The Simian Brigade - 1

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http://cx.aos.ask.com/question/aq/700px-700px/what-is-a-group-of-monkeys-called_3c76d414-993e-4d5b-82f1-2ad569d0fbcf.jpg

"Telangana Govt finds it an uphill task to curb monkey menace"...News Report



Well, Telangana's Hyderabad is not alone...I read that Lutyen's Delhi, including our Parliament House, is full of monkeys that the Netas find hard to control both within and without.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/photo/39381568.cms

I guess everyone loves to watch a troop of monkeys as long as they are not menaced by them...the confusion between 'they' and 'them' is intentional.

Monkeys do not make good pets, I believe. RKN says that he had a pet monkey in his childhood at Madras. This monkey was however always chained and one fine evening he broke his chain and ran away knowing fully well that he would meet his death by stoning by city urchins or other monkeys in a troop. Monkeys don't welcome back one of their kind who was snatched away as a pet and raised by monkeys higher in the Darwinian hierarchy.

The question arises why RKN's pet monkey ran away breaking his chains to meet his most probable death. The answer is well-known to the street-folks of France who revolted against their king a couple of centuries ago:

"Death (or possible freedom) is preferable to a lifetime of chains"

...ask Rousseau if you don't  believe me.

This hunger for freedom of the spirit at the expense of life is still adored by the French...ask her cartoonists...I don't imply, no, never, that the said cartoonists shared anything with RKN's pet.

Anyway I was and am fond of watching troops of monkeys as long as they don't enter my home and commit nuisance. 

Our parliamentarians in the Lok Sabha were smiling when a senior citizen of their ilk made nasty comments about a minister, who happens to be a lady to boot, a few days back. This gent is again in the news today:

"Samajwadi people (Socialists) should spurn Padmashri and Padmabhushan (uspe laat maarna chahiye). These awards are given to only those people who are dishonest (beimaan) these are given only to people from high echelons of society." 

"Not a single dalit (member of backward caste), adivasi (tribal) or farmer figured in the list of Padma awardees this year.

 

Speaking to the media after the event, he stuck to his guns, saying "Whatever I have said, I have said."

"I said not a single dalit, adivasi, farmer is there in the list (of this year's awardees). This has been happening for the last 68 years," he said.

He had recently triggered a controversy in Parliament with his remarks about the body and complexion of south Indian women while speaking about discrimination on the basis of the colour of the skin.

Read more at: 

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/sharad-yadav-padma-awards-comment/1/429694.html

There was this letter to the editor of DC yesterday titled: 'Disrespect':

"In the photograph Top Honour (April 9)  the President is seen wishing women's cricket team Captain Mithali Raj with a namaskar. But she is ignoring the namaskar and is looking at the camera. I think she should have acknowledged the President's namaskar."

Alphonse Jude
Secunderabad

http://st3.cricketcountry.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Indian-President-Pranab-Mukherjee-R-presents-the-Padma-Shri-Award-to-cricketer-Mithali-Raj.jpg

I protest that this is just a frame of one femtosecond...she might have earlier smiled and done a charming pronam to our President. And I see with my sleepy eyes that our President looks rather tired of the entire affair...his eyelids seem to be drooping with fatigue...I maybe wrong and if so I tender my hearty apology to all concerned in this post.


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Dark & Lovely - 5

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I am now wading into deep political waters and may get arrested despite the glad news that our Supreme Court has scrapped Sec 66A...that is another story for another day.

Let me declare outright that I am neither a member nor a sympathizer of any political party. I have equal regard for all. But I find our present PM interesting because he is different.

A few days ago a Bihari member of his ministry known for his provocative statements bowled yet another of his googlies. 

Earlier, during the hectic electioneering for Lok Sabha, he said that whoever doesn't vote for Modi should go to Pakistan. Naturally this was pounced upon by my secular friends in print in DC who condemned it. A couple of them, a lady and a gent, declared that they were not going to vote for Modi and would gladly shift to Pakistan if Modi were to become our PM...they did nothing of the sort...they are still whining, sitting here in Delhi and Bombay and contributing columns to DC and bagging monies.

This time this gent from Bihar asked a question that went something like:

"Would Congress have welcomed her as their president had Rajiv Gandhi married a black Nigerian woman rather than a white Italian?"

Shit at once hit all the fans and everyone who was offended asked for the outright dismissal of this firebrand...of course nothing of the sort happened...elections are looming in Bihar.

But none answered that question with a 'yes', or 'no', or 'I don't know' or 'it depends'.

