But then, like all good things (please, keep the snickering down, it hurts me when you do that) this little stint must come to an end as well, and I must now go back to my own blog, where the sitemeter stats will be much easier to monitor. Thank God for that.

So here it is: Thank you all for a great time, and good bye.

Neighboring Zimbabwe had an all-white cricket team as well, but that didn’t raise too many eyebrows because the team hardly won anything, but mostly because they played for a country ruled by a benign black dictator.

But today, things have changed. The benign dictator is not so benign anymore, and of late, he has been maintaining a punishing schedule – creating food shortages in his country by taking away farms from white farmers. But Robert loves playing games, and he is going to make time for cricket, punishing schedule or not. And how well he plays. First, he cleanses his team of all white players – using other people of course, why would a powerful man get his hands dirty? – and then obviously pleased with how clean the team looked, he is now on another cleaning spree – this time to get rid of all the good players, especially the pesky ones that want to get paid for their services.

Several interesting strategies have been employed in this round, including but not limited to robbing players of their money, death threats, divide and conquer. Meanwhile, the standard of cricket has dipped alarmingly in the country, and most games involving them bear a more than passing resemblance to games involving the Atlanta Hawks. But Mugabe doesn’t know that because he has no time for the NBA. Plus now his team is all black, and isn’t that good enough?

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Meanwhile, events in Australia are ensuring that things stay balanced on the racism front. Crowds at cricket matches in Australia are always a bit more, um… boisterous than crowds elsewhere, possibly due to a lot of beer and not too many bathrooms on the grounds, but this year they’ve taken their bad behavior to new depths. People have learnt new words, and are not hesitant to try them out on visiting cricket teams.

A few years ago, a prominent Australian cricket player was suspended after using an innovative new phrase that combined the color black and a certain part of the female anatomy to describe Sri Lanka’s cricketers, and at that time, there was a sneaking suspicion that this was no isolated incident. Events this year are proving that theory right.

Less violent [than the Sydney riots], but in some ways more disturbing, have been the growing number of racist taunts that have since sullied international cricket grounds throughout the summer. Perhaps spurred on by the alarming images a week earlier in Cronulla, spectators at the first Test in Perth subjected some members of the South African cricketers to crude apartheid-era insults. Fast bowler Makhaya Ntini and several other players were called “kaffirs” and “kaffir boetie” (brother of blacks) by people in the Waca crowd. [Link]

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p>And in some ways, the most surprising thing has been the incredulous reaction of most of Australia to protests by the South Africans – Much noise about harmless name calling has been the general refrain. Neil Manthorp explains:

Just over a month ago, between the second and third Test matches in Melbourne and Sydney, one of the country’s most prominent newspaper sports editors asked me to write a comment piece explaining what “all the fuss” was about.

To the majority of Australians being called a “kaffir” is no different to being called a “wanker” or a “prick”, said the editor. Could I please explain why the players were so ‘sensitive’ to a bit of ‘name calling…’ [Link]

Later this month, when Sri Lanka’s cricketers arrive in the country to play in the VB one-day series, will sections of the crowd welcome them with Tsunami taunts?

[...] That’s the equivalent of what Graeme Smith and his players have been experiencing from time to time during this tour.

South Africa, too, has had its Tsunami but it began in 1948 and it was called Apartheid. And it was not a natural disaster, it was man-made and that makes it even worse. And like Sri Lanka’s Tsunami, it claimed many thousands of innocent lives but, just as in Sri Lanka, we can’t be sure how many because there are still people missing, buried in secret graves by an invisible force.

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years of his life in prison for fighting Apartheid and there would not have been a single day of that time when he wasn’t called a ‘kaffir’. [Link]

And here is Peter English chiming in on the controversy, rubbishing the theory that racism was confined to expatriate South Africans living in Australia.

“Don’t blame Australians for the racist remarks,” a reader wrote to Cricinfo’s feedback this week. “They were made by South Africans now living in Australia.” This popular comment misses the problem that has been pushed underground for decades.

