Why Swades rox

1. The first time Shahrukh chucks mineral water and buys a cup of water for a few paise
2. Shahrukh's meeting with 'Haridas' the tenant farmer
3. When Shahrukh explains to the village elders on why India isnt as good as it can be, and why American culture isnt necessarily worse than ours. As realistic as it could've gotten.

One lesson Ashutosh Gowariker could use from Anbe Sivam is the art of subtlety - esp in the first half

Shame on us

"Thani oruvanukku unavu illai endral intha jagathinai azhipom" - this line from one of Mahakavi Bharathiyar's poems struck me as I was watching the movie Swades tonite. For those who dont know tam, the quote means "If there is even a single person who is starved, lets destroy the whole world" - i.e, such a world is pointless. Its been quite a while since he uttered this amazing line, and we still do have people dying of starvation. Sometimes I wonder if its right to have one section of the society feast on choices ranging from McDs and KFCs of the world to our own Saravana bhavans when another section just doesnt have anything to eat. Its all the more painful when our farmers themselves are starved to the extent of committing suicide. Well, we all do seem to accept that the PDS system has failed, but what is the solution?! Lots of work to be done on this front, and its time we got started.

Negotiation & conflicts

Heard somewhere:

"Beneath every conflict is a failed negotiation"

Got me thinking on the various conflicts across the world.

Rummy the fool

How stupid and insensitive can one get? Turns out that Don Rummy has not been signing letters to relatives of soldiers who died at Iraq and has delegated that to a machine - this when Bush has been doing it manually. I guess the following sums it up. 'One father bitterly commented that he thought it was a shame that the SecDef could keep his squash schedule but not find the time to sign his dead son's letter.'

Sentosa sux

Well, there's this island called Sentosa Island in Singapore - as fraud a tourist spot as there can be.

The cable-car ride was awesome, and Fort Siloso was also good. The underwater tour was a huge disappointment. Why anyone would pay money to watch fish is beyond me? But again, I probably got irritated because of some brochures that had raised my expectations. There was a dolphin show - well, it was interesting but I couldnt think of the exploitation of the dolphins. Overall, it was nothing like what I would have expected from a must-see tourist spot at Singapore.

On the cable car ride back, I was left wonderin of the amazing opportunities for tourism India has. If Singapore with such pathetic tourist spots can attract so many tourists, India shouldnt find it too difficult. The one thing we need to do is to create and sell experiences rather than selling individual tourist attractions. Singapore seems to have excelled in that aspect.

Anyways, if you ever happen to go to Singapore, do visit Sentosa Island - but dont expect nething great

Water rox!!!

I've come up with my own metric to figure out how capitalist a country has become.. the probability of a restaurant serving water for free! While at Singapore, we natives couldnt think of buying a litre of water - and to make it worse, at quite a few places water was priced higher than coke.

Incidentally, Coke seems to have swept almost the whole market for carbonated drinks at Singapore. The only place where I found Pepsi was in KFC. Btw, had mentioned in a previous post that Zinger meal @ KFC rox! well, I recently had it here in India and luks like KFC has decided we dont need to be fattened. everything - from frenchies & pepsi to cheese & mayonnaise - was scaled down by a huge margin. So much for building global brands.

Subway, McD and KFC

While in India, I had hrd about how Subway is provides low-fat, low-cost sandwiches and other fast food. I assumed that it would eat into McD's and KFC's marketshare. It was only when I had the option of going to any of these three places for 2 weeks that I realised how Subway and the others have a mutually beneficial relationship. After indulging ourselves in hi-fat diets at KFC and McD for a few days, we would switch to Subway just to comfort ourselves that we arent fattening a lot :) And promptly the next time we would go back to McD/KFC and help ourselves to as much fatty stuff as possible. :)

btw, speaking of KFC, Zinger meal roxxx!!!!

p.s: this is the beginning of a series of articles (hopefully) on my learnings at spore where i had gone for a couple of weeks ...