I can’t explain why I go out cycling every morning.

For the first fifteen minutes or so my knees are always sore and my hamstrings cramped up from the previous day. For the next few kilometres, after I am warmed up, I feel good but then about 10 km. or so into the ride my back starts to hurt. The grips on the handlebars rip up my palms and they are now covered with thick, ugly calluses from being rubbed raw for hours everyday. A few fingers on my left hand are often completely numb or tingly. 

If it’s sunny it’s so hot that I’m dripping wet with sweat about half an hour into the ride. If it’s raining, I am soaked to my skin within minutes of leaving the house and bitterly cold and uncomfortable for the rest of the ride. Each day I return so tired that my vision is blurry. 

Motorists think I don’t exist. Whether it’s at a crossing where I’m trying to switch down gears fast enough to keep going and a truck decides to cut across me anyway or on a wide road, a bus overtakes me only to brake hard, just a few metres ahead of me or some scrawny Goan mother-fucker on a scooter, who threatens to kick me over because I didn’t let him pass quickly enough.

Today, an auto-rickshaw side-swiped me and my pedal got stuck in the auto. I was dragged along for a few metres. He didn’t brake, he didn’t slow down. I finally got thrown to the side of the road and my foot got caught between the spokes of the front wheel of my bike and the front fork. Considering the violence of the crash I got off pretty lightly: one badly mangled foot, one destroyed shoe, one really sore ass and one scraped up elbow. The rear dérailleur on the bike is shot. Also the the front wheel is bent but I did that, while yelling in agony, trying to free my trapped foot. I got no apology and little help.   

So, I ask myself, why do I do it? Why do I go out every fucking morning, whether it’s in the pissing rain or the blazing sun to push pedals for kilometre after kilometre, torturing myself and pushing a cycle to the point that it is constantly falling apart? Why do I want to be out on the road at the mercy of the elements and of feckless motorists sending text messages from their cellphones while driving SUV’s? 

Maybe it’s because once in a while, not everyday, often when I least expect it, when I’m close to passing out, soaked with sweat, my lungs and my legs on fire after cycling up a steep hill, I go over the top of the hill and start cycling down the other side, free-wheeling down the slope, fast as the wind, with just the right song playing on my iPod and blasting into my head… and for just a few minutes I experience the closest thing to ecstasy that I can ever imagine.

These recordings have been at the eye of a storm with everyone accusing Ms. Dutt of corruption on an epic scale and NDTV and the ladies involved trying to brazen it out in a typically Indian fashion.

I just realised what the furore was about because in the past month I noticed a huge surge in traffic to this site that was looking for actual Barkha Dutt news and not just the regular wierdos looking for ‘Barkha Dutt Nude, ‘Barkha Dutt Boobs’ or other Barkha Dutt related pornography (I understand fetishes you guys but please, get a life!)

So I read Open magazine’s articles and listened to the recordings and call me cynical but I wasn’t shocked in the least. This is how the media has operated forever and anyone who is surprised by the level of complicity and just pure corruption for lack of a better word is truly clueless.

Listen to the audio recordings here and try to see if you can tell at which moment exactly the line of journalistic integrity has been crossed.

Also worth watching is Karan Thapar’s interview of Arun Shourie, a grand old man of Indian news who still makes more sense and has more dignity than anyone else in the fourth estate today can ever hope to achieve. I think it is very telling when the ex-editor of two of the leading newspapers in India encourages everyone to be highly sceptical of everything they see and read on or in the news.

Also, I said the words ‘Journalistic Integrity’  and ‘Barkha Dutt’ in a single sentence. Funny! Let’s try another one. ‘NDTV gives you balanced news and unbiased editorial.’ Bwaaa Haaa Haaa! Am I a comedian or what?

Some previous commenters on this blog have asked me why I despise the fine lady and my answer is the terrorist attack in Mumbai on 26th of November in 2008.

I watched a television in horror as everyone in charge seemed to be paralysed with inaction but also as Ms Barkha Dutt interviewed the distraught families and friends of the people hiding inside the Taj Hotel in Mumbai that the terrorists had laid siege to and in which they held an unknown number of people captive.

When the captives called their families pleading for help and told them which rooms of the hotel they were hiding in to save their lives, Barkha Dutt announced this information on live television to the world and I’m sure to the terrorists inside who were certain to have a television tuned to NDTV or at the very least have radio contact with someone who did.

The same thing happened when commandos tried to storm Nariman House during the same attacks to try and free the Jewish hostages. In her enthusiasm to get LIVE NEWS out not only did Barkha make a fool of herself by constantly contradicting the news she had just announced, she also gave the rescue team’s every move away.

Needless to say, NDTV got immense ratings for those two days and most if not all of the people hiding in those rooms at the Taj Hotel died and everyone in Nariman House save for an infant, met the same horrible fate. Wait, allow me to rephrase that.

MOST OF THE PEOPLE WHO BARKHA DUTT RATTED OUT IN THE 26/11 ATTACKS WERE SLAUGHTERED.

Since Ms. Dutt was not put on trial for treason back then these new accusations are totally pointless and shall go nowhere in a hurry. Shut up slaves and go back to your televisions.

P.S. There are absolutely NO nude pics of Barkha Dutt on this web site.

(A thousand guys just read this and went awwwwwwww! )

Be good, eat fruit.

