In the White Man's Trap.

It has been centuries since the white man left the shores of his native lands and went all over the globe, looking for riches that were nowhere to be found in his own.  Along the way, white man had to be resourceful - for invasion, violence, innovation, invention, and for making up things along the way, like democracy, free markets and so on - things that slowly persuade other people to follow benignly because it sounds like a good idea.

After all, how bad can "of the people, for the people, by the people" be?  Well, shit!  Pretty bad as we are learning now!  The idea of free markets has taken rampant part in exploitation, because those lands where people are being exploited do not have kings who would have slit the throats of businessmen doing anything like that.

The white man has always been about doing the dirty work out of sight, and keeping a nice, soft, benign front.  The rest of the world has been somewhat opposite to that.  If a kingdom stood for violence, you'd see dead bodies in the streets.  It won't be sending planes to bomb another faraway country while its citizens are sitting around in a coffee shop watching it on the news locally.

The millions of people that flock to the USA to live there, do so in all innocence, believing in shit like "The American Dream" while in reality, they actually strive to prop up some really huge lies, by serving the machine that white man built out of nothing.  You don't have to be very smart to do materially well in the USA - it has plenty of power to lend you money when you fuck up.  That is how it has piled up the biggest debts in history of mankind, but it doesn't matter!  The White Man is all about making us temporarily feeling good while he gets all the benefits!  All big businesses in the world - pharma, fast food, fashion, entertainment, booze, cigarettes, drugs, education, sex - are made of this simple philosophy.  Take the candy, and become a slave for life!

The same goes for the much talked about cultural invasion of ancient cultures by white man's content, on top of which stands Hollywood, and now taken over by television marquees such as "Friends".  The trap is the feel good factor.  Our children will fall for the culture of temporary feel good, as long as it never talks about consequences.  All love stories are traps.  Everything feels great when the romance peaks and ends in a commitment at the end of the movie.  Oh wow!  "Titanic" was great, but it really is about bad maritime navigation than anything else, isn't it?

There is never a story about how the romance gets fucked up just after the engagement and how this amazing idea of romancing, dating, the whole soulmate shit and all the good shit including the diamond ring and the wedding ends with rather stunning divorce rates of over 50%, and social misery, old age homes, and disjointed families.

Break ups are the release!  But you cannot sell much to someone looking forward to a break up, can you?  The boy and girl in love will buy cards, entertain themselves, buy gifts, and spend money!   The couple that come out of a breakup come out wiser, a little more discerning, and less gullible.  So, what do we do with them?

Well, there is always the next beginning!  And white man's next great idea is just around the corner.  Viagra!  Remain young forever!  For a culture based on the temporary, Viagra actually tries to keep youth permanent.

Popular romantic stories tell us that sometimes, even though we know something could be a mistake, we should make it!  What kind of moron would say something like this?  It is only by constantly building upon untruth that a bloated unreality can be maintained, which serves the selling machine.

It's the dishonesty of the "selling" culture that really bothers me.  In fact, this whole "selling" culture is based on the white man's idea of the free market and the assumed "right" to persuade someone to buy something, but there is some dharma in that, so it has a right to exist as a viewpoint.  What I find disgusting is that there is "moral science" in school, there is "physical education" and there is even "sex education" but there is no "market education".  How do we cope with shit that we are constantly sold and shit that constantly persuades us into believing untruth?

The same sort of happy, giddy, romantic progress translates into our newfound obsession with easy success.  Look at the number of idiots who fall for nonsense like converting $400 to $3100 in a month through Forex trading!  So why can't the government throw in its 300 billion of reserves into this amazing business and in a month's time, we will have trillions!  How hard can it be to conjure up some common sense?

The number of young Indian people I meet on a daily basis who believe they are smart enough to see huge success in their lives is just mind boggling.  There are simply no statistics to support that kind of success in such large numbers.  Even in the country that promises great things, the USA, 1% of the population has nearly 80% of the nation's privately held wealth!  Of course there is always the promise, the trap, the possibility, but where is the education telling us that this sort of success is going to be elusive?

