The weather, swades, media and everything ....

Anybody wonder whats happening to the good ol' bombay climate? I mean ... when I came here some 5 monsoons back, the climate / weather thing was so much more predictable. 2.5 months of rain and 9.5 months of summer. And take a look now ... there's actually a winter, maybe soon we will have spring and autumn also. Think of it .... we can't even laugh any longer at all those people buying the fall collections at Globus and Shopper's Stop in 38 degrees centigrade.

Weather apart ... saw a pirated VCD of Swades (too lazy to go to a theatre) ... the flick does well in patches ... but seriously can't comprehend what the raving ("this is even better than Lagaan") is about. I can count the genuinely moving moments on my fingers and none of them are exceptional (actually its kinda expected in this sort of a movie). Maybe I heard too much about the movie before seeing it. Anyways, what the movie makes you realise is, how cut-off you are from 70% of India's population.

The sheer incredulity with which most of us greet the fact that India in reality is not restricted to Inorbit Mall or Fun Republic is genuinely fun to watch. The last time I saw this feeling at a mass scale is when NDA lost the elections. There were these countless hordes of people who had the look of absolute incomprehension on their faces. They thought some landless labour from Bihar stole their "India Shining" dream from them. And look at them now ... how many of them actually remember Vajpayee?

There is this small germ of a debate in my head. Do we (as consumers) shape the media or does the media shape us? All those (that would include all my friends, I suppose) who are going to jump and say "Stupid, its obviously the media shaping us, what did you have for breakfast etc. etc.?" .... I tell them only this ... what are those poor sods at market research doing in that case? In case we are blindly shaped by whatever we watch, listen to or read then what is the point of trying to find out "What consumers really want?" as Business World wants us to do every month.

BTW, I hear that the Business India owner has turned out to be a major defaulter to OBC (erstwhile GTB). Now we all know why all those articles in that mag were sounding like company pamphlets (they must have been bought, estupido !!!). Ohhhh ... to have the luxury of saying "I told you so" is the most pleasurable sensation of all.

And this is a good site for sci-fi/fantasy stories.