Life in General

OK, I'm no longer the grammar policeman I used to be. Partly because I'm quite fallible myself and leave myself exposed to corrections galore and partly because I'm inured. However, there are still some solecisms that get me. I've spoken elsewhere about the "your/you're" abuse and the "their/there/they're" mixups and misplaced apostrophes. Well, here is another, fortunately, not so frequent, irritant...

How often do you come across constructs like this that make you flinch? This is an example of starting to write a sentence and then not being willing to back up and rephrase it! From Slate.com

The body in charge of assigning and overseeing domain names said that Internet addresses will soon be able to be spelled in any of the world's scripts, not just the Latin alphabet.

So, internet addresses have the ability to spell? Or is it you and I who have the ability to spell internet addresses?

Why isn't there more acknowledgement of the fact that this song is an eeyadichan copy of "Hare Ram, Hare Ram" from Bhool Bhulaiya?

Googling "mary J blige" "bhool bhulaiya" has quite a few hits but none officially admitting this- has Pritam not been made aware of this yet? Or is he in the imitation is the sincerest form of flattery mode?

Pokkisham, more than anything else, is a showcase for Cheran's writing abilities. I found it interminably long, the plot device of having the son read Cheran's diary entries and Cheran's and Padmapriya's letters palled pretty soon and the whole thing became an exercise in how flowery could Cheran express his love and regret.
Even given I'm not schooled in Tamil, and that my knowledge of the language is strictly functional, which meant that I couldn't appreciate the writing, my grouse is that a movie is not a vehicle for reading 'literature' aloud. Which is really what much of the 2 plus hours of this movie ended up being.
The story FWIW, is fairly cliched (boy meets girl, falls in love, girl's father opposed to relationship)- so it needed something special to move it along, not an endless series of vignettes with voice overs. And did I say how slow this moved? Wading thru molasses...

What if Ichiro had made his major league debut before the age of 28?
What if Monica Seles hadn't been stabbed?
What if Ayrton Senna hadn't died?
What if Gale Sayers hadn't been injured?
What if WWII hadn't interrupted the Don's career?
What if Nadal's career hadn't intersected that of Federer as early as it did?
What if MJ hadn't taken time off to play baseball?

I was watching 60minutes this past Sunday and one of the items was about this huge dump in China where electronic stuff is sent for recycling. In the introduction to this piece they talked about the culture here in the US where people constantly keep replacing their otherwise functional items and dump them. I dumped a couple of working monitors on the sidewalk but rationalised it by saying that
a) replacing CRT's with LCD's reduces energy consumption and
b)I was getting more desk space

I didn't take the trouble to find a place where they recycle monitors in a green fashion, so I am guilty of that.

Anyhow back to the consumption culture- people do replace all sorts of electronic items like cell phones and digicams and DVD players on a fairly frequent basis just because a new version has come out

Just saw this poll on ESPN's website where like 80% of the people rank Phelps above Bolt as the athlete of the Olympics. Of course all 100% of them are American!

I wonder how many Americans knew about Mark Spitz, say, 3 months before this Olympics. Expand that poll to the world outside the US and the number would be even smaller. At the same time ask the world outside about Carl Lewis- the answer is bound to be resoundingly in the affirmative.

Likewise 20 years from now way more people will remember Usain Bolt than Michael Phelps. Of course it helps if you are a champion sprinter called Bolt.

Why?

At the end of the day swimming is primarily a rich (OK well off) white person's sport. Once you take Australia and the US out of the equation how many other nations won medals? Not many. How many were non-white? Even fewer (that Algerian guy really stood out, didn't he?) Even the Zimbabwean swimmer is white.

Many other Olympic sports are the prerogative of rich white people- dressage, sailing, modern pentathlon, ballroom dancing (what? ballroom dancing isn't a sport? could've sworn it was, along with trampolining and rhythmic gymnastics )

The majority of people in the world have limited, if any access to swimming pools, everyone has taken part in a running race at some point in their life.

And that is the reason why people remember Lewis and will remember Bolt- running fast is the most elemental of athletic activities. It's the simplest competition, no equipment needed, just some open ground.
[I'd classify long jump and javelin as the other two "elemental" athletic activities.
The high jump is not a skill required very often, we are more likely to face a requirement to jump across a gap than over a wall (we will clamber over it)
The shot and discuss require peculiar motions to be successful, the javelin is simple. Just run and throw- the exact motion that a child is bound to execute if you ask him to throw something as far as he can ]

Sorry Michael, you are undoubtedly the greatest swimmer ever, arguably the greatest Olympian, but definitely not in the same bracket as Bolt when it comes to identification.

