Fool on the hill

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Haathi ka andala

One more on rock music lyrics. “Mishearing” of lyrics is perhaps as old as rock music itself. With lyrics tightly enmeshed in layers of high-decibel electric music, chances of getting them messed up are quite high. And embarrassing, too, at times. You might be ostracised at rock concerts if you sing She don’t mind, She don’t mind, She don’t mind, Cocaine . The Lynn Trusses of the rock world will cry sacrilege and dunk your head in a barrel full of Woodstock mud. JJ Cale, and later Eric Clapton, had sung this song as She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie, Cocaine . Why, I don’t know. The former interpretation makes more sense. Again, an American was humbled when he was told that the refrain in the Beatles song Across the Universe was Jai guru deva , and not John grew a K-mart . Poor John must have turned in his grave. So, don’t fret if you regularly mishear lyrics. You are not the only one. This website shows us how most of us mishear lyrics. It also allows you to relate the emba...

Bombay troubadours

Let me please introduce myself I’m a man of wealth and taste And I laid traps for troubadours Who get killed before they reached Bombay These lines are from the legendary Rolling Stones song Sympathy for the Devil . Strange are the ways of rock lyricists. Sometimes utterly pedantic lines become cult, like Deep Purple's "Smoke on the water, fire in the sky". At times it is a tad more philosophical – “teenage wasteland” (from The Who’s song Baba o’ Reilly ) became a headbanging catchphrase some time in the seventies. Coming back to The Rolling Stones, the song Sympathy for the Devil seemed strong in its logic till it came to this line – the killing of troubadours before they reached Bombay. I can hardly recall any troubadour coming to India through the Gateway of India. Unless if it is on a metaphysical level. Troubadours are travelling musicians. Some defend the line saying troubadours refer to The Beatles. They became mystical in their song writing after coming to India, ...

Google or Gagle?

The seemless world of Internet seems to be cracking up. The cult search engine Google , which has extended the meaning of the word “information”, is bowing to Chinese political censorship laws. Read this on CNN and here . Try this: Standard Google image search for “tiananmen” China Google image search for “tiananmen” However, if you spell Tiananmen wrong (Tiananmen/tienanmen…) you get the same results on both the Chinese and the standard Google search engines. So there. Also, what about reverse censorship? Think of Google Bihar under Nitish Kumar. Type “fodder” and you get Laloo mugshots galore!

On Rang De Basanti

Rang De Basanti is getting flak for the way its director has handled the second half of the film. The film at one point borders on the point of incredulity. Five young students gang up to kill the defence minister because one of their friends is killed in a MiG-21 crash. The film, however, is not about the killing as it is made out to be by “critics”. That is why the director just glosses over it, slips it behind the veneer of the so-called “willing suspension of disbelief”. Killing, at the end, becomes a metaphor. It could have been any simple act that becomes the harbinger of a change. It could be a single man standing in front of tanks on Tiananman Square or it could be the nameless faces involved in Chipko Andolan, facing giant electric hack-saws. As one reviewer puts it, the film is more about humanity than anything else. The film is, in fact, about the awakening of the characters, it’s about spring, and it’s about swathes of mustard field bursting into yellow. It’s about a new...

The circus

Bangalore was under a “terror” attack a few days ago. It had Rajdeep Sardesai standing for almost 4 hours. His channel insists on anchors standing while reading news, precariously holding a piece of paper. Godonly knows why. On NDTV, Vishnu Som was struggling with words and pushing them out before they melted in his mouth. A Reuters journalist wrote towards the end of his story: The gunman was suspected to have escaped from the leafy campus . As if the assailant would have waited for the cops to say, Bengaluru police! Freeze maari! A tired Rajdeep, the verbal pugilist, wanted to break for commercials (sit for a few seconds while his attendants spray water on his face and shove in a pipe of lemonade in his mouth?), but a producer kept him from doing that. A fumbling Rajdeep says, Wait guys, there’s more breaking news, my producer won’t let me go on a break. Great. And AajTak was just like a Laughter Challenge contestant had portrayed it to be: perennially trying to connect with its corr...

A story without an end - III

That was it, I thought. I had waited for three hours. And saw the sky change from ochre to deep orange to dark red. The last embers of the autumn evening were dying down. The cars and the buses had their lights on. People crowded the bus stop across the road, clambering on to already crowded buses. In a mad rush, the tin buses were darting around, scrambling for passengers. The entrance to the Park Street metro station was in a frenetic whirl. Mostly, people were entering the tube station to head back home. I was sitting on the steps of the Asiatic Society building, a prominent “meeting” place, smoking the last cigarette of the pack. Right across the Chowringhee lay the vast emptiness -- more conspicuous in the growing twilight -- the maidans, and the waste yard of the metro constructions. She had not come. Yes, she had not come to meet me. And now it was almost seven. There was a slight chill in the air. I was shivering. ********************************** The taxi lunged forward, cutt...