Category: Random

Myself, Preeti, Random

Bollywood And Bullshit

Sanjay Sabarwal
English: Indian actor Shahrukh Khan, arrival f...
English: Indian actor Shahrukh Khan, arrival for press conference of “Om Shanti Om” at the Hyatt Hotel, Potsdamer Platz, Berlin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mild Spoilers ahead. Also for those who don’t watch Bollywood, most of this will go over your head.

Preeti and I had the misfortune to go see Chennai Express. Within minutes of the movie starting, I knew it was going to be a  steaming pile of shit. However, we sat through the overacting by Shahrukh Khan and Deepika whatever her last name is (I am too lazy to go look it up), and I couldn’t help listening to the audience that was in the same theater with us. They were giggling and laughing away like it was the funniest movie they had ever seen. It hit me that perhaps they are such huge fans of SRK that seeing him in a comedy made more than worth their time. While I couldn’t help noticing how old he looked, and the fact that he had to quote his older movies to constantly remind us what a huge superstar he was, I couldn’t quite get over how disrespectful us North Indians are towards South Indians. The movie is full of every South Indian stereotype there is (idli anyone?), with a bare nod towards Rajnikanth  at the end with a song dedicated to him since he is a huge star there.

A quick glance at reviews online and I kept seeing the word escapism, visually arresting, blah blah. If you want to wade through glistening shit, this is the movie for you.  No matter what, with a big blockbuster like this, you can count on one or 2 songs being interesting especially the “masala” song which involves a girl with some flimsy clothes gyrating away as she has never gyrated before. It’s all in good nah. Never mind that it shows women nothing than sexual objects and things to look at.  God forbid, a Bollywood movie such as this show women as more than showpieces. Nope! Not happening.  Instead we get a mishmash of horrible songs, even worse dancing, and me wondering why the hell did I sit through 2 hours of utter bullshit.

I know that we all have different opinions, and perhaps I just couldn’t get past the over acting, but what really offended me is how we continue to watch Bollywood movies that are broadly stereotypical (a tamil speaking punjabi guy anyone?) and promote the idea that only particular north Indians are the true Indians. What a load of bullshit. We are better than this. Bollywood needs to get better before it truly become irrelevant to the next generation of South Asians.  [Rant done. Drops mike.]

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Bollywood High Heels

Sanjay Sabarwal
Bollywood & Beyond
Bollywood & Beyond (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

 

What is up with Bhangra songs and hindi lyrics and whats up with white people speaking hindi in Bollywood movies?  That’s what struck me as I went to watch Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani, and listened to Yo Yo Honey Singh‘s “High Heels” track with some painful hindi in it. I am the first one to admit that my hindi isn’t all that, but really trying to rap in hindi when your first language is something else is just plain dumb. The beat is catchy but wow can someone hire them a song writer or someone perhaps who can speak Hindi fluently at least?  Or perhaps it can be bad Punjabi like in Imran Khan‘s new track “Satifya” which really after 4 years is just Amplifier part 2.  What happened to meaningful lyrics and characters?  Which leads me to my next annoyance. What was up with the white people speaking in Yeh Jawani? I would think if it was pertinent to the story line, I would buy it, but to have them without so much as an explanation was just perplexing. I probably sound racist, but it just threw me off that there were white characters randomly in the movie who had substantial roles but no back-end story.  I need logic of some sort in my music and movies.

I have taken up my old passions and they are lacking, and it saddens me. I don’t even know where to find new desi urban music, and what am I finding is just plain unimaginative and not relevant to me.  Maybe I am just getting old.  Yes, or maybe I am old already. Either way it’s a sad.

 

 

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Food For Thought, Myself, Random, Ziba

Thoughts For Food

Sanjay Sabarwal
A penny for your thoughts...Dollars for your t...
A penny for your thoughts…Dollars for your thoughts – NARA – 513735 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

I have been doing the Daily Food For Thought for Ziba Beauty for almost 5 years, and I happened to read some of the old ones.  I realized that at first they started out as long one page inspirational stories that I scoured for on other sites. But now they are one liners mostly for quick digestion.  My world is slowly turning from one based on thought and reflection to easy consumption. We no longer seem to have the patience for learning through patience.  We seem to want our inspiration in 140 characters or less. As the messages get shorter and shorter, I wonder how much meaning is being retained?  Perhaps we are distilling it down to the essence of thought, yet truthfully for me, I miss the days of reading the whole story.

 

We are in the middle of a generation the prefers texting to talking. Leaving voice-mails seems old fashioned or just work related.  We no longer seem to feel the need to buy a CD or buy digital based entertainment.  The value of creativity based on words seems to be sinking.  I now have officially entered into the realm of the good old days.”  None of this change is bad. In fact, I love the ease and convenience of getting to music and ideas that I never could before. And there lies the lesson. It’s not really about the message or the shape or form of it. Its how you interact with it, what it does for you.  Someone who does not want to change will simply ignore a long or a short message.

 

That’s hard for me to swallow. I am a fixer. I want to fix everyone and everything. i know that is foolish and ultimately a waste of time. People will not change unless they are ready to. No matter how often I forward inspirational quotes, messages or texts, nothing will get through until they are ready to make a change in their lives. It’s hard to see people jumping over a cliff or harming themselves needlessly but as the quote goes, “until you get lost, you won’t find new ways.” Anonymous.

Touche.

