RUMINATIONS IN SPRIGHTLINESS

The Definitive(All Encompassing) Diary of the Decade

2010-01-10T04:51:00.000-08:00

Before I began to attempt this all-encompassing piece on the decade that is slipping past us even as you are reading, I asked myself the very basic question whether all encompassing is all-encompassing or just all encompassing.

Another important aspect when it comes to weighty compilations of this nature is how to include the word ‘definitive’ into the narrative. All things considered, consensus emerged inside me that ‘definitive’ has to definitely feature in the heading especially since many other words with ‘D’s also hang around. Luckily we don’t write history, otherwise you will find plenty of articles like ‘Bipasha Basu in Backless Beachwear’ included just for the sake of rhythm.

Technology

Cell phones: The cute convenient thingies have completely revolutionised the grammar of modern communication system by empowering the poor and weaker sections of the society with compelling technology and innovations they absolutely have no need for or have no clues about. The beauty of modern cellular phones, is that they come packed with so much facilities and functions that surprisingly don’t work in an emergency. With cell phones now even a kuppan or subban in the solar sysatem is acquainted with top-end technology terms like ‘no signal’ ‘battery charge nil’.

The arrival of cellular phones has also now made it possible to immediately reach an indigent farmer in a remote village in, say, Thanjavur, with the helpful information that the pizza outlet, which has no presence in the radius of 2253 kms of the entire district, is making a special festive discount package of buy 2, pay for 4 offer. This is the power of spam messages, which according to precise scientific data called guessing, make up 543% of all mobile phone information traffic.

Laptops: From the enigmas that filled the entirety of a room, computers have gone thin with laptops that are easy to carry and easier to lose. The power of technology is that laptop thefts are now a bigger industry than laptop manufacturing.

The humble PCs, which took roughly the time that a girl needs to reach puberty to just boot up, and which tied you down to a place, were this decade replaced by the handiness of the power-packed laptops which take the time which Namitha takes to undress in a film :P . For, the first rule of laptop running is that it stops running the moment it realises that help is not nearby. Luckily, help in the form of ‘Tech support’ is forever available in the form of ‘mellifluous music’, which is what you will be forced to hear life-long if you happen to call Tech Support, who programmed to remain ‘busy attending other customers ’ even tho' ter are no other customers in planet except you :D.

Internet, email, Twitter, Facebook: When this decade arrived the internet was at its infancy, and now when the decade wounds up, the world wide web has grown in ways that were unimagined, but without in any manner affecting its prime purpose: Propagation of porn. The other core competency area of pointless email forwards has now become a multi-billion dollar industry in itself.

Emails, the quintessence of the internet, have helped shorten the distance between people, and it is now very much in the realm of possibility for an ordinary and unpretentious worker in Nigeria to pass on his talent, which is to casually con an over-eager male in Karaikudi with bogus money transfer deals.

Shashi Tharoor would have been just another Minister with a portfolio and a siren-fitted car that kept him away from the masses, but with social media platforms like Twitter, Shashi Tharoor is able to be directly in touch with democracy :P

At a plebeian level, too, social media tools provide the emotional space for an individual to unburden to a receptive world his or her deeply resonant private thoughts like, ‘I am feeling sleepy ’ 'I m not ter right now' , 'Dinner now' etc.

I-PODS: If you see the message ‘Unsupported Format’, it’s advisable to upgrade to the higher version of Jagadish's blog and continue to enjoy your reading. This is roughly the larger theme of hand-held music players, which enable you to store thousands and thousands megabytes of music but can actually play just one and half song.
(For more details see Digital Music below).

24-Hour News Channels: People like Rajdeep Sardesai, Barkha Dutt, Arnab Goswami who were just starting out on their careers as TV reporters in the 90s, have now risen to the high stature wherein their mere sight impels the nation to even think of migrating to Mars, despite the fact that it has no air, but because it has no TV channels to beam news 24 hours. This is the power and potential of modern journalism as represented by the motto: Breaking News: Anything that can be scrolled in letters across the TV screen is breaking news.

The last 10 years have also provided the conclusive proof that with more and more eager channels peopled by enthusiastic reporters around, corruption and cheating become that much more easy (Don’t refer to Madhu Koda, A Raja below).

