Lord help us from TOI.

Anyone who still hasn't realized that TOI journalists are selected based on how low their IQ can go, needs to read this:

RK looks up to women:

Women are not things to be played with: Ranbir Kapoor

11 Dec, 2009 12:00 am ISTlRenuka Vyavahare/INDIATIMES MOVIES

Ranbir Kapoor’s private life has become a topic of prime importance for the media. Be it his alleged break-up with Deepika or his concept of romance. We just want him to talk about love, don’t we!

Ranbir’s Rocket Singh Salesman of the year is about to release and we couldn’t help but ask Ranbir if there is any romance in it. After all, dad Rishi Kapoor is known for romantic roles. “There is no romance in the film” said Ranbir. But don’t all work and no play make Rocket Singh a dull man we probed to which Ranbir cheekily replied, “Women are not the only things to be played with.”

Ahem! Now Ranbir has made an interesting point here and we are impressed. Err Deepika are you too?

So, Ms. Vyavahare and others at TOI. Do you see a difference between 'Women are not the only things to be played with' and 'Women are not things to be played with'? Just so you know, the two sentences mean pretty much the opposite of each other. The latter sentence is an expression of respect, and states the obvious fact that women (=humans) are not things (=inanimate, non-human), and that their emotions or bodies are not solely existing for the entertainment of other humans. The former sentence says not only that women DO exist as playthings, and for entertainment, but also that they are not the ONLY inanimate objects available for the entertainment or 'play' of the Great Mr. RK. So the latter sentence implies that RK looks up to women, and the former sentence implies that Ms.Padukone has got away early, luckily, and smartly.

So which is it?

Now I have ANOTHER excuse for not working out

Seriously, Reebok? Just saw the new ad of yours that shows the two breasts of a woman talking to each other, being jealous of how THAT SAME WOMAN'S rear end is so shapely. Did this ad even go through your usual quali/quant research? Did it pass the bar? Because it's so inane, so offensive and SO off Reebok brand equity I'm surprised your brand people didn't laugh off the ad pitch outright. Do you happen to have some new and inexperienced people running the brand, maybe? Men who know nothing about why women exercise (hint: it's not for appealing to men)? Or women who're auditioning for GGW and think ALL women share their aspirations?

Oh, and yes, see the awesome rant here by The New Agenda.

The only Rule is: there are no rules.

I was reading Kate Harding's awesome takedown of The Rules - this takedown ought to be a mandatory inclusion with every copy of the book, really. Now yes, I'm a feminist, but was also intrigued for the longest time by things like The Rules, or self-gleaned (incorrect) lessons from Gone With the Wind, or my experience with the men - and boys - around me. It's the part of me that's fascinated with how human beings work (said in scary alien scientist voice), and my furious attempts to be different from my decidedly mal-adjusted mother.

I will say that the Rules can be quite effective and absolutely accurate about the reactions of certain types of men and women. The problem is that they're incredibly simplistic and inaccurate about vast swaths of humanity. This leads to them guaranteeing mediocre relationships for everyone, with no fulfilment and enormous scope for dissatisfaction. For instance, in the above-mentioned GWTW, Scarlett's 'dating' techniques were an absolute model of behavior, and yes, they worked with so many of the men around her, but the two most intense relationships in her life - with Rhett and Ashley - were predicated on her breaking the Rules and actually finding and expressing her true voice.

Kate ends her article with this:

Based on my experience as a successful husband-getter, I can tell you that all of the following behaviors are proven 100 percent effective in leading to marriage (and even a holiday season proposal!): Making the first move; having a first date that lasts three days; calling him frequently; moving in together after two months; publicly declaring that you won't apologize for being fat and are never going on another friggin' diet; telling him to suck it when he mentions that sweat pants aren't the most flattering sartorial choice you've ever made; offering a cranky feminist critique of every movie you see together; making no effort to conceal the fact that you're at least as smart as he is; blogging the early days of your relationship; talking early, often and in-depth about subjects including your ex-boyfriends, your dead mother, politics, religion, patriarchy and yeast infections; not knowing for sure if you ever want to get married, anyway; and living together for two years without really worrying about it.

