The Da Vinci Code according to Damocles

The Code of Da Vinci was more like a sword of Damocles hanging over the Navi Mumbai theatre in which this poor soul was forced, dragged and cajoled to watch it.

It failed to trigger a shiver. Instead, the Tom Hanks starrer evoked a sense of disbelief at the way fiction was put through the filter of celluloid.

The Code is a disaster of a movie, and the suspense or apparent lack of it has made viewers squirm.

Now that wasn't the intention of the producers or for that matter Dan Brown or Tom Hanks, himself a credible filmmaker.

But the good thing about the code is that it is doing roaring business worldwide, despite the critics slamming it after its much awaited premiere at Cannes.

Now, when the book is a best seller and the adaptation is keenly awaited, expectations about the movie skyrocket.

That could be one reason for the disappointment at some quarters. And for those who haven't read the Da Vinci Code, the movie fails to give any reason to do so. Perhaps it should have
been vice versa. Tough luck.

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. Please, no prizes for guessing that this is a Fibonacci sequence. To hell with it.

Click here for hatemails

The great Indian embedded reality show

Protests and the politics of event management in the confines of an idiot box named India



There is a method in madness. There surely is a method in protests, for instance the anti reservation stir.

Protests as a weapon of democracy has a history of defiance. It is the most potent weapon in the armoury of democracy, the life blood of any thriving movement.

The Mahatma was one of the most innovative leaders vis-a-vis protests. He could weave a protest from the most unusual things, for example the humble salt. The salt satyagraha was a huge trigger for masses. It gave the scent of democracy an urge of passion -- it showed how the mighty can be humbled by simple off-beat things.

The Mahatma emerged as what some people now call out of the box thinker; in fact he was simply out of the world for the conventional British savage acts that they couldn't think of any way to tackle the half-naked Fakir.

Mahatma has now been spared from the burden of history as protests gain a new dimension, the dimension of spotlight falling on it -- the spotlight of television crews.

So we now have stage-managed protests to suit the camera angles of the idiot box as we clap in joy when the television beams images of anti-quota protestors being dragged in front of water cannons.

We laugh at the spectacle because the whole thing has drama, but it all looks like a stage-managed television show sponsored by TV channels sprouting in every nook and corner. Television shows have become a cottage industry now.

Recently a stir in Bombay was directed by an event-manager, we are told.

That is where the protestors loose their vital link which can strike a chord with the public, which has to step in to shape the policies which determine their destiny, or at least to trigger the message of the masses to the corridors of power.

The protests staged by anti-quota agitators seem to be managed, evidently by television producers. So while it may appeal to some idiots glued to the TV, it is floating away from the tidal waves of grass root realities.

Dud's guide to Sensex -- a book of joy & laughter

When it comes to losing, people -- with an eye etched on the Bombay Stock Exchange sensitive index, or Sensex as it is fondly referred to -- are not sporting enough it seems.

Investor wealth worth Rs 5,90,000 crore was wiped out in eight trading sessions, according to the information deluge associated with the mystery phenomenon called Sensex.

Why is it a mystery when the whole world sniffs Sensex in every whiff of air that Bombay's polluted horizons offer to its teeming crowds?

Why is it that newspapers decide to let their character go for a toss to accommodate bleeding graphs which show the volatile trajectory of the Sensex the previous day, when, we are told, the bears tamed the bulls at Dalal street.

It is a mystery, because, though the sexy Sensex, even with its slight bumpy ride can wipe out or inject lakhs of crores, that fortune, or wiped out fortune, is concentrated in a select few.

To be somewhat clear what this select few means, it is one per cent of the total population of the world's second most populous country that is ours.

To make matters easy, or rather calculations less painful, let us freeze our population clock at exactly one billion and then take stock of the number of people who dabble in stocks, keep quiet when they rake in a fortune and wipe out planet earth with tears when the market falls. The figure is one crore, in a population of 100 crore.

So ninety-nine per cent of the people doesn't have any direct bearing on whether the Sensex zooms or goes on a tailspin or when there is a meltdown or bear-run or whatever crap.

So when the one per cent is fed with a staple diet of charts and graphs to supposedly guide their path to the fortunes which are just a click away, the rest would rather try and watch a game of cricket.

So when there is pandemonium in Parliament after a jittery ride of Sensex triggered by the whims and fancies of institutional investors or foreign funds or LIC or any goddamn entity, the rest of the 99 crore remains immune.

To go by the street logic, on which the great punters who scent the opportunity to make a killing in every nook and corner also relies, for the Indian retail investor, the stock market is more of a gamble. Or shall we say it is pure gamble, despite a toothless regulator, over cautious government and the circuit filters that lord over the trading sessions.

Gambling is not about winning every time. It is also about losing. May be a 50-50 chance is what conventional logic gives to the forbidden art of gambling.

But then conventional logic would to some extent seek a safe distance from gambling dens also.

So you can't go by convention in gambling. And that is exactly why the pain of losses is more vociferous than the joys with which a fortune is made in a few minutes time.

Figures given above may be far from reality, calculations awry and logic weird. Doesn't matter since figures and facts don't count much for an overwhelming majority of people to whom this aims to cater to, though a majority of people who sift through this debris of market talk could be from the elite one crore club.

Illustration Rahul, DNA

A Papal blunder

The Pope has courted controversy with a seemingly disturbing comment, the merit of which has now been subjected to a political debate in the nation which houses countless communities and its faceless followers.

