Kyunki Mard bhi Kabhi Mard thaa or No Man's Land

When was the last time when one saw a man who looked like a man and who had manly qualities  in a TV serial?

Someone with masculine qualities like leadership, agression, protectiveness, assertion, being the man of the house and pure old anger which are deemed as terrorism by the feminists.

Someone who had rugged looks, who wore a man's clothes and not some pansy embroidered stuff, who had traces of facial hair, who didnt have carved eyebrows, bleached skin, manicured hands ? Someone who walked and talked like a man and not some kid terrorized by the neighbourhood bully? Someone who made decisions and made others follow them instead of just cowering behind someone?

Dont stretch your brains. Because manliness became extinct from TV in the 90s itself.

If one needs to find an example of complete feminist conquest, look no further than Indian TV serials. True, in soaps all over the world, male characters are being pushed into the background but in Indian soap operas the conquest of feminism is 100% complete. This dystopia is ruled by women who have a lot of face on their makeup (yup, face on their makeup. This isnt a typo) and who are adorned with enough gold to make Fort Knox cry tears of shame. The combined weight of their attire and jewellery makes them a weightwalker and not just a weightlifter (too bad weightwalking is not an olympic sport). Their hair has more pins than a porcupine has quills and their minds have more plots and plans than CIA, FSB and Mossad put together. 

Women in these serials come in three categories-

The middle aged heavily adorned and bejewelled ones who are macabre and evil beyond imagination. They can make any crimelord look like a novice and are conspiring against everyone from the cradle to the crematorium.Luckily, their criminal empire extends only till their family which can have between sixty to two hundred members. 

The very old ones who are more devout than all bhakti saints put together, who are instant sources of pious platitudes and doyens of tradition.

The third and the most important is the young woman, the protagonist around whom this whole dystopia revolves around and conspires against. She is young, sweet and mature beyond any scope of the puny human mind with sacrifice, selflessness and goodness firmly embedded in her DNA, thanks to the 'sanskaars' given by her spectacled Babuji in a safari suit and  a purdah clad Mummy. She is shy like a mimosa, innocent like a preschooler, virginial like Snow White, a moral educator for anyone who chooses to listen, an adviser for any situation which can range from someones divorce to someone getting married for the third time, a social crusader...

Infact the TV serial need not even specify that she is a fictitious character.

She has two to three siblings. If its a sister, then she will be a prototype in making of her Didi. If its a brother, well then he will be like any other piece of furniture in the house.

The audience of these shows are overwhelmingly housewives and hence the serial makes these masterpieces comprising of utopian and feminist fantasies, all in the name of showing a woman centric programme.

Men as mentioned earlier, are relegated to the background and one hardly notices their presence, throughly effeminate and without any virility in them. They are of the following types:-

The elders of the house,  the old men speaking philosophically and doing anything else.

The husbands, who are pitiably pussy whipped and henpecked, mere tools for the manipulations of the wily mother and sinister wife.

The only manly looking men in the serials, and hence the villians, chauvinists, having amorous designs on the heroine and the other nubile women. He has to be outwitted by the heroine with the help of her robotic husband. Same goes for the evil mother in law or grand aunt or the envious woman next door.

In trying to create a woman centric story, all these serials do is degrade the woman further and make a caricature out of her. As for the men, it gives the word misoandry a whole new dimension.

Can we even expect to see a hint of reality in these horrid creations?

Why does a family have to look like a brigade dressed ornately? And why do they have to always be never less than twenty or fifty in number?

Why cant anyone dress in normal everyday clothes? Whats the point of the women wearing heavy jewellery in early morning or the men wearing sherwanis or suits during dinnertime?

Why does the house have to resemble a museum or a palace? How many joint families does one really find in urban area? Even while showing a middle class family, the house is as big as the eye can see.

Why cant they actually show men going to work? How can they not show a man earning his living but being at home whenever you see ? Why do they have to hang around their wives all the time, adding value to the already unbearble stupidity?

Why must a widow dress in a satiny white saree? Which century are these people living in? Isnt this a slap on the face of the reformers who spent all their lives for their upliftment?

Whats with this obsession with extra marital affairs and illegitimate children?

Why must there not be a definite script beforehand instead of writing it on the sets? Two years of any of these soaps makes one feel that they have been running since Henry Ford invented the automobile.

Why must the whole universe revolve around the fight between the mom in law and daughter in law? Are there absolutely no more domestic issues to talk of?

And why do half of the women have to shown as some kind of hideous characters full of hatred and envy who can think nothing but conspire and plot the others downfall? Isnt this a mutilation of women in general?

