we are like this only

Yesterday I spend one of the most frustrating half days of my life, and came out tearing my hair and wondering about the answer to the above question. If the future is in the hands of India's youth - Lord help us! I was invited to be a panelist on the admissions panel to a business school in Delhi. While not one of the top schools, it has a decent reputation, and many of the students we met were toppers at their reputed colleges and had high scores in the CAT exam too. It was a dismaying experience. In the group discussion, very few of the students were able to put coherent words together to express a thought. And few of the thoughts that did get expressed were original. The topic was quite germane and one would have thought these kids would have some ideas, some opinions on the issue since it would have affected all of their lives - that of creating 50% reservations in higher education institutions like IITs and IIMs for OBCs. Some of the candidates didn't even bother to open ...

I've been meaning to review a couple of movies for ages but been really caught up at work. We saw Jodhaa Akbar last weekend, and honestly - a good effort but somewhere there was a lack of coherence. I feel the movie would have done better to be named Akbar and focussed on the rise of Emperor Akbar, with the Jodha love story as just a part of it, rather than supposedly the focus. The film meanders here and there from the love story and somewhere I feel the director got confused about what it was that he was trying to showcase. Aishwarya actually acted better than Hrithik who just didn't manage the regal aura in many of the scenes. I have a theory about Aishwarya that whenever she wears brown contact lenses her acting abilities are praised, like in Guru or even in the song Kajra Re, and it certainly proves to be true here. The supporting cast was mostly terrible apart from Sonu Sood. Ila Arun glowered her way through most scenes. Poonam Sinha never vacated her vacant smile throu...

Sometimes I think the weather God is a malicious little imp who just waits to see what the Indian met department will come up with before doing just the opposite. We in India have had an inkling of this over the years, so, for instance whenever the met bureau predicts rain we know to leave our umbrellas and raincoats at home and whenever they predict a cold wave, we dig out our bikinis and dust off the sun-beds. But in the last week, they have made even bigger fools of themselves than ever before. It started last week with the Beeb, of all channels, predicting that the current temperature on Tuesday evening was 2.4 degrees C and that it would hit zero within the week. All the Indian media were all over it and the Met bureau issued all kinds of cold front warnings. All schools in NCR declared holidays on Thursday and Friday - only to be greeted with the kind of sunny, warm weather which makes it a delight to be out and about in the winter. The cold wave warnings done with, once Sunday s...