A bay of supporters was decked in patriotic gold shirts at the SCG last summer to watch Australia play Pakistan. Closer inspection of their garb revealed a slogan including the words “Pakis” and “towelheads”. The year before Indian supporters were upset to be called “coolies” at Adelaide and in response to the Barmy Army’s 2002-03 chants the locals fans responded with “I’d rather be a Paki than a Pom”. [Link]

Yesterday a sports-loving gentleman at a club morning tea wondered what all the fuss was about: “They’ve been called kaffirs all their life, why does it matter now?”… [Link]

And in the midst of all this, John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister is concerned about the offensive language on television shows.

Prime Minister John Howard says there has been a marked deterioration in good manners in Australia. [Link]

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And you thought the British were masters of understatement?

PS: I hate to be presumptuous, but am wondering if we can keep the comments focused more on racism and less on cricket…

Thai Pusam is a giant carnival – an long stretch of road leading to the local Karthikeya temple is cordoned off, and a large number of people – wearing equally large quantities of jewellery – congregate for a few hours of fun tinted with devotion. In Penang, in spite of the constant drizzle, this year’s celebration was apparently one of the best attended – at least a hundred thousand people showed up. The street leading to the Waterfall Temple was lined with makeshift “water tents” – most sponsored by multinationals – that provided colorful liquids for free to anyone that showed up.

Among the visitors that passed on the refreshments were the Western tourists armed with Sony Handycams and increasingly incredulous expressions – because Thaipusam has another side to it. Belief has it that Karthikeya would grant the wishes of people who visit His temple on Thaipusam bearing burdens (called Kavadis) and over the years people have interpreted the belief as meaning that the more pain you inflict on yourself – increasing the burden – the more the odds are of your wish being granted.

At its simplest [the kavadi] may entail carrying a pot of milk, but mortification of the flesh by piercing the skin, tongue or cheeks with vel skewers is also common. The most spectacular practice is the vel kavadi, essentially a portable altar up to two meters tall, decorated with peacock feathers and attached to the devotee through 108 vels pierced into the skin on the chest and back. Fire walking and flagellation may also be practiced. It is claimed that devotees are able to enter a trance, feel no pain, do not bleed from their wounds and have no scars left behind. However, some of the more extreme masochistic practices have been criticized as dangerous and contrary to the spirit and intention of Hinduism.

The largest Thaipusam celebrations take place in Malaysia and Singapore. The temple at the Batu Caves, near Kuala Lumpur, often attracts over one million devotees and tens of thousands of tourists. The procession to the caves starts at the MahaMariamman Temple in the heart of the city and proceeds for 15 kilometers to the caves, an 8-hour journey culminating in a flight of 272 steps to the top. In Malaysia, although rare, scenes of people from different ethnic groups and faiths bearing “kavadi” can also be seen. Interestingly, Thaipusam is also increasingly being celebrated by the ethnic Chinese in Malaysia. [Link]

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An elaborate refreshment tent; there must’ve been several hundreds of these along the street.

The water tents have another purpose too – avenues of distraction for the kavadi bearing young men. Some tents – sponsored by conservative multinationals, I would assume – played devotional music, but most blared tinny sounding music using huge speakers. The delirious devotees bearing kavadis would stop at a tent, do a frenzied little jig, drink a cup of water and then move on to the next tent. Around them, other young men not bearing anything would just dance and ogle at the young women in sarees. The rain certainly helped the oglers.

Loud music, wet clothes, frenzied dancing, girls watching.

One of the simpler Kavadis, attached to the body by piercings

And then, there were the really devoted devotees.

Pain

Each of the little containers is pierced into his skin .. he was posing happily for everyone with a camera.

After the kavadis, the most popular form of mortification seemed to be this: A cluster of ropes is attached to the back using hooks, and another member of the family “rides” the person in front, yanking hard at the ropes.

