“A solid B-plus”, said President Obama when Oprah Winfrey asked him a few weeks ago to rate his administration a year into his first term. I can say with certainty that I would not be as charitable of the Number 44’s achievements. Yet to think that for someone who has always identified himself as right of center, just over a year ago, you could have easily labeled me an “Obama fanboy”!
Could it be that I just went with the flow in 2008, and then jumped ship again? Could it be that reality hit home? Could it be that I found the President veer far too much to the left? Could it be, could it just be that … ? Well, just how did Barack Obama lose me?
(Disclosure: I still strongly believe that Obama was the best candidate across both parties in the 2008 election cycle. In my estimation, John McCain does not even come second; Hillary Clinton was much better than the Senator from Arizona.)
The loss of the message
Most, if not all, candidates for President run as “the outsider”, the reformer that shares the public’s anger at Washington. Indeed, in most cases, the person who wins is often the one who successfully cast him as the one farthest from Washington. However, not since Ronald Reagan (and before him, JFK) has a President swept to power with a resounding message of a new tomorrow.
Barack Obama captured America’s attention with that message. More importantly, Candidate Obama was on top of every news cycle. It is hard to think of many news cycles when the opposition drowned out Obama’s message. And on all such occasions — like “guns and religion” comment, or the question of race, or the Bill Ayers association — Obama prevailed by speaking directly to the electorate. In fact, “prevailed” is an understatement. On each of those occasions, not only did he emerged stronger than his opponents, but he emerged stronger than the candidate that he was before the problem arose.
In contrast, consider healthcare reform — the one issue that has clearly proved his lack of his leadership, or an inability to take control of the message. If there is one thing we know about this, it is that no one knows for sure what it is about. The President or his partymen have not answered clearly one simple question: “How will this cut costs for the average taxpayer?” For a party that enjoyed a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate till a week ago, and a clear majority in the House, and a popular President, the fact that the Democrats have not been able to answer this and other basic questions is glaring. Yet they have not let go of a single opportunity to blame the Republicans for its failure. (The Republicans have at times been nauseating naysayers, no doubt.)
If there is one striking difference between Obama the candidate and Obama the President, it is that this substitution of the message for rhetoric.
Change? What change?
What really did alienate me from thinking that Barack Obama was different from the rest of them is not that he has failed to live up to his promises (hype, rather), but that he has not shown how he is any different from the rest of “them” — those he set out to reform in the first place. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the way that along with Vice-President Biden, Obama weaned Arlen Specter into the Democratic party. In fact, “weaned” does not convey the gravity of the horse trade. It is indeed an irony that at the same time Rod Blagojevich was being vilified (and rightly so) for selling Obama’s vacant Senate seat, the President was working out a similar quid pro quo to buy the Senator from Pennsylvania.
To this day, I keep telling friends in PA who are eligible to vote in this year’s Senate elections to vote for Joe Sestak in the primary and Pat Toomey in the general. My argument: “Well, you know Specter shifted parties so he could remain in power. How can you be so sure he will remain a Democrat if he is re-elected?”
All talk of reaching across the aisle was buried six feet under, as Obama and Biden signaled their inability to work out compromises with the opposition by buying them out!
Horse trading and quid pro quo are the way of politicians. It is part of a politician’s “higher morality”. So what is wrong that Obama did it? Well, nothing. Except Obama claimed (and still claims) to be the new new. He came here to reform this place, and yet he turned into someone who has conveniently drunk the Washington koolaid, and lost his way.
When he promised to shut down Guantanamo, we trusted him. When he promised to rid Washington of its special interests, we trusted him. When he promised to end the war in Iraq, we trusted him. When he… never mind! He is just another politician. A charming man, a voluble speaker, a gifted leader, but just another politician.
In a brilliant opinion piece in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria points out that Obama has acted more like a Prime Minister, the leader and the voice of the Democratic majority in the House and the Senate than like a President. Not the man who once said, “there is no red state America and blue state America…” And for this reason, I now feel ambivalent, even skeptical about his ability to bring about positive change.
One year and an undeserved Nobel Prize later, Obama seems like the very person he warned us to be wary of.
Tags: Barack Obama
Here’s why.
Ezhezhu thalaimuraikkum from Goa (2010). Composer: Yuvan Shankar Raja.
Tags: Bhavatharini, Gangai Amaran, Goa, Ilaiyaraja, Karthik Raja, Premji Amaran, Venkat Prabhu, Yuvan Shankar Raja
At a recent dinner party, I was surveying the menu to find out acceptable options. Unable to decide with confidence (there were no labels), I asked the Mexican behind the counter, “I am a vegetarian. What can I have?”
