Asides

Oh Holy Night

“Oh Holy Night” is one of my favorite Christmas songs ever. Yesterday I was listening to different versions of this song, sung by different singers. And my most favorite ones are the following three versions:

1. Billy Gilman – Just listen to this kiddo singing so beautifully and how he handles even the high notes with ease!

2. Mariah Carey – I love this one the most for Mariah Carey’s vocal range in the higher notes, her beautiful falsettos and the choir singing in the background.

3. Celine Dion – I love this version too, for the sweet, heavenly voice that this lady has.

A Christmas Wish

If you have been listening to music blogs and music online, George Kuruvilla should be a name that you are all familiar with. This amazing singer with a unique voice has recently been chosen by singer Sonu Nigam for his song tribute to Michael Jackson called “MJ, This One’s For You“. Now George has come up with a compilation of his favorite Gospel songs in this Christmas season. Titled “A Christmas Wish“, all the songs (cover versions) are available to listen and download from his blog. Click here to listen and download the songs.

Verry India!

coconut

Vikram Nandwani is an amazing caricaturist. He is also the driving force behind “Save the Tiger” initiative. He did caricatures of people to pool in the funds for this and thus brought art to make a change. If you look at the top of this blog or my Twitter profile pic, my caricature there was done by Vikram. You might have seen his political cartoons blog at point blank, and now he has started a caricature series called “Verry India“. In his own words, “Verry India is a caricature series on daily life in India by Vikram Nandwani. It is an attempt to capture fast disappearing rustic images of the country that is urbanizing rapidly.” Check it out.

Avant Garde Bloggies Awards 2009

Like in the last year, Poonam and team are coming up with the Avant Garde Bloggies Awards for 2009. As she says in her blog, – “Avant Garde Bloggies awards aim to recognise the best posts from your blog. It is an award competition where your entries are voted and judged by fellow, expert bloggers. It is a competition to recognise your blog. And as always, its meant to be fun and healthy.”

So rush your entries now! Check out Poonam’s blog for more details.

Sudheesh passes away

sudheesh

If you remember, I had written about K M Sudheesh in my old blog, back in June 2008. Sudheesh was a young Malayali poet whose works have been published by Kerala Sahithya Academy. He has been fighting with cancer and was a very good fighter at that. Many readers of this blog and Mutiny blog helped me collect some funds for his surgery back then, which was then transferred to his bank account. I remember talking to him on the phone and I felt the purity and innocence in that young man’s voice. He was so full of life and was excited to see that people around the world whom he did not even know were helping towards his cause. He enthusiastically asked about blogging etc and I felt like talking to a brother.

That blessed boy has passed away yesterday evening. I would like to take a moment to thank all those who contributed for his cause and may his soul rest in peace…

Cloud over Bhopal

A Cloud Still Hangs Over Bhopal by Suketu Mehta in New York Times is the best article that I read so far about Bhopal tragedy.

All over India, when misfortune strikes — when a child is ill, for example — people burn chilies to drive away the evil eye. The gas smelled like chilies burning, and people said to one another, it must be a powerfully evil eye that’s being driven away, the stench is so strong.

Fleeing the gas, the Bhopalis clutched their children. Some babies fell, gasping, and their parents had to choose which ones to carry on their shoulders. One image still comes up over and over in their dreams: in the stampede, a thousand people are stepping on their child’s body.

Read it in full here.

Bhopal: Never Forget

Amir Khan02

25 years on, and the poisoning in Bhopal continues…

Let us not forget…

  • A company that still refuses to take legal responsibility of the disaster, and to provide enough health damages (Rs. 25000 for life-long suffering?) and clean up the disaster site
  • Our politicians (planning to secure $1bn of investment from Dow) who want us to believe that the place is now safe, when the private institutional studies reports that the place is still highly contaminated by dangerous toxins
  • A company CEO who has fled India and was declared “untraceable” by Indian authorities although his address in a New York suburb is publicly listed
  • Generations of people, including many kids like the one in the picture above (I have excluded some very disturbing pics of the kids, go to bhopal.org to see them),  continue to suffer because of the disaster

Guardian article
Amnesty USA’s article
Riding the Elephant

(Image courtesy: Bhopal.org)

Bollywood and Indianness

I have time and again pondered over the pitiful situation that we have as Bollywood as a brand name representing Indian cinema to the world outside (just google with “bollywood+jocalling” to see my posts on this topic). For a long time, it used to be the self-styled ambassadors of Hindi cinema who keeps conducting the “Indian” film award functions outside India who are in a desperate need of selling the Bollywood brand in the name of India and Indian culture. But how would you feel when a Minister of State, who is the newest political messiah (after APJ Abdul Kalam – who also was mostly just hype) of our urban upper-middle-class babies, says this in the TED?

The fact is that Bollywood is now taking a certain aspect of Indianness and Indian culture around the globe.

Now think about the greatness of the times we are in – Bollywood being the face of not just Indian film, but also Indianness and Indian culture.

And what exactly happened to the quality of TED Talks? I think their tag line still says “ideas worth spreading”.