Itna drama kyun hai bhai?

Everytime I watch a Bollywood movie I tell myself, NOMORE! I will have nothing more to do with all of that mindless ranting and raving about some crazy/warped love angle, a heroine desperately seeking love and an overly eager hero ready to comply! NOMORE! But then I like so many others find myself being lured again into this never ending saga of romance/drama that is Bollywood. The colors, the happy go lucky characters, the LOVE stories that in almost all cases are always a success are created to draw an audience like you and I. Try as you may with all your might to resist Bollywood, it will in some way, shape or form came back to haunt you. You say you dislike Bollywood now, ok..ever think about someone you knew from the past, an ex?, a sweety you parted ways with, an evening of fun and frolick with friends? Think about any of the aforementioned people especially when you hear a certain song? That my friends is the power of Bollywood. Love it. Hate it. Either ways it’ll never let you go. You can run but you can’t hide. Now, I'm not saying that everything Bollywood is drama filled and a waste of time. No. Not at all. There are some truly memorable movies that are made in India, the romance kind or otherwise and are a must watch. However, all logical reasoning and thoughts must be put aside before watching some of them. My only problem with these movies is the false notion of life/love that they inculcate within the minds of the very impressionable youth. They say art imitates life, not so in your average Bollywood "masala" film. Therefore, my issue in the past till date has been the effect they have on the average South Asian teenager (especially those who actually live there). Watching a typical commercial hindi flick certainly creates misleading ideas about what life and especially love is all about, for in these movies it's romancing in foreign and exotic locales and a relentless passion that never never fades away with the hero chasing the heroine and winning her heart against ALL odds (Veer Zaara, KKHH, HDDCS, QSQT, KANK, etc, etc ,etc and if you aren't able to make sense of the abbreviations you're clueless about B-Wood and don't really need to be reading this). Infact, being rather nonchalant about the opposite sex I was able to steer clear of all this Bollywood madness (watched but never let influence) even as a teen and often times found myself pondering over why even bother making movies that are so meaningless?...ofcourse at some point on a later day I will hear the melodious "tujhe dekha to yeh jaana sanam" play in the distance and figure if you can't beat em join em and so the show must go on or in this case as SRK aptly puts it "picture abhi baki hai!".

Bliss in Ignorance?

Now you'll have to forgive me if this post may hurt the emotional sensibilities of some but I cannot contain myself from writing this note and furthermore to protect the identity of the individual involved in the to be mentioned narrative I shall use a hypothetical name and refer to her as Simone, in an otherwise non-fiction incident. October of last year, Muslims all over the world observed the Holy month of Ramadan and as most people are aware, it involves fasting from sunrise to sunset. So it came as a complete surprise to me when I was at work one morning while observing my fast when more or less the following conversation ensued in Simone’s office,

Simone: "Hey Suphia, you should try these cookies, they’re good!"

Me: "No thanks (my stomach already rumbling at the very thought of the cookie), I’m fasting today so I can’t eat anything till sunset"

Simone: "Oh really? must be hard, how long do you have to do this for?"

Me: "Ramadan lasts for a month"

At this point I have to add that Simone is short of hearing and one often finds themselves talking louder than they otherwise would in order to be audible to her so perhaps in her defense she did not hear me? Anyway before I could respond, in walked another co-worker into her office.

Coworker (turning towards me): "Hey Suphia, how’s the fasting coming along?"

Me: "Good, except that I tend to get thirsty"

Simone to coworker (with a very incredulous look on her face): "Can you believe it? They can’t eat anything for a month" and turning to me added “how do you survive without food for so long? DON’T YOU DIE?"

At this point the two of us couldn’t help but break out into laughter and told Susan that the fast is to be broken at sunset following which you can resume eating. She then heaved a sigh of relief and I guess realized (hopefully) how silly she had been in making that assumption in the first place. Now, I realize that Ramadan is an Islamic practice however truth be told, it saddens me to think that even though we live in the 21st century and enormous amounts of knowledge and information is available to us at the click of a button, some of us choose to live in ignorance and thus choose to not know.

Private ownership of handguns?

On October 20, 2008 the Supreme Court, overturning the District of Colombia’s handgun ban, declared that according to the Second Amendment individuals have the right to ownership of a hand gun for private use. Although in the past this issue has always been surrounded by controversy and differences in opinion I would have to agree with the Supreme Court ruling. It is crucial to be able to protect oneself if the need ever arises, even more so considering the fact that increasingly, every day we hear horror stories about people getting robbed, murdered, vandalized etc. However, I also think that one cannot ignore how dangerous these weapons can be. Just a few months ago I learnt that a girl I knew of through a friend was killed in a handgun accident at her own Birthday party. The gun belonged to her parents. So therefore I am of the stance that handguns should be made available to people for their individual private use however the people who buy these guns should be well aware of the risk factors involved and keep them in places where they are not easily accessible

Anti-Terrorism or Anti-Privacy?

A class action-lawsuit was filed by the Non-profit group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation against President Bush and the National Security Agency on Sep. 18th 2008 in hopes of putting a stop to the illegal surveillance of Telephone and Internet traffic by Telecom companies in America. The EFF had previously filed a law-suit against AT&T Corporation claiming that it had provided to the NSA without warrants access to its communication lines and customer records. The latter lawsuit was overturned by the Government this year and Telecom companies that were instrumental in helping the Agency were granted immunity. With President Bush and a few other officials ardently defending this surveillance technique the “Right To Privacy” seems to have been conveniently forgotten and ignored.

Back in 2001 when President Bush first passed the program, the National Surveillance Agency began listening in the US without court warrants which was followed by a statement in January 2007 that the surveillance had been put to a stop without court authorization. However, some programs continued on without judicial monitoring. The lawsuit in 2008 was filed by five AT&T customers with the help of information received by a former AT&T technician who claimed to have seen the NSA install equipment at a communication centre in San Francisco which would enable the company to monitor large amounts of Internet traffic.

The Government claims that this program will enable them to monitor any kind of conversation they think is suspicious which can possibly help them in averting terrorist attacks on America. This lead me to think about the group of people that would be likely subjects for this surveillance program which then invariably lead me to think that yes it would probably be the Muslim folk. Now I may be wrong but being Muslim myself I can’t help but think that this is “racial profiling” and it saddens me to think that even though I have spent quite a few years of my life in the States and have come to admire a lot that the country is representative of, I am under surveillance because of my religion and even more frustrating is the fact not once in the news have I heard of any terrorist ploy being sabotaged with the help of this surveillance program. All in all I think it’s just a gross violation of privacy and not very instrumental against the "war on terrorism".