Blabbering. Again.

Owing to exams and study holidays. I’ve been watching a lot of Television lately; a habit I had not pursued actively for while. But I see nothing’s changed, most of the old impressions remain and since this blog is dying a slow death due to boredom, I thought I’d note down in five minutes what I’ve noticed the last few days. I apologise in advance for the blabber that follows. Nothing serious. Just.

Couple of things:

TV news- can only be described as kind of a Scooby Doo on steroids, judging by the way it reacts to events existing and non. It panics and goes berserk at the slightest non event and the next second goes on the over drive with sun shine and yahoo! over something else. So we’re pretty much left with “how dare Tharoor say that” and “holi hey” most of the time. And this I noticed from a daily 30 second dose of ‘news channels’. I stopped at 30 seconds fearing permanent damage to my sanity from watching this non sense. Interestingly, Rajdeep Sardesai once said people who don’t make it anywhere else become journalists. Who can blame him? Most of the said people work for him! At the backdrop of all this, life in the real world goes on, shrugging indifferently at all the ‘information’ and ‘awareness’ and ‘activism’ and ‘debate’.

Ads- Getting dumber by the day. There’s no limit to stupidity. There’s one which I saw, where a rider/user of some bike/fuel picks up a pizza delivery guy stuck on the road in the middle of ‘nowhere-you-can’t-even-get-fake-Bisleri-let-alone-pizza’ (:P) and then drives this person for half an hour on a bike through treacherous landscape, knowing, all the while, that the fellow’s delivering the pizza to his own work shop, then drops him and surprises him with this extraordinary piece of coincidence. If I were the pizza guy I’d deliver it on the hero’s face! But of course in the ad, the boy looks all “I’ve learned so much from you super man….” Gee.

I hear a lot about portrayal of women in ads; stereotyping, objectifying etc. Let’s talk about men. Why don’t they protest? You may have seen, if you're as jobless as me, a recent Scorpio ad (the beastly car?). There’s guy on the vehicle golfing around on some desert with an entourage of attractive men and women. And this one’s just a sample of general advertising targeted at men. Why don’t men protest being portrayed as perfectly jobless morons who go about golfing in the Sahara with an uncomfortably dressed woman painstakingly following him around to clap and encourage him as he gets the tiny ball into the hole? (And lady’s look clearly says “what a retard… and I have to wear a maroon dress and smile at this ass”!) All of this with 3 or 4 other men, in dark glasses (again, stereotyped security look!) looking on. And there’s so many more(most in the car, perfume, shaving cream segment); most show men as perfect Neanderthals who get pleasure out of beating each other in silly car races at traffic signals or making a woman driver hit her head on the dash board with their ‘cool’ maneuvers(gallant!).

Any commercial aimed at men-perfumes say, they’re portrayed as testosterone bottles/idiots who’ll do anything just get to some deviant, non-existent breed of female who’s attracted to men wearing Axe or screw driver or whatever. Its assumed that you can sell even a Mars rover to a middle class Indian male (who never leaves his home town unless its to go to Bangalore), provided, you put a hot girl next to it. (“maybe if I buy this, she’ll deliver it…umhmmm”)

How dare we women complain of being stereotyped as loving caring mothers and indulging, attractive spouses when these guys clearly have it worse. And they don’t even care. Enough feminism, we need a ‘mennist’ movement. My hopes are pinned on gay men in the activist area; heteros are clearly busy, what with all the golfing!

Rosebowl-is a good channel, if you ignore a certain broad, drag queen met upperclass Indian house wife woman who insists on telling us about food no one cares to make(green yucky stuff and weird coffee which we like to drink at cafes thank you very much) while one unsuccessfully tries to make sense of her clothing style.

Bones-Good show. Of course nothing beats Seinfeld but this is a totally different genre.

MTV-Should get a life! Can anything be so boring? Even their ‘kickass mornings’ can give one a fatal depression.

Now that I have wasted a sufficient amount of time, I’ll stop. Tata.