But the most important, being a woman centric programme doesnt mean that men be shown something as dead as furniture or as miniscule as mites. Will it hurt these people to show men who can head the family instead of just speaking flowery dialogues and being a pansy ? Why cant they be something whom their children, wives and parents look at with love and pride instead of  merely some kind of a tailing device which follows the wife wherever she goes?

If this is the general idea of how people want to be entertained then something is wrong with the audience as well and not just the makers. A society is also known by how it likes to amuse and entertain itself. And judging by that, we have built a very lousy identity.

 

 http://theviewspaper.net/hindi-tv-serials-no-mans-land/

 

Beyond Pele, Maradona or the World Cup.

Somehow football, or the beautiful game as the Brazilians call it or soccer as the Americans call it, never found a fan following in India (except in West Bengal, Goa and Kerala) as it has in the rest of the world, even among the working class. Why it is so is one of biggest mysteries in the world, considering that this sport can pay rewards that can exceed cricket or tennis by a long way and that the lower middle class and working class from which all players have sprung from is plentiful in this part of the world as well.

There is a shocking degree of disinterest about the sport here. The popular media here only covers The World Cup and The Euro Cup. Thats the only time when the sport gets wide coverage here. Therefore the only players who gain recognition here are the ones who play and shine in these two tournaments.

Hence whenever the question of who was the greatest comes up, people dont look beyond Pele or Maradona.

But as anyone who follows football will tell you, international matches (match between national teams ) are hardly five to ten percent of the football matches that are played during a given year, or lesser than that. The rest is club football, which being professional is much more tougher and challenging. The toughest football tournament is not the World Cup or the Euro, but the UEFA Champions League where 32 of the best club teams in Europe battle it out from September to May every year since the tournament began in 1956.

The reason why the World Cup was conceived in 1930 was to have a tournament involving national teams to be prestigeous enough for the top players to participate. Same with Europan cup which was started in 1960.

I would first like to make clear that I'm by no way belittling Pele or Maradona or international football. But before calling them the greatest footballers, one needs to take a few things into account.

These two were strikers.

A striker has the possession of the ball for not more than 5-6 minutes from the entire 90 plus minutes of the match. How well a striker plays or whether he scores or not is determined by the midfield. It is the midfielder who has the bulk of possession of the ball, it is him who decides the pace of the match. Defenders are seldom superstars because people forget that stopping/saving goals is as spectacular and important as scoring goals, sometimes even requiring more skill than scoring, risky as well as  it is replete with the challenge of getting booked.

No need to explain how thankless a goalkeeper's role is. Thats why the likes of Kahn, Shilton, Yashin, Casillas, Buffon will never get half the spotlight of their 10 counterparts in the team.

So the game is much more about who scores a goal or who gets to be the one that scores it.

Defenders like Franz Beckenbauer, Carles Puyol, Paolo Maldini and Lillian Thuram (just to quote four examples) are worth their weight in precious stones. The way they stop the goals is at times much more pleasurable to watch than the goals being scored. Their tally of goals is hardly into double figures. So are they not to be called great just because they arent the goalscorers?

And what about the soul of football, the midfielders like Zidane, Rivaldo, Charlton, Giggs, Cryuff, Di Stefano and Messi? (the last three being able to play the roles of forwards as well) ?

The number of goals scored by them is not eye boggling, but their role is the deciding factor.

The reason why Pele is termed as the greatest footballer is given as he scored the most goals till date, 1200. Maradona because of the spectacular Argentina triumph of the 1986 World Cup mainly.

Pele can be termed as the best striker in international football where he scored 77 goals in a hundred odd matches he played and played a great part in Brazil winning the 1958 and 1970 World cups.

But he played all his career in the Brazilian League with Santos FC. The Brazilian League has a lot of flamboyance at the cost of substance and high scoring matches are the norm, with four or five goals being scored in a game being commonplace. It was therefore easy to see how Pele and another Brazilian great Romario who played for Vasco da Gama FC got to a thousand goals. Maradona by that comparison played in much tougher conditions, for FC Barcelona and then for Napoli, even though he played the bulk of his career for Boca Juniors.

The conditions in European leagues are not so liberal for high scoring. The conditions in EPL, Primera Liga, Serie A and Bundesliga to name the top four are very tough and there is hardly any open space for a goal to be squeezed in. 3-2, 2-2 are the normal scorelines (or in case of Serie A, 1-0 ). Hence the arguably greatest players to never paly the World Cup Alfredo di Stefano (who according to many is the best ever) and the tragic George Best playing in Spain and England respectively stand out. Their total tally of goals is not even half of Pele, but the conditions in which they scored them were and remain much more testing.

The best players always look forward to playing in Europe and not in any Latin American or Asian League. Any Argentine would look forward to play in Barcelona instead of Boca Juniors or any Brazilian in AC Milan instead of Fluminese . Thats where the biggest money and the best quality is.

