Cultural Fusion Changing rules of Animation world

Its so amazing to watch animation space be it movies, cartoon characters books and so on, changes coming to this space over priod of time are so fascinating, cultural fusion is number one factor which is attributing to so many changes.

During initial period of cartoon/animation industry it was mickey mouse, donald duck to so many entertaining and honest characters mostly living in a dream world and doing funny things, post world war II era gave rise to macho characters like superman, popey, batman and so many of them. For last few decades east and west culture fusion saw its effect on this industry and gave similar wester fashion characters like teenage mutuant ninja turtle and so on with machoism or so. This decade though many rules of game have changed and if we look at box office to television rating points one thing is very visible, only plain entertaining but intelligent characters with lots of extra power with politeness, well mannered and characters with both west & east see huge success. A 90's or 80's type of movie or character will fail to appeal larger kids to grownups here as we are already shifted culturally we cannot look at only one culture. This even applies to few classic creations like tintin, calvin and hobbes, garfield to others.

Most of todays popular characters like SpngebobSquarepants, ninja hatori, perman, dora and monkey, pokeman, justice league, power rangers to ice age, madagasker, happy feat to any thing, culture and fuson is very visible.

Happy watching.....

How future will look with a collaborative IndChi

When two of neighbouring most populous nations homing 30+% of worlds burstling vibrant futuristic's youngsters what can future hold. Either a prosperous and longlasting future or a over energised ruined one.

Following are two small stories one where it shows prosperous and longlasting future and next one which shows over energised ruined one.

India Rising Aaaaaahh Grrrrrhhhhh

Came across a nice article on outcry of india's potential to grow and how its stinking infrastructure is holding it back.

A realistic article on .

India Rising (or part of it)
Last year October I made my first visit to India. I had heard a lot of stories and read numerous articles about the 'Rise of India' (Thomas Friedman probably topping the list in terms of optimism). So...I arrived with high expectations. After arriving in Delhi Airport, staying three days in Delhi and travelling two weeks through Rajasthan, I was becoming more and more fascinated and disappointed at the same time.

Of course I hadn't expected India to have turned in to one big IT science park in just one or two decades (although some publications seem to give that picture). But I had expected India's optimism, ambition and rupees to have trickled down to other sections of society...at least a little bit. I have not been in the booming cities of Bombay, Bangalore or Chennai, but judging from my experiences from Delhi and Rajasthan, there's a lot of work to be done, in terms of public facilities, but especially in terms of equality.

Delhi's airport was in many ways worse of than the smaller regional airports I had just seen while visiting Indonesia and Malaysia the two months before. The roads and other public works were definitely a lot worse. Steve Hamm of Businessweek fears that the lack of investment in public space might hurt India's progress:
The infrastructure deficit is so critical that it could prevent India from achieving the prosperity that finally seems to be within its grasp. Without reliable power and water and a modern transportation network, the chasm between India's moneyed elite and its 800 million poor will continue to widen, potentially destabilizing the country. Jagdish Bhagwati figures gross domestic product growth would run two percentage points higher if the country had decent roads, railways, and power. "We're bursting at the seams," says Kamal Nath, India's Commerce & Industry Minister. Without better infrastructure, "we can't continue with the growth rates we have had."

In Businessweeks 'Covercast' Hamm explains why the private sector not investing in India's public facilities, even though it is dependent on good roads and airports for its own progress. One of the reasons is the bureaucracy in India. Compared for instance to authoritarian China, it's a lot harder to get things done in democratic India. As a chief executive of Novartis explains:
"If you have to build a road in China, just a handful of people need to make a decision. If you want to build a road in India, it'll take 10 years of discussion before you get a decision."

And obviously, corruption is still a big problem:
Nearly all sectors of officialdom are riddled with graft, from neighbourhood cops to district bureaucrats to state ministers. Indian truckers pay about $5 billion a year in bribes, according to the watchdog group Transparency International. Corruption delays infrastructure projects and raises costs for those that move ahead.

But what I'm more troubled with is the trickling down (or better, the lack thereof) of India's new economic prosperity to other segments of society. The division between India's new knowledge professionals and India's poor seems to have created different Indias. In a recent article in Theory and Society(*), Simitha Radakrishnan, a UCLA sociologist, illustrates this:
Rather than having successfully produced a “new middle class,” as touted in media representations of India’s success, emphasis on knowledge for development and a knowledge economy in India has had the effect of producing an elite with formidable economic strength, as well as the cultural dominance to re-imagine and negotiate meanings of Indianness.

