Raja's read only memories

A day after having voted in the 2014 general elections – dubbed the world’s largest – here’s my imaginative construct of the polls 100 years into the future, a la H G Wells! No sooner did the extra-sensory perception-based alarm chime did X wake up. This was the around the time when such clocks went off almost simultaneously in a good number of houses in the neighbourhood. Repeated appeals for a staggered schedule in setting the clocks went unheeded despite complaints of ESP interference from nearby residents. As the electro-magnetic wave activated teapot whistled, X mused, “Hard to imagine that people once complained of phenomena such as telephone interference and cross-talk.” The reason for the spring in X’s activities was that he would get to see, first-hand, the implementation of telepathic voting machines – his dream invention that secured him a Nobel prize – in the elections for the first time. A sensor would analyse what was going on in the voter’s mind and make the appr...

Households in Bangalore may have witnessed a sudden spurt in the number of Tamil cable TV channels – virtually all and sundry – that they have started receiving in their set-top boxes. There is a strong possibility that this could be linked to the upcoming general elections, by providing much-needed eyeballs to poll campaigns of TN’s political parties Tamil TV channel viewers in Bangalore have never had it so good. Over the last couple of weeks or so, the number of these channels has nearly trebled – from around 10 to nearly 30. Viewers who would have to otherwise restrict their options to those offered by the big four -- Sun, Jaya, Kalaignar and Star Vijay -- now have a smattering of options to put the TV remote control to further use. As if this weren't enough, any talk of subscribers being charged extra has gone unmentioned, at least till now. Viewers on the other side of the Cauvery have now started confronting hitherto unknown channels such as Sathiyam TV, Moon TV (...

Sivakarthikeyan's now the latest Tamil 'mass-hero' For Sivakarthikeyan, this is it. He has become the latest entrant to Kollywood’s ever-burgeoning “mass-hero” club. His latest movie, Maan Karate offers several pointers to the same: a shroud of invincibility to the lead character, irreverence to factors such as logic, the mandatory David vs Goliath setting, and an “intro” song (yes, you read it right). So much for an actor who shone in “very much like us” roles in Ethirneechal , Marina or Varuthapadatha Vaalibar Sangam . As in any other “mass” movie, Peter (Sivakarthikeyan) has his way with everything: Maan Karate is all about the man who is out to claim his space, be it by right or by serendipity. He hails from the “low-class” locality Royapuram, but manages to impress and woo Yazhini (Hansika Motwani) the daughter of a college professor (Sayaji Shinde, who surprisingly does not play the corrupt politician/ police officer). He can’t tell apart cricket from b...

If there was a memory of my growing up that I would like to hark back to, it had to be my first tryst with erotica, in the Irving Wallace novel The Second Lady . The novel, which was about the sexual escapades of a Russian doppelganger of the First Lady of the US as she manages to get intimate with the President in order to extricate war-time secrets from him for the KGB, had me revulsed and excited. An “emotional-fork-in-the-road” moment confronted me as I finished reading it. I gave the sentiment considerable thought before proceeding to devour all of Wallace’s books, in addition to those by Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon. I soon started grading authors on the basis of the e-quotient in their works. Wallace was lurid, so was Robbins; Sheldon and Clancy were measured and graphic; Archer the archetypal British prude; Puzo the neophyte American; Steele the eternal bore; and Grisham the American misfit. However, a nagging sentiment persisted in me: the source of the literature wa...

The reactions to media sting operations over time can be a barometer of their relevance. Consider this: In 2001, when Tehelka conducted one such operation on the BJP leader Bangaru Laxman by offering him a bribe; when caught, he was forced to step down as party secretary and was eventually sidelined. Such was the resultant embarrassment to the BJP that, as admitted by Laxman himself in an interview to The Indian Express , it consigned him forever to its margins. Circa 2014, two sting operations conducted in different parts of the nation under similar circumstances seemed to yield little result: while the one conducted by the news website mediasarkar.com on candidates of the Aam Aadmi Party, including Kumar Vishwas and Shazia Ilmi, showed them seeking cash donations in exchange for favours, the party firmly stood by them and discredited the operation. “Why not conduct this on BJP and Congress members?” asked one party member. Down south in Karnataka, when the Kannada news channel TV-...