If the embedded video doesn’t play you can watch it here

Then compare this song. Bharat Bhushan sings in front of a mike in a radio station recording studio. All the expressions are so subtle. He looks a bit conscious, a bit reminiscent, slightly romantic and he also seems to be putting in an effort to sing properly. Notice how when he says dil mein tufaan uthate huae jazbaat ki raat he comes forward and grabs the mike with both hands as a natural reaction to reaching higher notes (I too have this tendency to grab something – sounds crude, though – when I’m singing higher notes). This is how you sing.

Of course I’m not saying this is the only way of singing. I’m just talking about enacting this particular sequence. The director has so dexterously captured the contours of the character.

Got me thinking. When they announced, did they even in their wildest dreams think that a visually, hearing or physically challenged person may take part in the contest and win? Why leave mentally challenged? Well, I didn’t include this category because some of the contestants already seemed…

In a totally inclusive society that would be taken care of. I’ll welcome feedback from my friends living in the first world countries where disability laws are quite inclusive and stringent but what about such reality programs there? Would they include a disabled person if such a case scenario arises, and can they be persecuted if they are unable to make provisions?

When it comes to accessibility and inclusiveness my opinion is that it’s more about minority and majority than disability. A majority community is always, traditionally, insensitive towards the problems faced by the minority community. Among thousands of people, you come across just one or two persons who require assistive adjustments on the staircases, bathrooms and shopping counters. That’s why they’re “adjustments” and not a part of the architecture, the way it should be. It took a Stephen Hawking to visit India and sensitize the government about making Taj Mahal wheelchair accessible, although of late some NGOs have been doing stellar job at making other tourist places accessible, including Qutub Minar.

Coming back to Big Boss 3, I think such shows can revolutionize the concept of inclusive society if by default they keep the format of the program in such a manner that anybody can participate, irrespective of his or her abilities and disabilities.

Ideally, this type of holiday should be taken so that we can sit aside for a day and think about the great soul. People should get together, whether online and offline, and talk about Mahatma Gandhi: his life, his philosophy, how he supposedly got us independence, his non-violent (and controversial) ways, and what he thought about the world in general (and about sex, according to this Tweet from Pritish Nandy). There should be neighborhood gatherings (do we still have those?) of kids and adults and hold discussions on Mahatma Gandhi. Do we do that? Hardly.

For instance, this time it was nothing but an extended weekend. People pack up their bags and go to visit places they can visit and come back by late Sunday evening. Or they simply laze around. You hear or read things about Gandhi only while casually browsing through TV news channels, Twitter streams and blogs. Music and entertainment channels start broadcasting Valentines-related or festival-related programs days in advance (so that people don’t absentmindedly forget about spending their money on greeting cards, expensive gifts and themed dinners). They don’t even show themed songs the way they, occasionally, do on Republic and Independence Days. So it just becomes a holiday. So should we have it?

This holiday should be scrapped. But instead of working or studying, people should do some brainstorming on how we can improve our country? When was the last time you constructively talked about making your country a better place to live? We all criticize and crib as regularly as we shit, but how many times we actually think about solutions and how to implement them? If the guys at BlogActionDay can organize blog action days year after year and motivate bloggers all over the world to write on relevant topics, why cannot we organize such days on Gandhi Jayanti? Senior managers and school/college principals should organize cleanliness drives where they visit neighboring places and clean them up. You may think what can be achieved by doing such things once a year? Not much. But do you think our country is so hopeless that if hundreds of thousands of people participate in this annual event, not even a few hundred will carry on the work for a few more days and in the process motivate more people?

Before proceeding further, please give your opinion on this issue using the poll given below.

Many, including Maharashtra’s Chief Minister Ashok Chavan, has said that Karan Johar shouldn’t have apologized to Raj Thakery and given in to his gundaraj. I feel he did the right thing. So much is at stake when you make and release a film. The problem in our country is that you will find people a-dime-a-dozen who will tell you what you should do and shouldn’t, but when it actually comes to standing by your side and taking on the onslaught they conveniently disappear.

The thing is, you can either be a crusader or an entrepreneur. For Johar, they can shove the name up their asses as long as they let him run his movie. It’s like being mugged in a dark alley (actually our entire country is becoming like a dark alley); you don’t confront the gang of muggers or try to talk sense into them. You simply hand over to them whatever you have and move in with life. Losing your life over small things is not worth it. People like Raj Thakery and his goons are like those muggers. If they are happy with a paltry apology, big deal, you shouldn’t lose your sleep over it. Give it to them and move on. People won’t even remember this after a few days.

But then, you may ask, doesn’t it encourage them to commit further mischief? Yes. Too bad. We ourselves have made our society like this by continuously choosing wrong governments election after election. Raj Thakery and such are socio-legal problems and they have to be dealt at the police and political level. You cannot expect (and shouldn’t) Karan Johar to leave everything and start a campaign against Raj Thakery just to prove a point. All he wants to do is make films and earn profits, which is quite a legitimate aspiration. Instead of urging him to stand up to Raj Thakery and his goons, people themselves should organize a campaign and show Raj Thakery his true place.

After going through the details of the website I’m designing for them and the near-future social media strategy we started talking about the socio-political scene of the country. While talking Nalin gave a very interesting suggestion that he had also presented in the New Delhi municipality and administrative meeting around a year ago, and was laughed at. It’s about improving efficiency levels among bureaucrats and politicians.