I find that the lady whom the said Gandhi married does have a white skin and is Italian but she is no Gina Lollobrigida (see the pic above) according to me. 

And the pic below shows a popular Nigerian actress who is certainly dark and surely lovely, according to me again.

http://www.africangrio.com/thumbnail.php?file=images/nuella_njubigbo_385377490.jpg&size=article_medium

So my answer to the above question is: 'it depends'...I love this answer since I reveled in it while I was teaching physics at IIT KGP for 4 decades and faced many inconvenient physics questions from students, like:

"Is electron a particle or a wave?"

On the other hand, I now ask the following question to all the Congresswalas who got offended by the Bihari:

"Why did our Italian-born queen not accept the PM crown when it was hers according to her voters; but instead shoved it on to a turbaned head that was toothless?"

This is a question that can't be bypassed since it is a matter of future history of the nation.

I don't think it is a matter of supreme sacrifice since she was the de facto PM for a decade according to her opposition.

Unfair folks say that it was out of fear for life...the opposition lady, who is now strutting, had threatened to shave her head. But why fear a shaved head?...even I got mine shaved recently when my mom was airlifted to heaven:

And no one...I repeat no one, not even little Ishani, feared me alas!...

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Dark & Lovely - 4

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http://img1.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/14/14-michelle-obama.w529.h529.2x.jpg

Much before the current old yadav spoke wildly about the good bodies of south Indian ladies, there was this other yadav who once boasted:

"As long as aloo is there in samosa, Lalu will be there in Bihar"

Unfortunately there are still aloos in samose but this cow-cruncher is nowhere in Bihar politics. This rumbustious kid boasted that he would make the roads of his Bihar as smooth as a southee actress's cheeks...some cheek that! But, the lady just laughed it away...film stars and politicians love to joust one another...all they crave is publicity.

And then there is this yet another yadav kid from UP who dismissed his brahmin minister for cracking the same joke...this yadav doesn't seem to tolerate competition: 

http://www.dnaindia.com/entertainment/report-my-sympathies-to-the-minister-who-lost-his-job-hema-malini-1822837

All yadavs and kurmis and bcs of the north are now jelling together under a vast bowl to rediscover their place in the sun which is stolen by a gujju threatening their very existence. But all yadavs forget that their entire clan got drowned in the Arabian Sea along with their Dvaraka which happens to be in Gujerat.

Well, that is how political irony goes.

With a couple of honorable exceptions, the entire India, north, south, east, and west is obsessed with the fair skin of their girls. In my childhood there appeared the first ad for Lux soaps which featured many film stars who revealed the secret of their glowing skin...viz Lux.

All girls of my village fell for these Lux calendar stars and saved pennies of their pocket money to buy half of a Lux soap...the other half went to their moms. Dads were happy for several reasons like the saleability of their dot products...no way...

The limit was 50 years later when my wife discovered a tube of cream in the purse of our young housemaid who had a glowing skin that was as dark as mine. The ad for it is fatuous: 

http://s1.hubimg.com/u/2992396_f520.jpg

Nothing came out of it though...when last heard, she is still single.

There was this Bengali professor at IIT KGP who returned lock stock and barrel one day from London where he had a flourishing business of smart materials for two decades and more. When asked why he left England and returned to his home country leaving all his business, he replied:

"I decided to get back the night my 12-year daughter said to me...'papa! you are a wizard in material science; can't you invent a cream that makes me as fair as my English classmates?' "

In the 1960s there came up this weird slogan:

"Black is Beautiful!"

engineered by the blacks of the US. It went wild and all of us who bought black shoes instead of brown used to say:

"Black is Beautiful!"

That shows how slogans get twisted out of shape. 

I guess all kids...certainly all smiling babes are beautiful whatever their skin color, texture, pallor, or warts. 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/42234F79-B5F1-4F49-B66D5D747D34D278.jpg

This is similar to the Maugham statement in Painted Veil:

"Beauty is also a gift of God. You should be thankful if you have it and, if you don't, you should be thankful that others have it for your pleasure...beauty is not in the body but in the soul"

By that I mean that every kid, girl or boy or man or lady, black, brown or white looks divine when they smile out of their inner happiness oozing out to enchant all of us...some preaching that...sorry!

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Dark & Lovely - 3

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http://im.rediff.com/movies/2012/may/07sl9.jpg

To say that I am not color-conscious is to be a damned hypocrite.

