Me....Idea.... Media!

I want to say something here. When I cleared Class XII, I applied and never got through the IIMC’s or the MCRC’s of the world. Thik hai yaar! I wanted to do advertising anyway! I did not ever know how to win a debate. The reason I am saying this is that I am seeing all the friiggin channels bloody debating, getting eminent spokespersons, VC’s, honchos, top journos to debate about what happened, why it happened, was it Pakistan, was it them, was it him, her or whoever, “This morning you said this”, “HahahaI NOW THAT I KNOW WHAT YOU SAID IN THE MORNING, I CAN TRIP ON YOU, YOU MORNINGER”, was it some jehadis, was this Bin Laden’s next Quarter plan, “EXACTLY, I AGREE WITH YOU SIR”, “ Ya we have found the issue…. We must bring TERROR on to the agenda“ …… “No no let me finish,, the guy on the ground is asking, why does this happen to me?” ….. "...THE hOME mINISTER FROM HIS hOME SAYS"...“We have raised a viable suggestion… we should have taken that in to account during 9/11… what were we thinking then?”……” Its a very large issue.”….. “ I think that’s it’s a very very big thing, based on whatever evidence we have, lets get our house in order”…. where is ISI, what is RAW up to? “ No no please let me finish…” “ We are messed up… ON THE OTHER SIDE I HAVE SO & SO JOINING ME TONIGHT ON THE TOPIC…SEE YOU TOMORROW…… am so so so so thankful you institutes did not get me in the rut. Well, you bloody TRP-rakers, you money-mongrels, you News-Nymphomaniacs….keep going from Mr. X to Mr . Y. keep debating! Keep talking! Keep walking ! Get more of your Fab-India-clad-voices to throw some more LIGHT. Thank you so much Television. I hate you!

Do not trust a courier company called DTDC. This is why!

Hi,

I have had a harrowing experience all of this afternoon trying to reach your offices.

My intent to try and call you was to simply to try and track a courier envelope sent by my brother, Mr. Ankush Bose from Kolkata, to the Amity University campus (Noida).

Let me first explain what the problem is.

The courier was sent by us through DTDC (No.: K41277866) on the 24th of May 2010 from Kolkata. The same was addressed to Amity Delhi, Noida Campus, Block E 2, Amity University Campus, Sector 125, Noida – 201303. According to your website, the same has been delivered on 27th May 2010. Though, the same has not been received by them (Amity University).

I need to know, whom have you handed over the courier to at Amity University.

I have called Customer care (33004444). It was only after one hour that I finally got to speak to a customer-care executive, after hearing your DTDC song about a thousand times.. The executive could not give me any details and mentioned the same information that is already available on the DTDC website, i.e., the same has got delivered on May 27th 2010 to the Admissions office.

When I mentioned my problem, the person advised me to lodge a complaint in order for me to get the information about who has received the courier and that person’s telephone number. I lodged a complaint as advised (Complaint No.: 25248).

The person mentioned that the procedure is that they will check with their Noida office, get the paper which has the information, scan the same and mail it me. And that it will take 2-3 days, but they will try to do it ASAP. The ID I have given is my personal email ID, namely, omtirtha@gmail.com

To this, I mentioned, isn’t it a lot easier if you simply give me the number of the Noida DTDC office, and I can call them up for the information directly. To which the executive gave me three numbers, which I am stating. They are: 0120-3082750, 0120-3082755, 0120-3082748. If luck shines, and any of them ring, nobody picks up. But, of the 100 times, I called, it probably rang only 6 or 7 times. So you very well understand the ringing probability that I am hinting at.

For the last 3 hours I have tried to run from pillar to post trying to get one small piece of information. I humbly request you to help me with information as soon as possible.

This courier contains a Demand Draft on which depends my brother’s admission at Amity University. I sincerely hope that you can understand the gravity of the situation because it is direct relation to a young boy’s career.

If this what we are to expect if we sent a courier through you, then I am sorry, this is the last time that I deal with you. However, considering the present problem that we are facing, I look forward to your support in receiving a solution to this problem at the earliest.

Please help me about this.

Tirtha N Bose


Associate Creative Director

Dentsu Communications Pvt. Ltd.
New Delhi, India
Ph.: 09999 886064

Tripping the LOVE fantastic…. Dev.D!

If Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s ‘Devdas’ could be drenched in hallucinogenics, mutated in to a stoned, outlandish avatar… ‘Hey Presto! You have DevD.

If not a debut, definitely the one which unleashed some hard core screaming celluloid for Mr. Anurag Kashyap. The man who penned himself many screen-scorchers such as Kaun, Satya, Yuva to name just a few.

DevD, here is the rapturous tale of Devdas, Paro and Chandramukhi, which has been filmed by many on celluloid, even lifted as slapstick BIG ideas in advertising, lampooning the nasal yester-years’ feel. Rest in peace Sehgal Saab!

But, here, we have DevD. A monster on the silver screen that has eaten in to the soft and fragile minds of Indian cinema goers. Shot in and around folksy environs where you have the ‘gaaon’ or the ‘pind’ feel. Sarson ke khet, strong beer guzzling gabrus and colorful salwar-clad desi chicks and behenjis.

The movie begins with shades of a Punjab-da-Huckleberry film chap, a lad who prefers calling his dad ‘Sattu’, the nomenclature being a derivative from the business the man engages in, vis-à-vis making Sattu (a cheap but very filling cereal, poor man’s wheat flour). On the parallel is the young Paro, the factory manager’s daughter, confidante to Dev’s ways, as she smuggles parathas for her young man to devour. She is equally ravenous in attitude and a fiery tounge as compared to the young Dev.

Well it doesn’t take much for Daddy-Sattu Dear to realize that his hopeless ward should better be packed in to ‘Vilaayat’ (popular name given to the domain of her majesty herself, namely UK).

We see the adult Dev, chatting up with Paro back home. Asking her to pose nude for him. In their jawaani ki aag, they declare to each other that they just can’t take it anymore.

Dev returns to homeland. It’s his brother’s wedding. The stage is set. And then the moment. Paro meets DevD. Fire meets fuel. Dowsed in flames.

But, the local mundas are just not willing to let go. They fill up Dev with tall-talk of how ‘palang-tor’ Paro is. How they could not budge their will for 48 hours post their post-coital moments.

Dev is ablaze. If Mr. Morrison woke up in the morning and got himself a beer. Our man, Dev-Abhay Deol-D wakes up every morning and rolls himself a joint. Perturbed having heard stories of Paro’s she-mojo, Dev steers away, calling her a slut.

And in the meanwhile enters another chicklet in the story, who is an able distraction for not just Dev, but by all means for the male cinema-goers. At the pre-wedding proceedings we see this lady clad in a blouse which leaves less to imagination and more to the eyes. So-with dangling breasts and fox eyes, she takes Dev away for a wee bit of fun. But Dev’s ‘antaratma’ curdles him. And he stops right at the brink.

Meanwhile this damsel’s businessman brother has developed a softie for Paro. Dev takes it all in, as if Lord Shiva, himself is guzzling the poison of the nether-world down his gullet.

At the night of Paro’s shadi to the businessman, Dev goes bottoms up, on not a drink but one full ripe bottle of Vodka. In his drunken stupor, as Harish Band belts out ‘Emosanal Atyachaar’ with Patna Ke Presleys on lead vocals, Dev trudges towards the dancing crowd, trying to reach Paro, pushing away the foxy damsel away from his path, only to land, crash, boom, bang with one grand finale of a ‘Thud’.

With that we then move to the third adhyay. That of Chanda-Lenny-Chandramukhi. A nubile schoolgirl at Delhi, daughter to a foreigner mom and a long haired Indian father. Lenny is the cool chick, who bikes around with a sleaze-ball of a boyfriend, whereas her peers ogle her in amazement waiting for the school bus.

Young experimentation, and again here, the confounded ‘jawaani ki aag’ lands her in a sleaze soup when her beloved films her on a mobile, shares it with the whole world, only to be nabbed later by Delhi Police.

But by then the harm’s done. Socially ostracized, openly proclaimed the cool slut, Lenny is in the ninth hell of shock and despair. Her parents ground her, take her to the hills. But running does not help to hide.

The shadows of gloom follow her. Not able to bite the bullet, her father gulps the bullet by committing suicide. Lenny runs amock reaching her dad’s hometown, the same town where resided Paro, Dev, Sattu and the families therein.

