It's The Comedy, IdiotsShiv Visvanathan, 9 January 2010, 12:00am IST  The Times of India article  Text Size:  |   *Topics*:    - *laughter*<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topics.cms?query=laughter    *Pontification*<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topics.cms?query=Pontification    *College education*<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topics.cms?query=College+education   The college community has finally arrived, in folklore, with the movie 3 Idiots. Earlier, Bollywood recognised the college only as a site for the extracurricular. Education was seen  as a joke; the canteen was the theatre of activity. Hero and villain resolved key issues around the cafe. It was the site where boy met girl. Love was central, knowledge marginalised by common consensus. In fact, the good student was the standing joke of the campus the butt of every bully. In 3 Idiots, the college, even if arrogantly and naively called the 'Imperial College of Engineering', returns to the forefront. This shift is crucial because college education is recognised for the centrality it possesses in our lives. For the middle class, education is all. Failing an exam was the tsunami of our lives, where recovery was distant, difficult and doubtful. If you didn't make it to the IIT of your preference the family demoted you in the head. I still remember a student who was berated by her family for missing a centum in mathematics, the poor girl barely reached 99. Yet for all its tensions, college education was a precious moment of freedom, the wild period between innocence and responsibility the classic rite of passage in a modern middle class society. The college was what we looked at in anticipation and nostalgia. The Aamir Khan movie captures this entire gamut of innocence, stupidity and ambition by building the story around a wide cast of well-performed characters following different futures. The picture reeks of stereotypes, but that is its power. Even the critique of education is predictable. The movie *condemns rote education, emphasises the importance of choice, responsibility and freedom*. But what holds it together is the riotous sense of fun, where the three idiots see college itself as the rituals of idiocy, centring on marks, hierarchy and rigidity. Most of us remember college for its cast of weird characters who had odd nicknames that captured a type. Memory was built around these types the principal who would not listen, the professor who patented boredom, the student who competed ruthlessly for every mark and the roommate whose stomach contributed to global warming. These stereotypes were the stuff of education as theatre. The emphasis was not on the abstraction of ideas. Ideas were derivative. They became alive only when lived through this kaleidoscope of characters, the panchayat of friends and the impossible people that made college education a thing of beauty. The theme of stupidity drives the movie and slapstick substitutes for philosophy. For all its emphasis, the movie still plays on the standard themes of college life, hierarchy, rigidity and unfairness. The movie tries to show that laughter and a sense of play can still be winners in this ruthlessly competitive world. The beauty lies in the intelligence of the movie. Comedy, as a form of intelligence, and stupidity as stereotype create the dialectic called education. In a tacit way, *the movie shows that education is not _embed_ded in the blackboard, the textbook and the exam but in the friendships you make, the values you live out and the ideas seeded in college that might germinate later.* There are memorable characters throughout. The stereotype of the ruthless diasporic who stops at nothing for his future Lamborghini is brilliantly done. The young boy from a poor family, the nerd who commits suicide because his project could not be completed on time, are evocative moments. Incidentally, the number of suicides in the IIT during the last three decades is still treated as a state secret. At the centre of the movie is the question: is success a singular? Or are there plural definitions of success? The intelligence of Aamir Khan and his team lies in cataloguing this play of possibilities where boy gets girl, boy gets job, boy discovers himself and so on. This ballet of possibilities and varieties of success creates the openness of the movie and prevents any moralising about success, values, ideology or intelligence. Yet the weakest character cinematically is that played by Aamir Khan himself. He seems too original, too rascally, too generous. And one discovers that he is a kind of Indian Edison who has created a school in Ladakh; one knows it is time to go home. The logic of the story is not convincing. But it is these contradictions that keep the *myth of college alive as an ever-present