Thats where the contemporary players like Messi, Rivaldo,Raul, Zidane,Maldini etc stand out as they have played their entire careers in much more testing conditions than any league in Latin America. Its unfair that they be put below the past greats just because somehow the present cant be romanticized or glorified.

Messi has joined the all time greats by playing Barcelona where he effortlessly skips between midfield and forward positions. Maradona had a miserable two years in the same team.The name of the great Gerd Muller who was the mainstay of the attack of Bayern Munich through all the 1970s and was instrumental in the then West Germany winning the World Cup in 1974 is not even mentioned in the same breath. Neither are Johann Cruff and Alfredo di Stefano, "total footballers" who could play in any position. Strange.

When deciding greatness, all aspects of the game have to be taken into account. Its unfair to ignore club football over international football and vice versa. The media of country like India conveniently ignored club football till the end of the 1990s and never mentioned players who were never able to play the world cup, e.g., players like Ryan Giggs or George Best, because Wales and Northern Ireland couldnt produce ten other worthy players to play alongside them.

So in simple words, its not just the ones who score goals that are great, but also the ones who create them or stop them. As Zidane once said "This is a team game. Individual glory here is worth nothing. You pass the ball to the next guy 99 out of 100 times".

 http://theviewspaper.net/beyond-pele-maradona-or-the-world-cup/

When less asks for more

Remember Yugoslavia? That giant Balkan state, the result of the Pan Slavic movements in the second decade of the 20th century, a place which was meant to be the home of the ethnic slavs that were in minority elsewhere, which became one of the most significant components of the Red East. At one time, its armed forces were among the first five largest. After the fall of communism in the country in 1989, it took less than two years for Yugoslavia to break into scores of small independent states, because suddenly the ethnic minorities found their chance for their "right to self determination". It led to a bloody war for three years which in the end gave the most humiliating deal to the Serbs,the most numerous of the Balkan peoples (thanks to NATO) who saw themselves relegated to just one part of the former great state as their country.The ethnic minorities viz Croats, Macedonians, Bosnians,Slovenians got their own countries. Serbia( who were branded as villians after the war and their President put on war crimes trial) on the other hand lost Montenegro in 2006 through a thoroughly democratic process and today has almost half of itself partitioned into another autonomous zone.

Why have I remembered a country whose disintegration I was too young to remember? Just to state a fact.

Even the hated rule of communism could not cause this amalgamation of different races to rebel but then they were helped by the system which is loved universally.

Democracy

Strange at it may seem, but democracy today has in all the world, from America to Asia, from Israel to India, effectively told the minorities, ethnic, racial or religious that the country belongs to them before anyone in the majority and they have the preferential right over it and its institutions and resources.

It is not the generosity of the majority that they have given the minorities rights and reservation, but it is the duty of the majority that they nurture and feed the minorities even at the cost of their own remaining hungry.

It is not only the duty of the majority that they educate the minorities, but it is imperative that they do so even at the cost of their own remaining uneducated.

It is the very right of the minorities that that they have to be handed over the resources  at the cost of the majority being deprived of the things that they themselves built in the first place.

If this is done in any less measure, they are free to scream and cry to the now 100% progressive media about their being discriminated because they are a minority and how the society and the country and the majority is unjust to treat them as equal citizens and sacrifice more for them.

As if this was not enough, the minorities are told again and again, through the various liberal institutions and the media expressly or subtlety, that how they have been always wronged by the majority, how they must never shy away from using the establishment and the civil society to their own benefit (ironically, the very things created by the majority lawmakers to ensure equality) to demand their rights ,which thanks to ultra liberalism, can even mean the state ignores their share of crimes or even secession.

Minority organizations are created which over the years, months or even days grow into humongous proportions given the healthy democratic atmosphere around them and assume various forms whether as a trust, a lobby, a business enterprise, a media house or a political party.

The magnum opus starts through these entities. It is proclaimed how the concerned minority is being discriminated against by the state, how it is in a hopeless and a pathetic condition due to the government’s apathy and indifference, which incidentally is made up of all the majority, how the minority’s children and adults are hungrier , sadder and poorer than their majority counterparts, how they are abused by the law enforcement agencies and the security forces and how all this is the living proof that the given country should be ashamed to call itself a free and a democratic society.

All of these claims are instantly verified by the media and non government organizations as the truth handed out from god and that how it is imperative for the entire society to meet these demands and acknowledge these problems if they have to prove themselves as human beings. Under popular pressure, the government gives in upto a great extent. And who pays for all this You guessed it, the majority populace. It then becomes imperative for the government to have provisions made for the minorities, it doesn’t matter even if they are handouts and populist measures that will be disastrous in the long term as governments never look beyond the next election.