Boost improves stamina three fold?  What kind of motherfucking stupid ass, demented parenting pricks will believe this and feed their little shits with this goddamned product?  Three fold?  So how come our olympic athletes aren't tanking up on Boost and coming home with all the long distance gold medals?  Surely, if our athletes can tap into the secret of Boost, they could do three times better than the Africans?!  This lie is there on TV every single day, but since this is the white man's way of doing shit, we do not question it.

If there is to be an honest message to our kids and giddy parents, here it is - "Get off your pompous asses and work hard.  Save your money, and don't buy anything you don't need.  Life is not going to be easy.  Get used to it.  Your kid has to run kilometres everyday for his or her stamina to improve even a little bit.  Your kid will not become healthier by using Lifebuoy soap, or smarter or taller or sharper by drinking Horlicks.  Make the little shit eat vegetables and stay off junk food.  Tell the bastard that s/he will grow the same kind of paunch daddy has and suffer from worse diseases if s/he is not careful.

For heavens sake, your child is nothing special.  Your moron neighbour thinks just as highly about his little shit, and that moron also has medals and certificates to prove his little shit's great achievements.  Now think.  How did all of us excellent children from thirty years ago build such a mediocre nation?  By believing greatness is in our manifest destiny?  Yes, exactly.  Because we're staring at how white man built his countries and we think that is the way to do it!  Wake the fuck up!"

- BSK.

So sorry we're shitty!

It is now official - AR Rahman has apologized for "letting people down" with his song for the Commonwealth Games.  Apparently, he is proud of the composition and the anthem.  No artist should have to apologize to anybody for having attracted criticism from any quarter, but what composition is he talking about?  And what anthem?

What he produced for the CW Games was just plain rubbish.  It was sub standard trash and it stood out glaringly.  He did not do anything great for Slumdog Millionaire either, but white guys loved it and gave him two Oscars, so that was enough for our dumb (m)asses to cheer him on!  Looks like not many even made the attempt to find out Rahman's "Jai Ho" was originally put together for another producer for another film and then plugged into Slumdog Millionaire!  Still good enough to win an Oscar!

The Oscar for best song is usually a joke, and it should not take too much research to find what kind of rubbish this category generally attracts.  Heard Howard Shore's number for Lord of the Rings?  It didn't even feature in the movie, but yes, it won the Oscar too!  This category is in itself a joke, but for us Indians, two is always better than one, and coming from whitey, one is better than ALL we have from all non-whiteys!

Now, read this news item from The Hindu.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article832718.ece

This clown Rahman has apparently got great feedback from Australia, England, and all "those" places where they heard the song!  Sure, they even understood everything in Hindi, loved the beefcake dancers prancing around in designer cheap white see through outfits with green and saffron gloves, and could not get enough of Rahman's singing to the sky.  But wait a minute!  They are WHITE people who loved this fucking song!  So, how can we criticize Rahman?

How can we suddenly think the Commonwealth Games is an Indian affair, just because it was hosted by India, and 70,000 crores of Indian Rupees were spent for this extravaganza, just because this was supposed to showcase our ability to host such big events?  How can it be important to satisfy Indian audiences for just 5 crores as payment?  This is all about showing how good we are to whitey, whitey mighty whitey!

Sarcasm apart, I have never seen any Indian artist lick whitey ass as much as Rahman.  The reason he doesn't get that kind of exotic adulation from Indians is because he is really no great shit and many of us know it.  His music is uninspiring crap most often, and by law of averages, good sound engineering, great processing, and sublime packaging, Rahman can come up with something that "works" once in a while.  Frequently enough to keep him in the news.  And average enough to sell.  Quality is a hard sell, so why even go there?