And finally, the most mortifying of them all – a group of guys pulling a heavy chariot using hooks pierced into their backs.

These are the charioteers

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And this is the chariot.

As we left, I couldn’t help praying silently : I just hope all the pain was worth it.

Shiladitya Sengupta was on the subway in Boston when he saw someone selling balloons that contained smaller balloons inside them. If you’ve seen one of those things, you’ll know what a hideous racket they can make when some young swine with a sharp object gets close to them. But instead of exhibiting the normal adult human reflex of covering up both ears in anticipation, Shiladitya dug into his roots and exhibited the normal desi reflex: He started thinking about work.

Sengupta, luckily for us, was a postdoctoral associate at one of the biology labs at MIT, and was part of a team that was working on a treatment for cancer. The double balloon thing eventually led his team to develop something called nanocell cancer treatment.

The January edition of India New England carries a profile of Sengupta, who was one of the five desis on TR35 – the list of top young technology innovators last year.

Sengupta, an assistant professor for Harvard Medical School and MIT, came to the United States in 2001 after receiving his doctorate in pharmacology from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He is originally from New Delhi, India, and he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. Sengupta now lives in Waltham, Mass., with his wife, Shivani, who also teaches at MIT.

What Sengupta developed for cancer treatment stems from the idea of a balloon within a balloon. One balloon carries a drug to shut down the blood supply, and the second, smaller balloon carries a drug to kill the cancer. [Link]

Conventional treatments for cancer have used chemotherapy, and the biggest problem with chemotherapy is its egalitarian nature: it destroys without discriminating between healthy and cancerous cells. One of the most promising alternatives to chemotherapy is antiangiogenesis therapy:

Angiogenesis is the creation of tiny new blood vessels. The term comes from the 2 Greek words: angio, meaning “blood vessel,” and genesis, meaning “beginning.”

Normally, this is a healthy process. As the human body grows and develops, it needs to create new blood vessels to reach all of its cells. As adults, we don’t have quite the same need for making new blood vessels, but there are times when angiogenesis is still important. New blood vessels, for instance, help the body heal wounds and repair damaged body tissues.

But in a person with cancer, this same process creates new, very small blood vessels that provide a tumor with its own blood supply and allow it to grow.

Antiangiogenesis treatment is the use of drugs or other substances to stop tumors from developing new blood vessels. Without a blood supply, tumors can’t grow much larger than the eye of a needle [Link]

But the problem with this is that it could sometimes deprive tumors of oxygen as well and encourage tumors to develop more blood vessels because they want their oxygen. A possible solution would be to combine chemotherapy and antiangiogenesis drugs, and Sengupta’s idea was to create a dual layer balloon, the outer one carrying anti-angiogenesis drugs and the inner one chemotherapy drugs. The nanocells only penetrate tumors, because they are too large for normal blood vessels. Once the cell is inside, it explodes (there is no mention of noise levels when this happens) and the chemotherapy drug then kills the tumor. After all this effort that was presumably aimed at saving mankind, Sengupta and his professor then used it to make mice live longer. Now, why did they think more rats would help mankind? Whatever.

The team tested this model in mice. The double-loaded nanocell shrank the tumor, stopped angiogenesis and avoided systemic toxicity much better than other treatment and delivery variations.

Eighty percent of the nanocell mice survived beyond 65 days, while mice treated with the best current therapy survived 30 days. Untreated animals died at 20. [Link]

And here is my obligatory bad metaphor for the post. Whereas the nanocells pack cancer cures, Sengupta packs a deadly dose of winning humility.

“It’s a very simple thing — I mean, nothing great, but it has implications,” he says.

“It’s very logical, but nobody thought of this before. I mean, in fact I was thinking about this, like ‘Why didn’t it strike me before, or strike anybody else before?’” Sengupta says. [Link]

It is a widely held belief that – with all the advances being made in cancer care – in the next decade or so, scientists would be able to find a “cure” for cancer – a combination of drugs that can turn most types of cancer into chronic illnesses that can inconvenience but not kill. And when that happens, I’m sure some of the drugs will be double bagged, Shiladitya style.

