In 1949, Aziz Kashmiri wrote:
आज कल की नारीयां
आज कल की नारीयां
है मुफ़्त की बीमारीयां, बीमारीयां
रात दिन मर्दों से लडने की करे तैयारीयां, तैयारीयां
काम कुछ करती नहीं, और बांधती है सारीयां
In those simpler bygone times, people used to complain that women would tie saris and not work. It shows how far we have come that now people as diverse as Sri Ram Sene members and Shashi Tharoor make the opposite complaint.
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Books Movies and Music, TASK | Tagged: aziz kashmiri, ek thi ladki, lara lappa, lata mangeshkar, meena shorey, rafi, salwar kameez, sari, shashi tharoor, sri ram sene, vinod | 
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Posted by Aadisht
Remember my post from last year about how there are no yuppies shown in Indian television or blockbuster movies? Any character you come across in them is either a member of a lala business family or does something quirky/ outlandish – hippie, in other words – like being a cartoonist or a supermodel or a musician. But people who work the nine-to-five – or actually, in the Indian pre-recession context, ten-to-eight – shift usually get no love, except in low-budget low-viewership multiplex movies. There are no IT engineers. There are no bankers. There aren’t even accountants.
Back then, while I observed the phenomenon, I didn’t bother to explain it. Earlier this year, I saw Dilli-6 and to my great delight, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra and team have come up with an explanation1. It was actually referenced by Baradwaj Rangan with some irritation when he reviewed the movie:
When Bittu remarks that she wants to become Indian Idol because that’s the only out for an “ordinary middle-class ladki” like her to make the transition from a nobody to a somebody, the line grates – a sweetly personal dream is inflated into a thudding aspirational reality for a certain segment of society.
I didn’t find it that ham-handed. In fact I’m overjoyed that Bittu is used as an example of why the aspirational stuff shown in movies is stuff like being a singer or supermodel rather than having a comfortable corporate existence (which going by the mad rush for engineering college admissions, seems to be the actual norm in India).
The thing about a hippie career track is that it’s mostly all-or-nothing. There’s only room for about a dozen or so superstars in every hippie field, while the rest become obscure strugglers. You can make it to the Indian cricket team and ride endorsements to your old age, or get stuck in low-paying Ranji cricket or ICL. If you’re a Bollywood superstar, you will have a bungalow in Bandra. If you’re a minor actor you have a shared 1 BHK in Lokhandwala. If you’re a struggler, you live in a chawl in Dadar. The rewards fall off drastically compared to the yuppie world where even if you’re not a hugely successful yuppie, you just end up putting a smaller apartment or one which is a further commute away.
But if you’re aspiring to be a successful yuppie is that to get there you have to take a bunch of small steps. First you pass out of school with reasonably good marks. Then you do reasonably well in college. Then you get a reasonably well paying job, and keep changing jobs until finally you have credit card, car, and contemporary kitchen. The beauty of the yuppie career track is that by and large you can’t ever get thrown out of the game. If you don’t do all that well in school, you go to a shitty college but you can still work like bonkers and get a decent job, though it becomes harder. But you still have to complete the sequence of moves one way or the other.
So the insight that comes from Dilli-6 is that the hippie career track becomes the default aspirational choice for lala kids when their parents block any of the small steps on the yuppie track – whether it’s a Bachelors, further education, or work. If the yuppie path is being completely blocked off, you might as well take the massive risks of the hippie path – and so you’ll dream of becoming an Indian Idol or a fashion designer.
The whole thing reminds me of Chapter 3 of Freakonomics, about how drug dealers live with their mothers. Drug dealing is also a hippie profession where most of the people lower down the chain get no money out of it, are at high risk of being shot or arrested, and have to live with their mothers. The people right at the top of the gang live opulent lifestyles. But if you’re mired in American inner-city poverty, you’re probably not getting any other job, so you take up the horrific lifestyle of a low-level dealer in the hope that someday you might strike the jackpot at the top of the gang.
