You can always, always see it on their faces!

Whenever a beauty pageant winner - be it Miss World or Miss Universe - completes one year of her reign and the fateful time comes to hand over the signature crown to the next chosen girl, you can always see a strange feeling of sadness mixed with visible jealousy in her eyes. On the stage, she pretends to be smiling, but inside her she isn't - and it can be seen on her face and in her gestures. And this is despite the fact that she had herself decrowned some other girl just a year back, and she always knew that the crown won't be with her forever.

Salman Khan's acquittal reminds me of scenes from Jolly LLB #SalmanVerdict

The photo below of a newspaper story almost clearly shows that the Bombay High Court judge probably knowingly gave a pro-Salman judgment [out of either bribery or Modi government pressure or dire threats or all three], despite strong evidence proving Salman's culpability in the crime. Reminded me of several scenes from Jolly LLB.

If a corrupt judge wants to free a murderer in front of well over a billion people's eyes, he can just quietly write that the evidence isn't evidence after all. Brilliant!

Related posts by me on Facebook here, here [alternative] and here [alternative].

I like FIAT and Fiat Linea

I've liked both Fiat and Linea for a long time now. I especially like Fiat's diesel engine that powers both Swift and Swift Dzire. I think the Linea is a good car, and it would've done better in the Indian market if not for the not-so-nice image that Fiat has here.

Pakistani and Turkish flags are so similar

Classic Putin!

‘Hopefully, no nukes will be needed’ against ISIS – Putin

Rishabh Singla claps with joy :)

It seems that Sikhs sometimes try to "fork" popular Hindu festivals so as to celebrate yet differentiate

It sometimes appears to me that the small minority within Sikhs which is radical in nature wants to dissociate itself from all things Hindu [popular Hindu festivals, for example], and yet it doesn't want Sikhs and their kids to miss out on the nationwide/worldwide celebrations that take place on these popular festivals. And so a new, different reason to celebrate popular Hindu festivals is created for Sikhs, with a different name.

Examples include Hola Mohalla, which has been popularized to coincide with Holi, and Bandi Chhor Divas, which coincides with Diwali, and Rakhri, which overlaps with Rakhi. The point here is that Sikhs do want to be a part of the nationwide celebrations that take place for key Hindu festivals and they also want their kids to not miss out on the countrywide celebrations, but they do not want it to look like they're celebrating Hindu festivals, and so they create/popularize their own reason for celebrating the day.

Update [21-Sep-16]: Similarly, Sikh emphasis on the distorted word 'Arjan' instead of 'Arjun' can be explained as an attempt to not be seen as having been derived from Hinduism, when it's the latter that's the actual word. But because the latter is a character in Hindu mythology, Sikhs have changed 'Arjun' to 'Arjan'. Same for changing 'Hari' to 'Har', 'Govind' to 'Gobind', 'Ishwar' to 'Ishar', and many more.

Update [27-Oct-19]: From Wikipedia. Another related link.

"Sikhs historically celebrated Diwali along with Hindus, with Guru Amar Das explicitly listing it along with Vaisakhi as a festival for Sikhs.[1][2][3] In late 20th century, Sikh religious leaders increasingly called Diwali as Bandi Chhor Divas, and the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee adopted this name along with the Nanakshahi calendar in 2003."

Some actresses who went for plastic surgery now look somewhat different from normal humans

It's quite clear from the photos below that while Nargis Fakhri must've attempted and intended a surgical enhancement, the end result isn't exactly positive. Her lips look somewhat non-human, making her entire face itself somewhat non-human. Sort of slightly alien. Sort of like it's some cousin of the human species. It doesn't give a positive feeling.

She isn't alone. Many other Indian actresses - Anushka Sharma, Priyanka Chopra, etc. - have gone for nose, lips, and other jobs and some of them look a little weird.

Mixed-culture, mixed-ethnicity people might seem exotic, but they likely lead confused, dual lives

Two examples to explain what I mean. Sunita Williams and Mel Sabharwal are both ethnically Indian but have a look that's clearly hybrid - it's blatant that there are non-Indian structures on their faces, likely a result of having an Indian and a Western parent. Neither Indians nor Westerners think of them - and of people like them - as "one of their own".

To Indians, these hybrid/mixed people are good to gossip about, but these pseudo-Indians remain somewhat foreigners, who seem to look like Indians at the first glance, but feel distant when you try to go deep. To foreigners/Westerners, these mixed-race people are outsiders who are trying to call themselves American/Australian/British/Canadian. The end result is that these folks have one of their legs in the Indian boat and the other in a Western boat, and they aren't accepted completely by anyone [except, possibly, by other indian-origin, mixed-ethnicity folks].

Indian actresses who can't act try to hide this using anger, tears, laughs, smiles or by being an exhibit

There are dozens of such actresses in Bollywood, but a few examples make the general idea clear:

• Amrita Rao cannot act, so in Jolly LLB she can be seen displaying annoyance/anger, and even in this easy-to-express emotion, it's clear that she can't act.

• Parineeti Chopra cannot act, so she too can be seen in a perpetually-annoyed role in Shuddh Desi Romance. Annoyance mixed with anger, fear and tears is an emotion that's so easy and trivial to express that's it the first emotion expressed by a newborn.

•  Aishwarya Rai really cannot act, so she is either seen laughing or smiling endlessly like a doll, in a bid to pass time, or is usually dressed like an exhibit where she doesn't need to do or say anything.

 

• Even Deepika sometimes resorts to needless laughing to cover her hopeless dialog delivery.

 

• Alia Bhatt is a good example of an Indian actress whose acting skills are close to zero, and who tries to make up for this deficiency by resorting to unneeded wild laughs, short clothes, urban slang, etc. In Kapoor & Sons, for example, she had an almost zero role. The movie was clearly about, well, Kapoor and his sons, and Alia Bhatt was likely inserted into the movie just to "spread glamour" by showing Alia as a semi-clad doll.

What a confused and messy life Sushmita Sen has!

I used to think that she's a modern and smart woman. But when I read that she recently broke up with her tenth boyfriend, I had to think again. She hasn't married yet. She does drugs, drinks heavily, and smokes a lot. Is her personality, seen as a whole, seen as a sum of her habits and obsessions something that the public should be/would be proud of? I have doubts now. Her personality and her life appears to me more like a mess than something that deserves admiration.

[link 1] [link 2]