Pat came the reply: “Roast beef, and ham.”
Every time I drive past this, I ask myself, “Is the proprietor Gundappa Vishwanath?”
Tags: Fat Daddy, Gundappa Vishwanath
A co-worker and I had gone out to dinner last night, to a Middle Eastern restaurant. (Incidentally, the cuisine is growing on me.) The owner of the restaurant turned out to be an excellent conversationalist. One topic led to another, and we found out that his family was from Lebanon. My co-worker asked about to Hezbollah, and the man tried to convey his side of the story. Then, my co-worker let him know that his uncle, a professor at a university in Beirut had been held hostage by Hezbollah for close to a decade. The restaurateur offered his apologies, and the conversation tapered off.
It was then that I made a funny, but insensitive (but funny) comment to my co-worker:
“Small world, eh… your uncle was kidnapped by his uncle.”
Tags: Hezbollah
What kept me laughing all weekend:
உஷா: “அண்ணா, நாம ‘ஷோலே’ படம் போகலாம்.’
உப்பிலி: “ஆமாம், ஷோலே. ரொம்ப நன்னா இருக்காம். மலையாளம்.”
அத்திம்பேர்: “உப்பிலி, ஷோலே மலையாள படமாடா? இந்தி டா!”
உப்பிலி: “இந்தி-யா? அதைக்கூட தமிழ்ல எடுக்கறதா இருந்தாங்களாம். தேவர் பிலிம்ஸ்-ல தான் எடுக்கறதா இருந்தாங்க. கே.பி. சுந்தராம்பாள் கூட நடிக்கறதா இருந்தாங்க.”
அத்திம்பேர்: “அப்படியா?”
உப்பிலி: “படம் பேரு தெரியுமா? பழமுதிர் ஷோலே!”
(from Crazy Thieves in Palavakkam)
Tags: Crazy Mohan, S.Ve. Sekar
The Times has an article that captures the biggest sports stories of 2009 in numbers. Good read. My favorite from the list was:
3: Iron used by Elin Nordegren in the incident with her husband, Tiger Woods
Tags: Elin Nordegren, Tiger Woods
Listening to one’s entire song collection in shuffle mode has many advantages — for one, it enables me to remain lazy. More importantly though, I love the feeling of anticipating the next song — அடுத்த வினாடி ஒளித்து வைத்திருக்கும் ஆச்சர்யங்கள்! Today, two songs that the music player served up one after another caught my attention. In an earlier life, one of my favorite lines of thought was how, as time flies by, we have regressed as a society. While I do not intend this post as a social commentary, I cannot help wondering if that is indeed true.
The first song was an old classic, Chithiram Pesudhadi from the 1958 Sivaji Ganesan movie Sabaash Meena. I love the simple construction of the song, the unobtrusive music, and the civil choice of words to express passionate longing. Sample the first two stanzas:
சித்திரம் பேசுதடி; எந்தன் சிந்தை மயங்குதடி
முத்துச் சரங்களைப் போல் மோகன புன்னகை மின்னுதடிதாவும் கோடி மேலே ஒளிர் தங்கக்குடம் போலே
பாவை உன் பேரெழிலே எந்தன் ஆவலைத் தூண்டுதடி
The last line is a personal favorite because of its subtlety. It probably would have just been ordinary in another age, when subtlety was a given in popular culture. But somewhere along the way, I think we lost that sense, and as a populace, decided that crude — even senseless — lyrics were OK, so long as it gels with the tune.
For long, creators have blamed this on the audience. Their comfortable excuse is that “this” is what their audience craves for. And that is plain stupidity. As Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘Give us faster horses!’“. It is therefore the creator’s burden to uplift society’s appreciation. However, popular culture is a volume game, and so, pecuniary considerations demand that society be dumbed down.
For which reason, while I enjoyed the song that followed (Kalloori Saalai, from the movie Kaadhal Desam) , I will never be able to reconcile how Vaali — one of my favorite lyricists — penned the lines:
கண்கள் silicon graphics
Girls வந்தாலே jam ஆகும் traffic
V-channel choice உன் Dolby voice
Lightning கன்னங்கள் LASER
நம்ம love matter சொல்லாது pager
நான் காதல் computer நீதானே software
Tags: a.r. rahman, creator's burden, Henry Ford, Sivaji Ganesan, Tamil
(Much ado about something trivial. The section titles are inspired from The Day of the Jackal.)