1: It isn’t necessarily a correct explanation. But at least someone in mainstream Bollywood is finally addressing the issue. Hopefully more people will follow with other explanations.
Leave a Comment » | Arbit Fundaes, Books Movies and Music, Society | Tagged: all or nothing, bittu, brangan, contemporary furniture, dilli-6, drug dealer, freakonomics, gang leader, hippie, indian idol, lala, lokhandwala, long tail, sudhir venkatesh, tournament, winner-takes-all, yuppie | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
So long, long, ago, Beatzo came up with a muhuh thuhuh about A R Rahman:
The deal with Rahman music is that most of it, the stuff that has stood the test of time, is music that does not really have a template from previous film music. You sure as hell hadn’t heard an acoustic guitar and claps and a growling bass – and those instruments only – backing Chitra’s voice, until you heard ‘Kannalanae’ (That’s ‘Kehna Hi Kya’ for you non-purists) in Bombay. You heard Shweta Shetty singing herself hoarse on TV channels, but did you really think she could pull off the kind of high-pitched vocal violence that Rahman subjected her to in ‘Mangta Hai Kya’? Fine, so Iruvar was based on 70’s MGR movies, but were you really prepared for the scat portion in ‘Hello Mr Ethirkatchi’?
Let me tell you a secret. These three songs I mentioned above? I hated all of them the first time I heard them.
Why can’t we love AR Rahman’s music the first time we hear it? Because we are minor mortals. Because we have limited attention spans and equally limited aural capabilities, rendered sterile by the kind of puerile sonic experiences we are subjected to in the name of music. Please note that the previous sentence was bereft of irony of any kind. It’s true, you know it.
OK, so let’s take this ahead with the Dilli-6 title track.
For starters, let’s set aside the lyrics and the inevitable question of how truthful the statement ‘Yeh hai Dilli mere yaar, bas ishq, mohabbat, pyaar’ is considering that so much of Dilli is also road rage, sexual harassment, and papri chaat. What we’re focusing on is the music – and especially the vocals. Which were just as unexpected as Beatzo would have found Kannalanae or Mangta Hai Kya. Unlike Beatzo’s reaction, I didn’t hate Dilli-6 the first time I heard it. But I didn’t love it either. My first reaction was an overwhelming WTF.
Be warned. At this point the post abandons all objectivity and veers into dangerous fanboyism.
Yes, my first reaction was not “Yuck!” or “Wow!” but “What the hell is this? French women rapping? Mixed with Punjabi spoken word? Just what is the accent on Bas Ishq Mohabbat Pyaar anyway?”
The second time I heard it, my reaction was the same as the first time, except this time I also asked “And how does it all come together so well and become so awesome?”
Now is when I unleash my inner fanboy. The second time I heard it, I went ape over the song (no kaalaa bandar jokes in the comments, please). I sat stunned because I finally got past how strange everything sounded on its own, how it sounded even weirder together, and it still sounded brilliant despite all the weirdness. The French rap was catchy, the Hindi chanting was even more so, and Tanvi Shah’s refrain was incredible.
Okay, fanboyism over, and on to geekdom. The question now arises – why do the separate sections sound so different? I shall hazard – it is because A R Rahman has done an incredible job of mixing and matching rasas. Remember the time Neha Natalya Pandey wrote about navras over here? In case you don’t, click through on the link – but the quick summary is that Indian classical dance defines nine separate collectively exhaustive emotional states, or rasas. And while most Hindi movie songs use only a single ras, A R Rahman uses three rasas in the title track.
The मस्ती है मस्तानों की दिल्ली दिल्ली / Masti hai mastaanon ki Dilli, Dilli male vocals are in veer (courage) ras. As I had said to Beatzo when we were discussing this, the male vocals sound like an assembly of sardars chanting ‘Deh Shiva Var Mohe‘. They’re assertive without being aggressive, proud without being cocky, and are delivered with the assurance of stating the obvious.