He says whenever you are managing a civic service or a constituency you should be made to bear what other people have to go through. For instance, if certain government hospitals are under your administration, then you and your family can only get treated in those hospitals and nowhere else, and if you go to another hospital you should provide a valid reason. If you are in charge of a relocation drive then you should be ready to live in the newly settled colony and use the same amenities available to its residents. If some schools are under you then your kids have to study in those schools.

The gist is, whatever you manage, use it. This way you’ll make sure that things work properly. You’ll make sure the hospitals under you are hygienic (you can actually fall sick if you visit the general wards of AIIMS and Safdardjang Hospital) and the doctors come on time and are humane (right now they are nothing less then barbaric, not all of course), etc. You will want the schools to work properly. You will make sure amenities like electricity, water, roads, street lights are functional and the security of the air is actually present.

Wondering if such a thing can happen.

The Indian media is in a frenzy of course. I remember the launch of Chandrayaan-I didn’t create much buzz in the mainstream media, in fact Rahul G and Sonia G travelling in 3rd class and Shashi Tharoor tweeting on cattle class got much more coverage.

When Chandrayaan-I was launched on October 22, 2008 from Sriharikota’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre there were some who even protested that why India is sending a mission to the moon and wasting money, after all, what purpose can be solved by sending probes and people to the moon? Today’s media hubbub may be because of the NASA conference together with scientists from ISRO where they declared that Chandrayaan-I, along with Deep Impact and Cassini probes, have given evidence of the lunar soil containing traces of water.

Why is Chandrayaan-I finding water on the moon a big discovery?

No doubt it is a proud moment for India and re-establishes its scientific prowess. The brilliant Indian scientists who willingly choose to work in India don’t have enough resources to do their work. Hopefully more attention will be paid to them. India is now definitely on the world map of space science.

Why presence on the moon is important?

Space science is not just about releasing satellites into the orbits, sending deep space probes to find new planets and hopefully life or collecting lunar soil and rocks. Lots of scientific discoveries and inventions take place while scientists are working on space shuttles because of the extreme conditions.

In a few years many countries will be setting up lunar bases to conduct scientific experiments. Highly powerful telescopes will be constructed there so that distant stars, constellations, black holes, comets and planets can be seen more clearly. Countries having easy access to the moon may even set up colonies or generate power there to be beamed back to the earth.

Water on the moon also means there can be life there. This is like jumping the gun, but at least, water being there means that water can be extracted for consumption and irrigation once humans start farming in their lunar enclosures.

Of course the Indian media must acknowledge the contribution of the Moon Mineralogy Mapper – M3 – specifically designed by the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to search for water on the lunar surface. This means it’s not an accidental discovery, and scientists were already expecting such a find. To be precise Chandrayaan-I carried 11 scientific instruments built in India, the US, Britain, Germany, Sweden and Bulgaria.

This is certainly going to be a big boost for Chandrayaan-II, slated for 2012/2013. It will also give it a precise location to land.

In one of the shots in the song they show a sad-looking Mallika Sherawat lying on her bed with the close up of the face. As soon as her face covered the YouTube screen my daughter pointed at her and said, "Papa look, vagina."

Ruffled, I used the time line slider to move backward and see what exactly prompted her to pronounce the word but got no clue. I asked her why she had said that but she didn’t deem it necessary to answer my question.

She’s familiar with the word as we don’t normally suppress her curiosity and she knows that girls have a vagina and boys have a penis. Still wondering what made her say Papa look, vagina, when she saw Mallika Sherawat’s face.

Of course then you start thinking whether the sun is going to come up in the morning or not. The previous history of the world says that it should, but then, who knows?

The author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, calls himself an empiricist who believes on focusing on how things cannot be done rather than how they can be done. It rather sounds like a negative attitude, but this is the perception perhaps that he wants to change. He says we live in a world defined by our experiences and the events that we remember, and this stifles our ability to see things as they are. I find myself agreeing to this philosophy, as I myself have experienced personal biases due to congealed memories of real and imagined events.

By the end of today’s reading, there’s a portion that explains how, throughout our lives sometimes, we deprive ourselves of multiple smaller happinesses in search of some bigger, elusive (The Black Swan) happiness that happens once in a lifetime. Is it worth it? It depends on how you perceive happiness. May be that bigger, once-in-a-lifetime happiness means more to you than the smaller, everyday happinesses. The problem is, that bigger happiness may or may not happen.

He explains this by terming successes of novels, books, movies, an artist or a scientific discovery as Black Swans. They may change the world, but you’re never sure of their occurrence. Their successes are unexplained. Thousands of better books never see the light of the day. Exceptionally brilliant scientists commit suicides because they are way ahead of their time. Movies that should have been super hits flop. Why? I’m still to read that portion.

This book makes you sleepy unless you’re hell bent upon stretching your reading abilities, or may be I have been simply too tired because I start reading it after I’ve already slogged for 6-7 hours. Lots of abstract philosophy and logic, lots of references to mathematicians and philosophers, their experiments and their observations. The humor sounds clichéd and hence off-putting sometimes, like repeatedly making fun of the French, the bankers and the financial forecasters. Nonetheless, I have found some worthy nuggets of wisdom and I plan to finish it in the coming days.