As Mark Twain said, never trust anyone who enjoyed their childhood. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time in my happy place during the last twenty years of the twentieth century, but I digress…

So, the memory. Many, many moons ago in the late nineteen hundred and eighties there was a hindi film I was taken to watch in a cinema hall and then since it was such a great picture that all the grown ups loved so much I was taken to watch it in a cinema hall again.

The film was called HUM and it starred among others, Amitabh Bachan, Govinda and my personal gold-standard of pure, unadulterated manhood, Rajneekanth. For those of you not familiar with the pop culture of this subcontinent think about Steven Seagall and Chuck Norris meeting and making sweet, sweet man-love. Now stop screaming and  retching and think of their love child. Multiply this love child by one hundred with a level bonus for coolness and you have South Indian Demi-God, Rajneekanth.

So normally Hindi film-makers copy songs but in this case they were like “Fuck it! Why copy a popular song when we can just play it on a jukebox and have Govinda and Rajneekanth beat the fucking Bejesus outta some bad guy to the beat?” and then they all gave each other high-fives and shot this video.

What you end up with is a fucking #EPICWIN for entertainment even though it is a #FAIL for originality. Please watch the clip and try not to hurt yourself from laughing too hard. Also because I love you I have scoured the internets and found a version with English subtitles because it has been scientifically proven:

Crap Hindi Film + Ludicrous English subtitles by someone who seems to have little understanding of either language =  DOUBLE THE FUNNY!

So, watch the original video above first and then brace yourself and click play on the hindi video below. Watch for:

1> Govinda and Rajneekanth holding hands and dancing while thrusting hips homoerotically at each other.

2> Totally not fake or pasted on looking moustache on bad guy.

3> Rajneekanth giving us the first clue of the impending ass-whooping the baddie is about to receive by saying to Govinda “SHOW THEM THE PROWESS”

Enjoy! You can thank me later….

So summer is here again. How do I know? Because I am constantly tired and sleepy and grouchy. Why am I like this? Oh I’ll tell you why.

Because I live in the backwater of a third world country run by politicians who are corrupt sons-of-bitches who will not make any infrastructure investments unless they bear fruit within the time frame that these douchebags will stay in office i.e. a couple of years, five at best. What they will do is spend crores and crores of tax payer money on destroying forests and constructing huge, hagiolatry parks with ugly ass statues of themselves.

The huge statue of this particular stoop-shouldered ugly-ass bitch now stands covered in blue tarp because our toothless and frankly quite gutless Supreme court finally found its testicles and succeeded in putting a leash on her and making her stop the construction. So the park, the huge Dalit monument and the statues themselves just stand there, in limbo, an eyesore, a criminal waste of time, effort, money and a reminder of the pointless destruction of literally thousands of trees, a pretty jogging track, a park for kids and valuable and scarce green cover that the area could ill afford to lose.

So, coming back to the upshot of all this. Every year the onset of summer is heralded by rolling power cuts for hours and hours. Last summer just to fuck with us, the powers that be (UPSEB) thought that it would be insanely funny to regularly cut the power at 7 AM each morning!

This summer the wankers at UPSEB have gone back to their tried and tested modus operandi of cutting the power at about 1 AM each night, just the time that you have really gotten into some deep sleep. So, by about 2 or 3 AM your backup power source (the inverter) has run out of juice and died in a plaintive high pitched eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! wail that signifies ‘Low Battery’. But this wailing does not wake you up, oh no! You have already been tossing and turning for half an hour in bed covered with sweat and mosquito bites as the steadily decreasing voltage from the inverter has made your ceiling fan’s blades whirl around slower and slower and made the gaang! gaaaanng! gaaaaaaaaaaang! gaaaaaaaaaaaaanngggg! sound successively more and more irritating until the blades have just given up on trying to stir up the molasses of warm, humid air in your room and have crawled to a halt with a aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan! sound to inform you that they really are trying to move but just like Star Trek “They don’t have the powerrrrrrrr!”

So, you have gotten out of bed and turned off the fan but the inverter dies anyway and after lying in bed and listening to it for what seems like an hour you finally go “Fuck this shit!” and toss off what little of the covers you haven’t already kicked off and go and try to start the generator. So you perform the little routine that you can do in your sleep now.

Move the fuel switch from ‘off’ to ‘start’ position.

Turn the choke on.

Grab the pull cord and heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeavvve!

Nothing.

Repeat about 15 times until you have got your heart rate up and have a good, steady stream of curse words going under you breath.

Catch your breath. Stop wheezing.

Repeat about 10 more times.

Slap your forehead and check the kerosene tank. Full.

Check the Petrol tank. Empty.

(Let me clarify here that the world renowned engine boffins from Honda Motor Company in their infinite wisdom designed this petrol tank to hold at least a few litres of fuel. Good for a month of starts at least. But they also designed it in a way that let all petrol in it evaporate within a few hours of the tank being filled.)

The result is that I now have to go get a torch, find the Coke bottle full of petrol we keep somewhere, fill the tank just enough to get the generator started this time while taking care not to drop too much of it on myself so that if the shit does hit the fan I don’t scream and burn for too long.

Done.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeavve another few times.

Result!

The generator coughs and splutters to life and covers me with sooty black smoke full of unburnt hydrocarbons.

Turn the choke off.

Switch the fuel tap from ‘Petrol’ to ‘Kerosene’ while trying to inhale as few carcinogens as possible.

(This generator starts on petrol but runs on kerosene for reasons that I am too stupid or lazy to comprehend, especially at 4 AM)

We have power.

