Indian efficiency? Pull the other one!

My problem with life in India is that it’s simultaneously too hard and too easy. The easy bits are getting main roles in films, getting into A-list parties, and staying out of jail for drunken, unlicensed, uninsured, helmet-less motorbike riding only costs about 6 Aussie dollars. But the stress and frustration associated with something simple like buying coffee or getting dressed can cause me to vibrate and clench until I pop a valve.

I just went looking for Sony Pix to do an audition. I plugged “Sony Pix Mumbai” into Google maps and got a hit:

So I rode to the designated dot with the help of my occasionally awesome but frequently annoying GPS guided phone, to find the dot was on a big pile of crappy nothingness.

I checked the map again and again, and came to the reluctant conclusion that someone had actually bothered to go to Google Maps to place a marker, but had not bothered putting it in the right place.

I rack my brains every time this happens, trying to deduce the mentality that leads someone to make such an effort with a result that is worse than had they just done nothing (I fixed it).

On my way home, I stopped for coffee at Baristas. I pulled my bike up to the curb, kicked out the side-stand, switched it off, got off, pulled my helmet off and when I started walking away the security guard, who’d been sitting there watching me the whole time said: “You can’t park here”

Read more…

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Archbishop fishing for faith

He hates athiests and loves hair dye

Archbishop Anthony Fisher today decided to let the world know that he’s rather stupid. He used his inaugural Easter message to blame atheism for the ills of the 20th century, namely Nazism, Stalinism and Pol-Pottery.

What a dull cookie – particularly owing to the fact that he belongs to a church that is currently headed by someone who belonged to he Hitler youth and may have protected child molesters.

The reference to Nazism is regrettable, but it gets worse. He’s been so absorbed in his faith for so long he doesn’t realise: People don’t believe in Christianity because logic seems to indicate that a creator set up an intricate set of rules and laws that govern the natural universe and then occasionally breaks them for us if we ask him; they believe because that makes them feel good.

I was at the police station this afternoon complaining about bureaucracy to Khan, my friend and mechanic. Khan had found my motorbike at the police station, it’d been stolen a few months earlier – and we were trying to get it back. I was having difficulty proving that it was my bike, and the police were having difficulty explaining why they had it in the first place.

Read more…

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

The Lord’s Army: The Shiv Sena

"A burning bus? Perhaps over there."

There exists in Mumbai a nearsighted and rather unpleasant bunch of radicals who revile my very existence within their beautiful city. They want foreign actors out of Bollywood (that’s me).

They are the Shiv Sena – Lord Shiva’s Army  and the MNS – political groups by name, violently quarrelsome by nature.

It behooves a writer to remain apprised of the legal ramifications of writing anything at all in India, because sedition laws are arbitrarily enforced and rather ambiguously defined as anything that “excites or attempts to excite hatred contempt or dissaffection“( - Wikipedia)

If anyone reading this gets excited or feels a smidge of contempt, then I’m going to jail for life – so please don’t. Sedition, in my opinion, is the most dangerous law in India – for exposure of real wrongs often leads detention or expulsion, as was the case with my friend who wrote of the Dalit murders in Gujarat and was summarily deported.

Let’s be mindful of that and carry on…

Bal Thackeray started the Shiv Sena and ran for a while a respectable right-wing, religious political party concerned with supporting the local Marathi people in whose state Mumbai stands. He was about ensuring jobs, health systems, pensions and education exclusively to Marathis, his ‘Sons of the Soil’.

They have a hard-line Hindu and regional agenda, and dislike all things non-Marathi – including shop signs spelled in English.

Read more…

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Dangerous Value of Emotional Beliefs

The danger with emotional beliefs is that they are rarely questioned with reason, and yet they are defended with passion. Their hidden value is their demonstration of how wonderful we humans are.

It seems as if the harder the idea is to hold with reason and logic, the harder it must be gripped with fanaticism. You’d think we’re the opposite – but us humans aren’t very rational.

There is no way of categorically knowing whether there is life after death. I think that belief is a selfish and self-serving notion, and doing good to secure a better afterlife is even more selfish.

I think that there is no life after death. I think we are all part of an organism we call Earth, and we live on through the goodwill we spread during our lives and the nourishment we offer the worms when we’re dead.

Read more…

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Bindass – A campaign of recklessness

A UTV channel in India called Bindass recently released an advertising campaign which appears to indicate that being an atheist is on par with not being serious about one’s career, doing drugs and being a slut.

What does being Bindass mean to you?

http://www.bindass.com/post/utv-bindass-what-i-am/

Thanks to Manushka for the heads up on this issue:

Manushka: Intelligent eye-candy to stop traffic.

She’s a very dear friend who is serious about her career(s), very chaste and abhors drugs. She’s also an avowed atheist – she doesn’t even believe in a single god. She also shared with me a rather interesting article which showed research has linked IQ with Liberalism, Atheism and sexual exclusivity in men (not women). Nicely done!

The point of the campaign appears to be: “Just because I watch this channel doesn’t mean that I’m a reprobate.”

Read more…

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,