November 19, 2008

Yellow light, boss

Some odds and ends for today, November 19 2008.

***

Ma calling. They don't make 'em like this guy. Or his bro.

Nobody hit quite like him either.

***

Four inmates plan and then carry out a daring escape. They "scaled the walls" and then walked through the nearby town. Eventually, security guards caught them and "escorted them back."

This event warrants a front page headline in my paper this morning, and the lead Page 4 article.

Q: What was this, a jailbreak? People from a mental institution?

A: None of the above. Instead, it's what's happening on the TV show Big Boss.

News of major import for all India.

***

A New York based man by name Ashok Motiani claims this : "I am perhaps the best financial astrologer in the world." (Hindustan Times, November 19 2008). If that's not impressive enough, he says he "accurately predicted the last three stock market crashes in India." The clincher is, naturally, his "client repertoire of A-list Hollywood celebrities": Uma Thurman, Anthony Hopkins, Kurt Russell, Goldie Hawn, Gwyneth Paltrow, Billy Zane and John Cusack.

Mr Motiani also says that in 1992, his friend, "Bollywood director Vijay Anand, pursued [sic] him to predict a crash so that he could pull out his money in time. In October 1991, he predicted that the market would start crashing from February 1992 onwards. And he was right."

Some confusion with dates apart ... I'm wondering, does prognostication like this qualify as insider trading or some such?

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"It has been observed", says Bhagwan Thadani in a letter to the Hindustan Times (November 19), "that for the last so many years, locals are struggling to get jobs owing to the influx of north and south Indians in the city. In many cases, these people who come to the city for work don't have any attachment to the city."

I have two simple questions.

One, how do you "observe" that locals are "struggling to get jobs owing the the influx"?

Two, how do you "observe" that some people "don't have any attachment to the city"?

Specific, explicit answers solicited.

***

What does a yellow light mean?

and

Vacuum cleaners, or maybe not.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't it simple logic?

More people applying for local jobs more the competition?

In our engg college we had a special big quote for outsiders who paid 5-10 lakhs per seat (about 8 yrs ago), consequentially number of seats to be filled up by merit reduced.

Not suggesting locals need to be xenophobic.

Celebs like Kareena Kapoor when describing themselves, do so by saying they are Punjabi to heart, in spite of spending all their lives in Mumbai. I don't see an American born second generation kid , of Indian origin, calling themselves Indian to heart. The choose to identify themselves as American.

I had a friend in grad school who hailed from Hydrabad, in spite of his mother tongue being marathi, he spoke it broken, choosing to converse in Telegu.

The fact that one has to speak Hind i instead of Marathi in Mumbai is a good enough indication of amount of respect outsiders (no real desire to learn the local language) have for the local language/culture.

Anonymous said...

no comeback? very un dilip.

Dilip D'Souza said...

So let me get this straight.

Kareena Kapoor spends her life in Mumbai. She calls herself Punjabi. This is reason to criticize her, because surely she should be identifying herself with where she lives, not where her family originally came from.

A friend in grad school spends his life in Hyderabad. He speaks Telugu. This is reason to criticize him as well, because surely he should be identifying himself with where his family originally came from, not where he lives.

This is called "simple logic."