Krazy Kochi

Strike tourism: St Mark's Square, Venice: Striking Workers T he marked shift from picture postcard tourism to the participatory kind has given our perception of tourism new spectacles. To view from a distance and snap a picture “Wah Taj!” is considered the jaded route. Tourists have outgrown brochures and are experiencing the esoteric. “The elections in Kerala”, “Monsoon Tourism”, are the new packaged ideas that now draw tourists to this God forsaken destination. And it was the Minister for Home and Tourism of the State of Kerala, Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, who suggested that the striking trademark of communism as a marketable tourism commodity. Even in jest, his was the pitch of a true blue capitalist salesman. He said, “After Monsoon tourism, strike tourism seems to be the emerging trend in the state. There are tourists who visit the state to witness strikes.” Political Tourists Ahh! Even Working Communism with its practitioners has the potential to bring in the political tour...

If ONLY. If only some nun or some son of a gun had asked me what I did for fun: I went through school, through college and through some life. My list of fun…..Long. But no such question was put to me. My favourite fun thing: (Advisable to Hold your breath here) Cultivate my underarm hair, Curl it, Braid it and Bow it. Definitely would have breezed through Harvard . And The Dean of admissions would have loved it. THe GOOgle GAGGle At the work place I hang out with the Google Generation. I like to call them that coz for better part of their lives Mama Google has suckled them. Imagine Life without Google! But I have been weaned on a healthier diet of Doordarshan before I gorged on the alien Star TV and the Newsage.( Very much like the Iceage- all that information kind of smothers you and buries you .) For foreign affairs on DD, I was treated to the suave stuck record Prannoy Roy with his “Good evening and welcome to the world this week’’. He never let go of that l...

Notice the tilt? Who's got the upper hand? Most newspapers point out that it would cost the central government just about 8000 crores to get the infrastructure in place to increase student capacity in the existing centrally funded colleges to appease all sections of society. And all this money is going back to the same centrally funded colleges in the same states. Has Arjun ever considered reservation for the backward states? No. No. No. no no no Reserve some time and read a little... Even as the Central Government spearheads a policy for higher education tethered to reservations for an equitable India, what is shocking is the HRD Ministry's consistent negligence in allocating funds for higher education and for technical institutions to certain states since independence. Digambra Patra (Department of Physics, Waseda University, Tokyo), a Japanese scientist of Indian origin, and professor Chitta Baral (Arizona University), who have analysed in detail the Union Government fundi...

The man who popped out of a gigantic egg and sang with ease such bombastic gibberish in the film Amar, Akbar, Anthony, "wait, wait,wait.... you see the whole country of the system is juxtapositioned by the haemoglobin in the atmosphere because you are a sophisiticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your verbosity.... '' or played with equal ease the part of a brooding anti-hero in Namak Haram , or the jealous type in Abhimaan and more recently the sensitive teacher in Black, is the one-man industry `Bachchanwood' who has entertained the world for decades. In Munnar, for the shooting of Ram Gopal Varma's "bold and different'' film Nishabd, Amitabh Bachchan chatted with a few journalists at Hotel Tea County late at night, after a hard day's shoot. The casual atmosphere in the room was only seemingly casual. Bachchan was in control as he led us down memory lane reflecting on the best and the worst periods of his career. He joked, lau...

For a whole month, the press in Kerala just had no time for the man called Big B. They were busy with the heat and dust of election coverage. Then one fine day they woke up and rushed to meet him. It is amazing how many people think the same thoughts in a single day. More on Big B.... .

This guy is quite a cat. He Calls a press conference and sends in his mother to bowl the over. He now sports a new look for the Caribbean tour. The fiery baldness will further accentuate this six-footer's aggressive style: his glare, the pumping of his fists and his body language. And that's the best thing about Santhakumaran Sreesanth, one of Team India's most exciting pace bowlers. He has no qualms about displaying his idiosyncrasies or plain freaking out on the field. Some say he's weird, some say he's cool. Be it the different coloured sneakers for his test debut at Nagpur (black stripes on one shoe and red band on the other) or the jig he does when he gets a wicket; this feisty psychology student knows what it takes to get the striker's goat. And he will go to any lengths to intimidate the batsman. Religion is cool The 23 year old bowler from Kerala is paradoxical to say the least. This religious youngster begins his day with the gayatri mantra and ends it...

The Plagiarism Debate: Unpacking Arundhati Roy’s Literary Influences The Kaavya Vishwanathan episode: a young Harvard student writes a book called How Opal Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life and it gets published by Little, Brown. The writer is accused of plagiarizing from Megan McCafferty’s book. Kaavy apologises but her books are pulled off the shelves and pulped.  This literary scandal takes me back to a time in 2001, when I compared Arundhati Roy’s book,  The God of Small Things to “ To Kill a Mockingbird’’ (published by The New Indian Express) and later in 2003 compared Roy’s book to Ulysses by James Joyce (published by the Vijay Times). There are marked similarities but it didn’t bother Roy’s big and magnanimous conscience – even a wee bit. I had heard about Roy a long time ago, in 1984, when she was a little Ms.Nobody. And from then on admired her guts and loved her irreverent style. Five of my friends had spent years of study under Mrs. Roy, Susie's mother...