kaleidoscope where the difference between integrity and cheating, success and failure, is wafer thin*. Also while in *earlier eras, the emphasis was on isms, justice and social backgrounds,* this movie emphasises *individualism, friendship and mobility, making it rhyme with the contemporary generation. * *The power* of Bollywood lies not in refitting stereotypes but in playing with them *to suggest new possibilities*. This, 3 Idiots does with laughter and intelligence, by treating lightly what we usually pontificate about, turning education into a world of nostalgia and anticipation that we deeply treasure. The writer is a social scientist. Chetan’s ‘3 Mistakes’ to be shot in Ahmedabad<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/Chetans-3-Mistakes-...    *Idiots to be remade * If sources in the industry are to be believed, the Tamil and Telugu remakes of 3 Idiots may soon become a reality *SREEDHAR PILLAI Times News Network * Rajkumar Hiranis 3 Idiots which has also become a blockbuster might be remade in Telugu and Tamil. The buzz is that two leading production houses in the south are trying to get remake rights for the Tamil and Telugu versions of the film. The grapevine has it that one of the houses is holding negotiations with the makers of the film and that it is ready to offer a whopping Rs 10 crore to remake the film in all south Indian languages. The same house had remade Munnabhai MBBS into Vasool Raja MBBS in Tamil and Shankar Dada MBBS in Telugu. Mano Akkineni confirms , We are negotiating with Vinod Vinod Chopra and Raj Kumar Hirani for the remake rights of 3 Idiots. But we havent thought about the star cast. Meanwhile, rumours are afloat that most top heroes here are interested in being a part of the remake, albeit on their own terms. Madhavan has made it clear that he is open to repeating his role in Tamil as well. The front-runner for Aamir Khans role in the film is Suriya, though sources close to him say he has no immediate dates to offer. There are also unconfirmed reports that Vijay is thinking of doing the film. When contacted , Suriya said, I loved 3 Idiots. But the movie will require a very good director if it is to be remade in Tamil. Producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra had called Ram Charan Tej for a sneak preview of 3 Idiots before its release and the Tollywood superstar liked it so much that he arranged a special screening of the film for his dad Chiranjeevi and uncle Pawan Kalyan. Comments producer Dhananjayan, It is very tough to remake 3 Idiots in Tamil or Telugu. Films with a soft nature dont turn out to be blockbusters in these languages . A leading Telugu producer said, The price being asked for the remake rights is not worth it. We can make two films with the same budget.  *A still from 3 Idiots * Pamuk's book tops bestseller list again  - The Hindustan Times - 9 Jan 2010 *Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India* by William Dalrymple jumped one position to dominate the non-fiction section of the bestseller list this week while *The Museum of Innocence* by Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk retained its No.1 position in the fiction category. *Nine Lives - In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple * * Before you drink from a skull, your must first find the right corpse, Manisha Ma Bhairavi says even as her dreadlocked partner, Tapan Sadhu sitting at the back of the hut with a radio clamped to his ear shouts excitedly, England are 270 for four! This is the India British author William Dalrymple writes about in his latest book, Nine Lives. This is the India where mysticism cohabits with modernity, where even the fallen are worshipped, the outcasts form communities and where even a sadhu can be a MBA! In his 'first book after a decade' author-historian-journalist Dalrymple unravels the many paradoxes that make up the very fluid fabric of Indian society. With the help of nine lives, he taps into the soul of the nation. Nine Lives is a collection of _link_ed non-fiction short stories, with each life representing a different form of devotion, or a different religious path. A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet - then spends years trying to atone for the violence by hand-printing prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend starve to death. A middle-class woman leaves her family to live as a tantric in a remote cremation ground. A prison warden in Kerala becomes, for two months a year, a temple dancer and is worshipped as an incarnate deity. An idol-maker from Tamil Nadu, the twenty-third in a long hereditary chain stretching back to the great bronze casters of the Chola Empire, worries if the next generation will take on this art in the age of computers . A triple refugee from Bihar finds her place as the Red Fairy in a Sufi shrine in