Soon the pandemonium is covered not just by the local media but the “fair and professional” international media as well which cover it like some kind of revolution and a fight of the people against their oppressors. With due course of time, even criminal and terrorist elements from the minorities are romanticized into freedom fighters. As a result, even self preservation measures of the majority are seen by the bleeding hearts as barbarism and things like nationalism are proclaimed to be fascist concoctions. Therefore we see all the news channels everywhere in the world downplaying or even negating the crimes and atrocities committed by the minority elements but making any crime committed by the member of the majority community the breaking news. We are hardly surprised to see examples of countries who do not take sufficient measures to reign in crimes like riots or terrorism because of the fear of backlash from the liberals and minority lobbies and from the global popular opinion.

So the secession of a region of a country into a separate nation is seen as the triumph of liberty and freedom by the now largely left wing money fed media and the same is hammered down the heads of us unsuspecting viewers.

A confused and disorganized majority is always helpless against a organized and a ruthless minority. There have been enough examples in history to underline this but now the problem is that the majority is being made confused, identityless and insignificant by the very democratic and free society that they sacrificed so much to build. Democracy has been mutilated by liberal and progressive thought to become suicidal by undermining the very people who build and cherish it and glorifying the elements which seek to destroy it.

Isn’t rule of law necessary for maintaining the liberal and democratic values that the progressives are always crying about? Shouldn’t the immigrants adapt to the law of their adopted countries instead of agitating that the laws be changed to their own needs?

Isn’t undermining the majority all the time in the name of equality unfair to the majority? Is destroying the majority’s very identity culturally and psychologically the mark of a free society or is it a conspiracy by the elements who are being funded by sources we don’t’ want to talk about in the name of political correctness?

It isn’t democracy which is being criticized here, it is what has been done to democracy which is the bane of the world today. What goes on today in the name of equality threatens to derail the very fabric of society and undoing all the achievements, scientific or cultural. It is making the majority in almost all the democratic countries into a disgruntled or an indifferent lot, spawning groups that hate anyone who does not belong to their race, ethnicity or religion. On the other hand it is turning the minority into a group which is creating groups who have asserted their rights as freeloading, disturbing the legal and social structure for their “demands”.

When one section of the society thinks that it is useless to work harder or better because all the benefits will be swallowed by the other group and the other group thinks that working is futile because there are others working to keep them happy, the end is near.

Truth is the newest form of hate speech, and hence the humble writer aims to state the truth at the cost of being branded a bigot because he believes that political correctness only makes sense if politics is done properly.

http://theviewspaper.net/when-less-asks-for-more/

http://www.thefrustratedindian.com/2016/05/majority-minority/ 

Makes perfect sense

Win a beauty pageant where there are titles like Miss Universe (although just earthlings are involved) by sashaying around in ornate costumes and flimsy swimwear and giving emotional answers about how violence, child labour, poverty etc etc break your sweet little heart and how you desire to be the next saint to give hope to the world. Among the prizes are a tiara that is made of the same diamonds that fuel civil wars and slavery and go around the world sponsored by the same corporations that are causing many of these ills that you claim to want to fight.

Makes perfect sense

Develop display mindset in children. Dress your prepubescent daughters like sluts and make them dance in "talent" shows where they will be judged by washed out former or unemployed "artistes". Do the same with little boys and make them sing and dance and make a freak show of themselves. Promote "fifteen minutes of fame" as the ultimate target of life, to be achieved at any cost. And then sit back and complain about the rise of decadence in the society. Or cry if your daughter elopes with some flashy burned out glam icon twice her age.

Makes perfect sense

Lie and cheat for the gain of a few rupees. Indulge in the worse kind of sycophancy for any kind of professional progress. Find loopholes in every law and new innovative ways of corruption and embezzlement in every field. Make sure that not a single institution should remain credible. Teach your children from a young age to get what they want by any means and have them see you as an example. Tell them that any kind of decent behaviour is cowardice by leading the way yourself. And then complain about how the society is going from bad to worse and how morals have fallen down. Put all the blame on the "young generation".

Makes perfect sense

Elect a leader because he is from your caste or promises to give your caste reservations. Or because he has paid you to vote for him with cash or booze. Or that he promises free sops for you at the expense of others, promises to get you or your kin a job in the government. Or that you find him too irresistible with his gold chains and his fleet of cars. Or just say that you are "not political" proudly and prefer to distance yourself from everything related to it, including voting. Then when you are hit by inflation and bloodied by terrorism or if you lose your source of employment, cry tears of blood by screaming how all politicians are thieves that deserve to be shot.

 Makes perfect sense

Keep the educational and social system prevalent which teaches what to think and not how to think. Never encourage any kind of reading or curiosity for your kids beyond textbooks. Have nothing in the house worth reading except film magazines or tabloids. Tune into only the TV channels showing music videos or film industry gossip or Bollywood. Keep discussions limited to pop culture or trivial matters.