There too she receives not better than abuses and blames by her granny for gulping down her dear ‘puttar’. Her uncle even suggests getting her killed and buried in the ‘sarso ka khet’. Lenny calls her mom for help. Mommy cries, does not talk. Li’l girl Lenny is lost.

She flees. Catches a train, the very same one, where sitting in front of her is Dev’s now-married-to-businessman-beau, Paro. They exchange pleasantries.

Cut to now in the national capital. Dilwalon ki cinematic Delhi. She calls friends. Everybody shuns her away. She is lost in the painted, painful, psychedelic streets of Paharganj.

With not enough money to even have water she eyes people at cafes munching away. A woman having her meal chances upon her, and makes friends. She initiates Li’l Lost Lenny to the world of quick money, sex, cocaine and alcohol!

Pony-tailed Chunnilal, the Black Mamba dude, at the same time spots our tragic hero DevD, lost, thirsty. Not for water, but Vodka!

They drink away till the wee hours of dawn, while the Twilight Dancers put up a splendid song and dance sequence. The flashy break dancing is reminiscent of the 90s and awesome. The wall behind the dance floor reads “LOADING. PLEASE WAIT.” Trippy!

Thereafter starts Lenny’s education. She learns the art of sex and at the same time is enrolled for graduation at Delhi University. While she studies her text books at college, at home and in bed she studies fantasies. Kinky-spanking, bondage, Moulin Rouge, French, Indian, Italian, Schoolgirl, Nurse, Tamil…sex in many languages and avatars, ribbed, flavoured, extended climax, etc. Funnier, than raunchier indeed!

DevD, meanwhile spots Paro in Delhi. He tries to get in touch. He does get in touch only to be shunned. Paro though comes to his pad. The one-roomer-stoners’-pad with countless bottles of booze, and a graffiti-adorned wall which actually has Goddess Kali with the head of George-frikkin-Bush…now beat that! Fire meets fuel. Sparks fly yet again. Paro bathes her man, washes his clothes, prepares to leave. Leaving behind the angry and enraged Dev.

Enter Chunnilal the Dragon, to the rescue. More booze. More cocaine. More blood. More pain. Tauba tera jalwa. Tauba tera pyaar. Tera emosanal atyachaar.

Dev, then goes through a wild spree. He’s at most times with Lenny. Not doing her, or anything, basically that becomes his crash-pad every dawn. Sweet emotions start to blossom within Lenny for this fallen man. She starts caring for him. They hang out. Have a good time. Go dancing, skinny dipping, good times a rollin!

But the cops nab Dev. His Dad ‘Sattu’ passes away. He’s in a mess. He gets ostracized from his family. All hell breaks loose upon him. While returning from Pind to Paharganj, his sardarji driver also cons him. Runs away with his money. Dev is alone, wasted, and guess what, on the hills.

From there he hitches a ride with a biker to reach Delhi. Mama Mia, he reaches Delhi, spots the surd who duped him. Takes his money back. Meets Lenny. Starts life afresh. With Lenny by his side, modern day DevD gets real. He is real. Paro, here, isn’t his muse-et-al. She’s Paro. Only.

Needless to say Abhay Deol as the joint smoking, e-pill popping, acid tripping, vodka downing, and cocaine snorting DevD has shattered the aura of even Matt Dillon of Drugstore Cowboy fame. Though it is the cinematography, the casting, the acting, the script, the dialogues, the music, in fact everything, every bit and piece of work, which has put together a movie experience that is hard to forget.

And by god, I have no clue how this hard core of a movie went past the Censor-frikkin-board. Abhay Deol has rolled, smoked countless joints in the film. You might debate, “Yaar woh to smoking tobacco roll kar raha thha”. Arey yeh public hai boss, yeh sab jaanti hai, kya?

As I was telling friends, you can either love this movie or hate it. There are no midways. Just can’t be. You can either say ‘Wow’ or feel sorry for wasting moolah-in-a-multiplex. Having read this, I leave it for you to decide.

Rock n' Work

With music in my ears

And ideas in the mind

The comp-keyboard becomes my Hammond Organ,

Where I go Plinky-Plonka-Plinky-Plonka.

And while I rattle my Boogie,

Imagining lost souls dancing groovy,

Realms of paper get filled with Times New Roman,

In Font size sixteen.

And the band keeps jammin’

Somewhere in Europe

In the year 1972….

My friends, at work and otherwise

May the force, be with you too.