Pakistan even as the threat from Islamic fundamentalism looms over. A devdasi initially resists her initiation into sex work, yet pushes her daughter into a trade she now regards as a sacred calling. Dalrymple's journey takes him from Sravanabelagola in Karnataka to the deserts of Rajasthan to the temples of Tanjore and Kerala and madrassas of Sindh before culminating in the lakeside country villages of West Bengal. He documents the oral histories of not just these nine lives but even of the cults and religions to which they belong, some going back to the time of the Rig Veda. Each life acts as a keyhole into the way that specific religious vocation has been caught and transformed in the vortex of India's _meta_morphosis during this rapid period of transition, while revealing the extraordinary persistence of faith and ritual in a fast-changing landscape. Yet, in spite of all the development India boasts of, Dalrymple finds his holy men and women discussing and agonising about the same eternal quandaries that absorbed the holy men of classical India thousands of years ago - the quest for material wealth against the claims of the spirit, personal devotion against conventional religion, textual orthodoxy against the emotional appeal of mysticism and the age-old war of duty and desire. That Dalrymple is an accomplished writer is a fact. But it's remarkable journalism that makes this book a must-read. He steps aside and let's the people be the focus of the story. He brings himself him as only the thread that holds the stories together. The author has done well to add a glossary and a very note on the origin of the font type (Linotype Stempel Garamond) used in the book. Nine Lives isn't just another travel book. It's a window to contemporary India - the one that remains forgotten or hidden, but is very much out there on the road, quite literally. As Dalrymple puts it, The water moves on, a little faster than before, yet still the great river flows. It is as fluid and unpredictable in its moods as it has ever been, but it meanders within familiar banks. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Eisha_Sarkar <http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Eisha_Sarkar * Catch master percussionist Ustad Zakir Hussain in a fusion concert organised by Vista Entertainments on January 16 at HICC. For more turn to page 3 At 63, veteran playback singer S. P. Balasubrahmanyam is busier than ever. He talks about his successful tryst with television http://beta.thehindu.com/life-and-_style_/metroplus/article77605.ece?ho... *SPB’s friends are now compiling a data bank of his songs. “Easily over 35,000,” he smiles, and recounts how he’s sung up to 23 songs, including 15 duets with P. Susheela, one breathless(!) day in 1976. *For Kannada composer Upendra Kumar, SPB rendered 16 songs in a day (from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.) “I took a one-hour break in the afternoon and slept. I didn’t eat anything, only drank a glass of buttermilk and continued…It was all about mental preparedness. About focussing your energies into the songs. Most of them were done in single takes! *For Ram-Lakshman, he rendered six songs between 5 p.m. and 8.30 p.m., leaving actor Dev Anand stunned. “He asked if I was a man or a machine in an awards ceremony.” The singer, whose output as a composer, dubbing artiste and an actor is no less impressive, concludes in an introspective vein, “I never planned my life. But I think there's been a purpose. Music has been my livelihood. And through it I continue to make thousands of people happy. I thank God for this complete and fulfilling life. I'll keep singing as long as I can…” *Once for Anand-Milind, he flitted between three recording theatres in Mumbai, rehearsed in the car, and sang 17 songs in a day! [image: UNEARTHLY HOUR: Portland Head Light shines bright in the cold morning light at the mouth of Portland Harbor in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Photo: AP] *Pain in the back *    Here's how to protect your back from injury and stress * POSTURE matters most Bad seating can strain the back muscles * I have often come across people complaining of back pain — not only the old, but even the young. However, it is not something to be taken lightly. Lower back pain may radiate down to the back of the thigh and in some cases to the calves and the feet. Most of us suffer the pain silently and do nothing about it. Those who do so should stop and think. Low back pain can be acute lasting for three to four weeks, or chronic lasting for more than 12 weeks. Causes Poor posture Stooped or bent posture can cause a lot of damage. Many of us stand and sit in poor postures. If this is corrected, your back pain will reduce a great deal. Habitual bad posture can cause enough damage to the structure and the musculature of the spine. The