Indian Film Song Lyrics

I cannot resist Graphjam so here we are. Indian Film song lyrics explained with simple graphs. I promise, this will be the second last time I will be “inspired” (like Anu Malik) to remix a popular Internet meme for desi purposes.

First we explore the Hindi Film Industry, or as Cineblitz chooses to acronymize, HiFI

UPDATE: My 90 minute drive back home from office resulted in these

Priyank gives us a lesson in the geographic origins of day to day items

And Narendra ponders on Mr Singh’s route to kingship

And now, we look at Tamil songs

Update:

Ramsu shares with us, the Foot Presents Theory of Pessimism

Arvind Suresh psychoanalyzes thieves’ desires

As usual, this does not end here. Please email me your creations and I’ll feature the best ones here.

Swamijis and Science

Dear Spiritually Enlightened Person on TV in the mornings (and late nights),

I must first thank you for sharing your wisdom and understanding of the human condition with the masses. In the frenetic rat race we call urban life, your skillfully presented nuggets of common sense, wrapped in insightful readings of mythology and scripture, provide a small yet valuable window of time for people to introspect.

But I have problem when you pontificate on the impact of modern science and technology on the masses. So far, every one of you seems to belong to the camp that has declared technology to be the bane of our contemporary lives. You declare modern medicine to be a sham and urge people to value spiritual truth over scientific veracity, as if both of these were mutually exclusive entities. So I am afraid I am going to be a little blunt here.

By perpetrating the falsehood that scientifically verifiable truths are somehow inferior and trivial, you are being disingenuous. Science is a method, and technology, one of the tangible outcomes of applying that method. Like any subject of knowledge, there is nothing inherently good or evil about science. It’s what you do with it. Nuclear Bombs or mobile phone induced attention deficit disorder, it’s human choice, a behavioral flaw that you, with your insight into human nature, can effectively help address. But instead, what I find is this half-baked dismissal of science and technology on the whole, continual urgings to believe in mysteries and sadly, repeated warnings to not question certain religious truths. Every time an elderly relative of mine tells me with glee “Can your science explain this?” and point to some random occurrence of nature, I cringe and can’t help wonder how much your daily morning preaching on TV contributed to his cyclically reaffirming faith in the mysterious.

The other fallacy you often perpetrate is this whole “In those days…” nostaliga thing. While it’s important to appreciate the contribution of the past, our collective tendency, happily cheered on by you, to somehow believe that our glorious past was this paradise of peace, knowledge and pushpaka vimaanas serving gourmet meals in economy class, sweeps under the bed the harder to digest lessons of female infanticide, women’s rights, caste bigotry and gratuitous violence. Give credit where it’s due, but please do send the collection agents to defaulters once in a while.

So in a sense, you reinforce the average person’s convenient misconceptions (and ignorance) about the laws of nature. By dismissing scientists as being vain characters who have not come anywhere close to deciphering the mysteries of the cosmos, you are revealing a stunning ignorance of the advancement of human knowledge from a geocentric universe to dark matter, Quasars and Supernovas. By dismissing modern medicine, you conveniently ignore the shots of polio vaccine you likely received as a child that probably kept you from belonging to the infant mortality column, a rather common occurrence in those days incidentally. Life expectancy has gone up by almost 20 years (at least in Urban India) primarily because of better neo-natal care and advances in geriatrics.

Last but not the least, sitting in front of a television camera, a technological marvel that began its journey with Anton Van Leeuwhenhoek’s use of lenses for microscopy onwards to Galileo’s telescope, to John Logie Baird’s contraption to capture moving images, and speaking into a microphone, where vibrations from your voice causes a capacitor to generate an electric current proportional to the nuances in your voice, to transmit it across a wire that, along with the video signal, is amplitude and frequency modulated and beamed up to a satellite that was launched with a deep, mathematically precise understanding of escape velocities and embedded with gadgetry that takes your message and beams it to the world, your dismissal of science and technology causes me, and anyone with even a smidgeon of understanding of science to say – “WTF?”

Or, as Lollu Cat would say in such situtations,

photo © James Jones for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike

Pray, this is not arrogance speaking. Scientists question each other openly without fear of religion style recrimination, and also continuously build on each others knowledge. Your knowledge of human nature comes to you from your own keen observations and the abstraction of such knowledge over history by philosophers who used symbolism in the form of mythologies to embed such key observations. The symbols in our epics are memes, much like Lolcat is. In an era when we need a all-round understanding of both the scientific method and the spiritual truths about human nature that are so beautifully woven into the fabric of our mythology, you are doing, rather literally, a half-baked job. So if you are going to pass judgement on science, please do so after first understanding what it is. As the professor of calculus once said – “If you can’t differentiate, don’t integrate”. You are all extremely intelligent people. Not misrepresenting the scientific method is not that hard. Till then, apples and oranges please.

Actually, I am not asking you to just consider science and spirituality as apples and oranges. I’m really saying that I prefer Panchaamrutham. At the moment, you are discarding perfectly healthy oranges.

Update: The above-mentioned spiritually enlightened godman who wasn’t a fan of science was undone recently by an apparatus involving CCD sensors, some flash memory and a battery. Just FYI

28 days in Asuraland

The month of February was a busy one in Asuraland.

