At The Edge

1983 but don't think of visiting Kashmir wearing that. previously

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A note on one of the most violent modern Hindi poems.One more reason to hate wars. It makes old people blood thirsty. "From 22nd December 1962, the composition of the poem called Parshuram ki Pratiksha started and it was completed on 7th January 1963. Stirred by the Chinese invasion, he wrote several poems, but in this poem the anger of the whole country was articulated. By 25th December, 1962 most of the passages had been written. When his friend Manoranjan Prasad Sinha heard them, he thought that the poet was showing arrogance. But Dinkar was not at all receptive to such a comment. He wrote in his diary, Sivaji Ganesan in Ratha Thilagam, 1963. The Tamil China War movie. The poem has burst out from the abstruse part of the situation; it has emerged from its basic centre. If one is face to face with the centre, it becomes clear that a grave mistake has been committed. Those days he sat on the third floor of his house on Arya Samaj road at Patna, shed tears and kept wri...

Above: A Dussehra ad supposedly for TOI.  I don't know if it was published on not, if it was just something that some ad maker came up with and the paper never used.  But it somehow reached my Facebook wall. Below: Ravan I shot at Ghaziabad. 2010. I feel like collecting TOI issues from my neighbors, make a little Ravan out of them and set it on fire. Only the thought of global warming is keeping me from doing it. Why can't they just ask before using? And why can't they just use some photograph from their own collection? Are they like 12 year old school kids relying on Google to compete their summer holiday projects? -0-

From title credits of Carry On film, released in 1968 Life Magazine 12 May, 1941 -0-

[Update: Oct 19, 2012 India is now included in the Google Play Developer merchants list. Which means you can now sell app on Google Play's vast android market while developing the app in India. So the blues are hopefully over! This post is now a log of milestones in the development cycle of the game that I am working on. Hopefully, it will be of help to someone in future.] [This a rant. And only meant for tech geeks, And maybe for people who wonder if my job isn't making me mad. Well it is. And it is making me hell mad! And yet I blog...] I have spent last three years developing/designing MMORPG games for social networks. And right here in India. It was a small game development company. One of the games I worked on had millions of installs on two different social network portals (targeting two different demographics, US and Netherlands). It was a simple mafia based game. This was a time when Myspace was in. Then Facebook became the in-thing. So...

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Leela Mishra in Sai Paranjape's Chashme Buddoor (1981). -0- Not often remembered fact about this film is that the main motif of this more than thirty year old Delhi based funny film made by a woman was violence against women. I believe the reason for that could be that for a certain generation, driven by nostalgia, "the Room" and the life of its occupants defines a certain era, a certain phase in life. While a lot may have changed since then, but if walk on this city's streets now, you can see how the Delhi motif still persists. -0-

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Not from wet dream of ultra-nationalist Indians and indo-pak peaceniks From 'This is India' by Peter Muir. Maps by Frances Muir.1943. It's a funny little book [ read here ], sample this from a chapter titled Gandhiana: "If Gandhi were on trail and under oath, he would unquestionably stick to what he believed to be the truth, but his technique of circumlocution, indirection, and irresponsible self-contradiction gives the impression that evasion, not clarification, is his aim.There is no necessity to interpret the language of Rajagopalachari, whose vocabulary in English is no larger that Gandhi's. But few Indians, even, would volunteer to translate the meaning of Gandhi's utterances, his style is so successfully abstruse." While in a chapter on Jinnah titled 'Mr.Jinnah rolls up a Rug' Peter Muir say's had Jinnah been head of a Christian organisation, he would have been named Jesus Christ Jones. Actually the chapter is a take on caste pol...

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Vyjayanthimala in Amrapali inserted into a comic panel based on story of Hamsavali from Somadeva's Kathasaritsagara. -0-

"It is understood, too, that while Hélène's subliminal self can safely give itself up to the creation of a definite language in the freedom which the planet Mars affords, where there is no pre-existing system to be conformed to nor any objective control to fear, it would be very imprudent and absurd to repeat the process in connection with India: the few words of pure Sanscrit which were at its disposal kept it from inventing others, the falseness of which would be evident at the first attempt at a literal and verbatim translation. It, therefore, contented itself with these veridical elements, insufficient in themselves alone for the construction of complete sentences, being a jargon devoid of meaning, but in harmony through their dominant vowels with the authentic fragments." ~ 'From India to the planet Mars; a study of a case of somnambulism with glossolalia' by Th. Flournoy. Tr. by Daniel B. Vermilye , 1901. 

Photograph by great Brian Brake published in 'India, by Joe David Brown and the editors of Life', 1961 [complete book  available at Hathi ] as a visual aid to the text that deals with relevance of Gandhi in India, The Nation's Unsilenced Conscience. It would have you believe Gandhi was alive, in heart and spirit of Indians. As I looked at this beautiful picture, something about it made me realize that this can be a case study about  disjointedness of images, context and text. About giant sweeps of history. Of loss of footnotes. Of lost in footnotes. Of seduction by images. About loss. One may ask why. After all it does look like a perfect picture for an article on Gandhi. Children = innocence = unsilenced Conscience. Children in love with Gandhi = The Nations's un-silenced conscience. Simple and brilliant. The problem is with the details. The book only tells you that it is by Brian Brake and appears courtesy of Magnum. Place wh...