(...) So long as those engaged in the knowledge economy are blinded by the belief that their success reflects the progress of the nation as a whole, and that their class positions are not privileged, the possibility for sparking true social and economic change greatly diminishes.

This dilemma is outstandingly portrayed in a 4 part radio documentary of the BBC's "The Changing World". India’s economy is booming. Salaries in the big cities are rising, and consumer spending is exploding. Economic opportunities abound in India – but not for everyone. This documentary series explores the effects globalisation and a decade of economic reforms are having on India. In each of the 4 parts it highlights another aspect of the rise of India:

Part 1 (25:00 ; MP3 10MB)
A new materialism and consumerism is an obvious sign of India ’s growing middle class. The BBC’s George Arney has been visiting India for nearly three decades. He says that India used to spiritually rich, but materially very poor. Now, Arney reports, it's a very different story.

Part 2 (25:00 ; MP3 10MB)
This part focuses on the Indian state of Bihar. The squalor there is obvious. Bihar is glaringly left out of India ’s economic revolution. The BBC reports from a region known as India ’s Heart of Darkness.

Part 3 (25:00 ; MP3 10MB)
As India's economy rises, its entertainment industry is also taking off and an urban culture emerges. In this part Arney takes a close-up look at the nation that lies behind the shiny façade of modern India.

Part 4 (25:00 ; MP3 10MB)
The environmental and social costs of India's rapid expansion.

It's definitely a revealing documentary, with all 4 parts picturing contemporary India in a lively manner and with all its paradoxes. It contains several observations and interviews that clearly confirm Radakrishnan's point.
________
(*) Smitha Radakrishnan (2007) Rethinking knowledge for development: Transnational knowledge professionals and the “new” India. In: Theory and Society

Reading of 2007 so far.....

Not a book worm, one of those who collects books to showoff wisdom :) past few months managed to read cpl of books, as famous phrase books are humans best friend, yeah so wisely said. Every time a book is read u get into moods of author, there way of analysing world, some new words are learnt and after u done with last page one feels more energised and wisdom level gone up.

In Progress
Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey A. Moore


Argumentative Indian - Amratya Sen



Done(recent one on top)
The Children of Húrin by J. R. R. Tolkien.
The undercover economist - Tim Hardford
Inheritence of Loss - Kiran Desai
Crusader Gold Gold by David Gibbins
Thud by Terry Pratchet
Suite française by Irène Némirovsky
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life & Times by James Finn Garner
One Hundred Years of Solitutde(Spanish: Cien años de soledad), by Gabriel Garcia Marquez


I started with One Hundred Years of Solitutde(Spanish: Cien años de soledad), by Gabriel Garcia Marquez noble laurette.


Start was very slow pace, but beauty of master strokes on paper is Word come like butterflies from all over and they make u live and experience characters lifes. Story of a family's struggle, and the history of their fictional town, Macondo, for one hundred years, crosses genres, combining elements of history, magical realism, and pure fiction.


Checkout ::


Next one was on list for quite some time, a book which was in top rated book for almost 10 months or so, a book written posthumously going through scripts wrote by author during panic and chatic periods of one of worst memories in recent history
called world war II. For some one to keep notes while struggling to keep alive during a war initself is incredible. This one is none but Suite française by Irène Némirovsky a author who was born in Kiev in 1903 into a wealthy banking family and emigrated to France during the Russian Revolution.This French writer of Russian Jewish origin.

In July 1942, having just completed the first two of the series, Némirovsky was arrested as a Jew and detained at Pithiviers and then Auschwitz, where she died of typhus. The notebook containing the two novels was preserved by her daughters but not examined until 1998. They were published, in a single volume entitled Suite française, in 2004.

'Suite Française' ('Storm'/'Storms') portrays life in France in the period following June 1940, the month in which the invading German army rapidly defeated the defending French; Paris and northern France immediately came under German occupation.

The first novel, Tempête en juin (Storm in June) depicts the flight of citizens from Paris in the hours preceding the German advance and in the days following it.

