'Dirty' dancing

So, Mumbai's dance bars are history. Not sure what moral angle it will serve with most of the affected girls saying the only alternative for them is prostitution.

What's even more confounding however is this report in the Indian Express dt Aug 13, 2005: "Don't dance, this is Bangalore".

It was called the ‘Talibanisation of Bangalore’. Dharam Singh’s capital went a step ahead of R.R. Patil’s Mumbai as moral police brought night life in India’s most international city to a grinding halt.

A new law ‘Licensing and Controlling of Public Entertainment (Bangalore City) Order, 2005,’ originally introduced to curb the unregulated growth of dance bars/cabarets, or ‘live-band joints’ as they were known in Bangalore, had pulled the shutters on night life in the city.

The law which came into force on June 24, 2005 was seeing owners of not just cabarets but also lounge bars, restaurants and discotheques struggling to meet stringent licensing conditions.

As many as 49 establishments, falling into different brackets, had sought licenses for entertainment under the new rule but none had been granted since the police had not been satisfied with compliance.

So the work-hard, party-hard city was now being tucked into bed by 11:30 pm.

Don't know whether to laugh or cry at this bit:

At restaurants and lounge bars—with or without dance floors—owners these days get into a nervous tizzy even if clients tap their feet or nod too vigourously to the music. Over 150 plainclothed policemen are on the prowl to book anybody, dancer or owner, for dancing without a license.

"You can be arrested for dancing. You also cannot play music that provokes dancing. We have had to put sofas and fill spaces to prevent customers from dancing," says Amardipta Biswas, owner of Taika and Cosmo Village, two of the city’s in-vogue lounge bars and restaurants.

Apparently, night clubs are now playing 'classical music' to ensure patrons are not 'incited' to dance. Bangaloreans - confirm! - is this REALLY true??

What your problem is?
I've never been a party animal - discos aren't quite my scene. But that's my problem. I feel claustrophobic in small spaces populated with sweaty bodies, extra-loud music and smoke.

Besides, I am just not a 'natural' - my body doesn't 'move to the music'. But like I said that is my own predisposition.

There are tons of people who like to let their hair down on a Saturday night - and they should be free to do so. Yet this is what Deputy Commissioner of Police (admn) B Shivakumar had to say, "The new law is for the good of the people. Why should people stay out late and spoil their own health..."

Shivakumar is free to police his own sons and daughters - not all of Bangalore city!

As long as the patrons at nightclubs are over 18 or 21 or whatever the prescribed legal age where is the problem?

We can choose to stay up late.

We can choose to dance.

We can choose to consume alcohol.

Whether in a nightclub or in the privacy of our homes... None of these activities are illegal!

These sometimes silly, sometimes befuddling, sometimes hilarious bans have been appearing and disappearing for more than 10 years in Bangalore. It was not just Mr Shivakumar, there seemed to be something in the entire system that failed to differentiate between fun and sleaze. Live bands were banned in places where liquor was served because the combination apparently encouraged promiscuity! Dancing was banned within city limits for similarly laughable reasons - which led to the proliferation of "dance factories" outside city limits. (No doubt driving 20 miles out of the city to dance beats all promiscuity out of you).

Till the late 80s, Bangaloreans were known for being early to bed and late to rise. Made life easier for the cops too when people stayed at home. I've heard a story of an entire night spent by an individual in the waiting room of a large hospital in Dallas (U.S) and heard scary stories of people attacking each other with knives simply for overtaking (showing off their car speed). These were people with nothing better to do in the daytime and giving a lot of trouble to the cops at night with their aimless visits to "happening places".

Bangalore shouldn't be turned into such a "vice city".

Smoking is unhealthy - so it was banned from movies.

Dancing is not good for social well-being of the society. So what's next?

Dancing banned from movies - My sympathies with Farah Khan, Saroj Khan and Ganesh Hegde.


Apart from the fact that the govt. adds idiotic laws every now and then to a growing list.... how can they apply the law without being subjective...what if the dance girls pose as customers...would they arrest any customer who dances...Which brings us to the question as to what can be considered as dancing..is nodding ones head to the music dancing...where do they draw the line....?

There was some real time job for bouncers too as real mean looking bouncers went around in pubs forcing the junta to sit down as soon as anybody got up to shake a leg.

Stepping into our 63rd year of "independence.." and hence "freedom..", just gives me.. another reason to think if we are actually free in the truest sense of the word.. But i guess, all this is a part of democracy.. atleast it is not like China where recently 36 people were arrested for reading koran in a school..

Normal Bangaloreans, and not the pub-crawling variety, coming out of a movie were surprised to find a place to eat, everything being closed even though it was only just past 11 PM. Police vans would stand outside places which were usually open until 3 AM.

