Scraps Stuffs - Random musings from apun ka desh

Back from a week's vacation in Mumbai. Glad to be back since the humidity got to me from day one. Bangalore is bone dry in comparison.

The monsoon arrived while I was in Mumbai. Dark clouds started gathering on Sunday afternoon (19/6) and soon enough it started raining. And once rain starts in Mumbai, it really pours. It rained on and off for the next four days. Reminded me what I miss about Mumbai - a real monsoon.

Watched Parineeta, Batman Begins, Silsilaay and Mr and Mrs. Smith in Mumbai. Liked the movies in that order too!

Vidya Balan looks very nice in Parineeta, good performances all around, but the main female lead and her mother don't look Bengali by any stretch of the imagination.

Batman Begins was a kick ass movie, enjoyed it very much.

Silsilaay was kind of OK too, Riya Sen is hotttttttt in the movie, Tabu looks so beautiful. Both appealing in their own ways.

Mr and Mrs. Smith was a lame movie. I should have tried to watch D instead.

Random thoughts:

1. Mumbai remains a biiiiiig slum. Most parts are pretty filthy.
2. Mumbai infrastructure kicks Bangalore arse. Big time. Uninterrupted power, no water problems, nice public transport. Considering that Mumbai has twice Bangalore's population, they are doing a super job, relatively speaking of course.
3. Four days of rains just manages to rid the Western Ghats of dryness. It would probably take a month's rains to really green them.
4. Vada pavs are so yummy, I could eat them for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a week and not get bored.
5. Same for pav bhaji with cheese.
6. Times of India, Mumbai edition is decent, the Bangalore one sucks.

BJP President Advani's visit to Pakistan and Karachi, his comments on Jinnah while he was there, the subsequent firestorm of protests, his resignation as BJP President in a fit of pique and his eventual action of taking back his resignation is old hat now. I was struck by many things while I note down below, in random order

1. L. K. Advani showed gross error in judgement in going to Pakistan in the first place. For a former home minister and wannabe prime minister of India, to have displayed such bad timing and utter lack of judgement in visiting Pakistan at the same time that the Hurriyat was, is plain astonishing. Perhaps he felt that age was catching up with him and time was running out. Maybe he felt like visiting his home town before he kicked the bucket. Who knows what went on in his senile mind, whatever it was, it wasn't well thought out or reasoned. The GoI position was that the Hurriyat members (those that chose to go) would only be issued passports to visit Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) and that it would be a breach of trust for them to visit Pakistan proper. They have finally visited Pakistan proper so I wonder if Advani was suitable embarassed by this or not. Anyway, this wasn't the time for him to visit.
2. LKA needs to get his head examined. Why on earth did he have to spew the idiocity that he spewed? There are no doubts in my mind that Jinnah partitioned the country purely for his own selfish means and motive. Although he may have been secular in his personal life (and that is by no means certain), in his political life he certainly wasn't. And his political life is what we should all be concerned about, because that is what affected India the most. Who cares if he ate pork, or drank wine, or did other stuff that was un-Islamic as long as he believed that Hindus and Muslims cannot live alongside each other. Jinnah was most certainly not secular and to call him that is foolishness of the highest order. Unless LKA was planning to target the Congress with such a statement, implying that it was the Congress lust and greed for power in an independent India that drove Jinnah to articulate the two nation theory.
3. LKA should have been a man, stood by his words and pooh-poohed all suggestions of taking back his resignation. He is today exposed as a wimp and his credibility is at an all time low. This was the time his party needed him. The BJP is still shell shocked over the defeat it faced at the hustings more than a year back. It is rudderless and consequently directionless. Although its the only major party with a clean second rung leadership, there is a lot of infighting going on among all the "stalwarts" of the second rung. LKA is considered a very good organizer and was expected to set this right (although I didn't see any evidence whatsoever that he was even heading in the right direction on this). He showed very poor judgement in rocking the boat at this juncture.
4. LKA, ABV and the spent force Jaswant Singh should resign and make way for people with more credibility as they have very little left. ABV couldn't lead his party to victory, LKA shows poor judgement and we don't want such a guy in government, let alone as a home minister or a prime minister. Jaswant Singh has nothing to show for all his dances with "my good friend Strobe Talbott" except F-16s to Pakistan.
5. RSS needs to shut up and stay in the background as much as possible. The media is biased against them and any amount of good ideas/intentions etc. coming from them will be twisted against them. Best they keep quiet and influence the BJP as much as they can - the five star culture needs to be toned down, and the leaders actually need to be seen and heard (witness the deafening silence of the largest opposition party here in Karnataka).
6. VHP needs to be jettisoned as soon as possible. Ditto Bajrang Dal. More a liability than they are worth. Idiots all of them.
   

