FIlmfair takes back Fardein Khan's award, says 'India's become intolerant'

Joining an increasing number of writers and poets who have returned honours and given up positions in recent weeks, Filmfair awards today announced that they are revoking Fardein Khan's 'Best male debut' award for the film 'Prem Agan' given back in 1998.

"We are very afraid in the new India. It is intolerant of religious diversity, mediocre performances and stuff like that. This is not the free India of 1998 where we could give the award to just about anyone", said Filmfair's official spokesperson.

"This is our small way of revolting against the growing intolerance. We protest the restrictions on freedom of expression in the country today. We'd in fact given this award to encourage more facial expression in his subsequent films but that clearly didn't work out for us"

Filmfair's governing council earlier passed a powerful resolution protesting the killings of noted rationalists in the country and miraculously enough, not only did that bring back the dead, the perpetrators found themselves behind bars as well, as a direct result of the signing of the minutes of this meeting and subsequent scanning and uploading on their website.

More hate mail - queues

This post is dedicated to hating two types of people a)those who are in front of you in a queue and b) those who are behind you in the same queue
a) Those in front - the 'deep customisers' : Murphy's law does all the set-up for this act - you are already in the slowest moving queue leading to a counter staffed by an introspective ticket agent. This is when each person ahead of you decides to engage in a complex customised transaction with the hapless ticket agent. Or just enquire about a complex customised transaction and discuss for several hours before arriving at the simple one.
'We are 8 of us and we'd like to sit in 3 equal groups. 2 of us want to be between 30 and 40 feet from the screen. 3 of us are actually a couple and would like to sit together...blah. Aisa milega kya?'
'Nahi. Front row, Saath me 8 seats. Chahiye ki nahi?'
'Picture acchi hai? Chal rahi hai?' and so on.
Now imagine this frustration multiplied 8 times. That's a wedding buffet for you. The person ahead of you in the queue is invariably a perfectionist to the point of OCD. Needs to get the quantity on his plate exactly right, down to the last microliter of dal and the last particle of rice. And when a few extra ml of dal pour into his plate by mistake, you can see the disappointment writ large on his face.
'How could I screw this up? I just spent 5 minutes on this dal-pouring activity at the expense of these 100 people waiting behind me patiently and hungrily. And still poured excess dal on my plate. My career as an accurate wedding-buffet-portion-size measurer-and-eater is over - I'm finished. Oh wait! Let me redeem myself by getting the exactly right sized Paapad from this collection of 1000. Not this one, too big. Not this one, too crooked' etc is what must be going through the fellow's mind.
b) Those behind - the 'perpendiculars' :You finally get your turn to buy your ticket after the deep-customisers in front of you did their thing. The guys behind you are a different category of pain - they are the perpendicular queuers. As luck would have it, ticket agent goes off on a two minute break leaving you waiting. Guy just behind you also walks up to the counter and stands on your right, guy behind him moves up too and stands to your left and so on. Standing close enough to you so the ticket agent wouldn't be very clear who's first when he returns. The queue is now officially a perpendicular one also called a standard Indian queue. All of them squeeze a palm with money in it into the counter when the ticket agent returns. And simultaneously issue instructions to the ticket agent. The ticket agent now shifts to a more competitive process where the most aggressive get serviced first. The only way around this is to become a really fat and heavy person and retain your position right in front of the counter so there's no doubt in the agent's mind when he returns from the break.

Hate mail

I'm grateful to the law of the land which comes between me and what I would like to do to these people.

1. The fight of the century has just gone by between Mayweather and Pacquaio and like everyone else who missed the fight, I start searching for highlights online. I look for reasonably long duration videos. I land up on a video titled 'Mayweather vs Pacquaio full fight highlights May 2, 2015'. Very promising indeed at a duration of 51:25 minutes. But no, it turns out to be a video of the dude in the pic shooting himself watching TV while waiting for the fight. Note - it's not a video of the fight. It's not a home video of the fight showing live on TV. It's not a video of the dude watching the live fight on TV. It's a video of the dude watching some random crap on TV before the fight. And uploading this as a video of the fight. Why? Why?

2.  I read about Messi's spectacular goal against Atletico Madrid. Not too much into league football but something like this makes you get on to youtube. Guess what, there's a video titled Messi goal against Atletico Madrid, with the date. What could go wrong from here? I click it and am immediately subjected to really poor graphic design (in pic). So this was a dude who was playing soccer in PS-2, probably a 200 kg fat slob who last saw sunlight in 1995, who thought it was important to upload his PS-2 crap on youtube. Why not? I could watch recordings of other people's body of work on their PS-2s, all day. And he uploads it under a false title that would make people watch it. For about 2 seconds i.e., before cursing him, maybe leaving a nasty comment about his women relatives. Why? Why?