Here is a sample of wat was said in a tv news election coverage: "It is a historical day for indian democracy... a historical day for democracy in INdia, The day when democracy made history in India, the day when history and democracy became confluent...." and such crap..
Arts

Multiplex: Creative geniuses now need not suffer from the anxiety that their finely-honed offerings will be let down by the inferior facilities at the dingy cinema hall. Thanks to multiplexes they are now sure that howsoever insufferable the movie is, people can still be made to endure it as long as the popcorn is crunchy and tasty, and the parking lot spacious. As long as Rs,70 is paid for popcorn at Satyam Cinemas by ppl who look with the heads down at the money in their purses, which of course is on the verge of extinction by te extraordinary ambience at the theater;)

Multiplexes are here to stay and have spawned a sub-genre of movies, which deal with the agony and tribulations of an angst-ridden generation that is forever forced to subsist on credit cards and the humble diet of pizza and cappuccino.

Digital Music: See I PODS above.

Digital Camera & Photoshop: The art of photography has been democratized, in that anybody who has the basic talent to see can make it as a talented photographer. With digital cameras and Photoshop applications, quite conceivably your roadside gutter can be shown to be a grand tributary of the gushing Amazon witht the waters of the nile seamlessly merging straight into it. For instance, I have come up with dramatic pictures of Eiffel Tower at night despite the fact I have never been to Italy (which is where I believe Eiffel tower is) and never owned a camera at night.

Sports

IPL: IPL has done to cricket what Silk Smitha did to Tamil cinema: Bring bedroom glamour to mainstream. IPL not only lifted cricket from the dusty, dirt-ridden surroundings of the stadium and transported it to the comfortable and cool settings of banks, but also brought exciting new talents to the game in the form of busty cheer girls wearing dresses that are deliciously deficient. As long as they are showing those impish girly gaily cavorting around, people can be forced to forget that they are amidst the encompassing miasma of Ferozshah Kotla.

Tiger Woods: For long, the weird jargon of golf had the humanity puzzled. But all along the noble sport of golf was waiting for the exalted ability of Tiger Woods to unravel its myriad mysteries.

Politics

Manmohan Singh: This humble bureaucrat turned PM has brought a rare dignity to the highest office of the land where even a bureau of rats can aspire to be part of the Union Cabinet. If this is not empowerment, I don’t know what is.(See A Raja, Madhu Koda below).

A Raja, Madhu Koda: Whenever people talked of corruption in the top echelons, many kept silent, mainly because they did not understand the meaning of ‘echelons’. But with the likes of A Raja and Madhu Koda, corruption has got a new dignity as the public are not stirred into pointless furore over pittances below Rs 1000 crores. (For more: See Defamation Laws).

World Affairs

George Bush & Barack Obama: The impact of George Bush is so enormous that they decided to award the Nobel prize to Barack Obama simply because the brilliant minds of Nobel Committee quickly grasped the fact that Obama is a separate individual not answering to the name George Bush. But Obama, in the manner he is going, will soon surely bring a good name to Bush. And who knows, one day George Bush may get the Nobel peace prize or the Oscars for not having been the Obama of his times.

Islamic Terror: Sorry, no fun and levity here. Jokes, in this terrain, are attached to an explosive circuit and can trigger blasts.

Global Warming: This has been the topic of this decade. I would want to say that the threat of Global Warming hangs like a Damocles’ Sword over the planet, but refrain from doing so because I can’t decide on the spelling of ‘Damocels’. Global Warming impacts human lives in many ways, leading to the melting of Polar Caps and other words spelt in Upper Caps.

Considering the calamitous nature of the threat that Earth is faced with, the world leaders, in a rare of show unanimity, met in Copenhagen recently and laid out what collective will can eventually achieve: Total absurdity. At Copenhagen, they debated on whether they agreed on what they thought they agreed on at Kyoto, a similar gathering held several years ago. If my reading is correct, I think they all have come to the conclusion that Kyoto is somewhere in Asia, which could be in, well I don’t know.

For the now, well a Happy New year to you all. And as this 2010 blossoms, I’m waiting for salvation through resurrection.

My wishlist for the future :P

2009-12-05T19:34:00.000-08:00

Year-end time is great, especially since it gives an opportunity to indulge ourselves in fun activities that are plain foolish. Wish-lists are one of the time-tested practices of newspapers that match the all-round stupidity of the moment.

The great thing about wish-lists is that they need not adhere to any logic or norm, except the one they have to be unrealistic.