The French and Hindi female rap? I’m not quite as sure on this as the other bits, but I’d say it’s in adbhut (astonishment) ras. There’s a sense of wonderment and novelty in there, at this utterly cool and new and weird place that is Delhi.
And now we come to the यह है दिल्ली मेरे यार, बस इश्क मोहब्बत प्यार / Yeh hai dilli mere yaar, bas ishq mohabbat pyaar bit. And – there’s no escaping this – it’s in shringaar ras, the expression of love, compassion, and erotica. Except that the love is being expressed not for a person but for an entire city.
OK, now even more overanalysis.
The majority of Hindi movie songs are love songs, and so are done in shringaar ras. And within that – the shringaar generally comes with an element of longing and unfulfilled desire. Not always – there are a bunch of songs from the 60s which skip this (though I can’t remember any off the top of my head at this exact moment) – but pretty overwhelmingly.
Cast your mind back to the most romantic songs of 2008. Bakhuda tum hi ho from Kismet Konnection? It’s awesome because it too brings in adbhut ras with the shringaar ras, but it’s still very much about unfulfilled love – look at the कैसे बतायें तुम्हें, और किस तरह यह, कितना तुम्हें हम चाहते हैं? line. Then there’s that other Rahman masterpiece, Kahin Toh. It’s about aching for a place which you don’t have where your love will be safe. Milord, I rest my case.
So the refrain is weird and incredible because it’s shringaar ras in a setting of veer and adbhutam ras, which we’re not used to. But it’s doubly weird and incredible because even as shringaar ras, it’s very fulfilled shringaar ras – Tanvi Shah acknowledges that Delhi is full of love, and accepts this. She doesn’t want or look forward to anything more. To reference my original conversation with Beatzo again, he pointed out that it sounds like a cat purring. And that is something which is so unusual in a Hindi movie music context that it just blows our socks off.
The other songs on the album also evoke the WTF-in-a-very-good-way reaction. But none as much as the title track.
7 Comments | Books Movies and Music | Tagged: a r rahman, adbhutam ras, benny, blaaze, bollywood, claire, deh shiva var mohe, dilli-6, muhuh thuhuh, music, music theory, navras, prasoon joshi, shringaar ras, soundtrack, tanvi shah, veer ras, vivianne, yeh hai dilli mere yaar, बस इश्क मोहब्बत प्यार, यह है दिल्ली मेरे यार | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
Ashish Jaiswal, the author of True Dummy – a Fable of Existence, has asked me to review the book (psst: it launched two days ago). He’s also asked me to be honest about the book in the review, and not asked for special treatment.
I’m reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao right now. Once I’ve finished that, I’ll start True Dummy and review it. Normal blogging will happen in the interim (if it happens at all).
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Posted by Aadisht
My current to-be-read pile consists of Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s fabulous transalation of The Adventures of Amir Hamza. You can read Jabberwock’s posts on the books here and here).
Just to bring you up to speed on what the adventures of Amir Hamza actually are. The prophet Muhammad had an uncle called Hamza who was one of the major generals when Muhammad went about waging war to bring all the Arabian tribes under Islam. This is a well established piece of history.
Over the passage of time, history and mythology got mixed up, and Amir Hamza transformed into a mythic hero, and all major heroic adventure stories in the Islamic world from Persia to the Mughal Empire featured Amir Hamza. The way palace jester stories are the same all over India, but get filled in with Birbal in North India, Tenaliraman in South India and Gopal Bhar in Bongland; all adventure stories started to feature Amir Hamza. And so a huge number of stories about Amir Hamza winning over princesses and killing monsters and villains and treading the bejeweled thrones of the world under his feet sprang up. Very probably, when Sultanat and Mughal era grandmothers told their grandchildren stories, they were stories about Amir Hamza, though we don’t know that for sure.