I walk back to my room closing all the doors between me and the generator to muffle the godawful racket.

Switch the fan back on.

Peel the moist sheets off the bed. Mosquitos on the wall. Swat the blood-fattened little bastards, fall into bed and try to relax and get some sleep.

Almost as soon as I finally fall asleep the alarm rings to signify the all-too-soon arrival of a new day.

Mother.                                  Fucker.

A slight fuck up on my part as this domain name expired left visitors to this site looking at ads for penis enlargement etc (“Yaay! Improvement!” you say) Anyway, trying to fix the problem ended up with me having to pay both my hosting provider and my domain registrar for the domain coz one of them was being a difficult douchebag. I’m not bitter or anything but lets just say Santa is gonna be taking a dump this Christmas in the stockings of a certain person from a company “India Internets” (I know, what an original name, right?)

Moral of the story: Always buy your domain and your hosting from the same company. It shall save you money and yelling into the phone while you pull out your hair.

Anyway, normal programming resumes now. If you were one of the people who would rather look at penis enlargement ads click here. If you are reading this and thinking “Wait. What? You were gone for a while?” Eff you too.

So, the old geezer is one of those religious farts and he starts right off with his mini-polemic about how sodomy is a Sin and Unnatural according to the Bible and how the Delhi High Court has in one fell swoop, legalised bestiality too, the fools!

He carries on about the Pope (creepy picture above) and the Queen of England being the head of the church and both of them saying that this is deviant, unnatural behaviour (bestiality and sodomy) and he goes on and on and on….

All of this without even bothering to check if any of the people in the room that he has just met are gay themselves and might be thoroughly offended by his tirade. I had the urge to tell the pompous old prick that he needn’t worry, no one of either sex would ever want to fuck him recreationally and even the bestiality crowd would have to be going through a very dry phase to even look his way, but I demurred.

And that is the problem with non-religious, agnostic types, we let the religious nut-balls get away with all sorts of bullshit just because we don’t want to lower ourselves to their level and bash the world on its head with our theology. This shit has to stop! People too intelligent to believe in religion need to start speaking up and put these small minded sheep in their place.

Dear Gay People (or whatever the kosher phrase of the hour is) congratulations for what its worth. I don’t see how revoking Article 377 makes any difference to you while you still have to live in a society filled with douchebags who believe that God wrote books that tell them not to enjoy sex, who think anything except missionary is unnatural and who want to have a say in what you do behind closed doors in your own damn home! I wouldn’t want to be a child coming of age and realising that I was gay today, any more than I would while it was still illegal. I don’t see how it could, but if it makes life in this world full of assholes any easier for all of you, excellent!

My own cheap little thrill from all of this is that it will make all the homophobic, religious nuts lose sleep for ages, just lying in their bed thinking about the Delhi High Court’s ruling. Just picturing them provides me with endless mirth and dare I say it, barely suppressed giggles.

Go Delhi High Court!

And the government adverts in the main paper? Sonia Gandhi, Shiela Dixit or some other cowherd-looking ‘government servant’ grinning at me idiotically from every second page and our ‘Health Minister’ Ramadoss-something-or-the-other’s mug on every third page. It makes my blood boil.

As a Delhiite, I harbour a particularly deep seated and vicious loathing for Dixit (Is she still Delhi’s CM?) Every time I’m stuck on the stretch of road with the fucking BRT corridor on it I curse her and the IIT dudes responsible for this mess in language that would make a sailor blush. I do it loudly, with the windows down. People nod and cheer.

And Ramadoss. Jesus, what is this dude’s fucking problem anyways? Why is he so desperate to get his mug in the papers and on television everyday? Will someone just give him a two bit role in a South Indian film and let him get it outta his system? First he fucks with AIIMS, then he wants to outlaw smoking, now he wants to outlaw alcohol. Let me just say this to him.

THE COMMON PEOPLE NEED THEIR VICES MR. HEALTH MINISTER. IT’S THE ONLY THING KEEPING US FROM RUNNING WILD IN THE STREETS AND LYNCHING GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS.

That goes double for Dixit and the Gandhis. And you politicians know where you can stick those adverts too.

So anyways, no more Times of India. It pisses me off too much nowadays (as you can see). Between The Indian Express and The Hindustan Times I think I’m killing enough trees as it is. The news is filled with stories of how print newspapers are dying. I say it can’t happen fast enough.

Whatever you views on religion are, you really have to watch this film. It’s funny as hell. (Though if you’re the type that believes in the immaculate conception or armies of monkey-men you’d better have a thick skin)

Bill Maher (who also presents the film) totally rips into organised religion of all kinds, the film is brilliantly edited for maximum effect and is full of scathing one liners that will make you laugh out loud. Here’s the trailer:

Here are some other excellent zingers from Bill Maher:

On the Church: ”The Bear Stearns of organized pedophilia”

On Pope Benedict XVI (The thug looking, gay-hating douchebag I’ve written about here): “he used to be a Nazi and he wears funny hats!”

P.S. One major mark against Bill Maher is that he apparently co-founded PeTA.(Which I’ve written about here) 

Recently a blogger, Chyetanya Kunte posted this retraction on his blog, an apology for an earlier post where he totally trashed NDTV and Barkha Dutt in particular for their coverage of the Mumbai blasts. NDTV obviously threatened to sue the poor bastard which shows the new depths this once venerable network has sunk to.