Doesn't make any sense of what the Bangalore police are up to. Another of their schemes is to harass all bikers with pillion riders after 10 PM so as to prevent mugging. Their theory is that muggers also use stolen bikes.

I really don't know where's this country headed. You talk about development, what development. The politicians are sell outs, they kill the very hands that get them the seats. After they get the seats, they do a Dharma Guru act and show what needs to be curbed.

 Instead of addressing the grass root problems our Netas do the wrong things (which they are always accustomed to doing :) ).The government could have very well kept an eye on drug and women traffickers instead of moral policing. Why do we always go wrong????? Can't we take a leaf from many other countries where these measures have successfully been implemented.... ???!!!

Meanwhile every Bollywood film has five numbers where girls and boys are gyrating to music - disco and otherwise... Is dancing so dangerous that it needs to be reduced to a spectator sport? 

till we reach that state.. JAI HO..!!

The 'Mathematics' of Dating

Applied mathematicians studying dating is about as likely to deliver credible results as gorillas solving quadratic equations.

That's what I conclude at least after reading about this mathematical model created by researchers at University College London to explore the role of gift-giving in courtship.

A team of applied mathematicians created a sequential calculation as a model of dating... The researchers assigned points to an array of courtship behaviors, including gift-giving. The computer considered the hypothetical facts, mulled over a few variables and calculated which behaviors would result in the highest score for the imaginary male or female dater.

The researchers varied the type of gift the man could give. (Political correctness aside, it was a given that the man was the pursuer and gift-giver.)

So you had a choice of worthless, valuable or extravagant gifts.

Valuable gifts = diamonds for example. Items with usefulness or resale value

Extravagant gifts = dinner at a fancy restaurant, tickets to a Broadway show or a moonlit serenade. The value of these gifts was just in the experience.

The model showed that extravagant gifts had the highest score for both men and women. This was interpreted to mean: women feel confident that they have found a strong and committed mate when they receive an extravagant gift. And men avoid gold-diggers by giving only gifts that have no intrinsic value.

Hmm. I can see a whole lot of guys go bingo! We knew it. Women want rich guys who can spoil them, no wonder we never make any progress..

Forgeddahboutit
But let me just point out a few problems with this mathematical model. Especially if you're in one of those common (for Indian men especially!) situations where you've been secretly infatuated with this girl who barely knows you exist on the planet. Or perhaps knows you, but only as an acquaintance or friend.

Extravagant will not only NOT work in this situation it will have the poor girl running off in the opposite direction. Getting 100 red roses from someone you barely know on Valentine's Day is flattering to a girl only if SHE also has some feelings for you. Just the roses or the dinner won't trigger those feelings.

So an extravagant gift will work fine if you're IN a relationship. Otherwise, if you ask me, the 'worthless' gift variety which the researchers simply overlook could be more potent.

The best kind of worthless gifts are those which involve effort, not money. They indicate you care about the other person, that "I'm there for you".

Sometimes just being emotionally available is a gift. Helping someone with a difficult decision or problem can be a gift (though you should offer advice only if you're asked to). Offering to drop her home if it's late is a gift (she may not accept but your offering to do so will be noted).

But again NONE of this matters if she does not have a basic attraction for you.

Should I tell/ should I not?
Now take this common situation almost every girl (and a few guys) have encountered in their school days.

* Someone who you don't know at all comes up to you, turns red, thrusts a mushy card/ flowers/ other lame gift in your hands. And waits for a response.

If you're a kind hearted soul you just smile and say "So sweet" and somehow squirm out of the situation gracefully.

If you're a mean one you may laugh on his/ her face and walk away. Next thing you know the whole school knows about the incident and the red-faced one is standing in a corner, purple-faced and alone.

Of course he/she eventually gets over it but what I mean is the success rate of this 'cold call I love you' is so negligible that it makes no sense to even try it.

Then there's the second situation which takes place more around college time.
* There is a girl/ guy who is a friend - maybe even a pretty good friend - and you have developed feelings for her/ him. Now you wonder, should I tell/ not tell.

Now this is definitely tricky and while girls do take the initiative these days let's just say more often than not the 'who will bell the cat' question still has to be answered by the guys.

I guess here you have to trust your instinct. Although you may think the girl does not know you like her - she does. And if she likes you back, there will be some subtle signs of it - though she may not actually say it.

If you are getting those vibes - go ahead and take a chance. But if you're not, just keep mum because telling her "I have feelings for you" when there's a 99.9% chance she will reply "I like you as a friend" is a recipe for disaster.

Here's what is likely to happen. These are insights from a very interesting guy called David deAngelo who's written an ebook called 'Double your Dating'.