What we do know for sure is that daastaan storytellers from the Mughal era onwards used to tell stories. It became part of the rich Indian oral tradition1. And so there was an explosion of Amir Hamza stories by the time of the late Mughal era, all being told but rarely being written down. Until 1855, when a chap called Ghalib Lakhnavi (claiming to be Tipu Sultan’s grandson in law) published a single-volume compilation of adventures. This was then adapted in 1875 by another chap called Abdullah Bilgrami who added on even more poetry and flowery language. Finally, Musharraf Ali Farooqi has translated Bilgrami’s version into English in the present day, and this is what I’m reading.
What makes the adventures of Amir Hamza so awesome (that is, apart from all the reasons Jabberwock already mentioned) is that everybody rides rhinos instead of horses. To add to the joy, the fact of them riding rhinos is inserted into the text with complete casualness – as if there’s nothing out of the ordinary about riding a rhino, and that mythic heroes and villains riding armor plated beasts instead of horses should be taken for granted. Check out this passage, the first one where rhinos appear:
Thus resolved, Antar departed from the city with five thousand troops. Upon catching sight of him, Hashsham laughed with contempt, and said, “Death flutters above his head seeking a perch, and doom spurs him forward, since he has come to skirmish and dares show me his face!” Then urging his rhinoceros alongside Antar’s mount, Hashsham said, “What is it that you seek? Why do you desire the massacre of your troops, and wish to lay down your life?”
The incongruity of people riding rhinos is just heightened if you’ve read Guns, Germs and Steel, which has this awesome paragraph:
It’s true, of course, that some large African animals have occasionally been tamed. Hannibal enlisted tamed African elephants in his unsuccessful war against Rome, and ancient Egyptians may have tamed giraffes and other species. But none of those tamed animals was actually domesticated—that is, selectively bred in captivity and genetically modified so as to become more useful to humans. Had Africa’s rhinos and hippos been domesticated and ridden, they would not only have fed armies but also have provided an unstoppable cavalry to cut through the ranks of European horsemen. Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.
But the Mughal era storytellers made it happen.
OK. But interesting as rhino mounted heroes are, there was something else about The Hamzanama that I wanted to talk about.
This is a bunch of folktales told and written in Urdu. The compilation is done by a guy called Lakhnavi. The story is filled with uniquely Indian references like rhinos and Indian foods and suchlike. But the hero is an Arab who spends most of his time adventuring in Persia (that is, when he’s on the earthly plain). The only time the hero of Indian folktakes is associated with India is when he marches over to subdue its army, convert its king to Islam, and enlist him in his forces.
Now Hindutva types would doubtless point out that this is because Muslims consider Persia and Arabia more important than the country of their birth. And they may be right. But a better explanation is that Indian storytelling about the fantastic always ends up being located elsewhere. So you have stories about Ram going all the way to Lanka to fight demons, Raja Vikram fighting evil viziers in China, princes going to faraway forests where they find apsaras, until the point where Amir Hamza is going about Persia, Yemen and Qaf, all the while talking in Urdu and eating shirmal and nihari. And so it goes.
Of course, tales told in an Indian language about a fantasy world outside India really exploded in the past fifteen years, thanks to the efforts of Yash Raj Films. They started in 1995 with Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (London, Switzerland, and a sort of faux-Punjab); and since then have moved on from foreign locale to foreign locale – New York, Sydney, Canada, and of course multiple alternate-reality Mumbais where everyone has massive houses with swimming pools). Just to drive the point home, they have a movie coming up titled New York. Dharma Productions has not been far behind either, setting its films in London, New York, and most recently Miami.
And just as daastaan tellers had fantastic characters like djinns, peris, and ghuls, YRF and Dharma have given us equally unreal characters like racing car drivers, summer camp owners, cartoonists, conmen, and well… assorted rich people who’re never seen working or struggling. And the way Amir Hamza goes about converting everyone to the true faith, our present day luminaries immerse everyone in traditional Indian values, or at any rate what they think are traditional Indian values (this is actually a subject for the Pandeys to take up).