My own thoughts about the massacre in Mumbai and Ms. Dutt’s coverage can be seen here and here. Basically, a very large part of the infuriating, stomach-turning experience of watching the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year was the ‘journalist’ seen here with some BS award.

To put it very mildly Ms. Dutt and NDTV, sucked! Big-time. But then, the channel that I once had a lot of respect for has made it’s full-time job sucking for the past few years. But this is a new low.

Is NDTV so thick that it tries to sue a blogger? Do these stupid twats understand anything about freedom of speech? Personal opinion? How the internet works? Honestly. You can never, ever make someone take down a posting on the internet because once it is online it is in the wild, it will be around forever, even if the original poster takes it down.

As for the apology from Mr. Kunte let me just say this to the folks at NDTV. Your channel and news coverage sucked. Barkha Dutt sucked even harder. You idiots want to sue everyone who thinks so? There are thousands of people on Facebook in a group called ‘Make Barkha Shut the Fuck Up!” (Or some such shit to that effect) One of the more popular search terms people use to find this blog is (and I kid you not) ‘BARKHA DUTT BITCH’.

Get your head out of your asses NDTV. If it looks like shit, smells like shit and tastes like shit it probably is shit. You guys had a respectable channel. But somewhere along the way egos, ratings, political agendas and advertising money made you join in the race with every other news channel in a downward spiral into the lowest common denominator sort of news and guess what? You’ve won the race. There is no respect for you within the industry. Even normal household viewers who are essentially opinion-less sheep that you have dumbed down with Bullshit news about kids stuck in gutters and the US election now realise that the ‘news’ you air is essentially content-free filler between the ad breaks.

Read the full story for Mr. Kunte’s apology and the original post he wrote after the mumbai massacre.

So here is Mr. Chyetanya Kunte’s original blog post which he has since deleted but is cachéd thanks to the wonders of Google and the internet.

Shoddy journalism

Date: Thursday, 27 Nov 2008 20:39

Appalling journalism. Absolute blasphemy! As I watch the news from home, I am dumbfounded to see Barkha Dutt of NDTV break every rule of ethical journalism in reporting the Mumbai mayhem. Take a couple of instances for example:

In one instance she asks a husband about his wife being stuck, or held as a hostage. The poor guy adds in the end about where she was last hiding. Aired! My dear friends with AK-47s, our national news is helping you. Go get those still in. And be sure to thank NDTV for not censoring this bit of information.

In another instance, a General sort of suggests that there were no hostages in Oberoi Trident. (Clever.) Then, our herione of revelations calls the head of Oberoi, and the idiot confirms a possibility of 100 or more people still in the building. Hello! Guys with guns, you’ve got more goats to slay. But before you do, you’ve got to love NDTV and more precisely Ms. Dutt. She’s your official intelligence from Ground zero.

You do not need to be a journalist to understand the basic premise of ethics, which starts with protecting victims first; and that is done by avoiding key information from being aired publicly—such as but not limited to revealing the number of possible people still in, the hideouts of hostages and people stuck in buildings.

Imagine you’re one of those sorry souls holed-up in one of those bathrooms, or kitchens. A journalist pulls your kin outside and asks about your last contact on national television, and other prying details. In a bout of emotion, if they happen to reveal more details, you are sure going to hell. Remember these are hotels, where in all likelihood, every room has a television. All a terrorist needs to do is listen to Ms. Barkha Dutt’s latest achievement of extracting information from your relative, based on your last phone-call or SMS. And you’re shafted—courtesy NDTV.1

If the terrorists don’t manage to shove you in to your private hell, the journalists on national television will certainly help you get there. One of the criticisms about Barkha Dutt on Wikipedia reads thus:

During the Kargil conflict, Indian Army sources repeatedly complained to her channel that she was giving away locations in her broadcasts, thus causing Indian casualties.

Looks like the idiot journalist has not learnt anything since then. I join a number of bloggers pleading her to shut the f⋅⋅⋅ up.

And here is Mr Kunte’s apology:

Unconditional Withdrawal of my post “Shoddy Journalism” dated November 27th 2008

Monday, 26 January 2009

I, Chyetanya Kunte, hereby tender an unconditional apology to Ms. Barkha Dutt, Managing Editor, English News, NDTV Limited and to NDTV Limited, for the defamatory statements I made regarding Ms. Barkha Dutt and NDTV Limited, in my post titled “Shoddy Journalism,” dated November 27th 2008, on my weblog at www.ckunte.com.

I have come to the conclusion that my post contained untrue and defamatory statements and that I have expressed myself in a disproportional manner. As a result, I have agreed with Ms. Barkha Dutt and NDTV to publish this statement as a means of settlement. I did not have the right nor the factual evidence to accuse Ms. Dutt and NDTV of the acts that I alleged in my weblog.

Consequently, I hereby repudiate and withdraw my post dated November 27, 2008 titled “Shoddy Journalism” and, more specifically, the following allegations / statements made in the post titled “Shoddy Journalism” namely:

a lack of ethics, responsibility and professionalism by Ms. Dutt and NDTV Limited;

that Ms. Dutt and NDTV’s reporting at the scene of the Mumbai attacks during November 2008, resulted in jeopardizing the safety and lives of civilians and / or security personnel caught up in and / or involved in defending against the attacks in Mumbai in November 2008;

that Ms. Dutt was responsible for the death of Indian Servicemen during the Kargil Conflict.

In an effort to remedy the damage that my aforementioned weblog post has caused to the reputations of Ms. Dutt and NDTV, I have undertaken to send this apology and withdrawal statement to all the websites that reproduced my post.

