I will leave you with these beautiful lines that I came across yesterday:

कभी कभी भगवान को भी भक्तों से काम पड़े
जाना था गंगा पार प्रभु केवट की नाव चढ़े

Here we go now - the people are taking to the streets to support some militant. That’s what my first reaction was when I saw the veiled figure and his sympathizers. I was wrong! The guy in question is the ERF chief who has been sacked for daring to speak against the stupidity of the administration that resulted in the massacre of at least 24 of his soldiers at the hands of the Maoists.

But his troops and their families know better. And so they are demanding that he be re-instated. What sets these protests apart is that so far they have been peaceful - no burning down buses and destroying public property as has become the hallmark of any protests in West Bengal.

Way to go people! If the government has even an ounce of wisdom, they will have to listen to you.

I admit I chanced upon the movie while surfing the channels. I found the title - “The Dark Is Rising”- intriguing and so I hung on for a bit to watch the story of this boy who must find the 6 signs that will bring back the light in 5 days or the Dark forces will overrun the world. (Not an original plot!)

One scene was, however, too much for me. The boy, you see, doesn’t believe that he is the “Seeker” as an assorted bunch of oldies would like him to believe. So what does he do? He powers up his laptop and hits Google! Needless to say, he does find an article about forces of light and darkness.

Aaw, if that’s not banal, what is? Why don’t we all Google for “Ways to save the world”? Who knows, we just might find the solution. Only if they had called Google as Oracle instead :-)

Thank God I wasn’t watching the first ODI between India and South Africa. If I had, I would be writing this from a hospital room for sure! We need to pull up our socks, guys. It won’t do to make a habit of winning by a whisker, will it now? :-(

I am an occasional non-vegetarian though my consumption is limited to eggs, chicken and sea-food. So I was amazed at the amount of meat people can consume when I watched the Food Paradise episodes on Steaks and Sandwiches. No wonder, the trainer in the California gym years ago had nearly fainted when I told him that I consume chicken about once a week! :-)

Shadow of Power – by Steve Martini

There isn’t much to the storyline. An author has stirred up racial violence in the US with his first book that insinuates that the language of slavery was never struck out of the US constitution. He leaves burning cities in his wake as he goes about promoting his book – before he is brutally murdered in his hotel room. A hotel employee is arrested and promptly charged on account of highly incriminating evidence. And somewhere in the background is a letter by one of America’s founding fathers that could potentially cause the whole country to go up in flames!

What is more interesting is a glimpse into the American Judicial system and the cat-and-mouse game that the prosecuting and defending sides play with each other.

Honestly, I didn’t know it’s so hard to serve a subpoena on someone :-)

Infamous Assassinations

The program is rather unimaginatively titled - as if there can be any famous assassinations! But both episodes were interesting (History Channel – Sunday 6pm to 7pm). The first one was on the assassination of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. I felt that I was hearing the names Bhindranwale and operation Blue Star after a very long time. There was a time when the news broadcasts across India were filled with acts of the terrorism in Punjab and the name of Bhindranwale featured prominently among them. Same goes for LTTE, Shivarasan, Nalini and Dhanu – the cast of characters in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.

It looked like this program was made in 2007 because it said that as of 2007, Prabhakaran – the leader of LTTE – was still leading the terrorist outfit.

As an aside, it was amusing to see that one particular ticker displaying the date and place (city as well as country) of major events in the episode on Che Guevara listed just “Washington DC” instead of “Washington DC, USA” :-)