Quite recently the worlds gaze has shifted towards Burma, the land of the corrupt. It all started when the Burmese government decided to remove fuel subsidies causing prices of fuel to rise by as much as 100%. Now, this is a country where majority of the people are below the poverty line such an increase has effectively starved thousands as the food prices increased with the fuel prices, for how can the goods transported in to the market without fuel? Now this was the spark that ignited the already critical situation. The people in Burma mostly live in fear they stay silent because they have to stay silent they have no choice. They have been oppressed by the regime which takes no responsibility towards it’s own people but rather it is intent on embezzling as much as it can.

I still remember my last visit to Yangon, I was flying alone and I was really afraid about going through customs, what if they took offense from the books I was carrying? To my surprise customs was for me almost non-existent, for I grinned through it and I suppose many grease through it, I could see signs of corruption everywhere be it the guard in the corner to the topmost the custom official, show them a dollar and they would be at your beck and call.

My uncle used to work there as there in a hotel in Yangon, they used to live in the hotel (it had a 5-star rating), so I used to visit them, I had started to find the company of my cousin enjoyable despite our occasional alright perpetual differences. Now the First Day I arrived I was told “no discussions about democracy in public or human rights”. Ah well I thought that was quite bearable but as I walked the streets I was left aghast at the state of the people everything, there was no voice to their miseries. One could feel while walking the streets the state of poverty the masses lived in, in a country where inflation is so rampant that the kyat fluctuates a 1000 to a dollar the subsidy cut was an absolutely suicidal move by the regime.

Even worse is the brain in the drain phenomenon. I remember quite vividly the conversations I used to have with pianist who used to play in the lobby of the hotel; he majored in civil engineering. He told me that it was virtually impossible for him to find a job under the current regime and hence he was forced to scrape a living by playing the piano. I was rattled to my core, here was an undoubtedly qualified engineer who would be snapped up in seconds in a liberal market place but the fellow was starving and barely scraping through! I was reminded of the saying that one can judge a country by its taxi drivers. He told me that change was inevitable something would happen sooner or later the regime would be overthrown it’s just a matter of time.

It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that this place was a ticking time bomb, they just lacked organization but once they were united the junta would have a tough time of putting them down but the question was how? The mass media was state controlled, freedom of speech was non existent there was no independent framework for mass mobilization, the existing one was already beaten down and the choking hold of the dictatorship prevented any new ones from rising publicly but I was wrong, there did exist one way of mass mobilization in this superstitious country, the monks, they are the moral authority in the country. Living only on the alms they get from the people the monks of Burma are highly revered and for the public, seeking their blessing is an issue as serious as life and death.

These moral authorities have taken upon themselves to speak out against the regime and have told the people to revolt. Now, imagine the consequences of this, this one act transformed a protest of a few dozen people into thousands, their voice in the carefully crafted governmental subterfuge penetrated into the public consciousness. Amazing isn’t it? How the people became ready to give up their lives for surety of the after life, the power of religion should never be underestimated. Even more unique is the fact that the internet has played a crucial role in this struggle for the people, if those pictures hadn’t come out do you think that we would have even known about the protest thousands would have been silenced and killed and nobody would be any wiser.

However due to the shifting of the worlds gaze to Burma and the fact that there was a revulsion felt uniformly throughout the globe against the actions of the regime something phenomenal has taken place it is the beginning of the end for the regime and it’s a dawn of a new age, the age of internet democracy so dictatorial regimes around the world beware someone, somewhere is watching…

photo credit: plynoiThe Departed (read my review of The Departed here) truly is one of the best mob movies ever. Certainly not up to the pedestal where The Godfather is, because that’s unattainable. These movies stick on for generations because of the deep impact that they have because of their stellar acting, direction, script and cinematography. Take away any of these pillars, and the movie crumbles to sawdust. The reason why I’m writing this is because HBO recently showed The Departed on television, and having seen it twice in theater earlier I thought of seeing it again now. True to HBO’s style, they publicized it as ‘Premiering for the first time on Indian television’. They really need a bloody dictionary to understand that ‘premiering’ MEANS ‘for the first time’.

Anyway, what HBO did was that it cut out scenes from the movie, and made it awfully boring. Not a SINGLE expletive remained! Not a single f-word, when the opening lines of the movie itself would have somewhere around half-a-dozen f-words. And I don’t mean ‘fountain’ or ‘Fenchurch’. Unlike normally, they just didn’t silence or beep out those portions, they actually snipped them out. The end result was that what they were showing could very well have been a fucking Disney movie. Sadly, it’s Jack Nicholson’s character Frank Costello that suffers the most because of all this editing because his menace doesn’t come across that well. You don’t get the idea that he’s a dangerous mob boss until you see the actual version where he, er, shall we say, threatens to harm Matt Damon’s fiance. Then there’s the scene where Costello meets Damon’s character in a porn theater, and says “I own the place”. You don’t get to SEE what the place is in the ‘HBO-version’. They could have been meeting at PVR, for all we know!

Absolutely THE worst editing is done where they’ve cut out that AMAZING scene in the movie where Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb is playing. THAT was SO amazing, and they censored it out. With that scene gone, the suspense at the end about whose child Vega Farmiga’s character is carrying is also not there.

Take any of the shooting sequences too. All of them had over-the-top gore, with loads of blood splatter on the walls. In the version HBO showed, we hardly even get to see the bullet hit a guy when the scene is cut short.

Frankly, HBO should either show a movie without edits, or not show it at all. Someone who hadn’t seen the original might end up wrongly thinking that this was a boring movie, when it isn’t. Heaven knows which other movies have suffered the same fate and been written off by Indian audiences because of THEIR fault. It’s Martin Scorcese at his best, and we didn’t get to see it. A mob movie seriously doesn’t hold good if it has no expletives.

