Nostalgia

Reading yet another take on Aamir Khan's Satyameva Jayate, I went to refresh my Doordarshan memory on youtube. Very few things trigger nostalgia for me as old Doordarshan familiars and I'm a sucker for nostalgia, which works in weird ways. I mean, seeing the Mowgli theme song I went awww but I remember Mowgli used to make me very sad. I'd love to see the dubbed version of Alice in Wonderland in Hindi today, but I used to be very disconcerted by and even disturbed by the story as a child.

TV used to be so rare back then. We had a TV-only-on-Saturday-Sunday rule in the family and as we did not subscribe to cable until I was around 10, my weekend highlights used to include the kids shows in the morning and evening. Before 24 hours entertainment channels or even 24 hours cartoon network, the cartoons used to start around 5 I think, and go on for an hour, hour and a half. Ah bliss!:D There used to be a show once a week called 'Phulwari Bachhon Ki' which I used to LOVE and my mother used to find asinine. Oh oh and the summer shows!! Doordarshan would have summer holiday specials. Sometimes they'd get too educational with a morals filled* stage play (I dislike televised theatre even now), so I'd skip those. But a couple of summers they played Enid Blyton's Famous Five, which I watched hungrily even though the five and even Timmy did not match my mental picture of them in the books.

Like I said. I love Nostalgia :D If you were a late 80s kid, you might remember these.

Remember parents and grandparents setting their watches by the Doordarshan time check?

 I would LOVE for us people to be as 'integrated' (viewer comment) as this video suggests we are. But oh well, look at all those cricketers and athelets :D I love the shot of PT Usha running. There is something so poetic about runners.

Sumana Roy's article on Satyameva Jayate on Kafila, which actually started my youtube search today, mentioned this old public suggestion video. Playing it brought back memories, I realised I remembered this very clearly, especially the guy with a stick singing on top of an elephant. :D

                                         Remember this one?

I could watch this man bowl all day. Ok ok this isn't Doordarshan! But yes, youtube might soon be the only place to watch cricket like this again. DAMN YOU 20/20 CRICKET!

More nostalgia : old advertisements.

*Now that I'm all big and adult-y, I wonder whether many of those plays were like a saffronised 'moral' series I watched in the course of a job. All full of good-girls-in-salwar-kameez versus bad-girls-in-skimpy-clothes-who-the-good-boys-don't-like-even-though-the-popular-boys-like kind of stories.

International Hawkers Day, Kolkata 2012

Tomorrow is International Hawkers Days. Kolkata Hawkers have been fighting evictions since October 2011, with the most recent evictions being in March 2012 along the E.M. Bypass. They have been protesting in various ways, marches, candle light vigils, human chains, taking out a 3000 (ish) rally to the Kolkata Municipal Development Authority (photos below), a bhukha michhil. Tomorrow, on the occassion of International Hawkers Day, they were supposed to go on a Jail Bharo: filling up jails as a mark of resistance and protest against evictions. However, their movement has apparently met with tentative success, with the state government recently agreeing to their demands. This is ofcourse a verbal/informal acknowledgement, however, it's a start.

Tomorrow there will be a rally from Wellington Square at 4 PM. If you are in Kolkata, or know someone in Kolkata, do come and lend your solidarity!:)

Still not in solidarity with the IPG strike BUT...

...it DID get the Civil Aviation Minister to finally admit the merger was a disaster and perhaps not in the best interest of either pre-merger airline, both of which were making profits till that fateful move. And it DID get him to say that parity issues would be resolved within 3 months.

Now what does that say about the management (the Civil Aviation Ministry in this case...) and the kind of tactics it responds to?

Give the Kolkata sun some respect

said the queasy stomach to her brain.

*groan*

NOT in solidarity with the IPG Pilots strike

Striking because comrades from the other part of your merged airline get to fly the Dreamliner and you don't?

Striking when your actions are bound to have terrible repurcussions on especially Class III and Class IV staff of the airline who have anyway been going without salary for months now? (Yes, you too have not been paid, but your pay cheque has had many more zeroes than theirs since, well, the 1990s)?

Striking because career progression is supposedly affected (more like egos hurt me thinks...) when the survival of the airline is at stake?

Striking when that just helps the right-wingers say THIS is why you shouldn't have unions?

Striking at a time which allows the Civil Aviation Minister say the Government has no business running an airline?

Cheapening the achievement of years of labour struggle and making a mockery of workers who actually strike with reason? For shame!

Hellen Keller's hilarious account of the hell that is examinations

"At last the dreaded hour arrives, and you are a favoured being indeed if you feel prepared, and are able at the right time to call to your standard thoughts that will aid you in that supreme effort. It happens too often that your trumpet call is unheeded. It is most perplexing and exasperating that just at the moment when you need your memory and a nice sense of discrimination, these faculties take to themselves wings and fly away. The facts you have garnered with such infinite trouble invariably fail you at a pinch.

“Give a brief account of Huss and his work.” Huss? Who was he and what did he do? The name looks strangely familiar. You ransack your budget of historic facts much as you would hunt for a bit of silk in a rag-bag. You are sure it is somewhere in your mind near the top- you saw it there the other day when you were looking up the beginnings of the Reformation. But where is it now? You fish out all manner of odds and ends of knowledge- revolutions, schisms, massacres, systems of government; but Huss- where is he? You are amazed at all the things you know which are not on the examination paper. In desperation you seize the budget and dump everything out, and there in a corner is your man, serenely brooding on his own private thought, unconscious of the catastrophe which he has brought upon you.

Just then the proctor informs you that the time is up. With a feeling of intense disgust you kick the mass of rubbish into a corner and go home, your head full of revolutionary schemes to abolish the divine right of professors to ask questions without the consent of the questioned."

-Extract from Chapter 20, The Story of My Life

I like that last line the best :D 

Attempting things BEFORE TIME! *Gasp!*

I'm attempting to finish off assignments before time. That involves not procrastinating and setting deadlines. The motivation is not just to put into application that excellent doha

'kal kare so aaj kar, 
aaj kare so ab, 
pal mein pariley aayegi, 
bahuri karega kub?'

(Basically: what you can do today, do it TODAY because you don't know if something else will come up tomorrow to bite you in the backside)

-but also because I want to go HOOOME *whine*.

I'm telling myself that if I can finish 3 assignments by the 17th, and finish my interviews and infomation gathering for one term paper, I can go home and stay home for about ten days and churn out the 5000 worders (that have to be defended! eep!) partly from home, finishing up back here in Kolkata.

So far, I'm behind deadline. I was supposed to finish the first assignment yesterday, and I'm still struggling to write the first paragraph. I envision endless cups of tea (Lopchu and Red Label, 3/4:1/4, no milk) in the next few hours because I'm not going to sleep before getting this done.

*Ends post with grim look of determination*

We need to believe the myths we create in order to build. Or we shall end up being engaged in an excavation of a bottomless pit that joins at some point with the mouth of itself.