reason why older people stoop is not because they are getting older but because of poor posture; this holds good for youngsters too. Incorrect lifting techniques Very few ensure that the back is straight when they are lifting things. Those who lift weights with rounded backs are at bigger risk of back injuries. The pressure on the intervertebral discs is much higher when heavy _object_s are lifted with a bent back. Prolonged sitting Those who have sedentary jobs have a tendency to develop back ache. Sitting posture is critical for those who have backaches. Over training Exercise enthusiasts in quest of the perfect body tend to do many exercises that are orthopaedically unsafe and not necessary; they need to consult a professional on what is good and not good for them. Car seating Many cars do not give adequate lumbar support. Bad seating can cause strain to the muscles, ligaments and discs of the back. Prevention Standing and sitting erect is very important: if your chair does not give the necessary lumbar support, it's time to change it. Always keep your back straight while lifting _object_s, do not bend from your back; bend your knees instead. If you're in a sedentary job, make sure you get up and move around every now and then in conjunction with a few stretches for your back. While shopping try to carry loads symmetrically on both sides and try not lifting too much (use trolleys). Shift sides if you're habituated to carrying shoulder bags. Sleep is very essential; make sure you get to sleep at least seven hours a day. Avoid stress which can aggravate your backache. Avoid smoking as it has a deleterious effect on healing: the lack of sufficient oxygen to the tissues will affect the healing process. Treatment Stop worrying and get rest, but do not become completely inactive unless your physician says so. If the pain does not subside, contact a professional therapist, holistic exercise practitioner or an orthopaedician. Also start a professional training programme under a qualified fitness expert. *The asanas beckon * PRITI NARAYAN   The International Yoga Festival is back. PRITI NARAYAN discovers that the 17th edition it has something for everybody   PHOTO: T. SINGARAVELOU *BEND IT LIKE THEM At the International Yoga Festival * There is something infinitely fascinating about watching a person from Hong Kong in Bharatanatyam regalia, performing adavus and plying her body into impossible asanas. Sights such as these are common during the annual International Yoga Festival in Puducherry. Yoga may have originated in India, but its wings have spread far and wide, attracting people from all over the world. Once a year, people from different parts of the globe congregate in Puducherry to be a part of the festival. Going international This year, in particular, has seen international participation like never before. An official of the Tourism Department said that the number of international delegates has gone up by around 70 per cent, with people from places such as Hong Kong, the U.K., Finland and Germany registering for the festival. The Tourism Department has also arranged for food and accommodation packages for their convenience. Discovering the benefits The festival, now in its 17th year, has a lot on the cards for yoga enthusiasts, as well as those who just want to know what it's all about — lecture demonstrations, workshops, cultural programmes and yogasana competitions. And, all of it is for one important purpose — to promote yoga and its benefits. “My friends and I heard about it from a friend who has attended the festival,” says Iiris Varttinen from Finland. “Our Indian travel agent knew about it too, so, we decided to come. Although I haven't been participating in the competitions, I've been attending all the lec-dems,” she says. Spread the word For students of the International Centre for Yoga Education and Research (ICYER) _base_d in Puducherry, being a part of the festival was part of the curriculum. “My friends from Brazil and Portugal and I have signed up for the six-month yoga teaching course at ICYER, which is why we are a part of the festival. And, it has been wonderful so far,” says Winnie, from Australia. For many, it has been about simply soaking it all in. “I am not a delegate at the festival,” explains Hedda Malde from Norway. “But the festival just happened to me one evening, and since then, I've been coming back. I am so happy I discovered it,” she smiles. It is mostly word-of-mouth that has done the trick. Last year's participants have urged their friends to attend the festival this time. Tourism Department officials say the information on the website, and the rigorous promotions have helped as well. Considering the sheer scale of the event this time, it is only bound to get better next year. The International Yoga Festival just got truly international.