PS: By the way, just to show off how well I researched this post, previous winners of the TR35 award include Jonathan Abrams, the founder of Friendster and the ubiquitous Google guys. You are most welcome.

There is something in this post for everyone, though: the righties can be indignant about the clothes these women wear; the lefties can fume about the list being predominantly white. The others can gawk.

I’ve scoured the list very, very carefully, and I am afraid the news isn’t good. The South Asian representation on the list is pretty skimpy. (yes, I always intend my pun).

Aishwarya Rai, the most beautiful woman in the world, is in the list for the third successive year. She manages to break into the top 50 this year, at number 47.

Crowned Miss World 1994, Indian model Aishwarya Rai has become a superstar in Bollywood (the Indian film industry). But her influence, as Time magazine’s Asian edition pointed out in 2004, goes beyond her native land. Aishwarya was a jury member at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, and she’s even represented at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London. [Link]

Her black hair and chestnut skin are lovely enough, but those blue eyes make us feel like we’re staring into a Bombay beachside sunset. We’d wrap her in a regal sari, place her on a maharajah’s throne and serve her every whim, humbly genuflecting to her fantastic charms. [Link]

And at number 73, a girl that should make Siddhartha delirious : Lisa Ray, the Canadian born Polish-Bengali joint production. This Lisa incidentally, is the same girl that wants to settle down in Paris and write novels. Ooh.

This Canadian-born actress of Indian and Polish descent made her feature film debut in 2001 in the offbeat comedy Kasoor. In 2002, she appeared in Takkari Donga and the hit romantic comedy Bollywood/Hollywood. Her American film debut came in 2004, when she starred in another romantic comedy, Arrangement, before she relocated to England to pursue further training as an actress. [Link]

And then, .. that’s it! Only two people on the most important list this year. No Sheetal Sheth. No Katrina Kaif. Blasphemous, I know. And sad, if ever anything was. But there is some hope – we’ve doubled our representation over the last two years and at this rate, we’ll take over the list in a mere few decades. Meanwhile, here’s some fodder for your brains:

Askmen.com ranks celebrities based on a vague number called the Desirability Score. Aishwarya is at 7.68, while Jessica Alba, the eventual winner came in at 9.07. Mathematically inclined mutineers might notice immediately that Aish is a mere 15% behind Jessica. And here is an interesting titbit snippet: If you employ a more commonly used ranking index, Alba clocks in at 35-25-35 and Aish at 32-25-32. And the difference between those statistics? 15% . Hmm… hidden message, you think?

And those of you that think I made those numbers up, remember it is the brains that matter to me.

And it is only going to get worse – the rapid growth in the Indian economy and the mushrooming of budget carriers in the country means that in a couple of decades from now, Delhi and Mumbai will be as busy as Chicago or Atlanta are today. Imagine. The solution to the problem is quite simple of course: A lot more money, which the Government does not have. As early as 1997, the Government of India released an “airport modernization policy” that said among other things that:

Looking at the quantum of investment required the answer to all the problems lies in the infusion of private — including foreign — investment in this sector. [Link]

Meaning, we don’t have the money. And we think the way to fix these airports is by handing them off to someone else. After a lot of hemming and hawing, the policy finally looked set to take off this year with the Government inviting competitive bids to privatize the management of the two biggest airports in the country: Delhi and Mumbai.

Then the bidding process ran into trouble, and so they appointed a technical committee (but of course) that evaluated the bidding process and okayed it, and then another committee was appointed to make sure the technical committee knew what it was doing. And finally, a decision was made: The bidding process produced a couple of winners. Nice.

Uh uh. Not so fast. This decision was just a cue for the Communists to enter the fray, pulling in some unlikely capitalist allies.

