Ten reasons why India doesn't produce sportsmen.
1.Schools have no or very little ground space. Parents only check if the buildings are good, not if there are sufficient courts for various games or if the school has purchased games equipment such as hockey sticks or nets.
2.There are only one or two hours allotted for games every week. One young person I used to despise in every way, once made a very sensible statement, "If I were the principal of the school, I would have one hour of games every day." Personally , if I became the director of school education, I would have two or three hours of games every day.
3. The games teacher handles the difficult task of space management, by asking the girls to sit in small groups and chat, while letting boys use the only available basket ball court or volley ball court.In case the school has no such facility, the boys still manage to play lagaan cricket.
4. Parents constantly tell children to study.Guests ask kids if they study well. No one asks them if they play well.No encouragement. Low awareness of the importance of games.
5.There are very few government schemes to help sportspersons. There are complaints of favoritism, as children or relatives of coaches and government officials make use of the schemes for personal profit.
6. There are no playgrounds in cities. The concept of the play ground has ceased to exist.The once popular haunts of kids, where children used to play games such as catch and blind man's buff, have now been converted into apartment blocks.
Am sure there are ten reasons. will write them as andwhen i remember.

cheers.

Very heavy in the heart after having watched a 1976 Italian movie, whose title google translated as "Ugly, dirty and bad". The movie on you tube has no english subtitles. The visuals spoke so much that there was no need to understand even a single word. It is about squalor and slum life. Not something totally new to me. I have read about it in stories and a couple of movies. The energy and the survival instincts of the extremely poor is portrayed along with all their gross ways of going about tackling the insurmountable odds stacked against them. The sound track became a little pleasant when children were shown.

I however, felt terrible when i saw the end. It was an uncompromising end. It showed no ray of hope or scope for change in the lives of all concerned. The movie begins with a  prepubescent girl beginning the day with an assortment of cans in which she fills water from a public tap. The little girl is shown as responsible for taking care of kids, shepherding them into a wired enclosure, as the parents go to work, taking care of them during crisis. The director shows her run to a hedge and jump on  a few stones playfully on her way to fill water. She does exactly the same thing in the last scene. Only now she is pregnant.

Haven't been recording any of the stuff happening....when stuff keeps happening all the time.... any way thought i would be regular if  i began with funny stuff from college. The notice board in one of the colleges i go to, is a blackboard, where info is chalked out. Primitive, but useful. Yesterday, the board carried the names of the staff who were in charge of issuing hall tickets to different groups of students. One gifted student decided to modify his teacher Deepa's name. He rubbed off the D, (gender bias intended, am sure it's a he) and wrote a P in it's place, making her name Peepa, which means 'barrel' in tamil. The enraged teacher went to the Principal and requested him never to put her name on the board again. She would do any duty assigned to her, But since it was a small college, it would be sufficient to put up the room number, where the students had to go.

Dickinson's magic, or logic?

Emily Dickinson (1830–86).  Complete Poems.  1924.

Part One: Life Epigram

THIS is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,—
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed	5
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

I have enjoyed reading Emily Dickinson ever since she was taught to me in college by my brilliant and accomplished professor Shantha. But this particular poems seem to make greater sense to me now than ever before. Now that's difficult to come to terms with. I am a show off , blogging, face booking and speaking out without restraint to all whom I could bully into listening....trying to put most of my thoughts into words and sharing them with my daughters, students, colleagues and close friends (and not so close friends too at times). Now why would I feel that the above given words are relevant?
It is possible that  assuming the role of wife in a joint family and a mother in a conservative community and city have forced me to lead a double life of sorts. The way I presented myself to the world outside and conducted myself were, at least in parts, influenced by the strong traditions of the place I live in and my home.I may have done many of the important things that I wanted to, in spite of  the constraints of my situation, and failed in some and have kept some projects for tomorrow, but in many small ways , I probably just conformed and to that extent withheld my message to the world. The world has of course reached to me. How else would i be jotting this down for the whole universe to see?
There are of course, the charming twists and turns that create the music of these lyrics. And from this poem we know that although Dickinson never wrote to the world, she wondered if they would judge her harshly...If only she had, she would have known how people of all climates and colors love her verse and celebrate them.

I have discovered the best way to make friends. We have issues with 'friends' because we are often distracted by the happening people. I have read numerous teen novels about girls wanting to be part of a glamorous crowd and trying to fit in with an 'in' set and ignoring real friends etc. But even adults are distracted by noisy nonsensical pretenders.
We believe we can have good fun with those who dress up and speak up. But in reality, they are taking so much effort to appear as if they are enjoying themselves that they really don't have energy for anything else. In contrast, a lot of quiet looking people try their hands at fun stuff like organizing good parties, fund raising, trecking, travelling etc.
So the best way to make friends is to stay connected to the maybe not so cool, but really active people, who have no  interest in putting up a show of being hip. Let me repeat what so many have said in so many ways, "Looks are deceptive"; especially when we are looking for friends.

Some faults od mine that destroy the magic in life

1.Impatience with people i consider to be stupid (later i realize they are just people who are different)
2. Arrogance ; too sure of my ideas and aggressive in promoting my line of thought
3. Being distracted 23 hours a day
4. talking to but not really talking to people who are not like me
5.inability to make genuine small talk
6.assuming things about others
7.talking most of the time
8. talking unnecessarily
9.trying to make a story of life
10.inability to understand what others feel about me.
hmmm the list seems to be growing longer than i intended. 10 is a good number to stop.Sigh!

movie review

No one wore make up and everyone looked normally healthy, by which i mean they were mostly squat. By  squat I mean that most of the people were five feet tall and two feet wide. The clothes, every bit of material used by the characters, are used ones, mostly faded to the point of being non-distinguishable in colour. It was possible to relate to every single character in the film and observe all their doings with interest. And all through the first half an hour of the film I was conscious of the fact that no main character had been introduced and i was still trying to guess what the title of the film was all about.But I was  watching it with involvement.When a contrastingly good looking pair of young lovers are shown, they seem to be intrusive and their presence is barely tolerable.

 'Azhagar samiyin kuthirai' turned out to be a unique watch.  There are some unforgettable characters in the film. The kid who notices everything and questions grown ups with amazing logic; Azhagarsamy, the utterly convincing country bumpkin, with his pot belly, shock of curly hair and boundless energy; the spunky middle aged widow who thrashes the village lecher with a broom stick and defends the main character; the malayala mandharavadi (magician from kerala), the policeman in plain clothes who joins the bogus magician in exhorting money from the superstitious villagers, the smart and sensible Inspector of police. These characters are depicted by actors who not only look their parts but add life and power to them with their realistic portrayal.
You never know what to expect as the film proceeds. The narration seems so real that it is as unpredictable as any given day in our lives. The mystery of the lost horse is solved and peace and plenty are restored and there are two happy marriages. But this story has two romances, one of the standard variety involving the good looking pair, who elope from the village to escape the tension an inter-caste marriage could create. The second one, the cream filling in this cake is undeniably Azhagarsamy's romance with the beautiful girl and their affection for each other.
The locales have been tastefully selected and the camera moves along the winding paths of the hills used by village pedestrians and hovers over village landmarks where the quaint asbestos roofs are held in place with stones in a poor hamlet. A very subtle satire on rural Indian life, this film has you laughing aloud all along. Worth watching was what a friend told me when he recommended this film and to me and I second him heartily