So without much ado, here is the compendium of things I would want to see in 2010 or perhaps even later, say by 3020.

1) The courts shall not entertain any graft case involving amounts less than Rs.1,000 crore. After A Raja and Madhu Koda scandals, amounts less than Rs.1000 crore are an extreme insult to corruption. The Supreme Court can also seriously consider thinking up a special branch to deal with corruption cases. Needless to say, Dinakaran should head this court, as none comes with better credentials than him when you are talking of corruption.

2) All banks must explain in clear-cut logical terms as to why they need to have 16-digit numbers for savings bank accounts. To me, it just seems a sheer waste of numerals. Normal human beings cannot, I repeat, cannot remember numbers involving digits higher than 3. To create 16-digit numbers just for the convenience of unthinking computers is an exercise in excellent perversity.

3) Why don’t telephone companies come out straight and accept that they themselves don’t understand their various plans and talk-time schemes. It’s advisable to quarantine anyone who claims that he or she understands all the schemes on offer. Such openly deranged people are a threat to humanity.

4) In the interest of larger common good, each and every individual of this nation should monetarily contribute large sums to Sun Pictures if it promises to stay away from film production. Sun Pictures, for the record, not only backs all the worst movies produced in a year, but also comes up with the most torturous trailers for them.

5) The Prime Minister or the President should finally take the initiative and address the nation, unravelling the biggest secret confronting humankind: What’s the need for a Vice-President in a country like India? Brand the President or the Prime Minister as straight liar, if the explanation is anything other than: The Rashtrapathi Bhavan has too many free rooms.

6) It’s time to despatch a strong showcause notice to Prince Charles and the men folk in Scotland seeking their explanation on how on earth they accepted kilt as their national attire. To the rest of the humanity, wearing kilts can be acceptable only if transvestitism is a non-negotiable national rule.

7) All movies where the hero uses unimaginable quantities of prosthetics and shows up as something like an unborn boy or a mummified zombie will have to suffer penal tax of 35,000 per cent. A further service cess and octroi will have to be levied if the hero sports a six-pack in some scene. Further, Kamal Haasan’s make-up kit will have to stand confiscated.

8) With particular reference to Tamilnadu, directors of movies that involve Madurai as their backdrop should be taken aside and shot dead. This has to be done to as a safety precaution to prevent the dangerous virus from spreading further.

9) People using perfumes, which cost above thousand rupees, must be counselled with the help of specialists in common sense that the human nose doesn’t come with built-in sensors to differentiate between ordinary body-sprays and expensive ones. And it also needs to explained to any man that women are not going to be aroused into carnal pleasure just because he spends Rs.10,000 on a vial of perfume.

10) Call all the intelligent scientists of the world. Bring in all the top IQed men and women. Get them all together and figure out how a person could be named: Uda Walawwe Mahim Bandaralage Chanaka Asanga Welegedara. This Sri Lankan fast bowler has obesity in his name itself.

11) The man, or the team, that invented the idea of Captcha need to be gassed. Now, Captcha is the system of rightly typing out randomly scribbled askew letters for validating that the user is a human being and not a spam machine. There are any number of ways to establish humanness. But this has to be the most cruel way ever devised. And if this doesn’t deserve extinction, human kind can never be saved.

12) The nation should pardon Akshay Kumar’s dress sense. While it is at it, an all-party delegation should go to Kareena Kapoor and tell her that meaning to look slim is fine. But if she thins anymore there will be a technical problem: No person can be slimmer than her photograph. :)

13) Writers in English in India should realise that this is a land of several hundred languages. To understand English itself requires extra effort. So to involve strange Latin or French phrases in English writing is not only plain stupid but also an excercise in vanity. Ipso Facto, the congressus of insignis scholars de dato 22.2.2009 has agreed unequivocally that Jagadish's blog is exempt from this rule. :P :P ;)

This is a 100% 'fat-free' post!