And then lament the fact as how dumb your kids are and that why India cannot produce great minds in abundance.

 Makes perfect sense

Discourage sports or physical activity as it wastes time which should be better used in mugging up the syllabus for the quarterly or half yearly exam. Never encourage children to run, get dirty, rough it out (until its in some glitzy tennis court in a gymkhana club or in a summer cricket coaching camp). Or at best only encourage them to play cricket, squash or badminton cause they are the in thing. Learn to ignore the news of formal national level medal winning athletes living and dying in penury (Ah yes, some village waala background film Paan Singh came out some time ago, isnt it?) Dont get alarmed when the kids which once bundle of energy become land whales and struggle with health problems that only the very old should have. Consider it normal when in their twenties they prefer to use an elevator to go to the second floor and smoke two packs a day.

And then lament as to why a country of more than a billion and a quarter cant produce olympic material athletes or  footballers who could play in the best clubs in the world.

Makes perfect sense

Pay exorbitant rates to watch third rate films in multiplexes. Glorify the equally third rate "actors" in them by continuing to blow away your money in buying their film tickets or their endorsed products or giving them a few lakhs for half an hour of booty shaking just to show the world that you are filthy rich. Make them famous by causing a stampede in malls and likewise places where they are promoting their latest abominable venture. Make your chosen filmstar your god or goddess by devouring every word said by him or her in print or visual media. Make them feel that they are above everything.

Then get saddened by seeing them crush homeless people under their SUVs cause they love to drive drunk, be shocked when you get slapped by their hired goons because you got too close. See them do everything from drug running to arms running and other lesser crimes and then bitch about how arrogant these people are and how they treat the society and the common man with disdain.

 Makes perfect sense

Tolerate intolerance in the name of tolerance. Make the worst criminals and terrorists the  ideal candidates for bestowing human rights. Never mind their victims. Form unscrupulous organizations that claim to be working for the poor but end up helping the very elements responsible for the poverty and violence. By your civility and liberal lobbying, put tremendous pressure on the government so that it reigns in the armed forces and on the law enforcement agencies so that they wont bother to do anything as they know it will be futile.

Then scream before the world media how the country is a horrible place as no one is safe or happy.

Makes perfect sense

 Hurt and abuse people who care for you. Lose sleep thinking about people who barely know that you are there. Spend too much money buying things you don’t need to show the people you don’t really like to show that you have “arrived”. Spend half your existence and resources pursuing the girl who won’t even care if you vanish off the face of the earth the next moment at the cost of spending times with your parents and friends.

And then whine about how sad and broke you are.

Makes perfect sense

http://theviewspaper.net/makes-perfect-sense/

Stereotypically yours

Art depicts life they say. When one looks at Bollywood, one wonders what kind of life this so called art is depicting, one is forced to ponder. One has to stretch one’s memory to the limit to remember the name of a Bollywood offering which has depicted India’s problems and its people in a realistic manner. This exercise is without exception, a futile one.

What one would expect from the premier film industry of one’s country is atleast a fair depiction of its communities and people. But maybe it is too big task to ask for. Learning about India’s people by watching Bollywood will be like learning about good wines by drinking toddy.

Because Bollywood never shows a community. It only caricatures it.

A Maharashrian is either shown as a domestic help, a gully drunk always waiting to pick up a fight, a pandu hawaldar or a trigger happy psychopath sub inspector who’s always to be kept in check by an IPS named Ahlawat or Ranawat or Singh or Malhotra. Or just a lowly clerk who gets to mouth a few dialogues and cry for the hero.Inspite of being in Mumbai, Bollywood has decided that the Marathi maanoos has to be shown as a cheap and a downmarket character who cannot be anything other than a laughing stock. All their valour filled history and sacrifices for India and their patriotism don’t matter at all. A joker is how he will be depicted, a pandu or a Gangaram. And yes, he can never live in a more magnificent place than a chawl. And this downmarket depiction spreads beyond the screen as well. They always seem to want Mumbai minus them. That same attitude was seen in Wankhede stadium spat involving a guard and you know who. Madhuri Dixit escaped these stereotypes but she is the only lucky one. Shivaji Rao Gaikwad was lucky to find his footing in Tamil film industry as Rajnikanth or he too would have been reduced to the sorry state of Laxmikant Berde or Ashok Saraf in Bollywood.

Next come the Gurkhas, another one of great martial communities whose bravery is the stuff of legends. But in Bollywood land they can never be anything other than a khakhi uniform wearing security guard named Bahadur who has an IQ in single digit and the only coherent thing he gets to say is “Jee Shaab” and “Jee Memshaab”. Its needless to say that all he gets to do is salaam and never once does he gets to touch the khukri hanging from his belt.Any Gurkha who isn’t a security guard is simply Kaancha. Thats it. Of course they wont dream of showing them in the army. Thats just reserved for Punjabis in Bollywoodland.