Anatomy of a plot
I was going over Google Analytics after a long time this weekend, and I found that I was getting a few hits from Bing for the search term “Koundamani”. A closer look revealed that VKpedia was the fourth result on Bing for Koundamani. A friend in India told me that he found that my blog was placed first for the same search term on Bing for Sweden. (Wow!)
While I was still celebrating this high note, my friend Shankar posed me a trivia question. Anyone who has listened to FM radio in Chennai would know that some RJs (especially Blade Shankar and Speed Dheena) play a clip from Koundamani when the caller is a woman — “Ai.. ladies!” The poser was “Which movie is this dialogue from?” To someone like me who considers Koundamani the equal of Kamal Hassan and Tom Hanks, the lack of a ready answer was an affront.
Anatomy of a manhunt
Anyone who has cheated by using Google to find an answer, and then promoted the answer as if it was the result of one’s own mental faculties, would know that this is not one of those problems. Because the search terms are generic, but the intended result is super-specific, Google is not an ideal tool for such a search operation. (Marissa Mayer, are you listening?)
Twitter is indeed the right tool, for one can tap into the collective intelligence of the masses. This route was pursued, but to little avail, so I was forced to resort my own mental faculties.
The immediate tool of choice was the process of elimination. This is ideal because when someone tries to whittle down to a few options from a filmography as daunting as Kounder’s, selection does not work well. One could eliminate movies from the 80s and from 2000 onwards with confidence. So the movie must be from the 90s. Obviously, the movie must be reasonably popular, and therefore it could not have starred an also-ran actor as the leading man. And obviously, the leading man could not have been Rajnikanth or Kamal Hassan, for I know the combinations well.
Also, the movie is probably not a rural movie. Of course, the term “ladies” is not restricted to the vocabulary of just those who graduated from Ivy League schools, but still I went ahead with this assumption. (Case in point: Gounder tells Sarath Kumar in Suriyan, “Side-la yeng [sic] ladies ellaam varraanga…”) This rules out actors like Vijayakanth, Sathyaraj and Ramarajan, in whose movies, our man plays meaty roles.
So that leaves us with the few actors who play predominantly urban roles, and who generally allow Goundamani a free ride in their movies. In short, Karthik and Arjun.
Anatomy of a kill
We know Karthik-Kounder combos like the back of our hand. So, it is probably an Arjun movie.
Not Gentleman, because we know every single scene from the comedy track. So, it must be Jai Hind or Karna. I could have sworn that the movie was Karna; but then, I started watching scenes from Jai Hind in fast-forward mode. And then, I heard it – boom! Koundamani tells Ranjitha, “Oh, ladies… sorry!” when they are traveling by boat to a terrorist hideout. The previous sentence turned out to be a false alarm. The dialogue in question appears a while later. Arjun and his team reach the terrorist’s basecamp. They are looking out for an ideal moment to strike, when a group of women with guns walk past a guard. And this is the precise moment when the magic happens!
So there you go, the most definitive answer is Jai Hind!
Tags: Arjun, FM radio, Google, Jai Hind, Kamal Hassan, Karna, Karthik, Koundamani, Oh ladies, Rajnikanth, Suryan FM, The Day of the Jackal, Twitter
Yet another series of long nights this week, and I had, for some reason, decided that I will listen only to Tamil kritis. I think it all started with a desire to listen to the song “enna thavam seidhanai, yashOdA“. One led to another, and I chanced to listen to Madurai Mani Iyer’s rendition of Subramanya Bharatiyaar’s “veLLai thaamarai poovil iruppaaL” after a long time. And it set off a train of thoughts, and I have been feeling nostalgic ever since. To say nothing of the many dozen times I have listened to the song in the past two nights.
First the lines.
வெள்ளைத் தாமரைப் பூவில் இருப்பாள்!
வீணை செய்யும் ஒலியில் இருப்பாள்;
கொள்ளை இன்பம் குலவு கவிதை
கூறும் பாவலர் உள்ளத்திருப்பாள்!உள்ளதாம் பொருள் தேடியுணர்ந்தேன்!
ஓதும் வேதத்தின் உள்நின்று ஒளிர்வாள்;
கள்ள மற்ற முனிவர்கள் கூறும்
கருணை வாசகத்துட்பொருளாவாள்.மாதர் தீங்குரல் பாட்டில் இருப்பாள்;
மக்கள் பேசும் மழலையில் உள்ளாள்;
கீதம் பாடும் குயிலின் குரலைக்
கிளியின் நாவை இருப்பிடம் கொண்டாள்;
கோதகன்ற தொழிலுடைடைத் தாகிக்
குலவு சித்திரம் கோபுரம் கோயில்
ஈதனைத்தின் எழிலுடை யுற்றாள்
இன்பமே வடிவாகிடப் பெற்றாள்.
