Hero Worship

             I was talking to a friend the other day and he said something like " I don't believe that movie star was selfish in floating the political party. The people around him must have used his innocence and screwed with him". What I wonder is how we feel so attached with some person's talent that instead of appreciating his talent, we start defending all his actions, important point being "all". The actor in question is Telugu Star Chiranjeevi who floated and eventually merged a political party. He maybe a great actor but that doesn't mean he is a great human being. Even a highly educated and intelligent person is not ready to believe that a movie star who was a true-hero in all the movies could be selfish in real life.
            We spend so much time debating who is the greatest batsman of all time instead of enjoying the cricketing shots of Bradman, Sachin and Lara. Human brain is so selfish that instead of enjoying cricketing shots which caused us great pleasure in the first place, we start associating the pleasure we felt to the person and start appreciating him instead of the shot. We waste energy in defending the person instead of just appreciating the cricket as it is and enjoy a good shot played by any person. I am just taking an example of cricket.
            This might have something to do with as simple as "convenient" to our brain. Hero worship maybe needed so that we get a role model for ourselves. Trying to be like another human is far easier trying to follow a set of principles. You just try to do whatever the person does. But after a while you forget to, rather do not bother to, check if what that person is doing is right or wrong. Then we waste energy in defending the said person.
            Why do we like a person? We look at some of their actions and like the actions and we associate them with those actions but after a while, the liking to the person develops so much that if that person does something wrong, we start defending the person instead of just accepting that and appreciating a good act wherever you see it. When it is the good act you appreciate, why not just  do that instead of appreciating the person who did that and later defending his other actions? Shouldn't we love/hate their actions given that those are what caused the reaction to that person in the first place?
               One theory I can think of is, you develop a feeling to a kind of person so that it is easy to take decisions on them. For example, if you like a lot of actions of a person, it increases the probability of you liking the person's future actions. Hence, you have his mental picture of him in 'like' state so that next time he says he is doing something and invites you, you can trust that you would also like doing that thing. After several works you do together reinforces this, you call him a 'friend'. Maybe when we replace 'like' here with 'awe', we get 'hero' instead of 'friend'.
                

Why I wasn't satisfied with TDKR

Just stumbled across this piece that was in the form of draft for quite some time. I wrote this immediately after watching TDKR but by now I read many many blogs/discussion boards on the topic that this becomes irrelevant but still, here it goes...

   
Many people got surprised when I said I did not like the latest and last batman movie. Here are some of the reasons I didn't like it:

1) They show that Ra's Al Ghul comes back to that well/prison and rescues Bane and others. So why are there still people in the well? Did Ra's Al Ghul take over the fort and the well/prison and is now using it to maintain his own prisoners?
2) How the hell did Batman get back to Gotham so easily from the prison without anything when the whole city was blocked on all sides?
3) If you just look at the plot, it is like a typical action movie where there is a villian who has a nuclear weapon and the hero destroys it in the end. I have seen so many movies with this plot and batman repeats it??
4) Why does he make the Bat signal at the end when he should be trying to find the huge nuclear bomb?
5) The baseball filed scene is just an attempt to recreate the now iconic bank robbery scene from TDK.

   Incidentally, I quite liked the Robin part at the end which everyone hated!

My Review of Bankster

The Bankster by Ravi Subramanian

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


     I bought the book hoping it would be like another corporate thriller I read some-time back called Hickory Dickory Shock by another Indian author which I quite liked. But when I saw that he also wrote a book called "I bought the Ferrari the monk sold" I became skeptical that maybe he is just another sensationalist writer.
     He turns out to be so though he is not that bad a writer. While the author is definitely a more than decent writer, the cover and description is highly misleading.It is supposed to be thriller but the whole plot is understood in the first few pages. From then on, it just goes on and on and it felt as though we are reading it second time. He needs to first learn what a thriller means before attempting one!
      It starts off as a decent thriller promising to be an international one but soon becomes a teach-yourself-about-corporate-workings book. You know it is badly edited when
1)Almost the first 30% of the book introduces so many characters and has detailed descriptions of what happens in a Bank( when it had nothing to do with the main plot point of the book)
2)the main protagonist that the blurb talks of, doesn't come till half of the book.
I understand the book is about Banking sector but when it is almost clear in the first 50 pages that the book is about money laundering done by banks, there is nothing to look forward to for the rest of the book.
    Nobody cares about the final 'twist' in the tale . It was a lame attempt to justify the 'thriller' , the book is marketed to be. On hindsight, I should have known from the title and 'also from author' list that this is another bad wannabe-thriller book. I don't understand the count down to only 48 hours when nothing significant is going to happen at the end. The build-up of it (time at the  beginning of every chapter) is as if some big nuclear war is going to happen at 00hours!

    I try reading Indian authors now and then hoping some one impresses as much as Ashwin Sangh or  Samit Basu but still yet to find such high quality writers except the mentioned two people.

Biggest strength : 'Better' at writing than many contemporary 'popular' Indian authors.
Biggest drawback : The suspense part is completely missing in the book.




View all my reviews

"Oath of Vayuputras"

The Oath of the Vayuputras by Amish Tripathi

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


    The series started off as a re-telling of the story of Indian God Shiva and the first book of the trilogy stood close to its intention by having some basic facts right and very nicely relatable to the Legend (Kailash/Somras/NeelKanth and especially the famous Har Har Mahadev). The second book deviated a bit from the Legend we know by defining a tribe called Nagas which were evil. In the first part I assumed Nagas were just "created" to account for the famous snake around the God's throat but in the second book he added so much story to them that it looked like he deviated a lot from the Ancient version(I never heard of a huge Naga tribe in any of our tales. It would have been much better if he defined them Asuras but that's a whole different thing) but I liked how he built the character of Ganesh and his relationship with Shiva and Sati.
   The biggest disappointment (in keeping with the way he diluted the story more in each book) is the third one where the real intention of retelling the "God" stature to these bunch of great men from the past was so far from its purpose that he explains away the present form of Ganesh we remember, the fact that Karthik is a huge god in the south and even the way we remember Bhagiratha only in the last 2 pages in a 600 page book! He even tries to sneak in the Shakti Peethas in the last lines of the book as being established by Shiva/his sons!
  He ended up treating this book as the end of a Fantasy series like LOTR by concentrating more on War strategies / Wars instead of making it a retelling of Indian Epics. You only see familiar names from Epics but they do not do a single thing you expect them to do if you know the stories. Even by concentrating on "never-heard-in-Indian-Epics-wars", he botched up the ending very badly. I appreciated what he did in the end to Sati but he could have made it as a mid-point of the book which honestly is what I expected and what he did in the last two pages should be the second half in more detail which is what you expect if you are re-telling the epic or making it a more believable story of "what-if they are normal mortals?" Add to that the irritating way in which he narrates a scene and I am truly disappointed. 
  Nothing happens in the book which you can imagine as a retelling/believable version of things all those centuries back which is what he promised about the series in the first book. He ends the book hinting at a retelling of Mahabharatha too but I sincerely hope he doesn't attempt it. I am OK with him re-telling the epics but not by completely deviating from them like he did with this Shiva trilogy.
  In conclusion, the book defeats the whole purpose of the series and my respect for Amish is almost completely gone.
Ohh and I forgot to mention that there is no "real" significance to the title of the book in the story.



View all my reviews