So people who crib about Bollywood being at odds with reality and out of touch with the real India should stop. What Bollywood is actually doing is continuing the great traditions of Indian folklore and storytelling. Now if only they did it more comprehensively and brought in more rhinos.
1: As Neha Vish pointed out, it’s incredible how Indians managed to reproduce so much in spite of the oral tradition. But then the foreword and the preface both express concern that the oral tradition is dying out.
Leave a Comment » | Arbit Fundaes, Books Movies and Music | Tagged: amir hamza, chopratrash, daastaan, dastaan, dharma productions, hamzanama, musharraf ali farooqi, myth, oral tradition, pandey sri 22 yevgeniy yajmaan pandey, rhino, storytelling, the adventures of amir hamza, yash raj films | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
What got me started on all this pontification about Indian movies being filled with hippies was watching Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na. Although I liked the movie, one question went through my head throughout the movie: don’t any of these people have jobs?
And then I put analysis and realised that pretty much all Hindi movies have no yuppies. So I sort of lost hope in Bollywood’s ability to showcase yuppies. But then two months later a movie came along which actually had all the rich people stereotypes including yuppies. In fact all three stereotypes had lead roles. This movie was Bachna Ae Haseenon and the three heroines each represent one of the stereotypes.
Minissha Lamba was basically the lala. She was from a rich serd family and married a rich serd guy with a massive family house and reasonably decent family business in Amritsar Sahib.
Bipasha Basu was the hippie. In the first half of the movie, she landed up in Bombay and became a Shiamak Davar dancer which is basically your beginner or starter hippie. The point is that it involves no MS Excel. In the second half, she’s become a supermodel or superstar or both, and all her daily inconveniences are smoothed out by a succession of secretaries who take care of them. So between the first half and the second half she moves from beginner hippiedom to advanced hippiedom.
Deepika Padukone plays the yuppie. She does an MBA, works three jobs, and hunts for stock tips. She also follows tech and plays computer games. When Ranbir Kapoor asks her to put jeevansathi with him, she says K to him because she’s afraid he’ll ask her to stop working (which would result in her lifestyle moving from yuppie to lala).
The most interesting character is Ranbir Kapoor because his classification matches whichever woomaan he’s putting blade on. He starts the movie as a lala by being the rich son of a rich dad who goes on holiday to Switzerland and blades the lala Minissha Lamba. Then in the next segment he’s a video game designer which is a very hippie job. So he blades the hippie Bipasha Basu. Finally he gets promoted to senior management and has game designers reporting to him, and just tracks their progress, so he’s become a yuppie. In this part of the movie he puts blade on the yuppie Deepika Padukone.
I am not sure if the movie is a metaphor for how liberalisation forces lala family-owned businesses to professionalise and hire yuppie senior management. That sort of speculation is better left to people with columns in Sunday newspapers anyway.
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Leave a Comment » | Books Movies and Music | Tagged: Amritsar, Bachna Ae Haseeno, Bipasha Basu, bollywood, Deepika Padukone, microsoft, Minissha Lamba, Ranbir Kapoor, Shiamak Davar, Switzerland | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
So what is it about TV that inspired me to write arbit posts defining lalas, yuppies and hippies? Well, it’s like this. Ever since I started watching TV about four months ago (when I moved in with relatives in Mumbai), I’ve realised this about it – all Indian TV (fiction) programming is centred around lalas and hippies. But never yuppies. As far as the people who make Indian TV serials are concerned, yuppies don’t exist.
Now soap operas of the K variety are of course dominated by lalas. From what little I’ve seen of them (fortunately, my relatives in Mumbai are not devotees) they’re centred around gigantic business joint families where everyone is scheming against each other, often for control of the business. Very lala, really. Even when said soap operas are not of the Balaji K-variety, they tend to involve ginormous lala families.