The song is etched in my memory because it was the prayer song back in school. But that used to be lifeless – of course, if you assemble 2000 teenagers in the open sun and ask them to blurt out a few lines, it won’t produce the same effect as Mani Iyer rendering it in glorious Bhimplas, flanked by Chowdiah (methinks).
But I swore to myself that I have listened to Vellai Thaamarai in Bhimplas, and it wasn’t by Mani Iyer. In fact, I could attest that the memory was even before I started listening to Carnatic music seriously. And then it all came to mind. And my eyes welled up with tears.
My grandmother took a keen interest in Carnatic music. (My grandfather too, and I know for a fact that my veneration for Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar stems from him.) Apart from being a avid listener, she was a good singer too. When I was 5, we bought a tape recorder, and my hobby was to use the record function a little too much. So much so that I have upset my father so many times for having overwritten tapes of his favorite songs.
The one enduring memory is that of my recording my grandmother singing Vellai Thaamarai. I cannot be held guilty for overstatement when I say that, as a kid, I found it every bit as delectable as I find Mani Iyer’s version today. It is quite possible she had listened to his records many, many times, and had, as result, internalized it. It was so good that when I transferred to this school, my first reaction to the prayer song was “No, this is not how it must be sung.”
That red tape recorder is no more. The Meltrack audio cassette which contained my grandmother’s voice was probably cast aside when our house was repainted or remodeled, and is now lost forever. My grandmother passed away a year ago this very week. As Marcel Pagnol says in Le Château de ma Mère (which incidentally is the greatest movie ever), “Telle est la vie des hommes. Quelques joies, très vite effacées par d’inoubliables chagrins.” (Such is the life of man. Some joys, quickly erased by unforgettable sorrows.)
Tags: Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, Bharati, Carnatic, le chateau de ma mere, Madurai Mani Iyer, Vellai Thaamarai
Dimitar Berbatov has been a near-tragic failure since he moved to Manchester United from Spurs in the summer of 2008. The player who came in for over 30 million pounds has only scored four goals in 18 games this season, and apart from the one wondergoal against Sunderland(?), he hasn’t wow-ed me at all.
But he did have this to say in a stout self-defence:
Berbatov has scored only four goals in 18 matches in all competitions for United this season and missed two inviting chances late on against Villa, but the Bulgaria forward has defended his form. “I try not to pay attention [to what some people say] because you’re always going to get people who say white is black,” he said.
“I read a book recently and it started by saying, ‘Unless they have beauty and grace in them, they’re powerless to act’, so that stuck in mind because I like to play with beauty, with grace … I don’t like to show emotion sometimes, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love the game.”
Well, what else can I say other than “பெயில் ஆகறதுக்கு இப்புடி ஒரு பிட்டா?”
I was listening to a Bloomberg News podcast this weekend, and the topic of discussion was outsourcing. Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati was one of the guests. The discussion was on familiar lines, centering largely around the politics and the economics of outsourcing.
What set me thinking was an rather interesting point raised by Prof. Bhagwati. He alluded to the fact that the system of higher education in India was superior to that in China, and that this is one attribute in which China cannot surpass India in a generation. He said something like, “It is not like putting up a factory; an education system is developed over many decades.” My own experiences made me resonate with that point.
Maybe I am being very biased here; but the first thing that comes to mind when I think about outsourcing to China is cheap labor. Huge factories employing thousands of people who learn a skill, do as instructed and ask few questions, if any. In fact, I cannot think of China without the name Wal-Mart flashing across my mind.
India evokes a different set of associations. Probably because I owe my daily bread / rice to it, software comes to mind. A highly skilled labor force that produces high quality work. While in Indian terms, the cost of employing such a labor force is high, favorable exchange rates ensure a win-win-win for all parties involved (the outsourcer, the vendor and the employee).
The above comparison is definitely skewed. It seems to imply that there are 1 billion Indians who are kick-ass programmers, while there are an equal number of laborers in China who toil everyday under inhuman conditions. That is not the intention of the comparison. However, most people would agree that, a comparison of the labor force in both countries that are involved in an outsourcing relationship would reveal that the average Indian is more a knowledge worker than the average Chinese.