Sindhis. Always shown as pajama or safari wearing sorry figures who cannot speak a legible sentence without invoking Jhulelal or adding saaen or niii to it (Tum to badaa kutta hai niiiii, e.g.) Again they can be nothing more than henpecked husbands or jokers who the filmmakers are hell bent on depicting as the most cowardly people in the country.That they have one of the biggest businesses running in the country doesn’t seem to interest the Bollywoodwaalas. No wonder, Govinda had to remove Ahuja from his screenname.

Parsis are always shown as middle aged and above. Never in the last two or three decades, except the rarest cases has one seen a young parsi in a film. It will always be an old henpecked husband with his obese overbearing wife driving a 1950s model car. The surnames will never extend beyond Poonawaala, Batliwala or Sodawala. And there will be atleast one funny dance sequence. Did I forget to mention that they are never allowed to be anything better on the screen except comics?

No Bengali can ever speak perfect Hindi. It must be with a thick accent. He has to pan chewing , dhoti wearing , self depreciating character. No wonder Ashok Kumar or Kishore Kumar were never given a Bengali character to play.

Tamils are depicted as someone named Subbu who cannot do one decent action ever and cannot speak any sentence without adding aiyyo or amma to it. His English is reduced to yenna rascala and mind it. He is always shown as someone who is out of the place in the group and sticks out like a sore thumb. He is shown as someone who does menial job or is running some kind of rackets. Doesnt matter for Bollywood that Tamils have one of the best minds and have a culture which is as good as anything that comes under the word sanskriti.Even if Hindi films show them as someone in an influential position, the script will make sure that his comic depiction will degrade the character beyond any hope of decency.

The rest of southern states don’t matter because as it is everyone down south is simply a Madrasi.

Maarvadis cannot be shown as anything other than greedy moneylenders who are most eager to mortgage or pawn the helpless populace’s money. And they are shown to be most eager to lend large amounts of money to the poor as he is sure that they wont be able to repay and he can then fulfil his sexual fantasies with their wives/daughters/sisters etc.

Gujaratis cant eat anything except dhoklas. And no depiction of a family is complete without showing atleast a hundred people in the household.

Christians have to wear half a foot long crucifix and speak an atrocious mishmash of Hindi and English. God has to be invoked every now and then.

Sikhs are ofcourse funny guys who have no business other than partying 24/7 and balleballe

ying . Everyone from Veerji, Paaji, Bebe and Kaake must hold some kind of festivity in

the vast house all the times of the year and dance and sing tirelessly.

For a hero to look good, he has to be a Punjabi with names like Ranvir Malhotra. Anything

else is also ran.

Caste based stereotypes too are aplenty.

A Thakur comes in two types:-

1) A sadistic psychopath superrich landlord rapist and mass murderer whos got a

house bigger than the Rashtrapati bhawan.

2) A psychopath dacoit who lives in a cave with hundreds of his followers and

regularly watches semi clad women dancing.

Only Thakurs have a divine right to perform violent crimes and atrocities. There can never

be any decency in them.

A Bania is always a grocer selling cooking oil out of metal container to whom every poor

man in the village owes money. Or he shares the money lending profession with the on

screen marvadi and has all the huts of the poor mortgaged. In both these scenarios, he is

always lusting after the womenfolk of his debtors.

A Brahmin as a priest/pujari of the temple is always an unscrupulous and wile character

who practices untouchability even in his sleep. He always exploits people , makes fun of

their ignorance, embezzles money, molests the lower caste women. Shastra is some kind of

evil book he uses to subjugate the lesser people.He too has a strong libido and visits brothels

wearing a tilak on his forehead so that we as viewers know that panditji is going for a

joyride. And yes, a Brahmin can also satisfy his lust for poor women by becoming a munshi

of lalaji and sahukar saaheb.

These are just the very prominent depictions. Hundreds of clichés still continue to be

promoted in the name of popular culture. And the most regrettable part is that none of the

people maligned onscreen have ever raised objections.

If at all the Indian entertainment industry has to become anything serious it has to stop this or remain what it is, kitsch.

http://theviewspaper.net/bollywood-what-kind-of-life-does-this-art-depict/

A few PC facts....

Human beings have been around for more than 300000 years but the human civilization cannot be larger than 6000 years. Any new discovery no matter how old it appears to be, must be squeezed in this time slot.To think otherwise is simply not logical.

Our ancestors were very very primitive people and savage. They had no culture at all and and whatever humans have developed they have done that in the last two or three centuries.