DeAngelo is an amazing writer and I think what he says has cross-cultural relevance. (No I haven't bought the book but the guy has written a bunch of articles to promote his book - this is an longish excerpt from one of them)

A Secret Women Know but Men Don't

Here's the deal: If you do something to "let a woman know how you feel"... but she isn't ATTRACTED to you, then it's going to backfire.

It's going to trigger a feeling that like to call the "Instant Ewww".

The Instant Ewww is just as powerful as the physical and emotional response of ATTRACTION.

Once a woman feels it, YOU'RE DONE.

It's over.

It's like hammering a RAILROAD SPIKE into the coffin.

Once a woman feels the Instant Ewww, she will start behaving differently.

In short, she'll disappear.

So where did I get the concept of the "Instant Ewww"?

I got it from WOMEN.

I have actually heard SEVERAL women use the word "Ewww" when describing how they felt about a guy that was "confessing his love"... of course, these were guys that weren't loved in return.

So what causes the Instant Ewww?

And why would a woman feel it towards a man who was trying to be nice... a guy who was giving her a gift or telling her how he feels?

Because if you think about it from HER perspective, you'll realize that the moment a you do something to "confess", you have created a TURNING POINT in the relationship.

Up until that point, you were harmless.

I mean, women always know how men feel.

She already knew you wanted her.

She knew it from the beginning.

But now that you've started pursuing her and talking about how you feel, you've created a NEGATIVE TENSION that is VERY uncomfortable.

You've triggered an emotion that is repulsive to women. And it does repel them.

In summary...

You can't "make a woman like you" or "change how she feels about you" by doing nice things for her...

Guys think that they need to communicate when they like a woman... as if that's part of the necessary process of getting a girl.

In their minds, it goes like this:

Like her>Tell her you like her>She likes you

Well remember... if you follow this pattern yourself with women who aren't ATTRACTED to you, then it's going to BACKFIRE.

If she's not into you, then it goes like THIS:

She thinks of you as a friend>You tell her you like her>She gets the "Instant Ewwws" and never wants to be around you again...

Now of course this DeAngelo guy advises at this point: "Buy my book to learn the secrets of how to succeed with women". And you know what - it may be a sales pitch and the book may not actually work for you - but he certainly knows more about dating than those lame mathematicians. Considering the fact that such "Educational Lectures" will be unavailable to the guys in the real world the guys will have an easy time using the correct theories given by expert. But I am having a gut feeling that all theories proposed are for girls in the western world. In India, a better book would be: "A complete idiot's guide to impress prospective in-laws".

Any author willing to write on this would definitely make a billion in fortune considering the population of this country. Morover it would lead to more books like: "A complete idiot's guide to fend off imposter bridegrooms."
 Reserve 50% seats in IITs for lady candidates and you will find a million mathematical models to explain the girls' behaviour. After all, every statisticians needs a sample space to work on.

Many guys know how it feels living in this world where having equal number of girls in the world is an axiom and not a theorem that can be proved.

 There is another theory called the Ladder theory (read somewhere on internet.) The way its written is very chauvanistic but still gives an insight of priorities women have. The theory was: Women have two ladders on which they put their male companions: one of the only Friends and the other ladder is for the males they will consider for relationship. But males normally have only one ladder for women and that is of relationship.
If you are on the friendship ladder of a female then better not try to jump on to the relationship ladder. You will fall :). As you said, females look for powerful and rich men.

Sorry, guys! Courtship is highly complex and can't be distilled into a few sterile numbers and equations. Or there wouldn't be so many mopey single engineers and IITians!

Expectations 'Rising'

When Mangal Pandey released, being an Aamir Khan film  the junta had high hopes, and expectations.

Films based on historical characters, however, can be tricky. Remember Asoka? Not only did Shahrukh and Santosh Sivan fool around with the spelling of his name, they screwed around with the basic story and character.

Ashoka is known to us all as the Emperor who was so repelled by the death and destruction caused at the historic battle of Kalinga that he renounced war and embraced Buddhism.

But that portion never got its due prominence in the film as reel after reel was wasted in unfolding the love story between Asoka and some imaginary princess played by Kareena Kapoor. (I went back home and dug up an ancient Amar Chitra Katha to confirm that fact - the princess never actually existed!).

As Oscar Wilde once said: Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it. To that I would add, it takes an even bigger genius to film it.

The only truly watchable and yet authentic biopic I've seen is 'Gandhi', whose life and thoughts were very well documented both in his own writings and those of his contemporaries.

While staying true to the key events in Gandhiji's life, Attenborough managed to add drama, emotional depth and cinematic sizzle to produce a moving and memorable motion picture.

Fact vs fiction

The point I'm making is that historical films work when they somehow manage to fit our pre-conceived notions of how the character actually existed and yet add some elements which raise the effort above documentary, to the level of a film.

In the case of Mangal Pandey, the beauty is that while the name of the character is familiar to every schoolkid, no one knows much about the guy. So you can embroider all the fiction you want onto the facts and probably get away with it.

