From a few million fragments of input

Signal to Noise ratio
The market for TV music talent shows seems to be at an all-time high. We follow channels in five different languages and all of them have at least one (the average is about 2 per channel family). The problem is that most shows have little in terms of differentiation. The participants can be really good or really poor at times, but most of the anchors are uniformly obnoxious. The fad has done wonders for the musicians job market, both as orchestra players and as one-off judges.

The most interesting ones I've seen are: the Marathi programme on Zee Chauviis Taas (anchored by Pallavi Joshi) which has the participants sing in different song styles and thus avoid the rut of mere film music; Jaya TV's offering anchored by the legendary S.P.Balasubramaniam which provides excellent criticisms; some of the Malayali versions because they don't remain parochial: they sing Tamil and Hindi film songs as well.

"Shut upp, Shut upp, Shut upp o' tum"
What is Ram Gopal Varma's next release? It seems the nomenclaturally-challenged "Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag" (which almost begs the question: "ENO try kiyaa?") is accompanied by a film called"Darling". Promotionals contain a sub-title (a first for RGV?), a pair of casting cringes and of course Catbert crooning away. So much so that it looks like T-Series is extracting some anonymous pound of flesh.

Cricket Sounds and Lights
If I was Zaheer Khan, I'd import some jelly beans and serve them in my Pune restaurant instead of after-dinner mints. Martin Johnson, in typical Anglo-wit, opines the day would have been different had it been Mike Gatting at the crease ("Gatt would simply have picked it up and eaten it.")

My mother was asking me why cricketers wear those wraparound shades - doesn't it interfere with their sighting of the ball? Just like in the case of the Black-Eyed (C) Pea,it turns out that technology has the answer.

Blasts and verdicts
Have we ever had three big terrorism verdicts in one week? Don't think so.

The predictable ODing of news channels on the Sanjay Dutt result made me wish for a full time (and real-time) pseudo-news channel a la Jon Stewart's Daily Reports. A channel that said: those of you who've come here to wade in Sanjay-speculation, have you nothing better to do? Just wait for half an hour and we'll know. What's the point in idly conjecturing every possibility when the remaining 99 theories will go bust in the next 30 minutes? Till then, here, this is what Dr. Haneef is having for lunch.

I quite lost it when the Dr. Haneef coverage went into the kitchen: his wife was asked what was waiting for him on the lunch table ("Biryani"). Returning back to the real world, I have completely failed to understand the immense significance of this one case in terms of the amount of coverage in the press. That he has been treated so sympathetically in the local media is interesting to study.

One case that I personally find very intriguing is that of Yakub Memon. I know very little about details of the extent of his involvement in the Bombay blasts case, apart from what I read in the book by S. Hussain Zaidi and the resulting film, and newspaper reports. Consider this: this man, who sat in safety and knew his brother was the mastermind behind the whole carnage, comes back, is arrested amidst very contradictory factual claims, protests his innocence vehemently, and ultimately sentenced to death. This single instance interests me much more than any of the other results. But I find no one discussing this man's fate.

tim tim taare; log bechaare
Those happiness indices always have Bhutan at the top of the heap. I have a strong feeling that Bhutan has no daily soaps. Can you tell something about a culture from the soaps their citizens watch? Fundamentally, soaps thrive on unhappiness afflicting the nice guys, so if that is your sample, then the Bhutanese win each time.

Danse Macabre
Parachute, the hair oil brand, has a new product out which has the word "advansed" in its website URL. It doesn't even seem to be an American word. There's no defen{c/s}e against such cpelling.

Wisdom of grey hairs
The biggest argument against materialism: packing.