The second, Dolce, shows life in a small French country town, Bussy, in the first, strangely peaceful, months of the German occupation. Again here beauty is in begning naturally every villeger hates invader german army, sells them goods at exorbitent prices to show there protest, but slowly human side comes in picture and villegers and invaders live in peace and when german troops get orders to move to new russian war front entire village farewlls them in silence showing we care for lives irrespective of which side one is on.

The third novel, Captivité, for which Némirovsky left a bare plot outline, would have shown the coalescing of a resistance, with some already-introduced characters now under arrest, and under threat of death, in Paris. The fourth and fifth would perhaps have been called Batailles and La Paix ("Battles" and "Peace"), but these exist only as titles against which Némirovsky had placed question marks; necessarily so, since, at the point at which she wrote, the events that would eventually end the War had not yet happened and could only be guessed at.
Checkout ::


Next one i got my hands accidentally since my roomie was reading this one and one more by Thud by Terry Pratchet, i choose Crusader Gold Gold by David Gibbins over former one since after reading Da Vinci
i have realised i am not much of a guy who likes to read critisim or fun on others believes and religions, its good to read but to a limit as more u read books critising others more u tend to believe them and thats not what fascinates me, a simple Respect Ones believes and Respect Others is what I have been a believer of. So lets get on with Crusader.



The greatest prize missing from the final bloody conflict of the Crusades. For many it is the Jewish menorah, the huge golden candlestick looted by the Romans in AD70 when they sacked the Temple in Jerusalem and marched through Rome in triumph. It was carried off to Constantinople. Now, nobody knows where it is. Some Jewish activists today think it survived and is concealed in the Vatican. Some think it took another altogether more extraordinary turn, at the beginning of history itself ...Jack Howard is the only man who can find out. But the clock is ticking against him. Will ancient history give up one of its darkest secrets? The quest to find out takes him from the fall of the Roman Empire to the last days of Nazi power - and uncovers a trail more thrilling than anyone could have imagined.

Reading was enjoyable to most of part but in end to make it more spicy or adventurous author has lost track and control on story, few of pages i simply flipped through.


Again one more book i hot upon accidentally was Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life & Times by James Finn Garner.



Very modern, political humor, best part is classic stories 12 time-tested tales and retold them with the newfound sensitivity of our times. I loved new world Wooomeen it fits so much in todays too much cellphonised hinglish than ever. The results are extremely funny.

See accidents and mistakes help you learn new things, all u need is habit to lay your hands(with permission of course cause others books and wifes have universally accepted different rules on laying hands) on books, a steaming hot coffee/indian tea(definition of a warm and nice day was wrote after a cuppa of darjeeling/asaam tea) and readyness to enjoy vastness of subject along with subject and characters in it.


The Children of Húrin by J. R. R. Tolkien.

As a die hard LOTR fan, release of this book was a feast and some grief that no more of masterly penned dream worlds will come on paper any more. So grabbed this book and started new journey
in differnet JRRT world this time.

The Children of Húrin takes the reader back to a time long before The Lord of the Rings, in an area of Middle-earth that was to be drowned before Hobbits appeared, and when the great enemy was still the fallen Vala,
Morgoth, and Sauron was only Morgoth's lieutenant. This heroic romance is the tale of the Man, Húrin, who dared to defy Morgoth's force of evil, and his family's tragic destiny, as it follows his son Túrin Turambar's
travels through the lost world of Beleriand


The undercover economist - Tim Hardford

Book provides introductory information on principles of economics, including but not limited to demand-supply interactions,
market failures, externalities, globalization, international trade, comparative advantage. It explains in non-technical terms
how Starbucks and other Coffee providers price their products, why it is hard to buy a decent used car, why health insurance system
in United States is failing, and why poor countries remain poor while China grew continuously rich in last couple of decades, among other things.

Inheritence of Loss - Kiran Desai

This book came on list & later hands due to booker and reviewes sorrounding it. For any of ruskin bond fan, this book will come as easy as any bond books, set in similar mountain sorroundings with life and expectations of people too very similar.

Set in the 1980s, the book tells the story of Jemubhai Popatlal Patel, a judge living out a disenchanted retirement in Kalimpong, a hill station in the Himalayan foothills, and his relationship with his granddaughter Sai.
Another element in the novel is the encroachment on their lives by a band of Nepalese insurgents. Another concern of the novel is the life of Biju, the son of Mr. Patel's cook, an illegal immigrant in New York.




Happy Reading......

Europe - A modern and sphisticated version of India

Laterz