In the morning, I turned on the television to see if could catch the highlights of India’s defeat to England in the Hockey World Cup. (As an aside, I wish that India would not spend all it’s efforts to beat only Pakistan – there are other countries in the arena.) After the highlights were over, I idly flipped to the Australian LPGA ANZ Ladies Masters golf tournament.

Over the course of the tournament, which was incidentally won by Karrie Webb, I found that there were a few differences between the women’s game and the one infamously made unpopular again by Tiger Woods. The most obvious difference is that the course is shorter for the women than the men – expected, I suppose, considering that women are apparently unable to hit a golf ball as far as a man (I reserve judgement on this).

The second obvious difference is the clothing.

Here is Tiger Woods on one of his better days:

And here is one of the new golfer’s on the women’s circuit, Maria Verchenova, a top 10 finisher in the European Tour LPGA championship in Wales:

Do I really need to say more?

And the third point that struck me was the commentary.

Here’s so and so on the 13th tee. She’s 7 under for the day and is sure of making the cut. And she’s wearing such a cute top and it matches so well with her earrings.

I’ve never ever seen a man dress sexy on the golf course and I’ve never never ever heard the commentators discuss his clothing before his tee shot.

But, moving on… in the evening I was invited by friends to join them at a karting zone near my house.

I like karting and it’s fun. Of course, yesterday was a Sunday and everyone and their uncle and their uncle’s three-year old kiddies were at the track, but that’s not what I wanted to point out. I don’t know if it was sheer coincidence, or whether it was something more common, but all the women who went out on track yesterday were almost always the slowest. Most of them were overtaken at least once by other drivers on track during the course of their six laps.

The men on the other hand were raring at the bit. One driver was so intent on being faster than anyone else on track, that he literally shoved another driver off track with his kart while squeezing in a non-existent gap.

Personally, I like the slower women to the over-rash men, but I prefer the fast-but-steady men to the blocking-up-the-track-slow women. Is that a gender bias or is that just common sense?

Is it wrong for women to dress sexy and talk about accessories as long as they play the game well?

What do you think? Considering today is International Women’s Day, I thought it may be an appropriate question.

Last time it wasn’t part of the “Festivals of Sacred Music” and I didn’t hear any speeches or themes  although I may have missed them by going late. This time though there was a theme – “Environment and Climate Change” including a impassioned speech by Vandana Shiva about how we must be the change.

Still, the music and dance was the focus of the evening, and mostly it was really good.

By the time I reached there, the amphitheatre under the Banyan tree was crowded and Geeta Navale and Esperanto were playing their usual (very good) soul fusion.

And after they were done, we went and got some food to eat. This time, luckily there were more food stalls than last time, and the food didn’t run out! Of course, one of the food stalls was run by a bunch of guys who have a Cafe at Carlton Towers – I hope you guys are okay.

After this we managed to squeeze a place behind the huge towering speakers in the amphitheatre stage left. I wonder though, if there was not any other place to keep the speakers. Nearly 10 sq meters were wasted with the speakers and the line of sight blocked by them. And this time, it would have helped to be better placed, considering the organizers claimed an audience of 5000 people, double the previous outing.

Then we had Shabnam Virmani singing Kabir songs and explaining as she went along.

And then there was a folk dance from Karnataka, Hulivesha with the focus on Tigers (who would have guessed?).

Then we had Jalshaghar, who were missing for a bit – apparently interested in the offstage performance of Hulivesha. When they came on stage, the tabalchi decided that the audio problems (lots of people had complained about the mikes and the monitors) were so bad that he couldn’t perform. Here he is saying, “Sorry I can’t do this!”

Luckily the rest of the band was okay with the sound and went ahead. The tabalchi did return later, possibly realizing that he was being churlish!

Then one of the awaited bands of the night, Lounge Piranha. I had forgotten that they won the TFA awards in 2007, but their music was really good.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find that they had a guest bass guitarist, because this was the first time I’ve seen a woman on the bass guitar at an event like this.