For whitey, however, who is just discovering popular Indian creative output, Ilayaraja is still not accessible.  Rahman is the McDonalds variety that is ready off the shelf.  Perfect!  So, of course they celebrate him.  Ask those geniuses if they even know the music of RD Burman, the incredible talent of Kishore Kumar or Lata Mangeshkar, leave alone Jesudas or Janaki.  We haven't even started with our purely classical performers, if you noticed.  Our classical musicians do not give a shit, because they are all true artists.  They do almost no self promotion, and are too absorbed with their work.  That is why they have to be "discovered".  To mention a few here would be to mock the rest.  They are all gods in an unbelievably exalted pantheon - and it would take someone like the Beatles to even scratch the surface of that.

Is it still difficult for us to see this scam artist who isn't worth shit?  Are we deaf?  Certainly not.  And this waking up is exactly what happened with the Commonwealth Games!  There was no whitey to tell us all too soon that Rahman was God!  We had to hear his shit for ourselves and use our own brains that were asking us all along, "Is this fucker really that good?"!  NO!  He was never really "that" good, from any yardstick used to measure this nincompoop pretender.  That is the point.  He is a product of great management, not one of mercurial talent coming to the fore!

Great music is what evokes the accurate emotion, ecstasy or agony, puts us in the right place as intended by the composer.  In movies, this is for supporting the director's vision.  When songs are played lovingly years later, regardless of what happened to the memories of the movies, that is a very special accomplishment.  Rahman had something going with Roja, a bit with Lagaan, and when really forced to work hard and deliver, with a handful of other films including Rangeela.  These are the directors who make him work, not worship him.  Check out a film called "Karuthamma" if you really want to see how well disco beats work in a Tamil rural movie.  Check out the theme song the same fool came out with for the World Tamil Conference.  If you aren't deaf, you'd wish you were.

So why doesn't he produce something like the best he has produced so far?  Well, shit!  Too much competition there.  He is clever enough to make his own niche, hence the first run from Chennai to Mumbai and when the novelty has worn out even there, now onwards to Hollywood.  They're broke so they'll buy anything cheap right now.  If it is brown skinned with two Oscars, ride the exotic buzz!!

"All my life I had a choice between hate and love. I chose love and I am here," said Rahman after his second Oscar. What hate? What love?  Overwhelmed by whitey's generosity, this is what can come out of a rank simpleton in flashy clothes!  Awkward and insincere - duh!  Exactly what his music almost always is.  But he spoke about choosing "love" and how it has brought him here.  Like an Oscar award is the greatest thing a musician can possibly aspire for!  This damn Oscar is now a phallic aspiration for most Indian producers and directors.  It is the ultimate sense of belonging with the best in the world!  Indeed American cinema has produced some stalwarts and Shankar will never be as good a director as James Cameron, forget Terrence Malick or Spielberg.  To a film maker, this is still a legitimate aspirational goal.  But to a musician?  Come on!

Rahman has no place in any collective of greatness - plain and simple.  The fucker should not even be allowed in the same arenas as the masters, to perform his garbage.  We don't even need to criticize the fact that he copies a lot.  He isn't even good enough to twist that to something great.  He has this one dimensional but easily sold thematic approach of "enthuse, lift up, be patriotic, and sing to the sky", that is wearing real thin.  Now, he's apologizing?  Jai Ho!  Oh, yeah, just in case the ONLY song he made for the CW games was not enough value for money, he performed Jai Ho too!  This guy is fast becoming an expert at looking out of place.

Bollywood is still that exotic beast to most of Hollywood.  There are enough and more morons there who will take to this, in much the way they will take to Indian food.  They will never get to taste anything authentic, but a fair bit of what we choose to export.  Rahman is export material.  In this case, not good enough for us, but good enough for the white consumer.  He is easy to sell, just like a dosa can sell if called an "Indian crepe".  God bless him for all the good this brings him, but please let's see him for what he really is - an average performer who's running on empty and pretending like his tank is full.  Jai Ho!  Otha odi po!

BSK.

PS: Spitting is feedback, in its truest sense.