Look I cleared JEE: schmuck!

Contrary to popular perception, I endorse the decision to scrap the JEE and admit students into the country's top engineering schools through a single entrance exam. In all fairness there is nothing special in JEE, it is just another burden on the student entering high school. They do hand pick the best students in the country and make them brighter and world class so that they can get out of the country and drain their brains elsewhere. Whats the big deal in purifying gold from 95% to 99% ? If the IITs are so good and trust their teaching and research standards, why can't they brighten up the little duller of the lot.

I still remember the harrowing two years when I had prepared and passed JEE to get into one of those top colleges. Day after day, month after month all I did was go to coaching classes which cost a fortune and taught me the megalomania that the IITs weren't. Think about this issue from the perspective of a high school student and the burden he has to go through in preparing for 10 different entrance exams, all different format, all requiring separate set of skills. There are so many entrance exams that in the months from January-May of each year, all the Sundays are booked in all the schools across the country just so that these exams can be written by millions of students with dreams of an engineer or a doctor.

What the JEE has done over the years is give rise to entire cities whose economies thrive on the students preparing for these exams. These godforsaken children leave their homes, skip high schools and sweat it out in the coaching classes of which just one is not enough sometimes.The luckier lot gets to stay at home but is constantly reminded of the streets on which they might need to beg if they don't qualify. Parents, relatives, friends, friends of friends, even a passerby has some advise for you.There is so much free advise available all around that if it were all put together in a single person, it would humble the likes of Sri Sri Ravishankar and his Art of Living.

Please get rid of the JEE, AIEEE and all the entrance exams and make way for one single exam which tests students based on aptitude and reasoning. Why is it important to know how a pulley works or what a semiconductor is or which part of the body is used to digest sugar? Aren't the engineering and medical schools supposed to teach this stuff? All that should be required of the student should be basics of mathematics,physics and some chemistry(I would do away with this too if I could). Don't fill students with useless information that they will not need for the rest of their lives. If they do choose the devil and decide to join mechanical engineering, then it makes complete sense to teach them how a pulley works and maybe even hang them from one.

P.S.:Kapil Sibal, you might be the most hideous person I have ever seen, but I support you on this one.

Why this Mamtaveri Di!

Woman is evil, period. In politics though she is also venomous, overpowering, jealous etc. Basically a recipe for disaster. Be it the case of the "dalit ki beti" Mayawati or "Ma mati manush" bullshit  Mamta Banerjee.
Goldman Sachs would probably want to take tips from Mayawati on how to double your money in 5yrs. Luckily for the people of UP, the cyclists were able to get their punctured tires fixed and beat the slow moving elephants. Otherwise, the multiplication would have taken an exponential slope.

Coming to the Mamtaveri side of things, starting with closing the nano factory in Bengal to FDI in retail to price hike in railways, she has showed us that she is worse than the Communist who were way better with their Bandhs and working holidays who were like polar bears in hibernation during their rule. That is actually way better than opposing good policies for growth.
She was lucky enough to get a chance to ruin the present state of Bengal.

Mamta (no I won't use Didi for her) is like that astronaut who wanted to put the spaceship on reverse gear when all the thrust(The Indian Common Man) was trying to push it forward.
For her to get an insight on the condition of Railways, she should be made to sit on the tracks after a train with people having full bladders has passed through it. Sadly, this exactly describes the state of affairs our Railways is in.

She has learned one thing for certain though, how to use people's votes to ruin this country. Every time a sensible policy is put forward by the UPA, which is not quite often, she shoots it down by flexing her pawns(MPs) in the Lok Sabha. This time around though one of the pawns reached the other end of the chessboard and tried to become a messiah of Railways, but she would have none of that.

Pro-poor for Mamta means to impoverish every PSU,the government and the industry so that the poor don't feel alone anymore. She wants to take us back to stone age without cars, without trains, plowing our fields on a bullock cart. Thats progress for you from Mamta.



P.S: She is not even a woman by any standards when she refused to start an investigation of a rape victim stating it as a propaganda against her.

P.P.S:I do feel like Arnab Goswami when I talk about politics, going around with a lathi in my hand after the politicians.

India and the fallacy called Democracy!

I dare call India, a state of many monarchies. I agree that we have elections once every 5 years which are bought on the basis of biryani and some blankets, but what happens in between those 5 years is nothing close to Democracy. We have a political party which should be better known as Gandhi pvt. ltd., another which supports radicalism and many more which are born and based on thugs and dacoits. These people rule the roost, spend national assets, try to divide people based on caste and religion and shadow it all in the name of democracy and the so called supreme parliament. The agitation for Lokpal bill is a classic example, where even though we saw the middle class and the old man, Anna Hazare sweat it out, all that the political class could come up with was a debate in the parliament which said that we(parliament) are supreme, we will do what we want, you guys can keep ranting or ridiculing us on media.

A look at the political parties brings back the memories of the monarchs that ruled India pre-Independence. Congress can't dare to think beyond the Gandhis, DMK has its own monarchy with Karunanidhi who has kept up with the tradition of a king with many wives. Mulayam Singh, Late. MadhavRao Sindhia,Late Rajesh Pilot,Pratibha Patil, Late YSR Reddy all have their sons/daughters in politics. The only saving grace here is the BJP which hasn't followed this trend yet. Also, I must thank Narendra Modi, Didi(Mamta Banerjee), Amma(Jayalalitha) and Mayawati for not finding suitable matches when they were young. Regardless of the monarchy, most of them are run with the support of/by local thugs, who aspire to become MPs or MLAs one day. A resume with many murders and rapes would be perfect to become a politician.