The monsoon finally arrived in Bangalore last Friday (10/6), six days behind schedule. It started raining in the evening and the rains were distinctly different from the pre-monsoonal thunderstorms. For one, there was minimal lightning and even less thunder. Then there was a steady rain rather than the intense but short thunderstorms of the earlier rains.

Lots of gusting winds from the south-west.

But then the monsoon played truant the next two days and I don't know what today will bring, more rain or no rain at all. Considering that the weathermen have predicted 24% less rains in June and a 10% deficit in July, I'm not very hopeful that it will rain much this month. Anyway Bangalore gets just 522 mm of rains on an average every monsoon so it doesn't rain here very much.

This year the progress of the monsoon has been very tardy, it hasn't even set in, in the North East as yet!

Watched Bunty aur Babli recently and was surprised to see that the theatre was nearly full even for a Sunday late night show! The movie was fun if you didn't take it seriously. Good acting from Abhishek, decent performance from Rani. Amitabh was OK too.

Aishwarya Rai was hot, hot, hot in that item number. I would go watch the movie again just to see her in that song. I have never found Ash hot before. That number has changed my mind.

We truly get the government we deserve!

Voters of Chamrajpet assembly constituency elected a JD(S) candidate! The Congress-JD(S) coalition government has been busy raping Bangalore and the only answer the voters of that constituency can provide is to spread their legs further?

Or maybe its not politics at all. Maybe its religion talking and the voters of said constituency elected "one of their own"?

Art is the expression of imagination, not the duplication of reality

- Sculptor Henry Moore

I've been thinking of analogies lately.

Every other day Bangalore puts 60 mm of liquid and has a hangover soon after and on the next day too!

Watching potholes on the road (to avoid them) prevents me from seeing the traffic situation ahead thereby preventing me from exploiting gaps in the traffic. The ride isn't smooth as a result. Same thing at work - fire fighting customer issues and always under pressure to deliver "by tomorrow" prevents me from thinking of more optimal solutions (due to lack of time) causing sub-optimal solutions to be delivered. This is true for everyone and always comes back to bite us!

Last Sunday (29/5) we had a fantastic birding outing at Bannerghatta National Park. This 4th Sunday outing was graciously organized by S. Karthikeyan who also obtained permission to walk inside the Herbivore Safari enclosure.

The weather was fantastic, not too hot to enjoy the three and a half hour walk along the roads. We had good birds, an extremely close encounter with a curiously tame Sambhar, a close encounter with a massive bull Gaur, sightings of a Chital, a family of Gaur, two Muggers in the tanks in the enclosure enjoying the morning sun and a bull Elephant on a hillock outside the stone wall and electric fence boundary of the park. This elephant, reportedly called Rowdy Ranga, was a tusker and looked in the prime of life (apparently he was captured later and is being translocated someplace).

Each of the about forty people who attended paid 50 bucks to the FD.

Yesterday's rains were equal in intensity to Friday's. The traffic, post rains, however, was not. It was much worse :-(

These pre-monsoon showers have totally exposed Bangalore's unpreparedness with respect to the approaching monsoons. The only thing that will save Bangalore from descending to total chaos is the fact that it lies in a rain shadow region and doesn't receive as much rain as, say, Mumbai. If it did, then what little excuse we have for roads would totally vanish.

Luckily, there wasn't much wind yesterday, hence the power situation wasn't too bad (read that as, the power was out only for a couple of hours)!

Note to myself: Leave the office when the showers are at their peak. At least all those pesky two wheeler borne cockroaches will not be on the roads!