3 days before Valentine’s day

Jilpasura was nervous. Choosing a valentine’s day’s gift for Hidimba Jr. was not an easy task. The musical greeting card he gave her last year didn’t go too well despite the fact that the music* was composed by none other than the Master of the Fender Veenacaster, Ravana, himself. She had asked him if he truly thought that the most profound way of expressing love was to buy a piece of paper made by a large company embedded with music composed by some one else. This year, he was not taking chances, but it was already 4-2-2**, with only 3 days to go for the big day.

He was going to consult his grandmother, Jalsa Rakshasi, who was busy watching TV while snacking on vada pav with extra hot bhut jholokia chilly.

“Why are you watching Human TV, paati?”

“Because it makes me laugh”

“So what nonsense are they up to now?”

“Some joker named Pramod Muthalik is threatening to sue those girls who sent him pink undergarments”

“Whaa? Who? Why?”

“It’s a long story, but tell me why you are here. Shouldn’t you be busy preparing for V-day. I heard Hidimba wasn’t too happy with your creative laziness last year”

Jilpasura’s resulting expression could be described as sheepish, but only if the sheep in question resembled a Tasmanian devil.

“Paati, tell me something. Why do we celebrate Valentine’s day? Isn’t it a Human festival?”

“Ah well. St Valentine, as they refer to him, was actually one of us – Valyasura, who had this crazy notion that Humans would become a better race if they could marry out of love instead of being bartered like goods as part of the arranged marriage system of those times. So he went on this crazy mission and ended up losing his life”

“I see. So what did the humans end up doing this time?”

“Oh. Some guys calling themselves the Army of Rama declared the good saint an evil agent who was out to convert innocent Easterners into Westerners by convincing them to send each other Hallmark greeting cards and flowers while chilling out at pubs wearing tank tops and jeans listening to abaswaram rock music with lyrics that (recursively) promoted the aforementioned.

“The Vedas proscribe greeting cards and flowers?”

“No. But what is interesting is that these goons roamed around town armed with mangalsutras and rakhis threatening to conduct spot marriages for offenders of Indian culture. It was rather ironic because St Valentine used to go around town helping lovers get married and that was precisely the reason the authorities of his time felt that his continuing to breathe was not good for Roman society. I ran into Valyasura# at “Mohini’s Bar and Permit Room”## and he found it funny that the Ram Sene does exactly what he died for and yet calls him an evil agent of the west.”

“So what’s with the pink undergarments?”

“A bunch of brave girls decided that the best way to deal with these jokers is to trivialize their message, or lack of one, with a universal symbol of love and tolerance, a pink chaddi”

“Nice. Hey Paati. Give me some ideas on what V-day gift to buy Hidimba?”

“Make her an origami rose, write a poem, set it to song and make her a hand-drawn greeting card”

Footnotes:

* The song he had chosen for the musical card was Galle along the Watchtower, part of his seminal “Electric Sitaland” album

** Asuraland uses a metric calendar, with 10 days to a week, 10 weeks to a month and 10 months to a year. So 4-2 was the fourth day of second week of the second month

# Asuras normally live up to 2000 years. After that quota is over, they transfer their image (in .iso format) to a supercomputer before they die. The Asura governing council once in a while resurrects famous asuras when their presence and knowledge is required in Asura land. When St Valentine was martyred in Human land, he was recreated from his image in Asura land.

## The name is an Asura attempt at dark humour. Mohini was the one who deprived the asuras of ambrosia at the Big Churning

Later in February

“Paati. I have an exam coming up. Any tips”

“Ah Tests. There are three kinds of questions in this world

• Subjective questions like -
  • Is Slumdog an Indian movie?
  • Does Slumdog depict a stereotyped image of poverty in India?
  • Why Slumdog, and not Slumcat, Slumplatypus or Slumboa?
  • Why are dogs associated with slums?
  • Were they consulted?
  • Was this really Rahman’s greatest work?
• Objective questions like -
  • How many journalists who called Slumdog an imperialist caricature of Indian poverty called it an “Indian victory” when Rahman and Resul picked up 3 “uncles”.
  • How many Twitter, GTalk and Facebook statuses read “Jai Ho” when the results were announced?
• Tests of Time – In the immortal words of Puppy Manohar, a test of time is where one is given a fixed amount of marks in which to score a maximum amount of time.

Last day of February

“Paati. The school has given me an assignment to watch James Burke’s connections and come up with a similarly styled series of connections starting from Slumdog and ending with Slumdog.”

“Easy. Slumdog millionaire didn’t get very positive reactions from the Indian blogosphere. Blog – an online diary or journal, kinds include video blog, photo blog, microblog and mp3 blog. MP3 compression, that revolutionized music file sharing. File sharing, especially peer 2 peer, which gave the media industry such trouble, as files traversed the social network. Facebook, the social network that is often firewalled at work. The Great Firewall of China, which censors the internet, blocking free speech. The Free and open source software movement, that has produced Linux and Firefox. Browsers, of which Firefox prevents spam better than IE. Spam, that came from a Monty Python skit. Monty Python, who made “Holy Grail”, funded by among others, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Pink Floyd, whose seminal album was “The Wall”. The Hole in the Wall, a project by Dr Sugata Mitra that showed how slum children can learn to use the computer without any formal training. Vikas Swarup, who was inspired by the hole in the wall project wrote Q&A about a kid from a slum making it big on a TV contest show. Q&A which became Slumdog Millionaire.”

“Paati. The next time you do something like this, please hand me a telescope before you do so”

“Why?”

“You’ve gone where Janakaraaj has gone. Engyoooooo”