charukesi June 26th, 2008
So Kalpana Chawla was not the first. See this piece in Time Out on Sunny the Supersleuth, a short-lived seried created by the Shavurs on the exploits of Sunil Gavaskar, who apart from his known skills on field, could detonate bombs, overpower kidnappers and fly through the air like Superman.
Don’t miss the quivering damsel in clear distress, flaming red hair and all…
The Shavurs said they were loosely inspired by another Indian comic-book series of the time, Supremo, scripted by the lyricist Gulzar, which featured Amitabh Bachchan as a caped wonder - oh, the 80s were a much more exciting time than I thought - Bappi Lahiri or no Bappi Lahiri (but then, the 90s had Kumar Sanu, so why am I cribbing?)
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Caught Pyaar Ke Side Effects the other day on TV - scene at the pub - yaar, why are all superheroes unmarried? Ranvir Shoery as the pesky Naanu asks, and answers - Imagine Superman flying off to save the world - and his mobile phone rings -
Female voice at the other end - darling, where are you? when are you coming home for dinner?
charukesi June 23rd, 2008
Another week already? If you have been reading this blog for a while now, you will know my on-now off-now attitude towards full time work. I am on an ‘on’ phase right now - and surprising myself each day by enjoying it more than I had thought possible. This leaves me with little time for other things, including photography - but here are a couple of pieces I had been working on for some time that finally saw the light of day this month…
Midsummer madness - on the midsummer watch parade in Chester - appeared in Mint Lounge end May.
…And Uneasy dreams of Bundi - in the June issue of Himal.
Read on. And the photographs at flickr here - Chester and Bundi.
Have a nice week!
charukesi June 18th, 2008
Puzzled over this since I read it a couple of days ago - Government’s gift for rural brides: Pregnancy test strips!
The government will give packets of pregnancy test strips to rural women on the occasion of their marriage - to reduce unwanted pregnancies and maternal mortality across India. So how are pregnancy kits a way to avoid unwanted pregnancies?
So has the government accepted defeat over its family planning program and has decided that abortion is better than prevention? Whatever happened to varmala ke saath saath aur ek mala ko dhyan me rakhna? and all that?
charukesi June 14th, 2008
interfere with my education. and when it is a question of exams…
Mumbai Mirror gave six Class XII toppers a simple GK test. Most of them didn’t even come close to getting a first-class - and so the newspaper calls them rather cruelly, floppers in its cover story of Friday June 13th.
The questions we posed to them were based on common knowledge that any educated citizen should have. But most of them got less than 50% marks in our test. The overall HSC topper, Priyanka Shah, who had got 96.59% in the Board exams, in fact got 36% marks in the GK test, and one of the CBSE toppers got just 27%.
On this article which goes on to attack the “mugging-culture” in the education system, a commentor has this to say - “You have infront of you, your whole life, to get your General Knowlege ripe. You did the right thing by concentrating on the studies. You can pick up newspapers anytime and improve your general knowledge throughout your life. There is no need to feel any sense of incompleteness or a lack of confidence on that”. Concentrating on studies is one thing - but to the exclusion of everything else?
And as an aside, also this - which I found myself agreeing with - Please don’t call them flopper and that too on the front page of a leading daily. I am very sure if similar kind of test is conducted for your newspaper staff you guys won’t be able to score anything near to what these kids scored.
charukesi June 12th, 2008
How often have you heard that people spend far too much time in front of their computers and just do not read these days? Adverblog links to this great site created by Colenso BBDO Auckland for the New Zealand Book Council to make reading books more… well, more like reading computer screens.
The home page opens to a windows look-alike where you sign in as guest - and the screen turns into your computer desktop - complete with folders containing different reading genre - I clicked on poetry and found myself reading Brian Turner’s Listening to the river through pie-charts and sales pyramids.
What a superb idea! Definitely go check out readatwork.
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Related reading : from an earlier post
Literary classics become txt msgs - anything to get them to read!
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