When I turned about 5, I was made aware by sly comparisons that I was not as fair as my paternal cousins most of whom were fair and handsome. And that gave me an inferiority complex that persists. So were most of my half dozen siblings. To make matters worse, both my parents were fair and handsome...their kids had a recessive gene...our maternal uncles were what were called: chaamana chaaya (pale brown).

Then and there I decided that I would marry, if at all, a fair girl, cateris paribus, which I did. And luckily my son and his daughter turned out to be as fair as vanilla ice cream:

http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/34700000/White-Vanilla-Ice-Cream-white-34727364-600-447.jpg

Ishani was born late one evening in Nellore. And my wife, myself, and my son were in Hyderabad at home waiting anxiously for the news of Ishani's safe arrival on this earth. And Ishani's auntie was our foreign correspondent staying onsite outside the surgery at Nellore and speaking to us minute by minute. And when the baby was ultimately brought out to be exhibited to the waiting relatives, her auntie broke us the news thus:

"It is a girl! Oh, she is as fair as Snow White!!! And her ample hair is jet black!!!"

In 1978, I was standing outside the labor room at Gudur waiting for the arrival of my sister's baby at 2, in pouring rain. When the news arrived that a boy was born, my mom went in and came out after ten minutes and said I could then go in and visit the mother and child. By when I went in, my sister (whose hubby was the fairest of all) was watching her new arrival lying beside her. And when she saw me, she instinctively looked at me and then at her son back and forth a couple of times. And I asked her:

"So you are worried if your son is as brown as his uncle instead of his dad!!!"

And she blushed and said:

"I wish he would get your brains instead of your brown"

Fat lot of a consolation that was for me. For the record, he turned out to be not as fair as his dad nor as dark as his uncle...some mixture there. And he is now a physician (instead of a physics teacher) in England. And when his son was born recently, his dad called me up and said:

"I wish my grandson would be as talented as you are!"

which made me conclude that the chap is not as dark as I am...

When I grew up to be a professor of physics a IIT KGP, I was sharing for two decades office with my colleague, DB, who was a shade darker than me but more talented. So we got on well enough till one day he returned from Calcutta and bragged that someone there compared his looks with Soumitra Chatterjee's:

http://static.cinemagia.ro/img/db/actor/00/56/04/soumitra-chatterjee-659938l.jpg

That gave me a sudden pang of inferiority complex again after two decades. 

Luckily, however, that evening a student whom I gave a fantastic (though a wee undeserving) reco entered our office and announced that he got admission and TA into Chicago Univ, and gifted me a copy of Anurag Mathur's 'Inscrutable American'. And when I flipped it I discovered his scribble: 

"To Sir with Love"

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/2/Open/Sony%20Pictures/To%20Sir,%20With%20Love/_derived_jpg_q90_600x800_m0/ToSirWithLove-Still1_CR.jpg?partner=allmovie_soap

And I showed it to DB and he was duly smitten with envy ;)


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Dark & Lovely - 2

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http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ojy_UgBZbxo/maxresdefault.jpg

Yesterday I was talking about the senior Yadav MP from Bihar who found himself waxing eloquent in the Lok Sabha about the body and skin of South Indian ladies attributing their lure to him to their training in dance.

Well, he is as innocent of my real South Indian ladies as I am about the village belles of his Bihar. His knowledge is gleaned from the few Hindi movies he must have watched with ogle-boggles in which several South Indian actresses have made it good.

Last night I was reading a review of a recently published book titled:

"Unforgettable: The Iconic Women of South Indian Cinema"

In it there is this curious fact that many South Indian actresses made it good in Bollywood but not South Indian actors. The list of such actresses is formidable including oldies like  TR Rajkumari, Padmini, B. Saroja Devi, Jamuna, Jayalalita, Jaya Prada, Sridevi and Vyjayantimala; and later ones like Hema Malini, Waheeda Rehman, Rekha, Vidya Balan, not to talk of perhaps Aishwarya Rai.

The reviewer writes:

"...female stars from the South look like goddesses who seem to have jumped out of calendars hanging in their living rooms. Most of these women, apart from being very talented performers, have voluptuous figures and incredibly beautiful eyes. They mesmerise the northern male. The fact that almost all of them have trained as classical dancers also helps since singing and dancing are essential components of our films."

The reviewer is a Patel. What is ok for a Guju in print is not ok for a Yadav in speech in parliament.

He also writes:

"...a north Indian filmgoer's idea of good looks does not include the southern male --- medium height, dark features..."

Well, times have changed a bit with the advent of the youtube.  