Prakash Sontakke performed his fusion music; one of the regulars at Fireflies, it seems, and with good reason.

Then we had Bharat Sargam Group performing Qawali. Starting up with a few shayris to warm up the evening, they soon had a good thing going. The guy at the tambourine was going great guns as you can see!

They were so good, that the crowd went wild especially during the performance of Dum Mast Kalandar. Some people got on stage and had to be politely asked to leave. And when it was over, they kept clamouring for more. Not that it did any good – there were more bands to come and they seemed to be running a hour late as usual!

Once the hullabaloo died down, another regular band at fireflies came on – the Kerala folk song group playing on bamboo instruments – Vayali. And the crowd loved them as well.

By this time it was getting to 5 and we still had a few bands to go. Up next were Low Rhyderz, a rap/hip-hop/reggae band from Bangalore. They came on wearing their “style” statement – baggy shorts, oversized t-shirts, white Nikes and the reggae hairstyles – but had no style when it came to music.

Their music was so bad that we decided to leave. And we weren’t the only ones. While the band was urging the audience to “clap, clap”, I overheard a gentleman next to me on the way out saying “crap, crap!”

While we could have stayed through to the end, the unrelenting badness (and not in the good bad way) of the band persuaded us to avoid hanging on for another hour or so till they took the hint and got off the stage. I’m not sure why bands in India trying to be hip-hop or rap bands can’t be better than this.

So, as the dawn began to rise, we made our long way back to civilization.

P.S. Even though I really enjoyed it, I did wonder at the wastefulness of an event touted to bring awareness of climate change to the people. Not only the obvious energy expenditure but the neighbouring farms being cleaned up for parking and the basic fact of at least a thousand bikes and cars driving thirty or forty kilometers to watch the event. Maybe next time, a big bus?

The book, And Another Thing, seems to be the greatest/worst thing since the discovery of DNA (if you don’t get the joke — Douglas Noel Adams was born in the same year that Watson and Crick discovered DNA). Most sequels to famous books/series end up being pale imitations of the originals, and in some cases just completely lousy. So I have been looking forward to this book with mixed anticipation and trepidation. I loved the Artemis Fowl series (the first three books — the later ones seems tacked on), but H2G2 is a tough act to follow. Wouldn’t it have been better to complete the third Dirk Gently book first?

In any case, Nicolas Botti was one of the (un?)lucky few who was given the opportunity to read the first half of the book — some three months before it is due to be released. His review states pretty much what I expected.

Is it funny? If you read Hitchhiker to have a good laugh, maybe you’re going to be disappointed. I didn’t find it very funny. There are some good funny moments (mainly at the beginning) but Colfer’s ideas being less original than Douglas’, you are less surprised. And he has not the same grip on comic timing than Douglas had.

However, he ends by saying that,

I don’t want to give the feeling that it is a bad book. It is not. But maybe I was expecting too much.

Still, I’m going to read it the day it hits the stands!

The Gwent Police in Wales came up with this video as part of a 30 min Public Service Announcement on the dangers of sending an SMS while driving. It’s quite gruesome, and hopefully may make a difference.

He goes on to say: It is simply self-defeating for any community to discriminate against half its population. We need to challenge these self-serving and out-dated attitudes and practices – as we are seeing in Iran where women are at the forefront of the battle for democracy and freedom.

Way to go Jimmy!

Of course, the more common answers were Canada and the Nordic Countries, but it was pointed out that most countries have varying degrees of lack of freedom.

There was also the debate about Iran being so bad, so why should you worry – which was commented down, luckily.

In India, we have a worse problem. We’re not really a free country, no matter what our guiding principles may be, but we have even less chance of being able to get out. Most countries in the world have increasingly tighter laws against immigrating Indians, and of course, there’s the whole world of racial prejudice against the brown man.

Maybe the best solution is to try and fix our problems ourselves. At least support human freedom in all forms. Join the Queer Pride Parade on Sunday.