Look at the major world-class airports in Asia. Look at the airports at Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and elsewhere. All of them are most modern, world-class airports built by either the government or government-owned public sector companies. The world over, all the good, great airports are managed by governments fully or partially.

The Lefties want the whole privatization thing scrapped and the Government of India to raise the money required through bonds. They believe the current setup is just fine. And in an effort to prove how professional they are, the party bosses called all their friends who work at airports and asked them to work from home starting today. ( These guys know what they are doing, there was a dress rehearsal last year. ) And the obedient airport workers have stayed at home today, causing lots of stranded travelers all over the country. But air travelers are rich, so why should we care? Plus, I am sure they will realize all this is in public interest.

So, how professional is the current management? Here, read this interview with the Director of the Mumbai Airport. (through India Uncut)

You feel your customers tend to over-react? [about delays]

Oh yes! And they do it out of ignorance.

Surveys on the Internet place Mumbai airport in the worst spot, second only to Papua New Guinea, and the only reason we beat them is they have gangland shootouts inside the airport. There are complaints of unclean toilets, mosquitoes, staffers demanding bribes…

Here’s what happens: Due to the night curfew in Europe and the Far East, bunching of flights happens out here. 70% of the movement happens in a six-hour period. This means hundreds of people use the urinal at the same time. So how can we keep them clean all the time? We can’t ask people to shift while they use the toilet, can we?

Why not build more toilets?

We don’t have the infrastructure for that.

You think the Indian passenger is too demanding?

It’s got to do with the profile of our people. You know, it’s more difficult to maintain the international terminal. We have a very large number of labour that travels to the Middle East. A large number of them have never seen a wet toilet in their lives! There are people who spit inside our airports!

However, I think you are only pointing out the negatives, you are being cynical. If things were so bad, there won’t be a 40 per cent growth in air traffic. Things are not as hopeless as you are trying to make them out to be.

Read the whole thing, it is very exciting.

Siddharth Chowdhury’s Patna Roughcut is an edgy, cynical take on the life of Ritwik Ray, a young journalist in Patna. Patna Roughcut uses a fractured narrative to trace the events and people that shape Ritwik’s life – from his childhood in Patna, to Delhi where he goes to college, and then his return to Patna with dreams of writing a book. It “is a story of love, idealism and sexual awakening” – a refreshingly different theme for a desi book. Chowdhury’s prose is delightfully unadorned – the rough, untrammelled writing is just what a book like this requires. This is by far the best book out of India I’ve read in a long, long, long time.

Chandrahas Choudhury, in his review at The Middle Stage says

… the last section of the book, “Waiting for Godard”, is one of the very best pieces of extended prose I’ve read this year. [...] Patna Roughcut is worth your money just for this section alone. [Link]

And here is Jai Arjun Singh, at Jabberwock.

Patna Roughcut shows its hand early on; the very first paragraph of the book ends an overwrought analogy with the observation: “The poor shouldn’t dream. They can’t afford it.” The remaining 180 pages are an illustration of this statement. Cynical though the idea is, it defines the lives of untold millions in this country – people who reach for greater intellect and “culture” and find that it destroys their pragmatism; that they are still unable to escape the vicious circle of their existence. Chowdhury’s achievement is that he filters this pessimistic worldview through a style that is tender, empathetic and even humorous when appropriate. This is crucial to the book’s success as a story of the aspirations and dashed hopes of young Indians caught between different worlds. [Link]

The book is available online through abebooks, UK. (Thanks Selena).

At the other end of the spectrum is Sonia Faleiro’s The Girl. Weighing in at a hundred and twenty odd pages (any smaller and it would’ve been a long short story), Faleiro’s debut novel is set in Goa, and is supposedly about two men who loved a girl trying to find out why she committed suicide.

But the book and whatever plot it has are just excuses to showcase Faleiro’s exquisite writing – every little action is described in detail, and even the most insignificant of things get an unusual metaphor or two to themselves.

