I could not possibly convey in words the joy of watching an episode of this extremely politically incorrect and smartly written show. It has been described as something between Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, although far more bold and edgy. It’s mainly about a selfish and egoistic group of three guys and a girl, who run a Irish bar in South Philadelphia, and their highly distorted world views. This is Seinfeld on steroids. The genius of this show is its ability to take a lighthearted look at some of the most sensitive sociopolitical issues of our times and create great comedy out of them without being harsh or judgmental, often at the expense of its characters. I will just list the names of a few episodes of the show and that should say more than enough about the nature of the show and also why you absolutely need to watch it.

The Gang Gets Racist
Charlie Wants an Abortion
Underage Drinking: A National Concern
The Gang Finds A Dead Guy
Charlie Got Molested
The Gang Goes Jihad
Mac Bangs Dennis’ Mom
Charlie Goes America All Over Everybody’s Ass

Well!

Freaks and Geeks is truly a cult series in every sense of the word. Cancelled in its first season, the show was brought back to life on DVD after enthusiastic demands by its devoted cult following. This show about two groups of high school teenagers – the slackers and the nerds – is instantly likeable and will hit you with an overdose of nostalgia from your school going days, even if you didn’t go to an  American high school in the 80’s. The music on the show really sets it apart with its authentic soundtrack from the 80’s featuring The Who, The Grateful Dead, Van Halen, Styx, Rush, Deep Purple, Cream, Queen, Janis Joplin and others. The show is also far more true to life than almost any other teen comedy drama. The jocks are not very good looking and the nerds are not really smart and people have zits and body fat. If you have been watching Apatow’s recent comedy movies, you need to take a look at Freaks and Geeks, his only real masterpiece.

Next in Greatest Cult TV Shows Ever: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia!

“I will speak for you, Father. I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.”

Even if you are not a fan of my main man Mozart and his deceptively simple and divinely playful melodies, you should watch the movie for the utterly perfectly portrayed Antonio Salieri and his raging jealousy for Mozart’s facile musical ability. He is the real hero of this tale, the patron saint for all mediocrities in the world. The high point of the film is the intensely theatrical and cathartic scene where Salieri declares his war against God, addressing to a crucifix: “From now on we are enemies, You and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able.”

Next in Great Films About Music: This is Spinal Tap!

The Wire is like great literature. It is epic, profound, prophetic, realistic, verisimilar, edifying, enthralling, stylish, visceral, gritty, edgy, shocking, revealing and pleasantly addictive (and I haven’t even opened my thesaurus yet!). The show explores the Baltimore city drug scene in its five seasons and on the surface plays like a police procedural. However, it may more aptly be described as an exposition of the decadence of modern society and the failure of our institutions. The themes of the show are truly universal and yet the show creates such a thoroughly rich portrayal of Baltimore city that you could almost feel the tarmac when a pool of blood from a gunshot victim reflects a flickering neon sign. The show has amazing style with its sometimes indecipherable ghetto slang, cool gangsta talk and idiosyncratic police humor. The Wire is great art and certainly the greatest thing on TV ever. Period!

Next in Greatest Cult TV Shows Ever: Freaks and Geeks!

Not if Batman can help it!

Remember kids, the quest for cultural decadence is an inalienable right. Beating women in pubs is an act of moral depravity. The moral police will loose because it is old and it’s end is near. Binge drinking is bad for your health. Pink is not my favorite underwear color. Condoms only work 97% of the time. You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

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Rome is a dirty history lesson. Even with enough sex and violence to satisfy the most debauched mind, the show convincingly recreates the lost civilization with all its glorious battles and senate debates. This is a unique way of looking at history – through the eyes of a handful of richly created complex characters rather than a series of events between great battles. It’s very down to earth, like an episode of The Sopranos and is also full of human drama, an element normally missing from most history textbooks. There can be no more entertaining a way to learn history. The show’s production is singularly impressive, as can be expected from any HBO production. The detailed and intricate costumes and the exceptional acting free of the usual costume-drama pompousness is simply wonderful. Rome is smart, bold and stunning. History lessons have never been more sexy.