 

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Brownness, Myself, Random

Choices

Sanjay Sabarwal
choice and context
choice and context (Photo credit: Will Lion)

I don’t always do the right thing. I realize that we each face moments every single day of our lives where we have a choice to do the right thing.  We could eat better. We could exercise. We could be better friends, lovers, and the list goes on and one. I know those are choices yet somehow as I get older, I find some choices easier to make than others. There are days I just don’t feel like eating or exercising right, but with people its different. I see now that if I choose wrong then there are consequences. When I choose to ignore my friend’s need to be heard, I take a little piece out of our friendship away. When I say a not very nice thing to a family or a partner, I cut into their trust and love for me.

Choices run my world. And I am lately seeing a pattern that I am not liking about myself. I am less friendly. I make unkind remarks off the cuff. I am not the Sanjay that many have known me for many years.  The only explanation I have is that my recent surgery have made me less certain of who I am. Whats the point of eating and exercise if I still had to get brain surgery? What’s the point of being patient when I see other make the silliest mistakes?  How can I stop loved ones from continuing on the wrong path?  Why are some people continually on the path of getting hurt when all they have to do is step back? On and on in my head, I see so much wrong, and I want to fix it all, but I cannot.

I forgot that it is a choice we make when we are around others. We cannot make others do what we want them to do. Intellectually, I know that but emotionally  I have lost patience. I no longer want to let others be, yet that is not something I should be involved in. I try to remind myself of that everyday.  I know I have to choose the right thing, yet more often than not I am struggling to do that. What was an innate part of my personality is something now I have to struggle to do.  I also know that is my personal battle. I cannot control anything or anyone except myself.

I have to choose to be me even though lately that is the hardest thing to be.

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Food For Thought, Random

Boston

Sanjay Sabarwal
THINK
THINK (Photo credit: Erik Eckel)

I will be honest. I only know that 3 have been killed, and 147 injured. I have heard that from NPR, and have actively avoided watching TV.  I have briefly glanced at Facebook statuses which either express horror, or underscore people’s own insecurity. Muslim?  Then you go on a rant for people to be open-minded and wait for the person to be caught before blaming.  White? Silence. Because the reality is if it’s a minority, we will put you in a box. We will launch missiles, but if you are white, we will just call you mental and ask for gun control.  These types of events are so loaded that many of us struggle not to say anything that compartmentalized or sounds vaguely racist or xenophobic.And others feel free to spew their vision of the world. But as humans, that’s what we do to survive. It does not make it right, it just is.

So before we go balls to the walls on our social media networks announcing what we think, perhaps just for a moment take some time and think about those lost, and perhaps forever maimed mentally. Give a breath and a prayer to the ones who will never get to see another day.  These type of tragedies make me realize how truly alone we have become.  We only listen to like minds, and have no interest in knowing the Truth.  Whatever fits into our narrow scope of thoughts has to be the truth.  I realize that past experience forms our present prejudices, but it also allows us not to think anymore. We, as humans, can do better than that.  We owe it to ourselves to not let emotion run us all the time.  Yes, the person(s) intended to create terror, but their real win will happen when we become less tolerant, and more willing to let others do the thinking and actions for us.  We can do better than that.

We have to.

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Myself, Random

Clutter

Sanjay Sabarwal
Clutter Nutters
Clutter Nutters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Clutter. All around I see piles of clutter.  First, and always the mental.  The master To DO list that never seems to go down.  My creativity at adding all my thoughts onto a piece of paper does provide some relief, yet some items just languish there for ages.  It’s as if I hope time’s dust will bury them, and I won’t have to do them.  There are several I have been avoiding for a long time.  I know donating old clothes from my overflowing closet would relieve me, yet I hesitate to go there.  I realize that my library needs to be organized, and I need some breathing room in my work space.  Currently. I am typing gently so as not to disturb the stacks of the books I have placed all around me so they don’t fall on me. Yeah, the height of irony, me buried under words.  Everywhere. I see clutter in my life.  Words fill inside me, and I don’t make room for new ones, instead I push them down under more unsaid words and actions. 

 

Behind me, I sense my pacing dog who anxiously, but patiently, waits for me to take her on her daily walk. Back and forth, I heard the skitter of her feet.  Each day is a choice of actions.  Each day. I can remove or reduce the clutter or I can take care of some other pressing problem.  As I type this. I wonder if I should take the garbage cans in first or ensure Bella can get her morning walk in.  Each clear moment has become about decisions that make my day. I resist the pathological need to check my Facebook account or the FML website. Each passing minute, I make decisions that create my day for me.  And so lies the dust in my life. Some days, the dust seems to far spread that I don’t even feel like trying.  Then there are the other days where I begin to pick up something, and the whole weight of what lies ahead feels so suffocating that I rather just aimlessly roam over Spotify and keep creating playlists.

 

Each moment is a decision, and some days are just spent in whimsical searching of my past. The To Do list glares at me, and it becomes part of the clutter in my life.  Each time I glance at it, the enormity of it just gets to me. It has gotten so bad that I have been put taking my meds as part of my life.  I am drowning myself in to do items, and it hits me that I have cluttered thinking as well. So the past weeks, I have been doing Morning Pages from The Artist’s Way, and suddenly even the smallest thoughts are written, and I begin to see patterns.  Sadness and anger and regret at the thing I needed or wanted them to be. So much regret, so much longing for how I want things to be.  So I put the thoughts down on paper, and suddenly I feel a bit lighter. The clutter no longer seems suffocating. 

 

I move the books, and the words are no longer threatening to bury me.  One day at a time.  One thing at a time. 

 

 

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