Bitter Truth Behind the Sweet Sugar

We are with you Suraj Randiv

It's not just a game between bat and ball

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Sri lankan political atmosphere is calming down after back to back elections. on the
other hand the game of cricket is once again beginning to create the country hot.It's the world cup time here. Sri lankans changed there news channels in to sports channels. At night most of the hotels around the country are fascinated with giant screen of world cup games.


Even though the interest being shifted to cricket, its politics again, rather politics in cricket. Selection of the veteran all rounder sanath jayasuriya to the T 20 squad was highly criticized. how can a parliament member from a political party play for a national team.

Not only the local politics has politicize the national cricket,Indian premier league has completely change most aspects of the game. Now its not just a game between bat and ball, Modern day cricket has become a huge competition between Business tycoons.

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Salmen rushdie on reality tv

Reality TV: a dearth of talent and the death of morality

Salman Rushdie on the perils of voyeurism
Salman Rushdie


The Guardian, Saturday 9 June 2001


I've managed to miss out on reality TV until now. In spite of all the talk in Britain about nasty Nick and flighty Mel, and in America about the fat, naked bastard Richard manipulating his way to desert-island victory, I have somehow preserved my purity. I wouldn't recognise Nick or Mel if I passed them in the street, or Richard if he was standing in front of me unclothed.
Ask me where the Big Brother house is, or how to reach Temptation Island, and I have no answer. I do remember the American Survivor contestant who managed to fry his own hand so that the skin peeled away until his fingers looked like burst sausages, but that's because he got on to the main evening news. Otherwise, search me. Who won? Who lost? Who cares?
The subject of reality TV shows, however, has been impossible to avoid. Their success is the media story of the (new) century, along with the ratings triumph of the big-money game shows such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Success on this scale insists on being examined, because it tells us things about ourselves; or ought to.
And what tawdry narcissism is here revealed! The television set, once so idealistically thought of as our window on the world, has become a dime-store mirror instead. Who needs images of the world's rich otherness, when you can watch these half-familiar avatars of yourself - these half-attractive half-persons - enacting ordinary life under weird conditions? Who needs talent, when the unashamed self-display of the talentless is constantly on offer?
I've been watching Big Brother 2, which has achieved the improbable feat of taking over the tabloid front pages in the final stages of a general election campaign. This, according to the conventional wisdom, is because the show is more interesting than the election. The "reality" may be even stranger. It may be that Big Brother is so popular because it's even more boring than the election. Because it is the most boring, and therefore most "normal", way of becoming famous, and, if you're lucky or smart, of getting rich as well.
"Famous" and "rich" are now the two most important concepts in western society, and ethical questions are simply obliterated by the potency of their appeal. In order to be famous and rich, it's OK - it's actually "good" - to be devious. It's "good" to be exhibitionistic. It's "good" to be bad. And what dulls the moral edge is boredom. It's impossible to maintain a sense of outrage about people being so trivially self-serving for so long.
Oh, the dullness! Here are people becoming famous for being asleep, for keeping a fire alight, for letting a fire go out, for videotaping their cliched thoughts, for flashing their breasts, for lounging around, for quarrelling, for bitching, for being unpopular, and (this is too interesting to happen often) for kissing! Here, in short, are people becoming famous for doing nothing much at all, but doing it where everyone can see them.
Add the contestants' exhibitionism to the viewers' voyeurism and you get a picture of a society sickly in thrall to what Saul Bellow called "event glamour". Such is the glamour of these banal but brilliantly spotlit events that anything resembling a real value - modesty, decency, intelligence, humour, selflessness; you can write your own list - is rendered redundant. In this inverted ethical universe, worse is better. The show presents "reality" as a prize fight, and suggests that in life, as on TV, anything goes, and the more deliciously contemptible it is, the more we'll like it. Winning isn't everything, as Charlie Brown once said, but losing isn't anything.
The problem with this kind of engineered realism is that, like all fads, it's likely to have a short shelf-life, unless it finds ways of renewing itself. The probability is that our voyeurism will become more demanding. It won't be enough to watch somebody being catty, or weeping when evicted from the house of hell, or "revealing everything" on subsequent talk shows, as if they had anything left to reveal.
What is gradually being reinvented is the gladiatorial combat. The TV set is the Colosseum and the contestants are both gladiators and lions; their job is to eat one another until only one remains alive. But how long, in our jaded culture, before "real" lions, actual dangers, are introduced to these various forms of fantasy island, to feed our hunger for more action, more pain, more vicarious thrills?
Here's a thought, prompted by the news that the redoubtable Gore Vidal has agreed to witness the execution by lethal injection of the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh. The witnesses at an execution watch the macabre proceedings through a glass window: a screen. This, too, is a kind of reality TV, and - to make a modest proposal - it may represent the future of such programmes. If we are willing to watch people stab one another in the back, might we not also be willing to actually watch them die?
In the world outside TV, our numbed senses already require increasing doses of titillation. One murder is barely enough; only the mass murderers make the front pages. You have to blow up a building full of people or machine-gun a whole royal family to get our attention. Soon, perhaps, you'll have to kill off a whole species of wildlife or unleash a virus that wipes out people by the thousand, or else you'll be small potatoes. You'll be on an inside page.
And as in reality, so on "reality TV". How long until the first TV death? How long until the second? By the end of Orwell's great novel 1984, Winston Smith has been brainwashed. "He loved Big Brother." As, now, do we. We are the Winstons now.