ankurb – Page 245 – Ankur Banerjee's personal blog

Convent educated terrorust — Now which convent did HE go to?

Not sure whether there’s a Razzie equivalent of the Pulitzer, but one thing that definitely seems to be true is that media organizations are fighting a fierce battle to outdo each other in terms of stupidity. No other rational explanation seems to available why today’s Hindustan Times had a front page story saying that the mastermind of the Delhi (and earlier bomb blasts which happened this year in India) is a ‘…convent-educated, computer-savvy bombmaker…’. That doesn’t seem right, does it? Can’t say whether they got way too enthusiastic about writing in an English newspaper and translated madrassa into ‘convent‘. Maybe this will provide fodder for matrimonial ads – “Match wanted for psychotic convent-educated groom. Knowledge of bombshells bombmaking vitally necessary”. After all, HT’s caption for the photo says that he is ‘…currently the most wanted man in the country’. Read this whole paragraph again. Full of bad puns which had me cackling for a long time.

It could only be a staggering coincidence by which the same page of the same newspaper on the same day also had the magic number on the front page, albeit in a less-than-humorous context.

In other news, Prateek Vijayavargia was the runner-up this year at Siddhartha Basu’s HT InQuizitive 2008. School administrators didn’t believe me when I said buzzer systems could break down. One broke down during the inter-DPS quiz; thankfully, we had a spare. Even with a tree of knowledge to lean on, Mr Basu couldn’t conduct the buzzer round since one of them wasn’t working. Vir Sanghvi found it difficult to lift his arse up from his toilet seat (probably), so this year’s chief guest was Suneet Tandon. Promotion, ‘cuz that fellow is generally the emcee. I hear that it was a very close fight though, with the top two positions being decided by a tie-breaker. Surprisingly, DPS VK didn’t send its top team; instead sent some rookies to gain experience. Weird choice to make for the very biggest quiz of the year (now that Time of India Fun-da-Mental won’t be happening this year).

Download – The Bruce Willis Clone

Discovery Channel has started a new series called Download: The True Story of the Internet. Not a long series; it’s basically about the story of the World Wide Web since it’s beginning till now. The major bits, that is. I saw the first episode, which was about the IE-Netscape browsers wars – and it was quite fun. Of course, everyone has heard of the huge ‘e’ the IE team left in front of Netscape’s office, but watching actual pictures and hearing about the whole incident from the defiler and the defilee makes an interesting watch.

What really caught my attention though was the show’s host. He’s some tech journalist, who wears an attire like Bruce Willis in Die Hard 4; is bald, again like Bruce Willis; and even sports a stubble exactly like Bruce Willis’ look in Die Hard 4. He doesn’t do much, except keep walking out of street corners into the camera’s field of vision (with a Bruce Willis type swagger) talking about key bits of the story. The punch line? His name is John Heilemann. Aw shucks. Discovery should’ve stuffed him with wads of cash to make him officially change his name to John McLane, just for fun. After all, they Discovery does have a LOT of money (they blew up three jet planes).

The series is worth watching. With a title like Download: The True Story of the Internet, it would truly be ironic if they try to stop people from downloading this from peer-to-peer networks (the pirates can always claim innocence by saying they were doing what the title said).