All the great monuments in this world ancient and medieval were built with tools no more complex than chisels and hammers. It is a different matter that they cannot be recreated today with the most modern mechanical methods.

Earth is the only planet in the universe that has life. To say that the universe is teeming with life is absurd. To hold the notion that very advanced civilizations exist elsewhere in the cosmos and have visited us in the distant past and have aided our development is mental retardation. But believing that god used to appear every now and then and performed miracles is rational thinking. Religious miracles and dogma is perfectly normal and unquestionable. Believing in extra terrestrial life is delusion. Believing in angels is piousness.

India never was a nation. It was full of bickering people and their weakling kings who fought against each other.

Hindu society was nothing but oppression and superstition and did nothing worthwhile to contribute to the world. It was only when the British arrived that they gave India its national identity.

All religions are the same.

Noone knew that the earth was round before Copernicus.Noone knew that the earth went around the sun before Galileo. Noone knew about gravity before Issac Newton.Noone knew about America before Columbus.

In India, Hindus and Muslims lived in perfect harmony before the British came and sowed seeds of hatred.

All the accounts of massacres by invading armies are exaggerations. No Hindu or Buddhist was ever killed in the name of Jihad. All invading rulers were benevolent in India and the Mughal era was the zenith of Indian culture.

Hindu history is nothing but a history of defeats. Nobody ever had the courage to wage war against the invaders. The invaders instead brought many “positive” changes in the Indian society.

Qutub Minar was built by Iltutmish. Fatehpur Sikri was built by Akbar. Taj Mahal was built by Shahjahan for the love of his wife. Red Fort was built by Shahjahan .

Only one non violent gentleman is the reason for India’s independence. Everything must revolve around him and he is above any suspicion. Noone else has made even a fraction of contribution to India in its multiple millennia old history like he and his organization has. Anyone who follows the principles of the said gentleman is too a defacto great being without question.

Anti Semitism was the invention of the Nazis. Such a concept never existed before they came into prominence. The German people were duped by the cunningness of Adolf Hitler to bring the party into power. All that was evil in the 20^th century originated from Fascism. And ended with it.

Adolf Hitler is the most evil person that can ever be. Noone can ever exceed him. Not Stalin who killed sixty million and not Mao who killed close to ten million.

All atrocities that were committed were committed by Nazis alone. Soviet crimes must never be mentioned except in very intellectual discussions.The allies were spotless in their conduct of war and post war occupation.

Communism is an ideology that aims at social justice. All its ideologues are defacto intellectuals. The evils of Nazism must be discussed all the times but never the evils of collectivization. It was just that the dictatorship of the proletariat can experiment in whatever it likes with the cost of a few million lives. There are no crimes against humanity committed by any of the socialist saints.

Freedom is in danger in south east Asia when North Vietnam overruns South Vietnam and red threatens to colour Korea. At the same time if someone in the name of communism wipes out one third of Cambodia’s population in less than three years, its not worth noticing.

Using atom bombs, napalm and Agent Orange is very democratic. It does not stop you from becoming the champion of the free world as it is much better than the fascist Zyklon B.

Only one community has suffered and is suffering today as well. All victims defacto belong to this religion. To say that they are reaping what they have sown is inhuman. To say that other communities have suffered as well is being communal.

To burn a flag is a tolerant display of dissent. To wave a flag is homophobic xenophobic right wing extremism.

Saffron is hateful and backward. Red is intellectual and forward.

Extremism is only right wing. Left wing is nothing but humanitarian.

Israel is a bloodthirsty country hell bent on the genocide of the peaceful “Palestinians”. It always finds excuses to launch attacks on NGOs like PLO, Hamas and Fatah. All this because these poor Palestinians like throwing crackers in the evil Israeli’s backyards.

Kashmiris deserve the right of “self determination” from the evil Indian Army. India has to give them all they want in Indian Kashmir, even if the demography has been brutally altered. It doesn’t matter at all why no news from Pakistani Kashmir comes out.

JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald by an angle which allowed him to shoot three bullets from three different directions from one place.

Saddam Hussein was a nice person till he attacked Kuwait who needed to be eliminated because he had WMDs. He should have learned a thing or two from the tolerant Pakistani Army rulers, the benovelent Saudi royal family and the Magnificient Ayatollahs.

Just showing concern for Myanmar and Tibet is all thats enough. After that let them get back to being crushed by their rulers.

Socialism has killed more people than any other reason in the last century. Yet all the evils are due to capitalism.

Extremism and terrorism in the Arab world is only because America has interfered. Arabs can find more freedom in the west than anywhere in their countries. Yet, its the west that is the cause of their trouble.

If immigrants come to your country and start altering your society and way of life irrevocably, you must shut up. Because being called as a racist is worse than having a knife driven into your stomach.