So, as a certified relationship expert (I do, after all, have a legal document from the state of Nevada identifying me as someone a genuine male person agreed to marry), I can assure you that no matter who you really are or what you really want out of a relationship, it all boils down to one simple fact: Men want short-tempered, poorly dressed fat feminists who have sex on the first date and never stop talking.

My & P's own story is also so much like this. I often made the first move, especially physically & later sexually, I had sex with him when there was no comittment - we'd not even started officially dating, I did call/IM him very frequently, told him about my other relationships, was incredibly badly dressed, was abominably outspoken and a fierce, fighting feminist, had no qualms about bringing up commitment (though I did emphasize my lack of interest therein), lived together with him (and not in America but in India, where this was/is incredibly rare and pretty much equivalent to plastering your forehead with a bindi that ays 'hey, I'm a slut'), kept scrupulous accounts of expenses on all our dates and split them exactly mid-way for the most, then ended up borrowing large sums of money from him, and later held a gun to his head about marriage.

So yes, it does boil down to: Men want 'unsexy' intellectually-oriented women who're alternately fiercely independant and alternately painfully dependant, and are very very horny and open about their horniness.

Kurbaan vs. New York

After watching the Kareena-Saif movie, we totally feel "hamne apna Saturday 'Kurbaan' ko kurbaan kar diya".

The movie was a bore. And way too much like New York with John Abraham and Katrina Kaif and Neil Nitin Mukesh - Islamic terrorism, a wronged desi guy out to blow up some Americans, a hapless 'innocent wife', a friend who's an infiltrator into the terrorist group. But it's fascinating how two people can treat one identical storyline in two such totally different ways. New York was nuanced, shocking, held its suspense so well, and made you intensely relate to the characters and feel their moral dilemmas. Kurbaan set out to dazzle you with the looks of the leading pair - and it succeeded with Kareena, not so much with the over-botoxed, rebonded-combovered-hair Saif - and was a movie that never made up its mind about whether it was a love story or a window into the souls of people who like killing other people. At the end of New York you walked out wondering about the pointlessness of terrorism and the senselessness of American state-sponsored violence; at the end of Kurbaan we walked out wondering about the pointlessness of the movie and the senselessness of a story that pretty much glorified terrorism.

The problem (one of the many problems, really) with Kurbaan is that it was like that episode of 24 where a liberal dude trusts the brown stranger against the fervent opposition of the all-American dude suspicious of all brown people with funny names, and then the brown stranger turns out to be a terrorist after all. It shamelessly encouraged the average viewer to go ahead and stereotype every bukha-clad Muslim woman and every young brown man with a backpack and rewarded such stereotypes.

The writing was abysmal. They couldn't make up their minds whose perspective to pick - Kareena's or Vivek's or Diya's, so they went with option (D), all of the above. Unlike New York, where everything unfolds from Neil's p-o-v, and so even small revelations - like Katrina knowing all along that her handsome all-American husband is actually a terrorist - are discoveries that keep you engaged in the story. John's haunted expression and sudden character twists are hugely gut-punching, even more so when you hear the back-story and see the real, very plausible torment he's undergone. Here, you never really related to Saif or felt for him - not in the initial love story, not when he's revealed to be a scheming, manipulative husband, not when you're told why he became a terrorist, and not when he falls in love with his now-pregnant wife, and not when has his final melodramatic change of heart. His journey seems eminently alien and strange, and each twist is totally 'yeah, right'. They'd've been better off making his a fully negative role, throwing in a couple of wife-whacking scenes and maybe having a last-second unexplained twist (was a change of heart? did he really spare her? or did he miss his target for once?).

The logic was non-existent. It's completely frustrating how at least two of the characters - Vivek Oberoi's and Kareena Kapoor's - are supposed to be Amreekan educated and liberal-thinking, but in any moment of crisis, faced with any example of rule-breaking, small or large, they end up going the illogical, circituous route. When Kareena's neighbor comes to her for help since she's presumably being beaten up and about to be murdered, she doesn't go to the cops or to a local NGO dealing with DV cases, or to a women's shelter. No, she leisurely pays an in-person visit to a news reporter that the neighbor had met months ago in an internet chatroom (yes, huh?! indeed), and passively walks away when the reporter tells her she'll call the neighbor in a few weeks after her vacation/travel. And then Kareena, professor and consummate Manhattan girl, generally wanders around in the neighbor's basement in the dead of night. Seriously heroine, WTF?