Watching it was a fun experience, though the suspense of watching it the first time wasn’t there. I particularly found Mark Walhberg’s character funny when I saw it again, his performance probably being one of the most underrated in that movie. I leave with this scene from The Departed, which is one of the best from the movie.

photo credit: DoblonautI admit that I have always viewed the throbbing masses of humanity like a flock of sheep they always seem to stampede down the path of least resistance, while this is certainly true for most situations but I would like to stand corrected I now believe and know that sometimes the opposite can be true too. Before my lifetime, there had been a global thrust and still there is for democracy which at least in theory gives power to the people in an indirect way. This powerful concept had been around for more than a millennium but only recently did people rise up in the face of oppression realizing that poverty in a democracy is far better than wealth in tyranny. Yet the people in power or let it be the media likes to portray the fact that the masses are dumb that things have to be dumbed down for them.

Frankly I disagree, put on your television and tell me what is the amount of total intellectual content that you get on television. I bet that you will be counting on your fingers, out of the 200 channels on display only a few display such content. In India even the news is a joke these channels do not spend their time on important legislation, market scenarios or discoveries that directly change the world you live in and impact your lives, instead majority of the times they cover family feuds or kids in wells or some idiotic comedian pretending to be some actor. It is there view that this is what the public wants and sure enough people having nothing better to do sit down to watch these stupid shows. This is a very very dangerous trend we are dumbing ourselves down if not careful we will enter into what I call a regress to stupidity. This is dangerous because if the people are not aware what is happening and are open to such techniques of propaganda, hence it will threaten the functioning of the democracy, for it is only an informed citizen that can take action. Moreover, we have brought up with the idea that the majority of the people around us are dumb and that nobody wants to talk about serious topics and sadly we start believing it. This has led to ignorance in the people.

Go to any kindergarten class you will see children eager to learn eager to ask questions and then go to grade 12 you will see that rarely do people ask questions the same children have lost their sense of curiosity why? I am quite sure that it isn’t just puberty. They have been told and it has been hammered into them not to ask questions for if children developed a skeptical mind they will start questioning the institutions like the government, the so called “traditions”, religion e.t.c. This poses a certain dilemma clearly there would be a lot of awkward moments for the elders and the politicians won’t be able to hoodwink the populous as easily as they now do but I am quite sure that they will find other ways. Take a look at science I hate the way it is taught in school we are not taught the joy of learning but rather a more rote based method. Understandably many children loose interest in science and are not receptive to the ideas that have shaped the world. We are a society that is based on science and if science itself hasn’t percolated down to the grass root levels, one might as well understand the consequences.

So in the end it is vital for us to inculcate intellectual freedom in the world and throw off the draconian concepts of the dumb masses. Each and everyone can play a role start informing yourself about what is happening near you and moreover don’t quench your thirst for learning, keep exploring and keep on asking questions.

Today’s no-confidence motion coverage was simply so entertaining. I’m sure that Lok Sabha TV has never seen as many viewers in its existence as it did today. Especially worth noting was the Prime Ministers’ stinging (written) response, which caught everyone by surprise with its strong wording. I’m sure that if a bare-chested Manmohan Singh actually spoke it out in the House today, yelling “This…is…Spartaaaa!!!” while kicking those communist bastards into the Well of the House with a rock-my-chaddis soundtrack playing in the background, it would have far more entertaining. The good thing is that we can now all rest and cheer on as the nuclear deal can now finally be carried through.

When do you define something as real? Is it something that one can touch, smell, see or “feel” as they say? However if you carefully think about it you will realize that it is nothing but fiendishly clever stimulation of the brain. When this system fails, we start to get conflicting signals altering our perception in short we start to hallucinate take for eg schizophrenia or under the influence of psychedelic drugs like LSD often the person cannot tell the difference between reality and the figments of imagination, it is amazing how much this happens to people not under drugs. Have you ever noticed how eager one is to deceive oneself such as we always argue that mistakes were made but however not by me. Our brain even twists our memories to see ourselves in the way we want to see. Thus, we twist reality or the world around us to our liking. Will any human ever have the courage and resolve to break free from these institutions that breed the uniquely human qualities of hate, prejudice and extreme subjectivity. Does anybody has the courage to look at life and the universe as it is not as what we want it to be?

It is said that subjectivity is the boon but I argue that it is not so, one has to be objective in order to view the universe in all it’s pristine glory. This experience doesn’t destroy anyone but infuses the person with perspective which enables one to truly realize the importance and value of life. As, currently the universe appears to be one big waste of space. We are luck to be alive and to have each other to cherish this planet.

Yet there are contradictions, look at all those generals, terrorists and leaders who are willing to flow rivers of blood, but for what? Peace or more likely the proof of their pseudo superiority over the scarcely different inhabitants of this world? Out of the “leaders” of this earth not a single one of them is truly objective, each one of them is bound in the icy grip of subjectivity. So contradictory is the nature of the world or reality that we have created for ourselves, it is almost as if all of humanity has a tainted world view. Often people who do not subscribe to this world view and who don’t confirm to the current norms of the so called “society” are labeled, mocked upon and are called dreamers. Yet, it is these very intellectuals who sustain “society”, we create the basis of their progress and subsistence, even then these fools ponder about separation from us. Yet I do not blame them as they have chosen their delusions and perhaps I have chosen mine, as they say only time will tell. So for now I think it is safe to say that reality is what we make of it, nothing less and nothing more.