Interview of an Ordinary Man

I believe that every living species in this universe deserves to be interviewed in its own way. Because, with respect to that living species, a lot of important events happen around him/her, which is definitely a worthwhile information to share with his/her fellow living beings.

Aparna is interviewing me with the following questions and as a blog friend, I am very much glad to answer her interesting questions.

1. Which actor and/or politician would you like to meet? What would you talk to him/her?

There is not really anything in particular that I will like to talk to any person, because I believe what is more important is to hear whatever the person wishes to say rather than what you want them to say. And So …

I would like to meet one Actor – Superstar Rajinikanth. Spend one full day with him in his office. There is a lot of humbleness to be learned from this legend.

I would like to meet M.G. Ramachandran ( I know he is dead, but there is no other politician I would like to meet from the current times). Spend one full day with him in his office. It is known that he doesn’t allow any of his guests to leave without having food with him. There is a lot of Hospitality and Kindness to be learned from him.

Other than an Actor and a Politician there are people that can give us a lot of life lesson. I would like to meet a Buddhist Monk in a Monastery and live there one full day leading the exact same life that he does. I would also like to invite him over to my home in Madurai and spend one full day with us. There is a lot of life to be learned from him.

2. What is your opinion about the occult?

There is nothing called Supernatural. Everything is natural. Supernatural is just a perception of humans who cannot explain something. The realization has to be that everything including us is nature. Existing with the nature, respecting ourselves and the life and things around us, is the true purpose of life.

3. What have you learnt from your kid?

How to lead my whole life moving forward. A Kid is a reflection of yourself and when you are able to see that, you will begin to love everything in life.

4. What do you think is the best – Barney/Elmo/Barbie/Lego blocks/ cars/trains/ the box any of these came in – or wait…your mobile for your kid? ( you could replace or rephrase this question )

The best toy that my kid has ever got is not Barney or Barbie or the Blocks. They are just material toys that can be interesting for a year or so, but would run away with time. The best toy that my kid has ever got is me and my wife.

This is also one thing that I learned from my kid. Often, we are stuck in a rut to find the best toy that the kid will love to play or learn with, but we forget that we, as parents, can be the best toy ever for the kid to grow up with. I certainly believe she loves to go on an elephant ride with me better than just punching some buttons in her toys. The best thing about parents is, they never get boring, they last a lifetime and they need no battery replacement.

20 years down the time, when my daughter is old enough to read this post and understand what I meant by this, and comes to us and hugs us and whispers “I Love you Dad and Mom”, we will know that she has realized that her best toys in her life were her parents.

5. What is the advice you would give to your younger self – say when you were a teenager? (I liked this question from Teeni)

Considering how I am now, There is no need for me to go back to my younger self and give him any advice. I will let him face the bumps, hardships of life and end up where I am right now, because it all turned out to be just fine. In a way I am happy that it happened that way, so there is no need and there is no point to change what happened before.

Now, I would like to interview my readers who are interested. If you are willing to take this interview, please do the following steps:

1. Pick any one of the question from the above 5. Just one question and not more than that.

2. Answer that in any way – 1 word or 1 line or 1 paragraph or a nice 15 mark essay with diagrams and flowchart.

3. Publish it in your blog or put it as a comment (If you don’t have a blog) or start a new blog and publish it(because, this could be a good reason to start your blog).

Looking forward to hear from you. Thank you for reading this.

Love and Peace.

CD in the bathtub

Our daughter loves to conduct experiments. Her field of specialization is to perform a regular act of a toddler and examine the reactions of two fully grown adult species of Homo Sapiens, one from each sex – Me and my wife. She likes to improvise and hence her experiments have been more offline which means she does what she wants to do stealthily without our knowledge and then when we see it with our eyes we react and she takes down the readings, more like scribbling with a black ball pen on the Telephone directory.

In one such experiments of the toddler, I was stepping into the shower on a lazy saturday morning (No, Please don’t picturize this unless you want to suffer from Flu for the entire winter) when my feet stepped on a flat hard object. It was a CD. A CD in the bathtub. I went “arghhhh …..no……”. I then took a deep breath and said “it’s ok, it’s just a CD”. One close look at the CD and I was actually quite relieved. It was a Sony CD-R that I had used to copy some photos from my friend’s laptop. The photos were already added to my iPhoto library and hence this CD can be actually thrown away with no harm done (except occupy some square inches in the landfill and let it sit there for several decades).

Little did I know that I was going to be the subject of the toddler’s experiment and open my mind into self realization. I picked up the CD and wondered what other things it can be used for. I was feeling itchy on my back and used that CD to slowly scratch my back (Again don’t picturize). It felt great, tremendous. All of a sudden, an object whose primary use was to store some seemingly important data, was led into one of its possible other uses – Scratching my back. This CD could very well be doing it’s job of displaying photos on a  computer or a DVD Player but it perfectly worked its way comforting me from the itch. This was the moment of enlightenment.