A large clod of lumpy grey earth was being shovelled on top of her casket as we arrived. We heard the flat, grimy thud and watched as it spilt down the sides of the smooth, nut-brown teak, crumbling in deathly slow motion, encrusting the casket like pastry bubbling into hardness until it was firmly covered and could be seen no more.

D’Silva never understood how Breto’s flourished in the neighborhood that it did. The two were as mismatched as vegetarianism and a Goan, as profoundly antipodean as the Rua’s many little old ladies and the one young lady who lived opposite Breto’s in a stone mansion, and many years later flung herself into the well in the corner of her garden. She had had two children and a husband she called ‘Hey you.’

While the writing creates a rich portait of life in a small Goan town, it is so distractingly detailed that it draws the reader’s attention away from the plot. But such flaws aside, this is a promising debut: the beautiful writing alone makes it worth a buy. Plus, you can finish it off in a couple of hours and check one item off on your New Year’s lists. Here is an excerpt and here’s a list of places that sell the book online.

At the other, other end of the spectrum from these two books is Chetan Bhagat’s One Night @ the Call Center, a book that is is neither well plotted nor well written, but was a guaranteed bestseller even before it was released. It is the only book among the three that is on almost all bestseller lists in India (and it has been there for several weeks now). Bhagat and his publishers have managed to replicate the successful formula that made his previous book – Five Point Someone – possibly the bestselling Indian English book of all time. An accessible, contemporary plot and accessible (even if undercooked) writing. And most important of all, an incredibly low price: the books sell for Rs. 95 a pop (about $2), compared to the $5 that you have to dish out for the other books mentioned here. I guess size does matter sometimes…

PS: You can buy The Girl online through the official website. I couldn’t find any place that sells Patna Roughcut online, but that could be because I didn’t look that hard.

Unable to bear the anxiety, I asked my dad what in the world oil-pulling was and he handed me a magazine that featured a six page advertisement on the benefits of oil-pulling therapy. That’s right, therapy. And it is not fun.

The advertisement was not really an advertisement. It was a study on the benefits of oil-pulling commissioned by the oil manufacturer and conducted by a doctor who was featured on the front page of the spread. The results of the study can be summarized thus:

A group of people were asked to take a couple of teaspoons of pure, unadulterated sesame oil, and pour into into their respective mouths. After this, they were asked to swirl the oil in their mouths for a period of fifteen to twenty minutes. Care had to be taken to suck the oil through their teeth.

Eww. The ad continues.

After the ordeal, the survivors were asked to spit the oil – which had become all foamy by now – out. They were then given free bottles of oil and asked to go back home and repeat the process every morning for a period of two months. After the two month period, when the oil pullers were examined, there were some random things that had happened to them and the good things are listed herein.

Based on the results of the study, we state with certainity that oil pulling is an easy way to maintain your health and well-being. [Link, in Tamil]

And so, we recommend that you make oil pulling an integral part of your daily routine. It has the ability to cure several ailments. We recommend that you continue oil pulling until you can eat and sleep well. [Link]

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p>I asked my dad if he’d tried it, and he told me that on the one day he pulled oil, the maid showed up early. Chalk up one more victory for oil pulling. And wait, there is more good news. In another study linked on the website of the oil-maker, someone called F. Karach, MD claims that

[...] that the following illnesses can be effectively healed with the application of oil therapy: headaches, bronchitis, lung and liver conditions, toothache, thrombosis, blood diseases, arthrosis, paralysis, eczema, gastric ulcers, intestinal disorders, heart and kidney ailments, encephalitis, nervous conditions and female disorders. [Link]

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p>Normally, I would’ve concluded my post here after issuing a fervent appeal to readers to throw away their Advil and and buy more oil. But then, this is Sepia Mutiny, so I was obliged to go a step further. This morning, I picked up the phone and called the doctor who conducted the study.

Thanks for talking to me. Can you tell me more about the study?