The young chap at the header of this post had his fifteen minutes of fame not only in South India but across Indian and abroad.

Something there for tomorrow...


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Dark & Lovely - 1

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http://docs.testplant.com/sites/default/files/images/eggPlant-v12.png

Of late there has been a lot of brouhaha in our political circles about the skin color of ladies, both south and north Indian and Italian and Nigerian to boot.

It all started with a senior (read old) parliamentarian belonging to the famed Krishna clan...Krishna himself is as dark as a cumulonimbus cloud as his name indicates...maybe that's why.

This guy was speaking in the Lok Sabha about the insurance bill. And suddenly he found himself speaking about the color and texture of the skin of South Indian ladies...there are no women in this blog...all are ladies.

This reminded me of a faculty meeting in the Phy Dept of IIT KGP in the 1970s. The topic under discussion was teaching and how to improve it. The agenda was an outcome of students' feedback that phy teachers were the worst of the lot.

There were senior professors like HNB, SDM and GBM adorning the front benches. And us juniors were sipping tea and smoking fags surreptitiously in the last bench. As expected, the senior bhadralok started lecturing the juniors as to how to rivet the attention of the students. And we were smiling...except HNB, who was known as a world-class teacher, the other two were as innocent of teaching as a fish struggling on the sand. 

Suddenly there was this intrepid backbencher SVD (known as Shivajee because of his Maharashtra ancestry) who could stand this no further. He ground his fag under his shoe and shouted:

"All will be well if the eloquent senior professors go to the class prepared to teach physics and stop stammering and start rambling like street-smart magicians"

There was a stunned silence and the meeting took a break for snacks. And everyone left one by one...snacks were the draw.

Coming back to our Lok Sabha, the veteran speaker is reputed to have said something like:

"North Indian ladies have fair skins alright but the dark South Indian ladies have great bodies because they dance well"

Upon which the lady minister of education, who is trying hard to polish up the fading systems of IITs and abolish the UGC, took offence and gently reminded the senior speaker of the insurance agenda and asked him to please not talk about the skin of the ladies south or north.

Upon which the speaker pounced on her and chided the junior-most MP:

"I know what you are!"

I am sure the speech was in upcountry Hindi and untranslatable. 

Upon which the gents sitting (and not sleeping) in their seats simpered instead of coming to the rescue of the lady minister. 

This must have brought tears to the lady (if any were left after the saas-bahu serials), reminding me of the Telugu saying about the lady who cried after being beat up by her hubby:

"I din't mind my hubby beating me but I can't stand the laughter of my sisters-in-law"

The said lady minister had already had her bit of spat with another ex-parliamentarian:


http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/sanjay-nirumpam-remark-against-smriti-irani-irks-many/1/238786.html

Well, that's for today...see how I have rambled like a senior professor of phy at IIT KGP...


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Forgot how to blog

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Well, I am alive and kicking, sort of.

That was a long leave for introspection like our own Shehzada...no trace of him yet.

Many things have happened in these 3-month absence from the goofy space.

I lost my mom (92) in January. In all her 92 years that I know, she was bedridden only on her last two days on this earth. And she kept her brain as fresh as ever. 

Ishani has graduated from her kindergarten Lilly School and they had a fantastic Graduation Ceremony. On behalf of her class she was asked to make a speech of 8 lines. And she did it better than I ever did...she had 2 full days to prepare for her 'impromptu' valedictory address before a mike and a hall-full audience.

And she has started going to her new school in a school bus. So no more driving duties for me...I see her off at 7.30 AM and welcome her at 1.30 PM.

Well, though I have been down with the familiar bronchial problems I haven't been altogether lazy...idle man's brain.

I have composed a Shatakam (100 verses) in flat 25 days (and nights). Unfortunately they are all in Telugu with impeccable prosody calling for strict rhythm and rhyme. The Shatakam is dedicated to my eldest brother-in-law, Sri G. Ranga Rao, IAS. And as you can expect, all of the verses are political satire on current affairs. And each 4-line verse ends with the same last line having my B-i-L's name in it. For those few readers who are well-versed in Telugu, here is a sample:

1  38. Warm weather is due to hot winds says Weather Report:

వేడి గాలి వల్ల వచ్చు తాప మనురు

వచ్చు మబ్బు వల్ల వర్ష మనురు

వెఱ్ఱి బాగులోళ్ళు వెదరు పండితులుర

వెంకటాద్రి  సుతుడ  వినుర రంగ

Well, that is for today...don't know when the next post will be...que sera  sera




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