Poor Vivek ends up having to go one better. When he gets a lead on the people who may have bombed a plane and killed ~200 people, he decides to take on the whole terrorist agency by himself, and fight for world peace singlehandedly in a severe Miss World relapse moment. When he's in the middle of the terror plot, he still doesn't want to tell the cops what he knows, but renders ultimatums to Kareena (who's under house arrest) to source a f***ing subway map for him 'definitely by tonight!!!'. He tells the FBI/cops about the plot at the last minute, because evidently just saying 'subway system under threat' is less helpful than giving exact station names, because the silly FBI can't figure that out for themselves. Touching, such faith in the American legal system. And just proves my often-repeated assertion that modern journalists are, by definition, stupid. Thank you, KJo.

Of course, the five stations targeted by Saif and Om Puri & co. to 'teach the goras a lesson' are the ones with the highest possible concentrations of desi people - Jackson Heights, Lexington Ave - somehow suicide bombing takes on layer 2 meanings here, or maybe they thought desi/NRI audiences wouldn't be horrified enough if it was 57th avenue or Harlem. After all that analysis, Rensil couldn't even be bothered to keep his stations straight, because the back-ups bombers who were to target Times Square and Grand Central and 5th ave end up somehow, in a twist, at three of the originally planned locations, having been magically swapped for the dead guys with backpacks.

More logic issues - not only do the incompetent FBI not examine voicemails and evidence - (what happened to all the wiretapped evidence courtesy FISA and the Patriot Act, huh? huh? HUH??!!), they wait around for hours in churches for tip-offs from random people, in touching displays of patience and loyalty to anonymous informers. And then reinforce their good-guy status by exclaiming 'Jesus Christ!!!' at regular intervals, since of course this is all a war about Christianity vs. Islam, in which Hinduism mysteriously proves victorious.

Finally, possibly the brightest spark of talent in the movie belongs to Kiron Kher's uninhibited Afghani character - she somehow assimilates Iranian/Syrian hijabi sartorialism (maybe the real Afghan hijab was way too scary) and diction from villains in 1970s Amitabh-starrers to come up with a pretty good composite character, not too unlovable or too far from her usual Punju mom roles, but also crazy enough so you're a tad afraid of/for her. She was definitely better than Om Puri, whom one barely noticed - except when he sulked off in a huff when his authority was easily challenged by upstart Saif. And Saif! Saif, that nawabi bad-child looking for his lost youth just continues to embarrass himself and us by trying to be all-in-one: cool-dude and action-superhero and chocolate-boy-lover in every movie. He unfortunately seems to have upped his ambition and jock-style pecs (and steroidal intake) at the exact time that his talent - and jowls, and hair volume - are moving downwards. This when he's not terrorizing and manipulating Kareena in reel life and in real (watch their interviews where usually confident Kareena turns to him constantly for affirmation, very unlike the Poo-ing brat of Shahid's time).

Kareena is as luminously pretty as ever, and came good in the last scene with snot freely running down her face, but somehow she leaves you with utter despair for Indian women - if psychology professors are this dumb, there's not much hope for the rest of us. She's completely unresourceful, can't be bothered to do basic checks on the men she falls for, ends up accepting invites to boring sex-segregated parties, is trapped into house arrest in her own house and promptly packs a head scarf when she realizes her husband is a terrorist. And of yes, when tasked to do a difficult (!) chore, she turns to the only tool at her disposal - no, not Google, not her brains or her education, but her body and sexuality. It's possibly not just Saif here who's missing the 80's.

So, yeah, John Abraham still has my heart.

