Come Fly With Me

Some Good News, At Last
This Voice has been away because he’s been suffering from Writer’s block. When people who are actually good at writing, suffer from that block, we mark it as sad, and wish the writer gets out of it quickly.
When lousy-software-developer-going-thru-quarter-life-crisis-who-rants-more-than-writes gets writer’s block, the consequences could be blog-life-threatening.

Over the past few weeks, I have begun to despair, and I guess it’s affected my blogging. Yes, while people don’t have anough to eat, and other’s are happy to have a soggy cardboard box over their heads as a roof, upper-middle-class me has had the audacity to spend time worrying about myself and where the heck I should be i.e. the usual.

While this Voice has been silent, The Other Side, of course has gained the upper hand.

You scour the Indian Blogosphere, and you find posts on:
-how the rains in Mumbai “expose” chinks in the City’s infrastructure(I’m sorry but as of 2005, the only city with Infrastructure worth talking about is Delhi. This is obvious. That Bombay has actually plundered along is of course due to the much-used cliche of its people’s resilience).
-How Independence Day is meaningless, and since how all of us Indians are savage pogrom-inducing murderers, we have nothing to be happy about, nothing to celebrate.
-Any other regular posts which are designed to make the reader “think” and to “enlighten” them (i.e. feel despair and misery).

Since I aspire to no such aims as actually making anybody think about anything, I present you with the following link:

Rediff

Remember folks, nothing ever changes in India, nor has changed in the past 5000 years, and if it does, it’s always for the worst. This new airport terminal will probably lead to 15 times more air pollution, it probably relocated countless slum-dwellers, it probably employed lots of poor people at slave labour rates, it probably enriched loads of ministries’ officials. It is after all just a plaything of those Rich 1000 people who live in India. “How will this Help The Common Man?” goes the refrain. Those poor, poor rural folk. How will it help them?

Well see, I don’t care to make people “think”. So I don’t care, nor will I give any answer to those questions.

Is Dumbledore Dead?

Some More Surfer-Whoring…
Every once in a while, this voice decides to do something shameless and underhanded. Specifically, attempting to boost site traffic in the hopes of becoming the most famous person in the whole universe. Now the hard way to do this is to actually write something of importance. The easy way, is to occasionally post an inter-office forward, or the lyrics to Bulla Ki Kaana (I have a feeling that about 50% of traffic to my site is to the translation for this song, :-p)

So in that vein I pose a question. But do NOT click on the read more if you haven’t finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I’m assuming there are some people out there who still haven’t been exposed to the “Security Leak”….

Is Dumbledore Really Dead?
My short answer is I don’t think so….
I’ll present my strongest argument first: Harry Potter is basically the latest incarnation of the same theme that runs through a lot of Western fantasy – of Fall & Redemption, of Coming-of-Age, Rites-of-Passage blah blah blah. Based on this theme, Dumbledore is not dead…

In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi willingly let himself be murdered by Darth Vader, only to come back as a lecturing spirit.

In Lord of the Rings, Gandalf fell into Moria, battling the Balrog, only to come back as Gandalf The White.

The wizened Old Guide character always seems to take a fall and come back stronger…

I’m sure there are other series with the same theme, but I am simply just talking about my favourite two.

There many other parallels you can draw, about betrayal by someone who was thought to be good (Lando Calrissian, Saruman, Snape*)
The young,naive,humble and simple dude who is destined to become the Superstar (Frodo, Luke, Harry)
The cooler-than-the-hero sidekick (Aragorn+Legolas, Han Solo, Hermione?Moody?Tonks?)
The comic relief (Gimli+Merry+Pippin, R2D2+C3PO, Ron?Hermione?)
e.t.c.

Another theory is that Dumbledore is an impostor in this case.
What’s up with the blackened arm anyhoo? Is it really due to the ring? Dumbledore seems to talk to Harry in slightly bizarre tones as well. A little bit ruder. But then Harry is also a little older… but something just wasn’t right about the way Dumbledore went about pushing Harry to get the memory from Slughorn…
Plus, what’s up with the “R.A.B” note. Where did the “R.A.B” come from, what’s it mean, and was Dumbledore really so dumb as to not know that the locket he was going after was fake?
And when Snape finally kills Dumbledore, there is a small doubt in my mind – it seems to me that Dumbledore was pleading with Snape TO kill him. NOT pleading with him to be saved.

Any other suggestions, oh learned readers?
Please do write in….