I hereby undertake not to repeat the said statements or similar statements against Ms. Dutt or NDTV Limited in the future.

[26.01.09]

Chyetanya Kunte

All I can say is….

You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!

Doesn’t it give you a warm, fuzzy feeling inside to know that in these hard, credit crunch ridden times there are still douchebags out there with waaay more money than sense?

In today’s Times of India. This dude in particular and the Gandhi clan in general really need to get their head out of their collective behind. Telling design students to get into politics?

I’m surprised the students didn’t laugh his ass outta there.

1. Auto Rickshaws or three-wheeled tempos at their top speed of 40 kmph, spewing fumes in the right lane.

2. Person/Persons honking incessantly while in gridlocked traffic.

3. Person/Persons with car that is obviously faster than mine, driving at 40 kmph in front of me. The pedal on the right makes you go faster douchebag. Fucking use it!

4. Call centre cabs weaving through traffic. Actually any white MPV with yellow plates.

5. Person riding a two-wheeler, cutting me off in traffic while reading a fucking SMS on his cellular phone.

To be honest I don’ t really give a fuck about the company going tits-up, the creative accounting practices, the investors taking a bath etc. etc. ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

All of this has happened before, many, many times and will happen again for sure. What is really intriguing to someone like me (who’s understanding of all the ramifications of the scandal is weak, to say the least) is how the same damn names crop up every time the crap hits the rotary cooling device.

How come the good people at PriceWaterhouseCoopers aren’t getting their arses nailed to the wall for the Satyam debacle? Why didn’t they get nailed when Global Trust Bank tanked and all its share-holders lost their shirts. Why do these bastards get away time after time?

Lets just take it as a given that all big business is corrupt okay? Then why not at least put the onus for accountability on the firms doing the accounting and auditing for big business? I may be totally wrong about this but aren’t these companies supposed to make sure book-cooking doesn’t happen? Geez.

Anyway. The people I really feel bad for are the employees. The are a myriad little tragedies relegated to the inside pages of your favourite daliy. Top performers at the company that turned down jobs elsewhere in ’08 because they thought good things would happen for them at Satyam. Newly married couples (where both partners worked for Satyam) who took loans to buy houses last year and now face the prospect of losing quite literally everything. All the employees who just had the rug pulled out from under them in a big, nasty way.

As always my other favourite kind of organisation, the credit card companies acted totally in character. They immediately zeroed the credit limits of all the employees and called in outstanding amounts. Fucking beautiful isn’t it? The same bastards who literally throw credit cards at you are first in line to kick you in the face when you really need  them. 

Anyway. While I was looking up Mr. Ramalingam Raju (I can never get over names with the word penis in them) on ‘the internets’ I came across this ironic poem on a blog by a guy called Paras Sharma.

It is quite brilliant.

Wrong-a-Lingam Raju

Respected Members of the Board,

My job has become a double-edged sword

Today I am writing you this letter,

To shed my loads and feel much better.

I’ve been hiding a truth

Which has many facets

So here it goes

‘Satyam has no assets!’

You see, unlike I said before,

We don’t really have 7000 crore.

That cash in fact exists nowhere,

I pulled that figure out of thin air.

It started off as harmless fun

I made eleven from one and one.

But then it all got out of hand,

I swear, from thereon, nothing was planned.

I thought I’d be busted

When those fellows did the audit,

But even they didnt seem to spot it!

Yes, I admit,

I’ve been a coward,

I was riding a tiger,

Trying not to get devoured.

But now it seems

The cat can’t be beaten

So sayonara folks!

Guess I’ll soon be eaten.

I wish this didn’t happen,

I wish it weren’t so bad.

But now that it has,

I’m fleeing to Hyderabad!

That’s all I have to say

Before I pack and go

Sorry for your troubles

Signed,

The CEO.

On the front page of ‘The Times Of India’ today were many articles about India’s ongoing war of words with Pakistan about the terror attacks in Mumbai but one little sub-article made me laugh until coffee came outta my nose. 

Here’s the text:

Indian dossier credible: Mulford

    A day after authorities in Pakistan rubbished India’s dossier linking Pakistani nationals with the Mumbai attacks, US ambassador to India David C Mulford said the evidence provided to Islamabad by New Delhi was ‘‘credible’’. Mulford told TOI on Wednesday that the dossier had been prepared with help from the FBI. “The US is not in the business of compiling evidence that is not credible,” he said when asked about Pakistan dismissing it.

The US isn’t in the business of compiling evidence that is not credible? Are you fucking kidding me? Does anyone remember the ongoing War in Iraq? Does anyone remember that they never found any WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction,nukes) in the country? None. Not a single one. Zilch. Zip. Nada. (Proof of nukes was the US’s reason for invading Iraq.)  

And the US now admits it fucked up. I still remember watching the press conference a few years back where then CIA chief George Tenet said that the US had ‘SLAM DUNK EVIDENCE’ that Iraq had WMDs.

SLAM. DUNK. EVIDENCE. Repeat those three words aloud to yourself. This is the Chief of the most important, most powerful intelligence agency of the most powerful country in the world. An agency that has shaped world events either openly or behind the scenes like no other.

(For a complete, blow by blow account of the CIA’s history, read ‘Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA’ by  Tim Weiner.)

If one douchebag talking like a teenage frat boy wasn’t bad enough, Vice-President Dick Cheney later appeared on television and repeated the moronic statement twice while defending the US’s decision to go to war with Iraq.   

