Crazy Opulence

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I am crazy.

You need proof? Here it is:

I brush my teeth at least half a dozen times every day. And take cold shower every time I brush my teeth. I eat only one meal a day at 3 AM. Not on the desolate dining table but on my bed with my snoring wife for company.

I define craziness as an alarming lack of sense of proportion teetering forever on the precipice of stark madness.

Crazy folks do few things. But when they do them they overdo them atrociously.

I am not alone. The recessive gene (I have to check with Supratim on this) is endemic in AP...all of us here are crazy.

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I never heard of IIT Kharagpur (or any other Poor for that matter) till my frustrated co-research scholar discovered an ad for a junior faculty position at that strange place while scanning Indian Express. (The rest, as Pratik once put it, is history...me, he, DB and SDM are all co-travelers).

None of my co-research scholars too ever heard of IIT when they bid me fond Farewell...one smart-aleck said that Physics people are treated as harijans in an Engineering College (no offense meant).

When I used to go home to Gudur on Vacations, folks in the market place used to ask me where I work. And sneer at me saying that I had to go all the way to Calcutta when brighter people got the same job at Gudur itself. (They confused IIT with ITI, the Industrial Training Institute which gives one-year diplomas for those who couldn't make it to college).

It has always been my policy to keep mum when long and fruitless explanations are called for.

Till 1990s few students in AP ever heard of IITs.

Then, one lone Teacher in Hyderabad started coaching bright Hyderabadi students for IIT JEE.

They then learned that an IIT Degree is a passport to their American Heaven.

The flood gates opened crazily in no time.

Listen to this news item in today's newspaper:

"...Of the 2,610 students who qualified from the IIT Madras zone last year, 2,095 were from AP. With 9,059 seats available in 15 IITs nation-wide, students from AP got 22 percent seats. Which means that almost every fourth student joining the IITs last year was from AP...Last year, AP students bagged seven out of the top ten ranks in IIT-JEE including the all-India first rank for the first time ever..."

It is a news report and is liable to the familiar errors...but still...I mean what a lark!!!

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When I was a kid, the few Telugu films ever produced were poor cousins of Tamil films...and they had to take the help of studios housed in Madras.

And they were phenomenally good and memorable for their social content, music, dance and culture.

Then the Telugu producers fought with Tamilians and shifted their operations to Hyderabad.

Listen what happened then on from today's news item:

"...The Telugu film industry, which boasts of producing the second most number of films in the country, has earned the dubious distinction of being on the top in trying to peddle obscenity, vulgarity and violence in films....In terms of length, for the year 2008 a total of 8,073.68 meters of film had to be cut by filmmakers as the censors found it objectionable. Compare this figure to Bollywood's 1,825.66 meters...and Bengal's 116.59 meters.."

Hurray!!!

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Not convinced?

Here is another statistic:

A weird chap from Hyderabad posted 600 odd blogs in less than two and half years...and Supratim says:

"...like good wine, (they) are getting even better with time..."

QED

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