For starters Pope Benedict XV1 has expressed Vatican’s concern over the ban on conversions in some States in India. While the Pope’s concern stems from the fact that the right to convert a person of particular faith into another is a fundamental one, opponents of Pope on the issue see his remarks as an interference in India’s internal affairs.

While Pope as the head of the Church is entitled to have his views on an issue which has the Christian missionaries at its core, his credentials as the head of the State of Vatican makes the comment an interference in the country’s affairs. Diplomatic decency dictates that no head of state can make a comment which may have the potential to be seen as a peep into another country’s internal affairs. The Pope fumbled by doing exactly this..

The issue is that the Pope’s remarks came while India’s ambassador to the Vatican, Amitava Triparthi presented his credentials, which makes it an official statement.

If the Pope had such concerns, it should have been driven home through diplomatic channels in a subtle manner.

Now, what has happened is that the Pope has given anti-conversion elements in the country a stick to beat the Christian community as a whole. The age-old tool which was used against Muslims – The parochial notion that Muslims were less patriotic and tends to back their religious mentors across the borders rather than putting their pride in the country – will now be raked up against the Christian populace.

The danger with this argument is that it has the quality to sway liberal voices. For some patriotism is an elixir which blindfolds them. They tend to fall prey to the traps of propaganda if a right mix of patriotism is packaged in any debate of national significance.

The Pope has unknowingly given a trigger to the anti-conversion elements.

The elusive legacy of Bose & its uneasy pursuit

As ghosts return to taunt the Netaji riddle, a flight of fiction into the political junkyards of its uneasy trail becomes inevitable


So Subhash Chandra Bose is having a hell of a time in his yet to be undisclosed grave, assuming that he is no more. A parliamentary panel has told the government that there was no reason to believe that the firebrand freedom fighter died in a plane crash in 1945, as is widely believed.

But the government, uneasy with anything to do with the ghosts of the past, has said it doesn't agree with the findings.

The Centre has also refused to toe the line of the Justice M K Mukherjee panel that the ashes in Renkoji Temple in Japan were not of Bose.

The Mukherjee panel was set up by the NDA government to showcase its affection for Marxist West Bengal, some believe. Anything related to Bose achieves a regional fervour which could be a trigger to a better political redemption, according to one school of thought.

And the NDA thought the best way to get a posting in the electoral roadmap of West Bengal was through a resurrection of the last journey of Bose, which is mystery at its shrouded best.

So the panel was named to probe the circumstances concerning departure of Bose from Bangkok in August 1945 and his subsequent disappearance.

The mystery remains unravelled and the political game plan behind it will have to wait a bit longer to even hope to bear fruits. While Bose remains a revered figure shrouded in the mystery of his disappearance, the political star gazers have failed to claim his legacy and subvert it into the ballot box of democracy.

May be it is a tribute to the fighter in Bose who wanted to overthrow the British with arms that no one could claim the legacy of the warrior in him. Not the Marxists who pillion rode into the altar of democracy after realising the futility of the oceans of blood shed by their unsuspecting comrades.

As for the Hindutva cheer leaders who wanted to make a dent in the Marxist bastion by digging up the chronicle of a missing nationalist, they failed to realise that Bose's brand of nationalism does not even have a remote link to the sham of "nationalism" which they preach without much success other than rousing passions of hatred and triggering a scattered mutiny of divisive forces in pockets of ignorance.

For the Congress, whose claim to the country's fortunes was extracted from a holy association which the Mahatma had with the party at a vantage point in history, everything uneasy is unwelcome. So the Congress would like to bury Netaji, not to rake up his last journey.

May be Netaji did a Houdini act to vanish from the geographical flashpoints of history, only to save himself from the ignominy of seeing his unparalleled legacy of conviction torn to shreds to make or mar subversive political agendas.

The Dasmunsi Code

As a nation, we are too much in awe of bans. Now we see the sword of Dasmunsi’s cinematic abilities looming over the much awaited The Da Vinci Code.

Dasmunsi’s sword, assisted by unsubstantiated fears of insecure fringe groups who proclaim themselves as the only representatives of believers around the globe, is now taking the form of a double-edged sword. It can cut both ways.

It can cut the joys of movie buffs into size. It can also smoothen the ruffled feathers of the only children of the Almighty, who have zero tolerance towards conflicting ideas, challenging notions and all and sundry which they see as a threat to the holy cocoon in which they live.

So when Catholics across the world will view Tom Hanks crack the Da Vinci Code, a motley group of self-proclaimed believers in the land of tolerance will rejoice. Their moment of truth comes from the ease with which a spineless Union Government bowed to their dictates to see a conspiracy angle in a movie.

So what if The Da Vinci Code is blasphemous itself? Will its screening crumble the mighty religion? If that is the case, then our clergy and its cohorts on the streets should rather ponder on how to resuscitate a crumbling kingdom of heaven from the tsunami of onslaughts it is set to face.

This farce of blasphemous indignation has been enacted across the world for so much time, whether it is Hussain’s nude paintings or Prophet cartoons or the Da Vinci Code row itself.

The common element in all these "heavens may fall" protests is the religious Right. And the hapless Dasmunsis who seek every reason to pamper any thing remotely connected to the most sought after endangered commodity in the country: Religious sentiment.

So we go on banning cow slaughter, religious conversions, text books, movies and books, while we bombard search engines with a wish list of all things which we ban. This is what the nation's founding fathers visualised as unity in diversity. Amen