In his defence George Tenet later wrote a book ‘At the Center of the Storm’ in which he was self critical about the statement and also admitted that those were the dumbest  three words to ever come out of a person’s mouth.

All I can say to the US ambassador to India, David Mulford, is this:

HEY MR. US AMBASSADOR! SLAM DUNK THIS!

Last year, while fuel prices were rocketing skywards and crude was near 180 US $ a barrel, every media outlet was quoting international investment banking and securities company Goldman Sachs’ repeated statements that crude would hit 150 US $, then later 180 US $ and at the height of the madness, 200 US $.

Admittedly, my grasp of the futures markets is extremely weak, to say the least but it seems that Goldman Sachs was actually shorting crude prices i.e. betting that crude prices would go down and they made some huge profits on this speculation. Are any of the journalists at any these media organisations even doing a little bit of digging? A little bit of checking to see if there may be, any conflict of interest? Hell no! 

Does anyone even give a fuck about the fact the price of such an essential commodity is fluctuating so wildly? One that influences the prices of the food we eat, the gas we use to cook that food and almost every other commodity we use and that these changes in price are not based on demand and supply but on the basis of international banking and investment firms making a profit on speculation and using the fourth estate as their shills?

The media on one hand quotes the predictions of ‘experts’ from the very same companies reaming us with price manipulations like Chase, Goldman Sux and JP Morgan to mislead us and then to distract people from the stuff that matters it feeds us with images of Amy Winehouse’s visits to rehab and the fact that Obama (who’s election everyone is treating like Jesus’ second coming) may appoint an Indian as the Surgeon General.

Geez.

So. I’ve been watching nothing but these conspiracy-nut type films for the past week. One of them (on Google Video) is a French film, ‘The World According to Monsanto’. Monsanto, for those who don’t know off it, is a company that is essentially trying to patent food and the company responsible for the world-wide rush towards growing Genetically Modified (GM) crops.

They are also the geniuses that came up with rBGH or the Bovine Growth Hormone that I’m pretty sure is in all our milk and is giving men moobs (man-boobs) and Lord knows what else. But my personal favourite bit of history about Monsanto is that they are the company that developed and produced Agent Orange, the carcinogenic herbicide the Americans dumped literally tons of all over Vietnam during the war. This led to both American soldiers getting violently ill and the Vietnamese people dealing with birth defects in generation after generation, to this day.

And now these fuckers are selling us food? And as usual, our government bends over and takes it in the name of trade-pacts, liberalisation and globalisation. “Thank you sir, may I have another?”

Indians should definitely watch this film because India is one of the world’s three biggest growers of GM crops and the film talks about the part Monsanto’s patented BT Cotton has played in the farmers’ suicides in Andhra Pradesh over the past few years. The filmmaker, Marie-Monique Robin also speaks with environmental activist Vandana Shiva, one of the biggest opponents of GM food in India, who has a really interesting point of view about the original ‘Green Revolution’.

The Green Revolution is something all the children in the Indian education system are taught about and it is interesting to see that not everyone thinks it was some sort of panacea to India’s problems. 

P.S. One of REM’s best songs ‘Orange Crush’ is about Agent Orange. Michael Stipe’s father apparently served in the helicopter corps during the Vietnam war.

‘His Life’ is a chilling look at the life of former US president, Bill Clinton. But not the Clinton most people are familiar with, the dude who played the saxophone, found interesting uses for cigars, and had a very narrow definition of the word sex. This film originally came out in 2004 and it’s name is a play on the name of his book ‘My Life’.

It shows how easily the media kept people distracted from the Clintons’ dirty dealings, abetment of organized crime and communist spying while focusing on Clinton’s sexual escapades. The second half of the film is particularly eye-opening as it goes into great detail about the staggering amount of people with knowledge of the Clintons’ nefarious activities that have disappeared, allegedly committed suicide or been killed in shootings or plane crashes. This also includes a number of women who claimed to have had relations with the former president or were about to go public with such allegations.

Watch the film and then wonder about the kind of media white-wash that is going on with current President-elect, Barack Obama. Google some of his team and you will find that a large number of these people, hired by the president that was supposed to represent change, are the same old capitol hill crooks that have gone back and forth from American Big Business to the administration.

Case in point. Rahm Emanuel. Barack’s Chief of Staff. Emanuel has been at one time or another Assistant to the President Bill Clinton for Political Affairs and then Senior Advisor for Policy and Strategy. But most interestingly, this schmuck, who the papers have been eulogising as ‘Rahmbo’ was on the Board of Directors for the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (“Freddie Mac”) during the very period that Freddie Mac was plagued with scandals involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities. The same Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that have been recently bailed out by US taxpayers for (pulling a figure outta my ass here) about 600 Billion US $.

So, to all the dolts who got swept up in Obamamania (including the Indian dolts that sent me invites to join the support Obama group) please stop being such mindless sheeple and spend just one fucking hour of your life actually reading something worth a damn. Honestly.

The new Pope (Pope Benedict XVI) says, in his end of year year speech, that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction! Haaaa Haaaa!!!

Why doesn’t he just cut the BS and say that all ‘the gays’ are gonna burn in hell? That’ll scare those Godless Butt-pirates!

Just the kind of mindless, intolerant crap you want to be teaching your kids.

Click here for the full story

P.S. I’ve said this before. The previous pope wasn’t so bad. Where did they find this lout? The 16th Century?