So, finally, I got to see the new Star Trek movie. And the best part was that I watched it in a proper movie hall – not one of these itty bitty 100-seater tiny multiplex large screen home-theatre jinks.

I have always been a fan of the original Star Trek  – more so than any other SciFi programming out there.

Why? Primarily because I prefer to read my SciFi and secondly because most SciFi films and TV serials are either too cheesy and filled with only action/sex/idiotic robots or too complex to be attempted without some form of interactivity with the audience. (Actually I can’t really think of a SciFi flick that was too complex – any suggestions?)

Star Trek : TOS (The Original Series, as it’s apparently now known, in order to distinguish it from the Next Generation, Voyager, Explorer… whatever, you get the idea), was brilliantly conceptualized by Gene Roddenberry in 1964. Some of the obvious devices in the series included the Warp Drive (faster than light propulsion) and a variety of alien encounters. But some of the more unique features were the teleporter and the logic-over-emotion Vulcan species.

But my biggest draw in terms of the series itself was the fact that most technology was a theoretically logical progression from our times and most critically, this technology was rarely more important than the people who used them.

Of course, for a ten-year old boy watching Sunday television on Doordarshan, there were the usual cheesy fights; the fact that Capt. Kirk was a mostly lousy fighter who always managed to hang on to the cliff edge but still get the girl at the end; the brilliant single-eyebrow lift of Spock (which I learnt to imitate to show off – now I can do both eyebrows independently!); Bone’s corny “He’s dead, Jim!”; and all the shots of the crew members throwing themselves at the corridor walls to indicate the ship under attack!

The new movie manages to keep the spirit of the series alive, without being too much of a by-the-numbers kind of film. Using a slightly illogical plot-device of an alternate time-line being created due to a supernova meeting with red matter – the movie sets itself in a world similar to yet different from the world of TOS.

James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) finds himself born in a escape pod after his father dies battling the villain Nero (Eric Bana) and turns into a wild young man who is persuaded to join the Starfleet after a fight with a bunch of cadets. He manages to be Kirk without being overshadowed by William Shatner’s original portrayal, but doesn’t really get to kiss the girl.

Spock is brilliantly portrayed by Zachary Quinto and more than manages to hold his own against the original Leonard Nimoy in the brief sequence they have together. (Yes, Nimoy makes a guest appearance – but Shatner does not.)

The relationship between the two is more reminiscent of the fourth Star Trek movie (The Voyage Home), with Spock, in conflict with his half-human nature, coming into direct conflict with Kirk – who doesn’t originally start the show as the captain of the Enterprise – over the latter’s unconventional approach to solving their problems.

At the end of the movie, I felt a longing to watch the next in the series (I guess it is likely to come out sooner rather than later) and that is a good sign for the future of the new crew.

There were a lot of deft touches like Zoe Saldana’s portrayal of Uhura (and her relationship with Spock – of course, I should’ve guessed it before!); Karl Urban’s funny man Bones McCoy; and Anton Yelchin’s young Russian Chekov having problems with his Ws and Vs!

Nero was the least strongly defined character, what with a bunch of snarling and nothing much else – but possibly this was the only way to allow the other characters to be defined more clearly before coming into conflict with him.

You can watch this movie even if you’re not a Trekkie. It’s far far better than any of the Star Wars prequels – think more along the lines of Batman Begins. J. J. Abrams has managed to set a good foundation for a future Dark Knight-like movie.

And here comes the bowler from the Royal Challengers. He bowls a Vodafone No-ball and now has to pay the price of a ICICI Bank Free Hit. This match is turning out to be a Big Bazaar humdinger. Now the Deccan Chronicles (sorry Chargers) have to make a Hero Honda Dhak Dhak number of runs to secure the Nokia charged win.

And that’s a big hit, it looks like it may be… yes it is DLF MAXIMUM.

Now we are going for a Pepsi Strategic Timeout. Come back after the break (if the sponsors let you) to watch the rest of the match.

This is what cricket commentary has come to. Is there any point in watching this any longer?