Are we all CDs in a bathtub? Are we in the right place doing the right job we are capable of and not just the one we are qualified for? Could I have done better as a doctor saving lives rather than sitting in front of a computer all day and working through spaghetti of lines of programs? Perhaps a courageous Journalist? or a Sportsman? Or a Car Designer? Or a musician?

Was MGR a better actor than a Politician? Would Aishwarya Rai have been better off doing Modelling than acting in Bollywood? Didn’t Kumble and Srinath do great as Cricketers rather than Software Engineers? Don’t we dance to the tunes and voice of Shankar Mahadevan rather than do nothing with the Software that he might have written? Didn’t Bikerdude kick IT recently and enter Arts? Is Arnold better being a Governor than the Terminator?

Life doesn’t allow us to do everything at one time. We get to choose and when we do, we don’t know if we have chosen to be the CD on the player or a CD on the bathtub. But what we should do is we should remain truthful and good as the CD and shouldn’t mind being in a player or the tub. Who knows, being in the tub might perhaps make the CD feel better than being in the player.

I have to tell my daughter that her experiment was a success, she is a genius, after I change her diaper.

Why South India has more Actor Politicians?

Rahul made a comment in my previous post over why South India is seeing a lot more actors turning politicians than North India. I thought I had a few points in mind about this and so I devoted a separate post for this.

First, It is not uncommon to have Actor politicians in North India too. Looking at Jaya Bachan, Rajesh Khanna, Govinda, Sunil Dutt and the likes, they were full time actors who turned into Politicians. But the big difference between the folks up North and South with regards to this phenomenon is that we have South India churning out new Political parties from Actors as opposed to North India where the actors merely try to get a ticket in an existing party.

I am not a political analyst, in fact I am terrible when it comes to speaking about politics, so if you find holes as big as Mother earth in my explanation please forgive me. I will try to project what I think as the reason to this is.

Actors turning Politicians did not happen in South India until the veteran actors M.G.Ramachandran and N.T.Rama Rao did it. As we all know, it was mostly Congress and Janata Party throughout India with a majority of favour towards the Congress. With regards to race, South Indians (from the states Karnataka, AP, TN and Kerala) are considered Dravidians while the Northern folks were Aryans. The drive to form an Original fresh new South Indian party was started from this racial division and reservation of the backward class folks. I can speak for the state of Tamil Nadu that this was the case. The backward classes wanted positions in Jobs and Education since they were neglected and most of the high profile educational seats and jobs went to the Upper class Brahmins. In those days, reservation was an absolute necessity and leaders like Kamarajar fought for the rights of the backward classes.

(Picture: Wikipedia, Still from the Tamil Motion picture – Iruvar)

This was the basis for the formation of DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam – The party for Progress of dravidians). It was headed by Arignar Anna and supported by many. One among the supporters was one of the greatest Screenplay writer and Tamil Literary Pandit M.Karunanidhi. In fact he was a journalist/politician to start with who involved himself in the Movies. MGR and Karunanidhi were great friends (this is portrayed beautifully in one of Manirathnam’s epic movie Iruvar). It was pure chance and a lot of persuasion from his beloved friend Karunanidhi that MGR took the role of a Politician as an MLA to serve the people. This was a huge event. In fact this I can call the single most significant event like that of a Big bang for the Actors-to-Politician phenomenon.

(Picture: http://mgrroop.blogspot.com)

MGR’s screen presence was unlike anything. In fact with whatever little technology and publicity that was available in those days MGR was probably 100 times popular than Superstar Rajinikanth of today, even though it is unfair to compare both. MGR became MLA and his real presence was even more mesmerizing to common people than his screen presence. When MGR found discrepancies in the DMK party, he had a fall out with Karunanidhi and that sparked him to form his own party ADMK (Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam). With politically based movies MGR took ADMK to unimaginable heights. MGR is dead, but if MGR’s spirit stands in election today in his constituency, he will win by a huge margin. MGR made history with his party ADMK. Similarly in Andhra N.T.Ramarao did what no other actor/politician did. NTR was as much popular in Andhra as MGR was in Tamil nadu.

Unfortunately after MGR there was no one who could take over his place fully. ADMK became just another party and it broke into pieces and followed into a series of not so good metamorphosis. It was Congress Vs DMK in those days that made MGR bring out the ADMK and win squarely to give people the much needed change. Today it is DMK vs ADMK and we are back to the state we were in those days. The age old parties DMK and ADMK are quickly becoming irrelevant. To make another change in this equation people wish and people think that the crown has to be taken over by another popular actor who can form his own party and win against DMK or ADMK. This is exactly why actors in South India turn to politics. Because it has happened hugely once, they believe that they can make it happen again.