Carnivale is a story told with great relish. Notice the ‘e’ at the end of the name. It adds a certain style to the whole proceeding. It also stands for eerie, edgy and enchanting which appropriately describes the show. Carnivale is a horror drama set in the dustbowl during the great depression. The show easily has the finest cinematography on television. This spooky masterpiece is populated with some of the most bizarre characters you will ever see on tv – a blind psychic, a woman with a beard and other freaks, strippers, a dwarf and the Antichrist himself. The show revels in Lynchian macabre and even employs some Lynch favorites for its cast, most notably the little man from Twin Peaks. Carnivale mixes horror and grotesque with Christian theology, gnosticism and masonic cults such as the Templar Knights. At it’s heart Carnivale explores the ideas of free will and destiny in a battle between good and evil. Carnivale is like nothing else on TV. It’s too bad that HBO won’t give us a third season.

Dexter is the coolest show on TV that I have seen lately. Dexter’s premise is pure wickedness. The show’s protagonist, the eponymous Dexter is a serial killer! Yes, a psychopath who keeps a stash of microscope slides of all his victim’s blood. Dexter feels no human emotion and kills without remorse. He lives by a strict code that helps him fit in with human society. You would ask why watch this show when there is nothing endearing about Dexter, nothing you and I can empathize with or relate to? The answer is simple – it’s Dexter’s code. He has trained himself to only kill the people who deserve it. What a brilliant idea for a show! He works for the Miami Police as a blood splatter expert. Who would know more about blood than him? The show is surprisingly breezy with plenty of humor that is usually ironic or morbid. Dexter’s reflection on human society as an outsider looking in is usually profound and will occasionally bring a smirk to your face. Rarely has TV been so daringly bold or original.

I am not a big fan of Lisa Kudrow. I enjoyed her quirky brand of humor and her sense of comedy timing in Friends but it got old real quick. Now here is a really smart web comedy series called Web Therapy that is starred, co-written and co-produced by Lisa Kudrow. The show’s premise is simple. Each episode is a 3 minute therapy session between psychologist Dr. Fiona Wallace played by Kudrow and her patients, conducted over dual webcams. Dr Wallace has some issues of her own as we find out through the therapy sessions. The humor is subtle and understated, which is just how I like it these days after having seen a few too many laugh out loud sitcoms. If you have been watching any other web series you would have noticed that most of them use the first person confessional. That format really gets annoying in a while, to say the least. Web Therapy shows real time conversations between people and the use of webcams seem natural and not forced for such discourse. The good thing about a web series is that it is free and at 3 minutes an episode you can catch the next Web Therapy episode anywhere or anytime. How about a little breather at work? Check out Web Therapy now.

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It’s been two years since I graduated from IIT Madras. I don’t remember much of what was taught in the classroom. I do remember fragments of concepts and names of theories that I still throw around to impress people. I was good at the workshops. At the lathe machine, I fashioned a cylindrical lump of iron into a work of art. In the physics department I learned the mathematics of the motions of planets and molecules. I wrote a computer program to predict tsunamis; it’s still somewhere on my hard-drive. At the humanities department, I learned French and took to watching foreign films. I learned about industry and commerce and how to optimize everything from portfolios to the weight of a ship’s girder. All this i learned and forgot.
The most valuable learning in college was always outside the classroom – in the hostel, on the city streets, at the movies, in the cafes and on the beach. Here is a short list of all that I learned and I still remember:

1. There are many people in the world who are much smarter at everything than you are at anything.

2. Smartness and intelligence are overrated. There is no substitute for determination, effort and passion. We don’t live in an ideal world. We live in an unsympathetic one where only the strong win.

3. We practice science and engineering so that we may live. We live so that we may practice and enjoy the arts and share that joy with others.

4. College, they tell you, gives you the best years of your life. This, in my experience is not entirely true. As much as I enjoyed the college days, I don’t really want to go back there and do it all over again. Working and living alone in the city has given me experiences far more valuable and richer than anything I remember from college. Don’t they say the same thing about your childhood? Who really wants to be a child again and go through all the trials of growing up? There is no time like the present, because you can do something about it and the future is just around the corner.

5. Institutional education is overrated. In my hostel, I lived with hundreds of the sharpest minds in the country who knew about everything from writing compilers and designing digital circuits to genetic mutation and quantum chemistry. Most of them knew little about politics, philosophy, good cinema, classical music, art, photography, English usage, changing a fuse, tying a tie, swimming, riding motorcycles, talking to girls, dating, dancing, telling a good book from a bad one, playing a musical instrument, cooking, good table manners, dressing well, laboratory ethics and research! Well, you can only learn so much from your books.

6. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “When in doubt, don’t!”

7. Your grades don’t make you who you are, so don’t let them. I lost my schoolboy love for science in college because I could not cope with the demanding mathematics. I went into technology and finance after graduation. I now realize that I will never really be happy at any job, no matter how much it pays.

8. There is nothing that makes life as much fun as having good friends. I have learnt more from my friends in college than from all the lectures in the classrooms, and learnt things more valuable than engineering and mathematics.

9. It is more important to know where to look than to know everything. Besides, you can only remember so much. Learn concepts and stories, not equations and formulae. Google is your friend!

10. In retrospect, shit happens and things always get better!

I gave you a list of some of my favorite TV shows earlier. Today, I’m writing about why I love a good TV show. Good TV shows are like good movies, only longer, with the story unfolding over several episodes. Great TV shows, like great movies are seldom about the story and more often about unforgettable events and memorable characters. The miniseries format is my favorite kind of television. A great TV series can possess you and occupy your thoughts all day for several weeks. A movie does not deliver this lingering excitement, simply because it is too short, even when it is really good. Don’t you sometimes wish that your favorite film would just keep running, especially when it is about to end? A significant part of the charm of reading a novel is this very feeling of having it take over your life and sweep you into its own world. Somehow, that feeling is often short lived or completely lost at the movies. So, we watch TV.

Ironically, watching TV shows on TV, once a week, is not the best way to enjoy them. The joy of watching them on DVD, episode after episode is truly a wonderful feeling. Add a couch, a bag of chips, a few drinks and you are in heaven. It’s almost like the pleasure of reading an unputdownable novel before going to bed, racing through chapter after chapter, while your aroused curiosity struggles to keep you awake. Oh, how I love TV!

Are you a TV junkie like me? What TV shows got you completely hooked onto them?  Friends, Lost, 24, Prison Break, Heroes, Family Guy…?  What’s your addiction baby?

The show, in its second season seems to be going nowhere, and you couldn’t care less.
The show painstakingly recreates the American workplace of the 60′s, with all the political incorrectness and the sexual innuendos and the reckless smoking. The show’s central character is Don Draper, an advertising executive in Madison Avenue (mad men?), New York – a mysterious man with a dark past. The acting on the show is superlative and you could keep drooling at the beautifully recreated period details such as the interiors, the clothing and the mannerisms. The show’s atmosphere is almost film noir despite the color and everybody smokes like there is no tomorrow. Don Draper would say “I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.”

The Decalogue
Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue is a ten-part miniseries based on the ten commandments.

Often considered, a single film, the 10 films explore the complex issues of morality, free will, crime, ethics, love, and the relevance of the commandments through the lives of ordinary people living in a Warsaw apartment. Bold, subtle and thoughtful, each episode is a masterful dramatization of the complex moral and social dilemmas faced by these ordinary people and the difficulty of judging their decisions in the light of the commandments. Episode 6, A short film about love, is my favorite.

Twin Peaks
David Lynch’s spooky whodunit never answers the question it raises in the beginning – who killed Laura Palmer? But there is plenty of spine-tingling atmosphere and character development to keep you glued.

Populated with quirky and unforgettable characters, the series literally brings the whole town of Twin Peaks to life with its careful attention to detail. Special agent Dale Cooper who comes to the town to investigate Laura Palmer’s murder, is one of the most fully developed characters to have appeared on television, with plenty of memorable lines and notable idiosyncrasies. This show is best watched alone late in the night. There is plenty of surreal, mysterious atmosphere, supernatural spirits, backward talking dwarfs and plot twists to savor. Although it leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and some of the later episodes seem to loose focus, Twin Peaks is one of the best things on TV.

Battlestar Galactica
Battlestar Galactica, commonly shortened to BSG, is essential science fiction on TV. The show combines gritty drama and space warfare in a way that will please even the most ardent sci-fi haters. BSG reached its forth season mid-season finale this year and is scheduled to resume in 2009.

This would be a great time to watch the first three seasons of BSG on DVD before the second half of the fourth season starts. The series examines various issues of military dictatorship, democracy and the fundamental question of what it means to be human; a question that is most obviously raised when humans face the cylons – machines that look human and are capable of reason, faith, trust, love, biological reproduction and are yet immortal. The space battles are always exciting and make for the best action on TV, without ever sacrificing the elements of drama. And did I mention, the cylon women are hot!