That doesn’t convey much either. Knowledge workers in India tend to gather in the big cities. The top 20 urban agglomerations in India together hold about 130 million people. Even assuming that one in twenty people from these places works in an outsourced IT relationship, we are looking at around 6 million knowledge workers. I think that the actual numbers would be much lesser. Various sources on the Internet peg this number close to 2 million (directly) and another 3 million (indirectly).
So, as a percentage of the population, less than 1% (more like 0.5%) are knowledge workers. I didn’t look up or estimate the number of Chinese workers (semi-skilled, factory workers) as a percentage of the country’s population, but it would be much higher than India’s 0.5% as per the above estimate.
These numbers make very interesting reading, from a variety of perspectives. Firstly, social inequality. There are a large number of people in China who earn moderate wages as a result of outsourcing. So, in theory, the inequality in not as pronounced as in India’s case where a small number of people earn much higher when compared against the average.
Secondly, India’s edge is in the services sector, while China’s is in manufacturing. The former can be replaced more easily than the latter. As other countries gain ground on India, the chances of jobs involving skilled labor moving away from her shores is much higher compared to the chances of a big manufacturing unit shutting down in China.
The only conclusions that I can draw from this half-baked analysis are these: India’s tremendous lead in offshored services pales in comparison against China’s lead in manufacturing. So, the question India is faced with is, do we compete against a tightly regulated China on her strengths, or do we use our knowledge leadership to diversify to an extent where we force China to constantly play catch-up?
Here’s what I found when signing up for a discounted copy of Windows 7 (for anyone with a .edu email address):
Sloppy typo on Windows 7 landing page
DeVry advertisement in SEPTA
Saw this on the train ride home. I cannot comment on this advertisement without adding a standard disclaimer about “dignity of labor”. Or be labeled an elitist.
Tags: DeVry University, Fortune 100, Philadelphia, SEPTA
Went to The Hindu’s Friday Review page to check if they had a review of Kandasamy, which almost all my friends have declared a must-avoid. Serendipitously however, I ended up reading a review of Teree Sang, a movie about kids falling in love and going to second base and beyond. This line from the review stunned me with its simplicity, succinctness, and more importantly, adherence to newspaper ethics.
Rich brat 15-year-old Mahi makes friends with 17-year-old Kuku and his band of boys. Soon, they are sharing beer, bike rides and go camping, and before you can say ‘What the…’ they finish the expression.
By the way, The Hindu has called Cheran’s Pokkisham authentic and impressive. Way to go, Sir!
The only trouble with Chris Matthews, who incidentally is my favorite political commentator, is that he almost always assumes that anybody who does not agree with his point of view is an idiot. This is evident from the difference in the way he interviews liberals and conservatives – to one group, he is genial, even soft, while to the other, he puts on a confrontational tone. (Maybe it’s just me, for it is a proven fact that the viewer assigns tones to the speaker’s words based on his or her own prejudices.)
Today though, Matthews met his match. The man was William Kostric, now famous as the guy who carried a gun to a town hall in New Hampshire where President Obama spoke today. Kostric held his own when placed under the scanner. He appeared informed, and did not wilt under Matthews’ usual lines of questioning — Chris, who is more well-read than most people he interviews always tries to browbeat the other person on his knowledge of history. Here is the video. I thought it was a champion performance. What do you say?
Update:
I think the point where Chris realized that Bill Kostric was not someone he could kick about at will was when Kostric told him that he had voted for Ron Paul in 2008. Had Kostric told Chris that he had voted for McCain, the tone would have changed considerably — Chris would have done his daily Palin-bashing routine, questioning the intelligence of those who voted for a woman who was “one 72 year-old’s heartbeat away from the Presidency.” While there is no doubt that Sarah Palin was, and still is, almost completely unqualified to serve as President or VP, the liberal crowd has to stop milking this topic as a defensive tactic.
Tags: Chris Matthews, Hardball, MSNBC, William Kostric
“இதனை இதனால் இவன்முடிக்கும் என்றாய்ந்து
அதனை அவன்கண் விடல்.” – Saint Thiruvalluvar (c. 1st Century CE)
Frankly speaking, this man is seldom wrong.
Tags: Thirukkural
For the first time in weeks, #iranelection is not a top-10 Twitter trending topic. In short, but sadly, the house always wins!
Tags: Twitter Updates
Ilaiyaraja deserves an “Ilaiyaraja Award for Excellence in Background Score” for his work in Naan Kadavul.
Tags: Ilaiyaraja, Naan Kadavul
Recent Comments