2009-11-07T07:50:00.000-08:00

As a guy who is curious to learn new things(which is an euphemism for browsing net 24x7 for gibberish stuff) , the reports that intrigue me are the ones relating to some serious scientific conclusions apparently based on every-day phenomena. Usually, these findings are sourced to some obscure lab in, say, remote Germany (Thermostatic, Rheumatic and Electroplating Centre of Study and Sleep, Nordeg Gmbh,) or a nondescript varsity with a long-winding name in interior part of Philadelphia (The Montana University for Excellence in Automated Organic Science and Applied Brakes). The findings can be invariably classified into three categories:
1.Idiotic
2.Stupid.
(in case, you noticed the 3rd missing, you may fill in with a synonymous word)
‘Prevalence of TB linked to yawning before sleeping’. ‘Pornography watching leads to retinal damage’. ‘Fun gene at the core of party culture’ It is a moot point as to whether there are any sustained readership (excepting, of course, aimless columnists) to such reports. Perhaps, some scientist can do a research on this and come out with a story that would typically read ‘Scientific reports provide a cure for insomnia’.
Anyway, I don’t know why newspapers continue to publish them in all seriousness. The one possible reason could be that if journalists, are to fill the pages on their own, it would be worse.
Recently, while waiting at a barber’s shop, I chanced to read a report that said that obese persons are, in general, happier than their lean counterparts. But it does not tally with what we encounter daily.
There is a mad desperation for people to look thin that just stops short of actually disappearing. Being slim is such a status symbol that people are willing to part with their right hands to get that mean look. The rules of life is simple: If you look emaciated as if you are auditioning for the part of the Somalian refugee then you are deemed stylish and beautiful.
Take someone like Shilpa Shetty. In days of yore, the Shetty gal could have passed for a skeleton model in the biology class. She in fact has an uncannily striking resemblance to the rope that magicians use in the Great Indian rope trick. Yet, today she epitomises what stands for that 'hot chick' (good god, none really knows what co-relation te words hot and chick 've) elegance. Kareena Kapoor is another dame who is into this slim-is-style set. It is only a matter of time before Kareena vaporizes and enters gaseous state without any tangible physical property.
But who decided that thin is healthy and beautiful? Not me, because when we were growing up the fad was to grow round and believe that was healthy. Those were the days of bell-bottoms. Yes, we needed plenty of flesh to fill those cavernous pants.
Patently, the word ‘obesity’ had not been invented then, and anyone with a sumo wrestler’s girth and a cheek chubbier than today’s thighs was a picture of pink health. Any person, with a body structure of a redy actress, would have been urgently wheeled into the ICU for emergency treatment. To put things in perspective, Sivaji Ganesan, who wore his pants well near the chest (if the fly was open, you could conduct a bypass surgery), was the totem of handsomeness. And Savithri, who looked like Michelin Man in drag, was seen to be oozing glamour and glitz.
Well, those were the days!
It was mandatory then to pack in as much fat as possible into one’s daily diet. This was managed by the simple strategy of adding milk solution to every liquid quaffed or providing an oil and ghee base to any solid ingested. So this meant drinking coffee —– recipe: 99.999 parts of milk to .001 parts of decoction. The morning breakfast comprised idlis, watered in thick oil, and eaten with podis liberally smeared with ghee. If it were dosai, it better be the buttered variety. Poori, pongal…you name it everything was swimming in litres and gallons of oil and butter We consumed every morning roughly the life-time calorie intake of today’s youth. Today’s Gen would even dread to think about those delicacies for fear of putting on weight But we couldn’t care less, we were chasing the ultimate in good health: Literally, a rounded personality.
And suddenly the bubble burst, and fat was literally on fire. Looking like a newly-spindled yarn became hip. Talking of hip, it itself had to be no thicker than yesteryear wrists.
Why this change? Who brought about it?
It must have been the researchers and lab scientists who had been bored to death just gathering fat and putting out occasional report that attracted the attention of none.
Then, out of the blue, they put out this: ‘Obese persons don’t have the marriage gene’. This finding was based on the ineluctable scientific understanding that to get married one has to be single, while being obese amounted to being double.
So thin is indeed in the thick of it, and everyone has chosen to chase the chimera of lissomeness. It has now come to the stage where people have begun to look at the calorie count even if they are just buying, say, lottery tickets.
The natural flip side is anything and everything is peddled off as being fat-free or cholesterol-clear. The other day, I came across in a departmental store shelf fat-less coconut oil. By my understanding, both coconut and oil, are basically products that abound in fat and cholesterol. Unless they are selling water in the name of coconut oil, there was no way it was going to be fat-free. But there were people queueing up to buy that.
The moral of the story is pretty simple: People are suckers for fads.
So for all those fitness-fanatics and calorie-counters, here it goes: This blog post is made of organically-grown English, fat-free vowels and sugar-free consonants. No artificial colouring or preservative have been used.
If you are still not convinced, you can check with the Illinois Institute for Vacuum Research and Void Studies in DNA Chromosomes , whose recent research has unequivocally showed that ‘ reading Jagadish's blog linked to reduction of fat in the brain’.

