What men want...

Or...why Mel Gibson got it horribly wrong..(cringe)

While it is a surprisingly well known fact that men want power(and sex) and women want money(and sex), it really has failed to render all sorts of books, TV shows, DVDs, and movies on the subject obsolete.

And this is simply because we don't really want to know the answer to the question. We are just fascinated by the question itself. Oh yes, we love it when this sort of carnality titillates our lurid desires. We love some sort of distraction, albeit prurient, from the tiresome banality of our drudgery. In short, we like to leave some things to the imagination. That's why we don't enjoy watching porn, as much as we enjoy watching Bigg Boss 4. On some bucolic level, it satisifies our voyeuristic desires, the way most roleplay(yes, hot nurses included) can't.

No seriously...I was watching Truth Love Cash 2(or TLC 2 for the hip crowd), and it is a total ripoff of Splitsvilla. The stupid entertainment channels have gone from ripping off foreign shows, to launching variants of the same show, adjusted to air at different timezones. This is ludicrous, and intellectually vituperative.

Which is exactly what we love about it!! Come on, if we'd have wanted to watch an informative, intelligent, and slightly educational program, we would have watched TMZ...

No, but the point is...market capitalisation. It is now the single greatest force known to man. Women, on the other hand, have that single greatest force known as the credit card.

On the eve of Wen Jiabao's visit to India, we come across, rather ingenuously, as a bored nation of young people who think MTV is fab, and Chinkys are cute. Which the Chinkies, who are really quite evil, are going to use to screw us out of Arunachal Pradesh, Kashmir and (hopefully)Varanasi. But China has done well for itself. To compare a nation with 10 times the auto production, 6 times the steel production, and 5 times our GDP(yes, PPP is just a lame excuse) is utter foolhardiness.

They just embody what power means, to the Socialist. It means a better life, for all of the country, err..except for Liu Xiaobao, and Google employees, but who cares about them anyway? And maybe that's what the Chinese have done right, that we haven't..

They forgot about market capitalisation..

Oh yeah, and they kill corrupt politicians, and mint their own Nobel Peace prize too.. that can't hurt..

Addicted to Social Network

OR...why the world will implode if you don't change your status every 20 minutes...

Well, this could have been about the movie, which, was pretty amazing. Kudos David Fincher, for bringing to life one of the biggest revolutions of our time. However, it is testimony to the growing banality of our generation, that the smartest thing to take hold of public imagination, the apotheosis of modern intellect and creative chutzpah, has only had the effect of never having to go outside to meet your friends again. Also, you need never to open your window again, to check what the weather is like, or have to worry about the nation's agricultural status..FarmVille, anyone?

Just to clarify things, here is a timeline, of a decade by decade blow by blow account of inventions that have moulded the destiny of our civilization:

lets start at say,
1930- the TV
1940- the atom bomb
1950- the microwave oven
1960- integrated circuits
1970- the microprocessor
1980- the personal computer
1990- SETI
2000- the iPod
2010- Facebook

Is it just me? or did we reach the peak at 1970...and has it all been downhill since then?

So, now that we have entered the era of the social network, and the era of never having to leave your home..again, ever.. isn't it time we stop..and ponder for a bit?

Now, its time to go update your page on Facebook again...You're the only one keeping this world together..

The Somebody Else's Problem (SEP)

Now Douglas Adams might have known nothing about improbability, or about astrophysics, or even about tea, or he might have known a lot. That, really isn't the point.. The point is, he did latch on to one thing, the SEP.

No, I'm not talking about SEO, thats search engine optimization...or SAP, thats some German company I know nothing about. And the only reason you haven't heard anything about the SEP, is because its somebody else's problem...

Now, let me explain, and no, it's not going to involve lists with 5 items in them.. Imagine you are crossing the road. At the very end of the road, you observe a giant truck, carrying a giant payload of packages, that you presume to be deliverable parcels, to someplace, crashes into a lamppost with about the same force as that slap you got when you tried to chat up that girl yesterday.

Would you stop to help the poor driver pick up the packages, and re-sort them in alphabetical order? NO.

Of course not. In fact, chances are, that if you are the normal sort of human being(and most people really aren't, these days), you wouldn't even have seen the truck, its poor driver, or its contents spilled out on the road. And we owe it all..to the miracle of modern day existence, that is...the Somebody Else's Problem.

We can blind ourselves to the most obvious things..poverty in Andhra Pradesh, right wing extremism, National Games, telecom scams,the river Brahmaputra, pretty much anything...

All we have to do, is pretend its someone else's problem