Curb Your Enthusiasm
All hail Larry David, the comic genius! Larry David is the creator of the hit sitcom – Seinfeld, another of my favorite shows which I will write about in the second part of this post.

Curb Your Enthusiasm is a close look at Larry’s life in a cinema verite style. Larry David constantly gets into the most awkward social situations with other people and the simplest of daily activities spiral into a chain reaction of the most bizarre outcomes at the end of each episode. The phrase – a Larry David moment – used to describe these situations is now part of the idiom. Everything about this show, from the use of music to the ad libbed lines from the cast is unique. Highly addictive!

Deadwood
At 1.56 fucks/minute in its dialogue, Deadwood is easily the most profane show on TV. But under all the gun slinging, the whiskey guzzling and the frequent use of the word ‘cocksuckers’ lies a most wonderful TV drama. Really! If you can handle the profanity and violence, Deadwood is the greatest dramatization of the wild west on television or cinema.

Widely praised for its writing and highly stylized dialogue, the show transports you to the lawless territory of Deadwood, South Dakota. The character of Al Swearengen, the owner of the Gem saloon in Deadwood, is played with great panache by Ian McShane, who was the voice of Tai Lung, the snow leopard in Kung Fu Panda. Swearengen must be one the greatest bad guys on TV. The show deals with the issues of misogyny, prostitution, race and capitalistic and political greed in its three seasons. Like so many great shows on HBO, Deadwood was canceled before its time. The three seasons of Deadwood make for splendid television.

I am throwing in the towel. After two failed attempts at the CAT I won’t be writing the test this year. On my second attempt I had embarked on the battle with renewed strength and vigor, only to fail even more miserably. Is this someone’s idea of a joke?  It is beyond me how you can get worse at something with more practice and experience. The CAT simply defies conventional wisdom, and while that is often a good thing, such a high element of unpredictability is frustrating to say the least. Your CAT score is by no means a fair estimate of your potential to succeed in a business environment or even at a B School. As far as I’m aware, the test makers have never undertaken a research to measure the relevance or the effectiveness of the test. It is assumed that the test works simply because it assigns a range of scores and those who pass receive handsome pay packets after graduation. You may say I’m whining here only because I failed the test and its a case of sour grapes. I won’t argue with that, but I will argue that the grapes are wrapped in plastic.

MBA is the new BTECH. Engineering graduates today are not satisfied with the jobs they land after college, but little do they realize that job-satisfaction is a myth. Most people hate their job. The jobs for B School grads are no different. If you have found a job you love, good for you. You don’t have to be an MBA to love what you do, you only have to do what you love. It may be true that an MBA degree allows you to pursue the work you love with more freedom, but remember that most MBA’s end up in the business world and rarely risk following their true passions, unless their true passion is business and making money.

Lakhs of students and virtually every engineer from this country’s best colleges aspires for one of the top B school programs, chasing it like the rats of Hamelin. Isn’t it surprising that such an overwhelming number of intelligent young people are deeply passionate about business? It’s not. Most of them are not in it to fulfill their entrepreneurial ambitions, it’s obvious that they vant ze money, Lebowski and they believe in nothing. Nihilists! Where is the disciple of science who studied tomes of Dorling Kindersley encyclopedias as a kid and and who grew up watching National Geographic on TV and went on to graduate from IIT? The stock market beguiles him more than the mysteries of the universe. Space is vast, dark and mostly empty and there is definitely no money in it. The capital market is where it’s at. The child’s gone. He wears a suit now and talks out of his ass. If you are truly smart and intelligent, you have no business doing business. We need you in the vanguard of our quest to extend the frontiers of knowledge. The sorry state of scientific research in this country is no surprise, with all the best science and engineering students chasing the MBA. And what about the arts? Is it only for those kids who are no good at math. Oh, what a miserable bunch of philistines we are!

Godspeed, brave CAT aspirants! This year, come November, while you spend sleepless nights taking mock tests and fishing through your forums for the secret strategy to tame the CAT and await the result with nervous anticipation, I will sleep like a baby and read that fat novel I never had the time for and explore some new music and maybe think about what I want in life and what makes me happy.

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