The Dalai Lama and me

Today was going to be the day they were going to throw it back to me but instead I managed to end up going for a talk by the Dalai Lama. Now obviously it was not a personal meeting, anyone who has seen me would know why, but then it is no less than the Dalai Lama so why would I pass up the opportunity?
For the uninitiated the Dalai Lama is the spiritual head of the Buddhists, one of the religions that has a lot of monks in it and has some pretty soothing music as their hymns. They also preach the usual stuff about truth and being good but with nice terms and they don't ask you to worship any God (at least as far as I know).
The Dalai Lama is an old man who is bald and wears glasses that look like dark glasses. He also cackles like a grandfather, waves to people when they wave to him and laughs at his own jokes which people don't really get. He spoke for two hours and quite expectedly didn't manage to say much. It would be too much to expect anyone to tell everyone how to solve their life's problems in the short span of two hours and he is no different.
And quite admittedly some of the stuff he said was not something unknown to me or many of the people present there. I mean we all know that we should not keep ourselves bottled up, every second woman and study tells us that. He spoke of mantaining inner peace so that you would feel happy in life, but then someone wrote that ages ago in the ancient Vedas. He spoke about tolerance, secularism, AIDS, global warming and everything we read about daily in the newspapers.
So whats so great about this guy? Or what can I say I really learnt from him in two hours of listening to him speak in a tongue as alien to him as his teachings might have been to me? Well that no one knows the answers to my or anyone else's problems. He was asked,"Is secularism dead in India?" and his frank reply,"I don't know! You should know better, you are an Indian!" And he was right. If we can't look into ourselves and know whether we are secular or not, how can we judge society? His answers were not as spiritual as they were practical, he admitted to not knowing answers to anyone's problems and just gave them suggestions. And the best statement for the day? "I once spoke to a religious leader, a friend, and I told him that we need to be less serious so that we make more sense to more people," said the venerable Lama, before cackling happily. I don't know what I expected to see but what was a pleasant surprise was to see an old man, a happy and peaceful old man who could give valuable advice to show you a way and one who knew a few more answers that not many did.

p.s: Though it must be said that the audience of Mumbai was as uncouth as could be. And not the poor who came in their best clothes just to see the Lama but those who came 'dressed down' in their designer ware and sat in the VIP area. They walked off while he was on the stage, they air kissed in the hall before the end and treated it much like they would have a fashion show.
Some may say its Mumbai attitude but its still uncouth and maybe something we could afford to lose.

To war!!! (all for Shilpa)

These are grim times we live in. With the threat of nuclear war looming large over us and the Western and Eastern world very polarized, it is a time to hold your loved ones that bit closer, reminiscence about your life and be convinced that you should have shot your irritating neighbour’s barking dog when you had the chance. If you as usual, have stayed cocooned from the world with the pitiful excuse of work and bettering society, then you my friend have been living in a fool’s world, for a storm has been brewing and it involved a lissome lass from our country who traveled across two seas to be paid to be called a Pakistani and a dog.

Yes, it is to the Shilpa Shetty controversy that I refer. The one involving a foul mouthed woman, a lot of other people, some cameras, and a big house all of which apparently somehow makes up a television show that no one seems to want to watch until a diplomatic issue is created.

Imagine the corridors of the Westminster Abbey on a cold and frosty night, when even the spies grudge themselves a night’s sleep albeit with a bit of guilt. And then they switched on the television where the P-word is put out into the universe and the somewhat weepy Shilpa is called no less than a dog.

Suddenly, phones rang across the UK and the globe, with thousands of Indians calling each other to tell each other that they had seen Shilpa, their own Shilpa, the one who came to see them only when she released a movie that no one wanted to see, being racially insulted. I am sure for a very brief instant the English government feared that the Indians were finally taking over after making them dependent on their now famous curry.

I mean look at it. The mallus have the Gelf, the gujjus have the UH, the sardars have the Kaneda and Africa is to busy fighting with itself and is unlikely to do anything about anything anyway. So I can understand the stab of fear the west felt when they heard of the incident and promptly went into damage control mode by telling us that there was no racism except among common people.

But now as we stand facing each other across two continents, nuclear weapons at the ready, we must wonder, what can we really do? In the words of a villain of a movie starring the incredibly fast Jet Li, “There is a time for diplomacy and there is a time for action…The diplomacy is over.” After that he begins shooting, and Jet Li does his kung fu stuff, and since none of us can do either I say, at least let’s do away with diplomacy. The Brits had the chance and they blew it. Now it’s our turn.

Let us start by calling a British celebrity onto our very own version of the show and put him/her in the same room as our own guys and see how he does. Then when the Brits call to say that they don’t like being called Americans, we can give them the Gabbar Singh laugh. I further say, lets give them a dose of their own medicine by doing the same things that they do. Let us also breed tabloids that publish bilge, breed an attitude of absolute conformism when it comes to foreign policy, be racist to anyone darker than white and have irrelevant national celebrities. The frightening part is, we have done that.