My cousin watched two soap operas earlier in the year. One involved a female who was dark skinned, so she was married off to a spastic guy. As in, literally spastic. I am not making this up. But the spastic guy belonged to a giant lala family and his sister-in-law schemed against this dark-complexioned chick. So full lala fundaes again.
The other soap opera was halfway between hippie and lala. Like I said, these things are intersecting stereotypes on a Venn Diagram rather than properly mutually-exclusive-collective-exhaustive categories. So anyway this one is about a star kid who’s being launched by his bigger movie star (or maybe director or producer) dad. Now being a movie star is as hippie as it gets, but if you’re being launched by your dad than lala fundaes come into play again.
The point is that in all of this, yuppies are missing.
Cut to now. My aunt’s favourite thing on TV these days is this thing on NDTV Imagine called Radha ki Betiyaan Kuchh Kar Ke Dikhayengeen. It regularly scales new heights of hippieness. It’s about this woman from Meerut who packs up and brings her daughters to Mumbai so that they can be successful in life.
What’s amazing is the path to success these daughters take. The accepted path to success is the yuppie one – become an engineer, then become an MBA, then become a finance professional, and pay off your EMIs for the next thirty years. You would think that these daughters would follow it too. But no! The oldest one gets a job at a fashion design house, which is the borderline between hippie and yuppie. But then she quits to enter a dance contest, and abandons all pretensions of yuppieness. And in fact this goes on throughout the show. The three daughters and their mother perpetually have to raise money for some reason or the other. It’s like watching a Sunday morning kids movie every night at primetime. And instead of doing it the yuppie way and becoming management consultants, they do it buy selling songs they’ve written, taking part in dance contests, and providing Hindi tuitions. Something involving Excel, or even maths done with pencil and paper never crosses their minds. It’s amazing.
Then there’s the stuff my cousin watches. There is first this show on Star One about doctors who seem to spend all their time singing and dancing rather than taking care of patients. So you have singing dancing doctors who never worry about the price of bhindi, or how much rent they’re paying. Come to think of it, they don’t seem to have homes – they just sing and dance at hospital. The point is that yuppie concerns of day-to-day minutiae are given the go-by.
Now it would be okay if the total absence of yuppie characters was restricted to television. But it exists in movies also. There are no yuppie characters in Bollywood either. Everyone in a Hindi movie is blissfully unconcerned about where the money is coming from. When will you ever see a Hindi movie character worrying about rent, or who’s going to clean the toilet? Let’s run through some of the movies in 2008:
You see my point, yes?
So in all of this, do yuppies get seen at all? Well, yes. But only in the ads, which most people just surf away from. Now, let’s look at this in detail. With YouTube examples!
Usually, the category with the maximum yuppieness is life insurance. Which makes sense. Lalas don’t need life insurance because they’re already rich and have enough assets to take care of their dependents. Or if they do buy life insurance, they’ll buy whatever their CA-moonlighting-as-insurance-agent will sell them, not on the basis of advertising. Hippies don’t make financial decisions and just leave it to their private banker or lala family’s accountant. So you have to pitch to yuppies, who actually live on a month-to-month basis and have to worry about this shit. So it makes sense to have yuppie-focused advertising.
For a long time, the HDFC Standard Life ad was the yuppiest in India:
Consider! It has a daughter buying her father a car, which is the antithesis of regular lala relationships. Buying their parents stuff is probably what every yuppie dreams of. Plus look at all the other yuppie indicators – personalised checkbook from a new age private bank, shirt and pants instead of salwar kameez or sari, hair let down instead of plaited. In fact HDFC Standard’s slogan – Sar Utha Ke Jiyo – is the sort of thing that resonates more with yuppies than anybody else.