CONSTITUTION- A RECONDITE CONCEPT :)

2009-10-10T23:18:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of terminologies associated with the process of democracy formation for all those intellectuals who have been following only broadcasts of matches which India, as usual never won:)
First and the foremost lemme begin with
CONSTITUTION: It is defined as a multipaged user manual for the country of India running to about 107328(And still counting..) pages that any person with an average intellect is quite unlikely to remain sane on reading it. It is a book for constant deliberation and debate by those bald headed experts who wear those black colored glasses and speak in such a fashion so that the gap between two successive (2 successive,,pardon an oxymoron) sentences is the of the order of 12483 kms or 7393 miles, which ever is longer:-D.

Those gentlemen who framed this manual (sry, the constitutional manual of course) had some legitimate reason for framing the Constitution in the manner they did:

They knew for sure that nobody would want to read the Constitution.
If at all the writers of this constitution had felt atleast an iota of interest that they were going to make this work of democracy (the definition of which is at the last para of this post), they would have put an attractive pose of some nubile actress in a seductive posture on the front page of the constitution (The strategy which most of Tamil Magazines follow to make their stuff a hit across teenagers)

PRESIDENT: Now that we have given a definition of what a constitution actually is- we proceed on to discuss the definition of a President.
In true sense, a President is defined as a person who spends most of the time in a royal, flamboyant, extravagant Bungalow (supposed to be the Rashtrapathi bavan, reminded of Saravana bhavan :-P). This bungalow is constructed based on the underlying philosophy that public money can be squandered and embezzled by those peculators (tos 3 words mean the same:) ) as long as the youth are struck on a debate over Bipasha Basu's bikini appearance and the older ones are still crying viewing mega serials.

One duty of a president is to attend those royal functions which are being celebrated for the only reason that the President should have some work to do and to remind the rest of the nation that there is a President existing :-)
Another duty which every presiden is obliged to perform - to travel in a limousine as large as a constituency even if it is a visit to an adjacent room of his(oops,its HER now) own house from the hall.

VICE-PRESIDENT:
It is often churlishly thought that this post has no human purpose..
Anyways, as a matter of fact, this post has been constituted to keep historians busy taking records of who the vice president of this country was during each span of time.
Generally, the Vice Presidents have even turned up to be presidents who are "vice" rather than Presidents who are "wise". In sum, the country's most luckiest person gets to occupy the post.

In general, note that the function of a vice president is to also keep pretending as if he is awake and alert despite the fact that he had been eternally yawning in all the Rajya Sabha Sessions right from the first day he assumed office. :-)

HUNG PARLIAMENT: Now for a more technical term:)

It is a situation which arises in a democracy when no party gets a sole chance to spoil and plunder the country's resources and hence join with like-minded parties (which is usually every kuppan or subban party in the entire solar system having the same intention to play spoilsport).
when a hung parliament occurs, it also serves yet another vital function-ie to keep the likes of Arnab Goswami of Times Now and Rajdeep Sardesai of CNN IBN busy posing questions for which only God knows the answer. Our imbecile politicians pretending to be prudent reply saying, "All alliances shall be decided at the appropriate time".
Of course, the dictionary meaning of an alliance is a bond. And the word bond has always got something to do with money(Of course, ICICI bonds)., Hence, rule of transitivity, alliances are about money(eppidi?? DBMS transitivity rule).

DEMOCRACY: It has nothing to do with ppl. Above all, its for politicians and tv anchors to while away time in a tv shows. And above all, one feature of democracy is that "ANYTHING IS ACCEPTABLE AND SHALL BE PASSED"..
And that 'anything' shall include this blog post tooo :-)

here i am...

2009-10-10T08:16:00.000-07:00

Here i am into this all new world of blogging :) If u have stumbled upon this post in a rather frantic expectation of a meticulously authored blog replete with great view points, then you are totally mistaken. This is just a piece of some gibberish 'sensational' stuff amidst those 'sensibly' authored blogs. he he.. (Blog writers do have a weird sense of humour, you see. Understand that when there is no 'he he' then it s got to do with some serious stuff ;) )