White man should never have come to the new world. He should have let the various tribes live with their leathery tents and fire dances and bison hunting and scalping.

War is unnatural. Peace is natural as humans are by nature peaceful. Disband the armies. It does not matter that hardly 300 years out of the last 4000 years have been without conflict anywhere.

Male chauvinism is an animalistic quality. It must be countered with the progressive and tolerant ideology of Feminism.

A woman may wear strips of clothing which leave hardly anything to imagination. But remember, she i'snt seeking attention.

Its a man's world.Men are amoral, emotionless, soulless, ungrateful creatures without an ounce of goodness in them and whose only thought is sex. Women are beautiful, intelligent creations of nature who somehow are oppressed inspite of the law being in their favour.

Every heinous criminal has a right for dignity. The human rights of the victims that he killed and disfigured do not matter at all.

Politicians are responsible for all wrong that there is. The innocent god fearing virtuous people who elect them for short sightedness and vested interests are spotless.

Democracy means freedom of the people. It gives the people the right to decide their own destiny.

The intellectual future is surely in good hands....

Pedestal

We Indians love pedestals. And we waste no time in putting our revered figures there. After all what more can we do to honour the great people who were born among us than to put them on a highest position, make them into demigods and sing paeans to revere them?

Pedestals for us are meant for every great person. Our definition of great personality doesn't extend merely to some figure in the recent or distant past who did something which we don't remember or did too much to remember. Anyone can be great. It could be the cute leading star of a romantic no brainer or the anorexic plastic faced beauty pageant winner or the winner of a reality show or a talent hunt show, a politician who gives away freebies, an actor who is known for his supposed acting, a starlet whose talent lies in shaking her booty to third rate songs, a businessman who signifies extravagance and so on. In a culture as great as us, greatness is freely available.

The western civilization is surely decadent. They have absolutely no respect for their great personalities. Thats why they always bring them to the level of mere mortals, scrutinize their life and work and never ever blindly believe what has been officially told to them for generations. And they have th audacity to think that they can surpass them. We sane people can never have such an attitude, not in a million years.

After all, we are cradle of civilization and culture and we have to prove that time and again. One of the ways is by deifying great people. And its important we do it because it makes life very convenient for us.

Putting a great person on pedestal saves us a lot of troubles. We are saved the trouble of rising above our petty mindedness and puny mentality. As the person in question has been idolized and made into a divine figure, we certainly can't hope to emulate him/her or walk in his/her path to achieve what s/he strived for, as how can we, mere mortals, even dream of even being a fraction of what our idols were? We can forget about it and very well continue our corrupt and third rate ways which make life so much comfortable for us.

Putting great people on pedestals also saves us from feeling guilty. We as a great society always ensure to make life a nightmare for anyone who thinks of rising above the mundane and pettiness and dedicates his or her life to it. By deifying such people after death, we always think that we have atoned for making them miserable in their lifetimes.

Deification of great personalities also saves us the trouble of doing what the moral less west does :- Emulating them , keeping their ideals alive and making tomorrow better than today.

We can never undetake such wasteful exercises. So we deitify the great personalities, thereby mythifying their existence, placing them to stratospheric heights which we are sure we can never acheive in multiple lifetimes and making them into superhumans and gods. That makes the task of being puny and mediocre so very easy.

Another field where our genius lies is portrayal of revered figures in a way that suits us and popularising only the part of their life which we can easily adapt to.

Therefore, inspite of being an able statesman and a valiant warrior, Lord Krishna is portrayed nothing more than a bejewelled lover boy who spends all his time cavorting with village belles. Its not convenient for us to depict him with a sudarshan chakra but its so cute to put a flute on his lips. Its too tedious for us to picture him preaching the Bhagwad Geeta to Arjun but so very nice to see him as a butter stealing toddler.

Lord Raam and Lord Hanuman are too inconvenient for us to be portrayed as fierce and ruthless warriors. They must be portrayed as boy faced pleasant looking entities who smile at us through portraits, heavily adorned with ornaments and having the appearance of being hardly able of hurting a fly.

So, as a society, we have escaped the burden of achievement of greatness and improvement by putting the greats on a pedestal and convenient deification as per our whims and fancies.

Once we do that, life becomes very easy.We are then free to surrender our souls and brains to the pursuit of the profane and trivial, emulate our chosen role models to make our lives as pointless as theirs, elect the leaders who give us freebies and reservations, raise our children with a display mindset and to teach them to lie and cheat for the sake of a few bucks as we have been doing and in the end continue our tradition of being a little people and making the place we live in a spittoon for us and just about anyone in the world.

It also leaves us free to do another thing: Keep on harping how rich and varied our culture is and how we have the best brains in the world. Proofs of course are not required. The statues of our idols and great personalities alone bear testimony to this fact.


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