Qora explains net neutrality

Q:What is this net neutrality? Can someone out there really really dumb it down for me? I'm 2 years old btw, just started using qora.
A:(upvoted 2 billion times)
Picture this. An American, a Chinese guy and an Indian walk into a bar.
'Get us all some beer' the American dude growls.
The bartender says 'No can do. You gotta buy drinks online today. Can't order it directly. Sorry, buddy, that's the rule'
The three of them pull out their smartphones and open web browsers. They get a little distracted and check email for a while. The bartender's annoyed by now, 'Get a move on, fellas, don't got all day'
The Indian guy sees a facebook status update by one of his friends that talks about net neutrality. He's intrigued and looks up the wiki entry. The bartender meanwhile updates his status on his phone 'Stuck with three nerds, Want to go home, now!'
The Indian guy is still at it and even signs an online petition demanding net neutrality. The Chinese guy downloads the app to order drinks at the bar. Download's really slow. To kill time, the American guy asks the Indian guy to explain net neutrality to him in a simple way.
'Sure. Let me paint you a picture. Imagine you go to a bar to order drinks. Let's say the bartender says you need to download an app to be able to order drinks...'
The bartender's now all ears. '...and while downloading the app, you happen upon an article on net neutrality. Let's say you want to know more about the topic. The bartender is busy with something else while you read the wiki entry on net neutrality.'
The Chinese guy smiles. He sees where this is going and continues. 'What do you do then? You go to Qora, of course. And ask someone to explain the damn thing to you and pretend you're younger than you are so people won't think you're stupid'.

Shortform

The namesake - The rise and the rise of K L Ragul
- Caravaan desk

It was December 26th, 2014. Tens of people braved the sun to throng Melbourne Cricket Ground. They watched with a heady mix of emotions as K L Ragul, wearer of cricket whites, carrier of bat, striker of ball, walked out to bat. And holed out in the first innings for 3. He had arrived. A few days earlier. In Melbourne. By aeroplane.
Cut to 1990 types. Senior Ragul was a worried man as he walked to and fro in a middle class house in Bangalore. Karnataka was in a socio-political cultural situation of sorts. As if to mirror the State's vague circumstances, the birds and the leaves around the house were also inscrutable. It was an important day in Senior Ragul's house. It was the day when other important events must have been happening across the world. I mean, if you pick up the newspaper of that day or google a bit, you'd surely find some stuff. Ragul arrived in this world, a tiny child (hopefully). The hospital, Ragul, and his parents were unavailable for comment. Even the hospital janitor's now retired and untraceable.
Back to 2014. KLR failed again in the second innings. The parallel to Don Bradman, who failed famously once, in his last innings, was not lost on anyone, especially in our writing team. The world had gotten to see hardly a glimpse of KLR. KLR was undeterred.
"He couldn't believe himself. I mean the bowler", said an unrelated veteran cricket journalist who supposedly watched the match live on TV, "I mean who'd think KLR would fail miserably in both innings".
The next few days were the toughest out of the few days that KLR had played international cricket so far. 5 out of 10 days to be precise. He was in the eye of a storm. "He would go quietly to the nets everyday and come back to his room quietly", said someone who claims he was also staying at the same hotel as the Indian team. "I didn't see him at the breakfast buffet one day and I was so worried", he continued, "but then there he was! And I think he ate some apples that day" he concluded, painting a vivid picture of the storm-eye that was mentioned earlier.
KLR was no stranger to failure. He'd failed many times in other matches as well, going back all the way to street cricket. "Gully cricket those days was serious. If I hit a six I'd be in a good mood. If I got out for a duck, very bad mood", reminisces one of our writers, capturing the universality of emotions that gully cricket brings out in people including KLR.
At nets one day prior to the Sydney test, again all eyes were on KLR. And in a shocking few seconds, he took Dhoni's keeping gloves. While it was well known that KLR could keep, no one thought he would be asked to keep for the Indian team. What was going on? There was only one thing going through every onlooker's mind. Would KLR become another batsman-keeper like his namesake, Ragul Dravid?
Dravid, the wall, the gentleman, the guy who'd do anything for the team. Fun fact - Dravid once stood in a line to buy milk in the 90s. The 90s - inarguably, a period of great churn and development in the country.
But KLR in his characteristic way, dusted something off the gloves and returned them to Dhoni. Unlike his namesake, Dravid, KLR would not keep, at least not yet.
Fun fact #2 about Dravid - he has a test wicket! Of some guy.
Sydney, 2015. KLR walks out to bat. All 12 people in the crowd watch with bated breath. A cover drive. Everyone takes a deep breath. People would now speak of the other Ragul - KLR. The namesake has arrived. In Sydney, probably by air though there are direct buses also from Melbourne.

Vijayender, Sayna kick up Cannes row

Boxer Vijay and Shuttler Sayna are angry. And this time they're not acting. The jury was out, and literally, till midnight, at Cannes. It's not every day that they get a million sms's.
There have been rumours in the weeks leading up to the awards this year, that Vijay was not entirely happy that his bravura performance as himself (without the boxing stuff) in Fu.gly was ignored completely in the Palme d'Or category for best international film. Sayna Naiwal, not to be left behind, wrote a letter to the Cannes Lions jury demanding an explanation for not nominating her disturbingly brilliant portrayal of a pained athlete in the Iodex gel advertisement. The two of them launched an sms voting campaign asking for the people of India to vote for their favourite film 'in which a sports star tries to enhance his or her income by trying to act' but that backfired with Sachein winning top honours, and he wasn't even a nominee.
Not the ones to give up, in sport or in life, the second phase of the campaign was launched - 'we cannes do this' which was a plea to sms the jury members directly - CJ0001 for Vijay and CJ0002 for Sayna. These are being counted and the results will be out tomorrow. Sachein might just come up trumps once again.