Shaktimaan revisited

Watching the unintended hilarity of Shaktimaan on TV. Everyone's hamming away to glory!!! This is getting funnier by the minute.

Shaktimaan is doing past life regression with a crazed chick who claims to have been waiting for him for 5000 years. In the flashback, we get to know how the chick falls for him and tries to coax Shaktimaan into a Gandharva vivah. He has love only for God (ha ha) and tells her to bugger off. So chick takes a vow that she'll get her maan (urf Shaktimaan) and does kathor tapasya for 1500 years and becomes a mayavi chick. Only to find out that Shaktimaan's past life avataar has kicked the bucket.

Mayavi chick says WTF? She obviously knows that a moron like Shaktimaan could never get enlightened so he will eventually get reincarnated. So she waits through the ages for Shaktimaan to get reborn while retaining her sexy avatar from her past life and gets herself an imposing palace as her pad.

Cut to present and the crazed bitch has become a witch and still wants to snag Shaktimaan and has kidnapped his "kabab-me-haddi" girlfriend (actually she is not his girlfriend but he secretly pines for her).

Shaktimaan is wondering WTF? He is wondering how to get rid of this crazed chick and get the Samay Yantra from her which he needs to save Earth. "Devi, samay vyarth na karo. Samay Yantra hame do aur hume Prithvi bachane do" Memorable stuff.

Now guess what? The serial ends here. Now my turn to say WTF? Anyways, I got my daily dose of entertainment from the idiot box.

Awesome comedy scene!

GoldSafe and similar fraud shows

As usual, the idiot box is on while I am surfing the internet and watching the inane stuff that shows up on late night. In addition to the usual teleshopping ads, there is a new kind of unbelievable con that is legally allowed on Indian television. There is a program called GoldSafe on NDTV Imagine (and there are similar shows on other channels as well). The con goes like this - you identify the face of a celebrity which is partially hidden and win money for the guessing the right answer. The face is generally easily recognizable and the presenter - an ever chattering nincompoop that incessantly keeps asking people to call and win the moolah. You will have loads of clowns calling up and dreaming up names that do not even remotely resemble the celebrity in question. I am pretty sure that they are people hired by the show to change accents and names call up with all kinds of funny wrong answers.

The charges are freaking exorbitant (Rs12 a minute) and the time keeps piling up without any discernible end in sight. Right now, it's almost an hour and no one has guessed the obvious face. How do they manage to get people to hold? They keep having these 1-2 minute timers which keep popping up interlaced with the constant chatter of the unbelievably stupid low-life drones asking people to pick up the phone and call. Then they have the 4-6 minute speed round where there is no wait and all are let in. Finally, when the con takes too long (which is usually the case), they have a final 5 where the last 5 callers are chosen.

This must be incredibly lucrative for the channel and the producers but can't help but wonder how many viewers are left holding the bag. I don't know how this can be legally allowed. Makes the junk sold on the teleshopping network look benign in comparison.

Goes on to prove the proverb - A fool and his money are soon parted. And there is no end to the number of fools or the number of people helping them part with their money.

I believe that viewers should vote with their remotes and avoid channels like unscrupulous channels like NDTV Imagine that help perpetrate these kinds of fraud