Btw, does anyone remember a guy called Alexander Dityatin? Won 8 medals at a single Olympics (not all gold). No. Why? He won them in gymnastics- another sport like swimming that enables an Olympian to win multiple medals more easily than athletics. Or how about Larissa Latynina who won 18 medals across 3 Olympics (again, in gymnastics)

Quick thought- why does the audience cheer when people make money on game shows, especially the kind where there is more luck than talent involved? (Deal or No Deal for instance)
It isn't as if the winners are going to share their largesse with the audience. It isn't as if the winners demonstrated some skill or knowledge the audience lacked for which they are appreciative. They just picked a box, people. Just a box!

I was quite taken aback to find out that a Barack Obama bumper sticker is going to set me back 3 bucks. So now I should pay to root for someone? The space on my bumper is worth more than 3 bucks!
Tell me, Mr Presumptive nominee, if I am willing to campaign for you by sporting a sticker that supports you on my car, why do you expect me to shell out money for that? Aren't I doing you a favour?
Considering the mega-millions you have raised for your campaign wouldn't it make sense to give away bumper stickers and pins?

See a sports team doesn't need my vote, but you do. You not only need my vote but you need me to convince others to vote for you. And by sporting that sticker I am helping in that regard. I most certainly don't want to pay you in addition to telling people to vote for you.

Sorry my man, you may get my vote, but you most certainly don't get my 3 bucks!

I posted some of these thoughts on the IMDB discussion board for this movie but was not all done. So here goes.

It's not often that I am completely at odds with the populace on a movie, but, boy, is this one of them! Sentimental claptrap, created with the intent of extracting every last tear drop from the audience, that is what I thought this was.
Not one cliche was spared- insensitive teachers, angry and abusive father, concerned mother, one caring teacher, documentary clips, spastic children enjoying...

The one cliche that was left out was the principal scolding Nikhum for taking the kids out of class, though it was amply offset by the scene where Nikhum feeds the boy at the roadside chai shop, tea and biscuits.

5 minutes into the movie I told my wife the kid was dyslexic. I knew about dyslexia more than 20 years ago (thanks to cartoon graffiti of the sort "Dyslexia lures KO" and "Lysdexia rules") and so found it difficult to believe that in 21st century India, in a private school, people were unaware of it.

Forget dyslexia specifically, I found it difficult to believe that the kid had spent 5 years in a private school (KG, 1st std, 2nd std, 2 years in 3rd std) and none of the teachers had figured out that he couldn't write his ABC's? How did he get to 3rd std anyway given that he must have been getting single digit marks in his exams all along?

Or that his mother supposedly spent time over his homework each night and still hadn't realised that her ladla couldn't string letters together to make a word (far less words to make a sentence)

The father character- he was fine while he was angry, once he started to cry, he was like the guy who played Himanshu Malik's dad in the Khwaahish movie!

Nikhum, being a dyslexic growing up was yet another avoidable cliche. And the whole deal where the teachers in the staff room take him to task because they heard singing and dancing in his classroom- haven't we seen that more than once (Dead Poet's society springs to mind, as does its Malayalam derivative with Mohanlal)

It was kind of gratifying to see that the review in Variety, the Hollywood magazine, picked on all these aspects.

OK, enough venting- time for lunch

A couple of things I think are overrated in schools
a) Reading
b) Teaching arts and music

Reading
When did reading become this all-consuming obsession? "Read to your children everyday" they tell you starting with like age 1. "Have your child read for at least 20 minutes each day". You have incentives to read, targets to meet, forms to fill out detailing what you read and how many minutes you read- there is no end to it.

While a lot of school and college drop-outs and prematurely toothless hillbillies obviously didn't do enough reading, there is no cause-effect relationship here.

Most of the successful people I know and have met read very little apart from what is necessary for their job. They might read a sports column or two. They don't spend any of their spare time reading meaningful literature or having meaningful discussions. These are people who make a good living, have flush 401(K)'s, whose children's college funds are, well, funded, drive nice cars- in short meet most of the requirements for success in today's world.

So what is the need to obsess about reading? Yeah, if you like enjoy reading and prefer it to watching re-runs of Seinfeld, more power to you. But you are no better than someone who watches Seinfeld re-runs, so there.

Music and arts
School is for the 3 R's, reading, writing and 'rithmetic. The public school system should have no business using tax money to teach kids to play the violin or draw landscapes. Interested parents can do this outside of school on their own coin. For a person to succeed in life (for the vast majority of them, anyway) s/he needs to have the right education to get a job that pays a decent salary so they don't have to fret about money all the time. This kind of education involves letters and numbers not musical notes or paint palettes.

Schools should focus on teaching their students what they can use in later life to go to college and find a job. Sure a minority of people get jobs in music and arts, but they can go to special schools for that.

Children get adequate exposure to music outside of school anyway, thru TV and radio and MP3 players. It is not as if they won't listen to music if they are not taught music in school. This is more than sufficient to spur their creativity.

All that guff about children in some inner-city schools who became better students because some violin teacher taught them- well if some maths teacher had come along and taught them addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, they would have been better equipped for later life. After all way more people need maths in their later life than violin classes.