As director Ketan Mehta himself admits: "There is not much historical data available about the life of Mangal Pandey except for the episode when he sparked off the revolt. However, a lot has been written about the life of the cantonment and the cultural atmosphere of those days. Besides lots of legends involving him have been passed over the generations. So Mangal Pandey is the mix of this written and oral tradition of history.'

History as you like it

Of course there are many versions of the 'truth'. A book by Oxford educated historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee asks: Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or Accidental Hero?

The author claimed Pandey was an ordinary sepoy who, under the influence of bhang, committed a reckless act for which he was hanged. Mukherjee's analysis examined whether Pandey really was the heroic figure history had made him out to be, or just a soldier who happened to get lucky.

The book had its share of controversial statements such as: 'Nationalism creates its own myths. Mangal Pandey is part of that imagination of historians. He had no notion of patriotism or even of India. For him, mulk was a small village, Awadh.'

It also went on to claim that Pandey's action was contrary to the spirit of insurgency: 'A rebellion is a collective will to overthrow an oppressive order. Pandey acted alone; he was a rebel without a rebellion. The name Mangal Pandey meant nothing to the sepoys who raised the revolt in 1857.'

And that too, is quite believable although hardly inspiring...

We've already internationalized Mangal Pandey 'the hero' through school history textbooks. With the release of the film the legend has been sealed.

Mr Mukherjee may well be right but it hardly makes a difference!

More than a Mutiny?

Besides the curiosity generated by the Aamir Khan factor, the producers cleverly played the patriotic card.

"India. 1857. The British called it the Sepoy Mutiny but for Indians it was the First War of Independence", says the official website.

Of course there was no concept of 'India' as we know it then... We were just a rag-tag collection of princely states. Although Arab travellers clearly defined "sindh" (from which we get the name India...), which included the ports of Gujarat as well as the southern ports like Calicut.  So, clearly, culturally and historically India as an entity (though not necessarily a single united country) existed.

The primary trigger for the uprising was the belief that pig and beef tallow was being used to grease cartridges. So it was more about protecting one's religion than fighting for your country. The question is, had the British been more sensitive to such cultural issues - as multinationals are today - would they have been spared the events of 1857?

I saw how Mangal Pandey - the film - tackled these issues. But was his rebellion accompanied by patriotic exhortations - the kind which we associate with the freedom struggle that followed?

Or did the film stick more closely to the facts: that he unwittingly set off a chain of events (Bahadur Shah Zafar, Rani Laxmibai, Tatya Tope etc) which came to acquire some semblance of a 'war of independence'.

Personally, I hoped the film makers erred on the side of subtlety and didn't make it a 'Bharat Mata ki jai' kind of film!

We have now known which way the biskoot crumbled.

The movie Asoka, was based on an historical character but in the beginning of the movie, the introduction clearly mentioned that this movie is not based on fact, it is a romanticized version of the story. Asoka was a commercial film, it's main aim was to "appeal to the masses", which it did. The love story of Asoka had been added to the story to make it more commercial. No one really cared about the fact that Kaurvaki didn't exist. But apparently, there might have existed a Kalinga girl called Kaurvaki, who may or may not have been a princess, and who may (or may not) have been Ashoka's second or third wife (don't remember which....I read this in some paper from the ASI which talked about some inscriptions found from that era, that indicate some such story). So the movie took some distant speculated fact, and wove a love-story around it. :-)

Asoka was one overrated, hyped movie where the actual issue and story never got importance/relevance and it was reduced to a mere Bollywood love story. People that time, made a hue and cry and spoke more of the liberties taken by SLB in changing the story of Devdas, where Paro meets Chandramukhi but never really bothered to talk against the changing of the actual life of a great Indian Emperor Ashoka in the movie.

If you are looking for history, if u want to watch a documentary, THIS IS NOT A FILM FOR YOU. BUT, if you are a fan of the Hindi film industry and if you understand the essence and need for this industry then you will enjoy the movie.

I do not understand the need for critics, in fact i feel the whole idea is WEIRD.A film is a piece of art, it is an expression, how can it be good bad or great. It can just be. Yes, art just is. Every artist has something in his mind when he paints, now that idea is art, how can that idea be classified or examined?

Majority of the people in India, are poor, they just aren't ready to see the reality. Hindi films give them an escape, they give them hope that things can work out. Not so many people know about our glorious past, if some not-so-realistic movie can at least make them see a part of it, i think its great. You need fiction and a little drama to make a movie, but change the entire story/ characters for that ?! That is ridiculous.

That is the essence of Bollywood and that is why we "need" it.

Bottomline : History is one of those things that changes every moment, depending on who's talking about it, and which voices are loudest :-)