Yes, it was a study conducted on a very small sample. We’ve only listed out the benefits reported by people and we are not sure yet about any side effects. A larger study might be done soon.

Can we use other oils?

Yes, any type of oil should be ok. We only tried sesame oil.

About the therapy itself…

Don’t call it therapy. It is an edible product that possibly provides some benefits.

Why do you think it works?

I don’t know.

Any side effects?

I don’t know. We haven’t done a study large enough to study side effects.

Hmm. So hold on to your Advil then, folks. On another note, I am starting to wonder what benefits of vodka pulling are. It is a far more obvious candidate for someone wanting to design a therapy. You are encouraged to try it and let me know how it goes. And please, do swallow.

“But this is not like Universal Studios at all. It is a functioning studio, not a theme park. No trip to Hyderabad is ever complete without a visit to the film city. It is a happening place. We should go.”

“Happening place? I see you’ve never been to K-Mart.”

“No, but this is happens to be largest movie studio in the world. Sometimes you can even see live movie shootings. Imagine seeing Nagarajuna in action. We are going.” This from the increasingly hysteric friend, who was starting to drool.

So we went. And it was a very disturbing experience. I might have grown up building elaborate temples for film actresses, but I know as well as you that not everything I see in movies is true. Like the blood spurting out of people is tomato ketchup. That the vamps are all drinking Sprite, not vodka. That there is a small possibility the email Aishwarya Rai wrote to me asking me to go check out her topless pictures on the internet may not be from her. All this I know. But then, this trip proved to me, there is so much more to add to that list. Such as the Taj.

The friend and I entered the studio, and after a cursory glance at a rather crowded Wild West set (“for cowboy scenes, man”) whose highlights were (naturally) Bills Gun Factery and the Flying Fish Beach pub, we were whisked away in an Ashok Leyland bus whose top has been sawn off for a tour of the city.

As the bus wound through the city at an alarming speed, we passed several buildings – each one of them designed to appear differently from different directions. Airport from the front, Church from the back. Imperial bungalow from the front; seedy apartment building from the side. Standard deception. The friend has almost his entire body out of the bus, trying to catch a glimpse of a sitcom being shot about a couple of miles away. Meanwhile, a tour guide with a karaoke microphone starts up a running commentary of the sights, rapidly switching between Hindi and Telugu. “Remember all those Bollywood movies shot in London? Well, you remember wrong. There was one shot of the Tower of London borrowed from some old classic, and then they moved the crew here for the rest of the movie.”

Phoreen shoots are expensive, so this can pass for London, I suppose. The tour guide continues as the bus driver morphs into a speeding maniac. [Excuse for bad photography: Done.]. “And when the dashing old man proposes his undying love to the charming young girl with the Taj in the background, the couple might actually be standing right here.”

I’d had it by now. “But sir,this structure bears little or no resemblance to the Taj”

“Good camerawork can take care of it,” the guy mumbles as his driver speeds up. He continues speaking. The highlights of the Ramoji Film City, he says, are the parks and gardens with pretty flowers that form a great backdrop for song sequences. And then my friend points to a tree, claiming that he’d seen a song shot around it.

“No way people are gonna believe that’s a tree. No way.”

“ThatÂ’s what you think. Why do you think they make the girls wear those dresses – itÂ’s all a giant distraction strategy to save money on real trees.”

Oh well, at least the girls are real. Or so I thought, until I came across this. (from the Indian Express Online.)

Eight years ago, film star Sushmita Sen held a teary-eyed press conference to deny her breast enhancement. But today, almost every actress or actress-in-the-making has had one. Shilpa Shetty, Priyanka Chopra, Ayesha Takia, Koena Mitra (sheÂ’s apparently had two), Shamita Shetty, Bipasha Basu, Aditi Govitrikar, Jessie Randhawa and, most recently, Sushama Reddy have supposedly had implants.

I am shattered, but I have that email from Aish I can go back to.