About this time last year I already wanted to quit NewsX, barely

A network started by Peter Mukerjea for chrissakes! He headed STAR TV! The news channel would be headed by Vir Sanghvi! One of the few Indian journalists I knew off, he wrote and spoke extremely well and I respected him immensely. These were excellent credentials to me and despite it being a news channel I signed up because I thought I would get to make some great programming and I would learn a whole lot from the Brits that Peter brought in to get the channel off the ground. The same Brits who hired me as a Producer for the channel.

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve made a boat-load of mistakes in my life but NewsX has to be among the biggest. Where do I even begin?

The Brits.

Only thinly-veiled racist twats. Trying to teach the basics of camera, editing, scripting and the basic elements of television itself to people who had been doing it for years and a lot of who had spent years in film school and could teach the Brits a thing or two about television. It wasn’t just that everyone was forced to undergo the training which was questionable enough but the sheer condescending, supercilious, stuck-up and often just plain rude manner in which some of the Brits conducted themselves was just plain horrifying.

One of our ‘trainers’, I later found out was a SECRETARY! A plain vanilla, file this, make me coffee, hold the phone, SECRETARY from Britain who was only here because she was Andrew Barron’s (the Brit Head of Programming)  girlfriend! Jesus-fuckin-Christ!

To be fair not all of them were total twats but everyone in NewsX was glad to see them go. What a fucking waste of money and everyone’s time they were but the wastage was only just beginning.

The Equipment

Sony XDR-EX1′s, the cameras NewsX leased. The most cutting edge, highly capable and future ready camera in it’s category on the market at the time. It could do a full 1080p, recorded on the Sony’s new side by side card which was a 3/4 express card (an equally new and promising format, no real time captures, just stick the card into a MacBook Pro or an adapter and dump ALL its footage in a couple of minutes) a non-servo mode focus ring so you could pull focus and just the most well thought out fully featured compact video camera I had ever seen.

To someone who had shot endlessly on a PD-150/170 and spent hours capturing footage and wrung his hair out in frustration at shortcomings of the little Sony (much as I loved it) NewsX’s new camera’s were brilliant. A little choir played in my head the first time I got one in my hands.

But then, the madness, NewsX was not only NOT going to be transmitted in HD but they were also in 4:3 NOT 16:9 which is the aspect ratio for HD. So, the day they decided to switch up to HD not only would they have to switch definition but ALSO aspect ratio. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! It just boggles my mind and makes my head hurt to think about it,even now.

Oh and BTW all of this AFTER leasing ludicrously expensive (I’m sure), cutting edge cameras (NewsX was one of Sony’s first customers) THAT ONLY SHOT IN FUCKING HI-DEF! So you would go out and shoot in HiDef but then come back and down-convert the footage to StandardDef and throw the original away. So the advantage of having these cameras? The huge HD footage archive you could have built up in a few years ? GONE!

The Management

I don’t know who the technical heads at NewsX were/are but they obviously had/have no clue.

Actually I do know who they are. During a shoot for the film about the start-up I once had to shoot a highest level board meeting in the basement of the NewsX building in Noida, this February or March, to show to NewsX’s investors.

In the meeting were Peter and Indrani Mukerjea, Vir Sanghvi, Avirook Sen and a whole lot of department heads. Among the many things the tech people pulled right outta their ass and told the Mukerjeas was the hilarious porkie-pie that you could monitor what a person was watching on a Tata Sky or a Dish set-top box. HOW? Its a one-way signal! TV station to satellite to the dish outside your house to the television. How does any information about what you are watching get transmitted back?

Those tech people couldn’t tell their ass-hole from their elbow without a torch and written instructions, preferably illustrated.

Anyway the meeting went so badly and it quickly became so painfully apparent that absolutely no one in the room had any clue about a direction or a future for NewsX that I didn’t shoot a single frame of footage. At one point Indrani Mukerjea remarked ‘Why don’t we just shut down the channel?”

My face must have betrayed my horror because Avirook Sen looked up at me and suggested I step outside and they would call me back when they had something to talk about that was suitable for viewing by the investors. So I sat outside the glass office for what seemed like hours and twiddled my thumbs while having a nice little panic attack about what was going on inside the board room. I was never called back in. There was nothing to shoot.

The Remaining Brits

The few remaining Brits who were supposed to set the format for the channel (or some such shit to that effect) spent months getting pilot after pilot shot and then shot down. They tried to graft every idea they had tried in the UK for a show in the last 20 years onto an Indian show not realising that this is India, not the United Kingdom and we aren’t the Queen’s subjects thankyouverymuch.

Not only did they waste time but tons of money. I once wanted (for a show)  a spy camera that cost under 10K INR in Delhi but it was decided that Andrew Barron would buy it in the UK. For 66K INR! And he did. And it was the wrong type of camera! And we would have needed another 6K INR of equipment to get it to function properly. So the few times I used that camera on shoot (twice) I had to record the anchor’s piece to camera’s on my goddamn cellphone.

Politics

The first whiff of this was when I joined the channel and quickly realised that there were people with no television experience or training whatsoever had been hired at the same position (and sometimes at higher salaries) as I.

Lets be really honest. Everyone played the game, some just played dirtier than the others. The Brits, the Indians, Peter’s people and Vir’s people and in the end Vir’s people lost and lost bad. I had never seen an organisation where people are fired on the spot and then physically thrown out of the building by security in the presence of gleeful department heads (Karun Thakur, whom I later caught in the basement edit labs doing some shit to the security camera footage from that fateful night) but sadly that is what happened. All of Vir’s people (many of whom I had/have utmost respect for and was crushed to see leaving) trickled out sooner or later.