So yes. For a very long time, nothing could beat HDFC Standard Life in the yuppieness stakes. And then Airtel unleashed Madhavan and Vidya Balan. First, they established the young and urban part by showing them at an apartment building’s lift:
Having established yuppieness, they then set out to reinforce it:
Once again, we have the yuppie aspiration of giving money to parents instead of the other way around. Plus, check out the furniture. It screams yuppie. But in case you had any doubts at all, the next ad in the series set out to bury them once and for all:
Now prepaid recharges may not seem very yuppie. After all good yuppies have postpaid corporate connections. But set that aside for a while. And look at everything else in the ad. You have Vidya Balan telling Madhavan to make salad and do the household chores. This is the pinnacle of yuppieness. Hippies have domestic help to do the household chores. As for lala families, the woman telling the man to do stuff around the house is an exercise in futility.
But anyway. So there are yuppie characters in ads. But even this is in a very small set of ads. Usually for services, especially the financial sort. FMCG ads are dominated by celebrity endorsements (i.e., hippies). So are laptop ads for some bizarre reason. Confectionary ads have fantasy characters, and Fevicol actually goes so far as to show poor people. And like I said, people mostly surf away from ads, so it doesn’t really count.
So clearly the situation is grim for us yuppies. We get no representation in popular culture, and now the financial crisis is making the real world dark and depressing too. Now, we can only hope that the recent spate of yuppie suicides will mean that Sainath will give us some love. But honestly, who wants that?
PS1: I realise I’m only looking at lalas, yuppies, and hippies and ignoring poor people. But that’s pretty much because there have been no poor people in movies or on TV since the 1980s. People who watched Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and encouraged the secular trend in movies about hippie kids of lala parents, this is your fault.
PS2: Actually, even when there were poor people in the movies, they weren’t really poor. Even if they lived in chawls, rent never seemed to be a factor. Indian cinema and television is a fantasy world where everyone owns their house, no matter how poor or unemployed they are. (Insert subprime crisis/ NINJA mortgage/ Congressman Barney Frank joke here.)
PS3: Actually, there is one Hindi movie this year which has acknowledged the presence of yuppies. In fact it has covered all three stereotypes. But that will be discussed in the next post.
29 Comments | Arbit Fundaes, Books Movies and Music, MBA, MSM, Society | Tagged: advertising, airtel, balaji telefilms, barney frank, bollywood, bombsploitation, consumer finance, dance contest, doctors, ekta kapoor, EMI, financial services, hdfc standard life, hindi movie, hippie, house ownership, joint family, k serial, kidnap, lala, life insurance, madhavan, maths, MBA, microsoft excel, ndtv imagine, ninja loan, radha ki betiyan, rent, salary, singh is kinng, soap opera, star one, subprime crisis, Telecom, television, tv, ulcra, vidya balan, yaane tu ya jaane na, yuppie | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
So I finally got around to reading The World is Flat. My cousin who I’m staying with (and whose usual reading is self-help books) had MED for it and in a moment of weakness I succumbed.
I didn’t find it as terrible as Prof. Ed Leamer’s scathing review (so scathing, he takes no less than 51 pages to scathe through) makes it out to be. The difference drawn between wholesale reform and retail reform was one of the better parts of the book, and the first time I’ve actually seen it drawn outside of a one-off newspaper op-ed or blogpost. On the other hand, the breast beating about declining standards in American education and what should be done about them, are entertaining to read but manage to contradict the rest of the book stunningly.
The overall impression I got of the book is that Thomas Friedman is to business journalism what Navjot Singh Sidhu is to cricket commentary. While there is an actual concept at the bottom of everything they talk about, these guys fall in love with their metaphors, to the point where the metaphor takes on a life of itself, and it becomes impossible to find the funda. Such is life.
Leave a Comment » | Books Movies and Music | Tagged: globalisation, Navjot Singh Sidhu, The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
What do exploitation movies exploit? Stereotypes?
P.S. This is a serious question. Wikipedia isn’t any help.
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Posted by Aadisht
Leave a Comment » | Books Movies and Music | Tagged: maktub, melodic scandinavian death metal, motherjane, raghu ramone, rags is a cutie, scandinavian melodic death metal | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht