spoke. He read out some lines from one of his books and they were pretty good. People were whistling all around. He also made some comments about how other languages were invading Bangalore. But like everybody else, he failed to tell us what the solution could be to the problem. At the end of the event, I looked around to see that almost 80% of the chairs were empty! 

- I wish they announce an International holiday on Tuesday. I desperately want to watch Obama’s coronation live on TV!

- Talking about Obama, have you checked out L.K Advani’s new website? I thought I will see the line ‘Advani for PM‘ all over the site but that was not to be the case. Do read his views on India’s foreign policy. Most of it are excerpts from his autobiography though- another one of those books in my ‘must read’ list. Also, his blog posts are pretty interesting. Check it out. If you are interested, you could also explore Congress’ website. It looks archaic compared to Advani’s. Btw, when is the bloody ‘Third Front’ rising?