That is the driving force behind actors like Vijaykanth (although people would prefer Rajinikanth to enter politics) and Chiranjeevi forming their own parties, to bring change to the people. These are folks who probably considered MGR as their idol because they were fans of his when they were young. They have the mass appeal, they have huge number of fans and supporters, they have a strong faith in history and hence they are not afraid to try and do that again.

If there are other reasons/motives for actors becoming politicians in South India, I believe it is not as huge as this one.

My fellow South Indian Readers ( or anyone who is knowledgeable in this subject) please feel free to correct me or add your view points in the comments.

P.S: Please take a few minutes to vote on the poll in my previous post on Stars turning politicians.

Stars Turning Politicians

Actors turning politicians is not uncommon in India. We have a whole bunch of them joining a party and winning the MLA or MP seat. But instantiating and leading a new Political party is quite different. Vijaykanth did it recently and now Chiranjeevi enters politics with his own party, whose name he will reveal on Aug 26th at Tirupathi. There is no doubt that Chiranjeevi is a success when it came to films, but when it comes to politics we have to wait and see if history will repeat itself and show another NTR or MGR. People will answer that soon I think.

(Picture: http://www.daijiworld.com via Google images)

I just have one question. Why do you think Robin Williams or George Clooney or Julia Roberts don’t run for the President? I mean Ronald Reagen did it once, why isn’t it repeating as often in the US as it does in India?

(Picture: http://movies.about.com via Google images)

a. Is this because Hollywood actors just want to do what they are doing? or just interested in what they are doing as their profession and not indulge themselves in Politics?

b. Do they want to do good things to people not by entering politics, but by simply doing good things as they can like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie?

c. Do they think that the role of a Politician is meant to be something for a career politician and not for them?

d. Do they try to support a particular party/politician by providing monetary donations during elections, but do not involve themselves actively, But they do rally sometimes supporting their favorite candidate?

e. None of the above, and if you selected ‘e’ do you have any personal opinion yourself on why they don’t run for president?

BACK TO THE PAST I

I remember the first time I started watching movies was with my father. He used to take me to all those old Black and white movies of MGR and Sivaji. I used to like the movies which had lots of action, especially the one with Sword fights. So I kind of liked those MGR, Sivaji movies which were based on ancient historic subjects. The best ones were Nadodi mannan, Mannathi mannan, Alibabavum narpathu thirudargalum, Malai kallan, Uthama puthiran. I usually watch them very interestingly during the first half hour when you can expect some fast paced story, action and after a while when all the romances and songs start I fall asleep. Intervals are the best part when I get to have Popcorn and Icecream (If I am awake!) and back again for some sleep…action…sleep until finally it is the last 30 minutes of the movie. The climaxes are usually lengthy but that’s when you get to see hell lot of action. I used to be fascinated when MGR escapes from Jail by bending the Jail Kambi and when he easily kills enemies in sword fight. The stunts are usually amazing, MGR runs around the palace during sword fight. He climbs the table, swings from the chandelier and jumps from the stairs. During this time I guess I was in primary school (I std or II std) so I didn’t care much about the story – the only thing I knew was MGR was the good guy and all other Guys – Nambiar, Veerapa were villains. MGR’s aim – Help poor people, Kill Bad Guys, romance a girl. Moral: Sword fight movies are interesting and don’t fall asleep during interval.

As years passed, my interest in movies changed. Rajinikanth was becoming popular in those days and I was totally amazed by the movie – Murattu Kalai. Even now, when I hear the song “Pothuvaga em manasu thangam…” I get goose bumps. I used to like it so much that me and my cousin sometime sneak and go to the theatre to watch it. I guess we were in 3rd std and the ticket price was usually 90 Paise or less. I don’t remember how many times we did this, but my Mother used to say that we used to go to that movie a lot and she usually had to send our uncles for a search and rescue mission. Payum puli was another amazing movie, that was the time I was introduced to Bruce lee movies and when I saw a similar styled movie in Tamil it was simply superb. I don’t remember all the Bruce lee movie names but liked them all. My favorite was of course Enter the Dragon. I still remember when I was in 3rd std I guess and it was the final day of the Exams. We all completed our exams a little early and our class teacher asked us to perform something impromptu in front of the class. Some told stories, songs, Aruvai jokes but I told my teacher I liked Bruce lee and I wanted to show some stunts. I did not know where that came from, but that was the only thing which came to my mind because I was not a singer, didn’t remember a story off hand and not good at jokes (remembering jokes). The Teacher asked me to come and stand in front of the class and show my stunts. I just stood up on the desk (not the chair) made a shrieking noise and was punching and kicking air – uuh aahh uhhh ahhh ! and after a few seconds I just shouted at my highest pitch, made the angriest face in the world, jumped from the desk with my legs stretched (exactly like Enter the dragon Climax fight) and landed on the pavement in front of the Teacher’s desk. Applause everywhere! I still can’t believe I actually did that, and I don’t think I even told my parents then.

The summer holidays of the same year, I got interested in a new hobby, a chance to learn something.

To be continued …