Lorenz attractors

The problem with picking marketing/brand management as a career is that your earning potential is definitely capped. It's like picking supply chain management as a career option - even the absolute best experts in the field, the people right at the 90th percentile and above, only earn about twice that of someone just starting out. In brand management, the ratios are slightly better since general management is infinitely more accessible, but even the GM in my Southern company makes only ~$200K as his base pay (and add another ~$300K or so as a bonus).

This is totally different from, say, finance. Or even sales. If you're an entry-level sales person, or someone without the best pedigree or connections, you start out as a door-to-door salesperson or someone selling sabun to kirana stores, making the equivalent of ~$50 a day. Slightly better educational qualifications, or slightly better connections, keep getting you higher in the food chain - to pharma sales, to CPG/FMCG sales, to regional sales/distributorships, to financial sales, to the investment banking sales/trading floor. In the last category, a person 5+ years in earns ~$5-10 Million per year, about 300X of the door-to-door salesperson.

I can't think of the equivalent 'big bang for your buck' niche in marketing.

Women typical use considerations like work/life balance, etc. when picking a career - even us 'high-powered alpha women' from ultra competitive business schools. Which is why brand management is a disproportionately favorite choice for so many of us. This means we think short-term, and forget the long-term career-long implications of our decisions - we earn less than our classmates for ever, even if the (often male) classmates weren't all that great to begin with, they quickly overtake us in earning power because of that career line advantage. Marketing therefore gets us on the mommy track before motherhood/families even get a chance to hit us.

And this is the kind of stuff one should be taught to analyze in business school - not double-entry bookkeeping. Or, you should be smart enough to figure this out before you go about picking a career. Clearly, you get the profession you deserve!

Yeh toh kuch nahin hai, hamarein yahan toh....

Then there was the Bigger family with Mr. Bigger, Mrs. Bigger, and Baby Bigger.
Q: Who was the biggest?
A: Baby Bigger, because he was a little bigger.

Remember the old popular joke about the guy who was visiting a small town and kept showing off that everything was 'so much bigger' in his own town? The roads, the houses, the cars - and then, when the small town guys dunk him in the pool, even the pools and the jokes were bigger in his hometown. And someone calls him an idiot, and he says there are even bigger idiots in his hometown?

That's what AP sounds like in this farce of an article:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Sarah Palin's book is highly anticipated in her home state — but she's no Harry Potter.
...
"I'm excited about the event," he said. "Am I as excited as I was for Harry Potter? No. That was huge."
...
At Gulliver's Books in Fairbanks, tins of candies packaged as "Sarah's Embarrassmints" are a hot item, far outselling Palin's book.
...

Store owner David Hollingsworth said he has received 10 pre-orders out of his 100 copies. It's nothing like the frenzy he saw for the 2,000 copies he ordered with the last installment of the Potter series.

The July 2007 release of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" prompted two young sisters to wait in line outside his store for 11 days, living out in their parents' camper. Hollingsworth also had a midnight release for Potter fans but didn't plan to repeat those hours for "Going Rogue."

"Yes, it's a big deal, but we've had bigger deals," he said.

So they're comparing a political book by a supposed (they wish!) non-entity to the last Harry Potter book? Umm, why not compare this to the two Obama books - wouldn't that be a more equitable comparison? Or to a McCain book, or a Clinton book? Or to any autobiography/life story/non-fiction/roman e clef by any famous woman, since they only think women should be compared to women? It's a truly telling sign when your detractors need to compare your book to the series that is supposed to have sold more copies than the Bible internationally in order to come up with negatives and then say 'ohh, it's no big deal' while crowing about it falling short.

I'm no Palin supporter, but when a global news organization reprints press releases from one side of a battle verbatim as news and claims zero bias, one needs to call b***shit. Proof:

Coinciding with Palin's national book tour, the Alaska Democratic Party announced Monday it was launching a Web site to hold Palin accountable on some issues. It's called "Say nO to Sarah," or SOS.....

On the Net:

• Alaska Democratic Party: http://www.sarahwatch.org/

And that's the sign-off on the article - not the AP reporter's sign-off, but that of the party issuing the press release. Rachel D'Oro didn't even bother to wash hir hands and wipe the blood off the knife.