Abuse of a National award

What a crappy start to the day, First thing i read in the newspaper (surprise, i do read the newspaper) is

"Aishwarya Rai awarded a 2009 Padma Shri for her contributions to Indian cinema."

I can't, no matter how hard i try, find one instance of contribution from this person to Indian Cinema. What the hell has she contributed to Indian Cinema. Everyone knows that 10 years down, she will be a bygone, replaced by yet another pretty face. Apparently all you need to win a Padma Shri award is to have a pretty face.

Keeping aside the so called contributions, she is undoubtedly one of the worst actresses in the world of Indian Cinema. Not a single role worth its celluloid. All she's ever stood on was her pretty face and of more recent times all she does on screen is reveal more skin.

Some say that her achievements of Miss World was a great thing. I beg of differ, it was a beauty pageant, and she signed up to win for her own self. After that she modeled and eventually fell into the actor wanna be bucket. And through it all she has been rewarded amply with riches and fame. Its not like she did all of it selflessly. How can they award someone like that bimbo with hard working selfless people like Sister Nirmala is beyond me.

I'm sure this is a move by one of the political parties in trying to rope in the actress or one of her relatives in to or in active support of the party so as to foist the vote of the multitudes of stupid adoring fans. They have demeaned all the previous award winners through this action.

Real isn't real anymore

We had a change of caterers in my office recently under the pretext of having one global catering service. They got rid of all the individual caterers like Sweet Chariot (Bakery), Juice Junction, etc and just had one group catering which provided the same (or what they consider to be the same). Now the stupid thing is that we have to go to the counter to see what we want and then go get a coupon and come back to actually buy the item.

Now on this day i was feeling a bit peckish and went over to the counter and saw that brownies were available and thought i get myself one. And so off i went to the counter to buy myself a coupon and I'm told there are no brownies for sale. Apparently the system says no brownies, now who am i to argue with such a high end piece of technology. Any attempt t convey the point that they are at the counter was met with shocked disbelief - "The system cannot be wrong". They even sent a fellow to go check if the actual brownies exist and to my shock, he comes back and reports that their are no brownies at the counter. I gave up. I resigned myself to the fact that my sense of sight and touch are nothing compared to the bits and bytes stored on this system's database. On my way out, the lad behind the counter asked if i didn't want the brownie, but i had to tell him that - "I do want it, but the chaps at the cash counter won't give me a coupon for it as they are not real".

On the same day on a similar note, the Pakistan government claims that the lone captured terrorist of the Mumbai attacks isn't a Pakistani since he's not in their database. This database is apparently the most comphrehensive list of citizens in Pakistan. It contains a total of 60 million people out of 160 million people who reside in Pakistan. I guess the remaining are imaginary or stand up props. I guess we can get rid of the 100 million not in the database and not have to worry as they never existed.

The bottom line is that if you ain't in the sytem you ain't real anymore. no matter if you can be seen, heard, smelt, touched or tasted.