Fool on the hill

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, ...

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!

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...