Karan Thapar (is that his name?) was rumoured to replace Vir but as little as I knew about any of these people, I knew he wouldn’t touch NewsX with a long barge pole after what had just happened.

Enter Arup Whatshisface and his entire coterie of country bumpkin, tobacco chewing, ex-hindi news channel cronies. How can a dude who can’t string more than two words of the English language together coherently, be part of the editorial team in an English news channel that aspires to be the Indian BBC?? (Indrani Mukerjea used to state this goal often and even in the early days I was slightly incredulous. Really Mrs Mukerjea? The BBC? Surely you jest?)

Throughout all of this the Brits surprisingly outlasted almost everyone (like roaches that survive nuclear war) despite adding absolutely no value whatsoever to the channel but their time did come and one day they finally slunk out of the office with very little fuss. Before he left, Andrew apparently ‘confided’ to one of my colleagues that ‘he wasn’t given the freedom to do anything’. I read that as ‘he wasn’t given the freedom to screw the pooch for another six months’.

Today friends (and I did make many there) tell me there is no money to run the canteen, there are no cabs to go on shoot and they are afraid they may not get next months pay.

My own pay was docked because the plucky Brits took off with my ALL my shoot tapes for the film I spent most of my time at NewsX making single handedly and told NewsX they hadn’t a clue. Even after personally speaking at great length with Mr. Mukerjea about the tapes and giving him a copy of the film that Andrew Barron had on his website THAT I HAD SHOT, NewsX docked a huge lump of my pay and had the nerve to tell me that I owed them money and they would pardon the cost of the content on the tapes but I would have to pay for the blanks.

Now rumour has it that someone is going to buy the channel, lock, stock and stinking barrel. Rumour has it that someone already has. So NewsX hasn’t lasted a single year and no one who started it has come out of it smelling of roses. Most sensible people (I’m guessing) will be wary of joining any organisation again on the basis of either Mr. Sanghvi (who bailed) or Peter or Indrani Mukerjea (who couldn’t manage her way out of a wet paper bag, recent puff piece by the New York Times Wall Street Journal notwithstanding)

If only a little voice had come to me when I first signed up with ScrewedX (as my friends who still work there refer to it) and whispered to me…

‘This is all gonna end in tears’

This is a follow-up to my previous post. Bombay. How I loved you.

Lets start with the ‘media industry’. A lot of people raised a huge stink about Barkha Dutt’s grating coverage of the events and the huge cock-up about whether the hostage situation at Nariman House was over or not. There is even a group on Facebook called ‘Get Barkha off air’ or some such crap.

Please. Get Barkha off air? She may look like a dog, sound like nails on a chalkboard and ask the most inane questions but people who say that she used to be great but has sold out, ought to get a clue. Also, part of essential reading for all students of journalism and mass communication, especially all the wannabe Barkha Dutts doing piece-to-cameras for news channels ought to be this book.

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media – Noam Chomsky

Newspapers are hardly any better. My paper of choice is ‘The Times of India’ which has always been like toilet paper but worse. (At least toilet paper is honest about what it is). It has been  a couple of weeks and ToI has done its bit by covering the clueless fashion frat lighting candles at Jantar-Mantar in Delhi and some self-important dweebs in Mumbai fighting with the cops for their right to demonstrate at the Gateway of India.

So ToI has gone back to its regular drivel. Yesterday there was a full page picture of some old douche-bag with an expensive hair-cut astride a Triumph Rocket. Though, to put that into perspective TOI is part of Bennett and Coleman, the company that brought you the epitome of a double-think, mind-fuck: The Advertorial

Some thoughts about the politicians.

1. Narendra Modi grand standing in front of the Oberoi. – Why didn’t we trade that murdering rat-bastard to the terrorists for some hostages?

2. Priyanka Gandhi telling the press that her mother, Indira Gandhi would have handled the hostage situation better. -  Please, just get over yourself and your clan. All of you.

3. Raj Thackeray and the Thackeray ilk in general skulking furtively during the whole episode – Why can’t you Thackerays be like this all the time?

4. Manmohan Singh’s speech. – Mr Singh. You disappoint me.

Another Facebook group that I have been invited to join (and have also ignored) is one called ‘Dedicate your profile picture to the Indian flag’. There are a myriad reasons why I think the idea is repulsive, jingoistic BS but a friend of mine has described her feelings about our national flag and national anthem better than I ever could. Read Namrata Siviya here.

So. Facebook groups, candles at the Jantar Mantar, demonstrations at the Gateway of India, this is the best the middle and upper classes can do (besides writing self important blog posts like the one you are reading.)

There is one part of me that hopes Delhi’s notoriously thuggish cops lathi-charge the pompous twats at the Jantar-Mantar and Mumbai’s cops push the demonstrators at the Gateway into the Arabian Sea (It can’t possibly get murkier can it ?)

But then, what is the proper response? How do normal people express their outrage at the events? How about a dignified silence? Would that be better? Would it be more respectful to every single person who died an utterly pointless death? (Including the terrorists)

I was at a concert a few days after the attacks and before it started everyone stood up and observed a minute’s silence for the people who had died. I may be very wrong but that respectful silence seemed like a much better idea than anything else I have seen in the weeks since.