- 2:54 PM, while @ work, 20.8.08, listening to Grateful Dead,
Europe '72, CD 1.

Untill we rest in peace!

Death is a word

That ends a carefully crafted sentence called life.

Death is silence

That separates a song from the next one.

Death is a wishful end,

To a paragraph, hopefully, before the turning of a page.

Nothing but existence.

Passionless existence

befits only those

who choose

not to die

but live on

and drag with them the world

a littler closer to death.

If to live is to exist,

then don't live... Die!

The music never stopped....................

Redefining America through Rock Music after Woodstock and Altamont:
Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty

- The Grateful Dead -

Jerry (Captain Tripps), Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzman, Ron Pigpen McKernan

The band came to represent all that the spirit pervading San Francisco in the summer of love seemingly was all about—what is usually associated with the "hippie smile," to borrow Neil Young’s phrase. They were the staple of the psychedelic ballroom scene; they often took the stage of Bill Graham’s Fillmore, and frequently they also did free concerts in Golden Gate Park—obviously continuing the style of the Acid Tests. They were fiercely anti-establishment, contemptuous of the commercial spirit that dominated the music business, but they were never as openly political or topical as the Jefferson Airplane or Country Joe & the Fish; they were content, it seemed, with doing their thing—which was music, their music.

The Grateful Dead brought together a number of disparate musical elements into an innovative and influential whole. Lead guitarist Jerry Garcia had served stints in jug bands like the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers and Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions; bassist Phil Lesh was involved in the frontiers of electronic music; keyboardist/vocalist Ron McKernan had a background in the blues, while rhythm guitarist Bob Weir and drummer Bill Kreutzmann were well versed in rock, folk, and rhythm & blues. What they made of it was eclecticism in its very best and highest sense. At the same time, the music played by the Grateful Dead in those early days was fundamentally different from what was normally offered to concert audiences at the time. Rather than the usual run of three-minute pop songs, they did open-ended jams, using the standard line-up and instrumentation of rock bands.

They fused jazz structures and blues sensibility in long improvisations, expansions on a theme and variations that would go for twenty minutes and more, all clad in a show that easily lasted for three or four hours and was enhanced by caleidoscopic light effects. (Ken Kesey, the choreographer of the first Grateful Dead concerts, is often credited with having invented the light show as an asset that was soon indispensabe in rock concerts.) The first four albums, The Grateful Dead (1967), Anthem of the Sun (1968), Live Dead (1969), and Aoxomoxoa (1969) reflected the band’s style.

Anthem of the Sun (1968)

Aoxomoxoa (1969)

The raw, improvised sounds were meant to convey the feeling of a concert; even the takes recorded in a studio were to reflect the spontaneity of a live performance. The spirit of the early years is perhaps best captured on the double album Live Dead, which contained only six songs, and those songs, moreover, seemed to melt into each other.

Live Dead (1969)

A little more needs to be said about Grateful Dead concerts, for they are peculiar in the atmosphere that is created. They demonstrate what the interaction between performer and audience can amount to. The band’s insistence on being free of the self-dramatizing posturing so common with rock stars—that posturing may be taken as one kind their audience would accept. For three main points of the Dead Head worldview are close to unanimous: the warm sharing of a family; the hippie contempt for commerciality that makes Deadheads stubbornly condescending to most other rock bands; and a noisy but peaceful determination to have a good time.

Dennis McNally also notes the "familial feeling of a cult" that is a characteristic of Dead concerts; "the distinction between performer and audience is blurred here, because to a remarkable extent [the] audience is part of the act. When the Dead play there is a family—an inner family of band and staff and crew, and an extended family of ‘audience’—all come together for a ritual that most closely resembles a stoned religious proceeding."

"Me a Deadhead?" another critic begins, implying that the answer is no. And then he writes this: "At the highest moments, the crowd’s intensity was reflected in the playing: performers and audience seemed to coalesce, to spark each other and erupt, creating the kind of spontaneous magic that vinyl never delivers." Less emphatic, though no less positive, is the summary Richard Kostelanetz, a noted expert on postmodern literature and culture, gives of his experience at a Dead concert. "The audience seemed a microcosm of a new society that was free of both race prejudice and class prejudice, free of middle-class inhibitions about pleasure, free of censorship, acutely sensitive to political and social evil."