Talking about the media which is supposed to be the fourth pillar of democracy, instead acts like the fourth pillar of the parliament. All primetime shows are parliamentary type debates moderated by Darth Vaders(star wars anyone?) such as Arnab Goswami. The funny part about all these debates are that you can listen to the same tunes in all the news channels because its the same politicians that flock from one channel to the next. Since when did moderating debates become part of news reporting?

 The result is pretty clear, India is far behind in all kinds of indexes, be it poverty,literacy, human rights,women empowerment , infrastructure etc. The growth India has experienced is entirely due to personal efforts of the people(middle-class) who are just fed up of expecting anything from the government. Classic example is the suburb of Delhi; Gurgaon. The total lack of governance in this part of the city is made up with personal efforts like generators for electricity, personal taxis for transportation, private security guards for security etc. The reason for low voter turnouts in the urban areas can be traced to this very reason. We have created our own mini India. Those who are still expecting free grains, free electricity to run their pumps and other incentives ,constitute the backward sections of the society. These people constitute the majority of the voter turnouts. Hunger and poverty drives them to beg/plead for the basic necessities from the government. Meanwhile, the government is busy in improving its statistics by lowering the below poverty line bracket to Rs26/day. I dare Sonia Gandhi to leave her mansions and try to live on Rs.26 for a day.

PS: Why do we have a mannequin in place of a Prime Minister?

The death of Bollywood

Why should I care if you lost your job when you can still drive an open car in Mumbai,get drunk in the world's most expensive places and go for a spa! Yes, folks my life's precious few hours were wasted on this gaudy monstrosity called Ek Main Aur Ek Tu, the name of which was based on the number of people that were supposed to watch this movie. I thought freedom for an average Indian meant getting to eat at all, little did I know that it actually meant to make a choice of whether to use chopsticks or hands while eating. Previously, Karan Johar only used to buy Filmfare Awards, it seems he has extended his reach to buying the film reviews as well.My frustration is not directed only at this movie but to this genre/director/producer/karan johar/shahrukh khan in general. Please explain to me why a Bollywood movie should be thought out and made from bottom up in Vegas/Spain/Germany/The Moon. A decade ago it would just be a song or two which would be fine because everyone's eyes would be concentrating on the landscape of the actress rather than that of the background. Are Spain's mountains more beautiful than the Himalayas/Nilgiris? Is the sport where you get killed by the bulls in Spain grander than "Jallikattu"?
I know what the problem is. This new generation of actors living on the new found richness of their parents(who were also actors) have lived all their lives abroad, as a pseudo Indian ,aping all the things western. So, they do not know what a life of an average Indian looks like. Hence, all their movies are rip offs of Hollywood and made in US/Europe which the Indian can neither relate to nor tolerate.
I would rather prefer watching those hindi soaps on star plus/sony. At least they stick to their script of the Indian family, although they do change the name of their serials once a while.
The effect of all this neglect towards India is pretty clear if you switch to the movie channels on your TV(zee cinema/sony/sahara filmy). A dubbed version of a Telugu movie is all there to be seen on primetime, matinee or any other time. If these movies are getting more TRPs than the Bollywood ones, that's saying a lot. There is a reason "Why this kolaveri di" got more hits than "chikni chameli" on youtube,it touched more hearts than the semi nude katrina kaif ever could.
How hard can it be to stop badnaaming the munnis, stop the chikni chamelis from getting their pahuas and get back to what Bollywood stands for, pure, undiluted India.


PS:I suggest a pre-production approval board on the lines of censor board to allow whether our precious weekend money should be spent on a cricket match and bag of chips or popcorn and Bollywood.

Smile, dear, I will put on the horns on top of your head later

Back in the good old days when computers could only count only to 10, cameras were simple optical devices with one or two pieces of glass called lenses and a film roll. This made our lives easy because if you were on a vacation you could take only 24 photos because that was the size of one roll. Now however, thanks to Bill Gates, Steve jobs and the guy next door who wears fat rimmed glasses and studies at IIT/MIT, computers have gotten smaller, so small that they dare to fit in all the cameras making them sophisticated pieces of equipment. Not that I hate what technology has done for us, but consider how complicated our lives have become. Just after returning from a vacation I realized that my camera had more than 500 photographs. Previously, you would pick and choose which moments were worth capturing on a photograph, but now you capture even your dog yawning.Pet dogs get more photos shot than Aishwarya Rai must have when she became Miss Universe. Well, getting back to the story, I realized I had to transfer all the vacation photographs on my hard drive (which will eventually crash) or on a DVD(which I will eventually lose). So, I get the DVDs from the store and hook up my camera to my laptop. Then I realize that I can be more creative and add captions to the photos, reduce red eye, maybe put some horns over my sister's head, replace the landscape etc. All this effort just to dump all these photos in the DVD which will be kept in one corner for the rest of my life. Unlike the old days when we would get a print copy of all our photos and keep them around us in the form of photo frames or albums, now they are just dumped in folders beneath folders on our computers. That is not what bothers me the most though, its the diarrhea of photos that are posted 24 hours on the social networking sites. Squiggly and disgusting insects would be the happiest of the species on earth getting so much importance.
How hard can it be to pick and choose what you want to shoot, print all your photos leaving the innocent insects to squiggle around and die to a HIT spray!