I have been watching a lot of movies lately, so I thought I would start this ‘Suggested watching’ thread. Two movies at a time, no review, just a name and a link to IMDB page of the movie. So for this week:
1> Death at a Funeral (I heard they are making a crappy Bollywood version. Watch this before it releases. For bragging rights at least)
PS: Watch out for the nude dude.
PS: Don’t try to connect first half and second half of the movie.
Sorry for such a cheesy headline. After all, I am an Indian journalist, we end up churning out a dozen such headlines on a daily basis. So when such cheesy headlines turn up on my blog, I request you to classify it as an occupational hazard. Now, don’t put my poor/pathetic/lousy humour-sense under that category, that is just a manufacturing defect.
My parents tried their best to repair it by forcing me to watch mimics parade (video is in malayalam. Non-mallus please continue reading to avoid frustration) and by making me read Khushwant Singh’s Joke Book (which I enjoyed a lot). But to my parents shock and dismay, none of them seemed to have any affect on my sense of humour, or non-sense of humour rather.
All right, I will get back to the original topic, Mr Michael Joseph Jackson, who passed away on June 25, Saturday. I was never a huuuge fan of the King of Pop, for I could never figure out the ‘words in his songs’. Come on, I was just a kid then and I could only speak Malayalam and Manglish. For the uninitiated, manglish is an amalgamation of Malayalam and English. The language is quite simple. Add an ing at the end of every malayalam verb and ta-da you can be a manglish professor like me!
So anyway, I could never understand his songs or rather the lyrics, so all that I liked about him was the way he moved on the stage. I guess, move is the wrong word, for he used to float. He could control every bone which combined together to form his back bone. Wow that guy was brilliant! But then there is this thing about my generation. We have very low attention span you see, so all they had to do was start showing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on TV and I had forgotten all about Mr Jackson.
His name no longer meant much to me. Of course, I did ooh and aah whenever someone talked about his dancing skills. But hey, the man did grab my attention again, but this time it wasn’t due to any public performance of his, it was due to err… a rather private one. He was accused of being a pedophile!
You know what’s ironical? In 1990 he featured in a SEGA game, in which he was rescuing children who were being held hostage. I think they were just trying to keep the kids away from him. Here is the gameplay video:
The rest of his life was spent between court cases and trying to revive his career. But just when it looked like he was reinventing himself, he suffered a heart attack and passed away in a hospital. May his soul RIP and not moonwalk around the graveyard.
(Don’t blame me for such a lame last line, I already justified myself in the first three paras!)
Notytony just mailed me details on launch of a book, Kerala, Kerala, Quite Contrary. Having lived in Kerala for 17 years and having spent the last 5 outside it, I know how big a set of hypocrites we are. I am not sure if the book deal with mallu hypocrisy, but the review by Deccan Herald sure gives me such an impression.
"For the resident Malayali, it renders in beautiful detail the dear and
familiar. And for the non-resident malayali… it feels like going home."
The book promo is at 6PM on June 18th at Crossword on Residency Road. The event will also include a lively debate featuring eminent panelists (Anita Nair, Hormis Tharakan, Yusuf Arakkal, Shreekumar Varma, Jayanth Kodkani….) about the "Kerala paradox".
Another thing I found interesting was that it has contributions from people like Shashi Tharoor, Cardinal Varkey Vithayathil, William Dalrymple, KR Gowri Amma, Anita Nair, Hormis Tharakan, Yusuf Arakkal, Shreekumar Varma, Jayanth Kodkani to name a few. This unique
anthology has been put together by Shinie Antony, an authoress herself.
I might head to Crosswords for the discussions. No guarantee knowing how my plans go. But if you are interested, then sign-up at this Facebook event page.
I had promised here to narrate the long story behind this domain I bought and how I set it up. It all started with me being confused about what kind of domain I wanted to buy. Should it be chupchap.com, chupchap.in a shorter domain like chup.in or something even shorter. I just wasn’t sure; just indecisive. Yet another problem with young people these days I suppose. 
So what do most people do when they want a domain? Head to who.is to check if the domain they want is available and that’s what I did. I searched chupchap.com and chupchap.in, and to my pleasure, found that both of them were available. So what now? Should I go ahead and register them or waste more time searching for shorter, but not necessarily better domain? I decided to waste some more time.
So I thought if I wanted a magical domain name what would it be? The first domain name that came to my head was i.in. After all this blog is all about me; I hardly write about anyone else no?
So I searched and to my surprise (very very surprised) I found that it was still available. Oh My God, the shortest domain possible, a premium one and it’s available! So I headed straight to eWebguru, where my gaming blog is hosted. I booked it in three easy steps at around Rs1,600, which is a standard rate at the host.
I was rejoiced, after all I have a premium domain, I could start a impossible-to-make-profit-off URL shortening service, an email service or sell it off at a higher price. I was overjoyed. So overjoyed that I decided to share it with my followers at twitter. After a round of congratulatory tweets, someone pointed it out to me. It is impossible for me to own such a domain. Turns out, all one-character and two-character domains, are reserved by government and NIXI order, and are not available to the public. For example I could buy abc.in but not a.in or ab.in 
I was heart broken. After filing for a support ticket, which was answered in fifteen minutes, I was given an option to opt for any other .in domain. This time, I did not try to experiment. I opted for chupchap.in and by next day my domain was active. But every day when I visit my blog (to find that 25 people landed up on my blog and they came via image search aaargh!)I wish it was i.in and imagine having a four/five/six figure bank dollars (in dollars I mean).
If you are interested in setting up your blog/website, you can try out eWebguru where my blog is hosted. You will get a good deal if you follow this link. This link is part of their referral program which I have signed up for, but this post is in no way sponsored by them.
I don’t understand China at times. Call it cultural gap/shock whatever you want, but they are just strange, just like Chailey goes aaagh about things here in India I suppose.
First, they decide to beat up/slaughter students in Tiananmen Square about 20 years back and then they try to white wash it by scaring witnesses and suppressing those who chose to speak out. A lot of time has passed since then, the country has gone from being an iron fisted closed one to one of the vibrant and fastest growing economies in the world. Yet they continue their attempt to hush up the past. Why? Can’t they just accept the past and move on into the future?
Now they are not just arm twisting Google and Wikipedia, but also foreign media. Take a look at this video from BBC.
Apparently media lens is being covered by Chinese police dressed as civilians. You can find more photos of them here. Does China think it can change the way the world perceives them by coming up with something like that? They have only succeeded in intimidating the rest of the world with an act like that. Not that India is not already intimidated by them!
MUST READ: James Fallows’ (The Atlantic) Beijing report
