Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall

Elephant and ant were petty ego clashing...
Our same old elephant and ant.
Rex the Tyrannosaurus, charged from behind the bushes
and crushed the two mortals in one Jurassic second
Animal media calls it a natural disaster

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In Sixteen Hundred and Forty-Eight
When England suffered the pains of state
The Roundheads lay siege to Colchester town
Where the King's men still fought for the crown
There One-Eyed Thompson stood on the wall
A gunner of deadliest aim of all
From St. Mary's Tower his cannon he fired
Humpty-Dumpty was its name...

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Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Iruvar

In case you don't know tamil, there are subtitles. In case you know, there are subtitles. Even tamilians would need subtitles to make sense of Iruvar. The scene, the script,the background score and the way the camera moves is genuinely admirable. The below scene is considered to be one of the best in Indian cinema *by some*. Scene is explained here. Vairamuthu, Santosh Sivan, A R Rahman, Mohanlal and Mani Ratnam at their best.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Suggested Read : William Butler Yeats

and a great song video to go with, The End by Doors (thanks to Alex)

Nixon

Days after the May4th Ohio college shooting, massive protests broke out across the country's colleges. One hundred thousand students marched on Washington and laid seige to the capital, four hundred and fifty colleges shutdown across the nation. Nixon was moved to Camp David for his own safety. The president spend two sleepless nights there at the very verge of a nervous breakdown. The nation he was presiding over was at war with itself,he decided to reach out to the students. The night he was back in Washington, fourty seven outgoing calls were made by the President. At four o' clock in the morning, the secret service radios hissed "Searchlight is on the lawn", much to surprise of officers on duty that night; 'Searchlight' the code word for Nixon. The Presidential motorcade sped to the Lincoln memorial where the student leaders where keeping vigil. At the Lincoln memorial, Nixon "treated the student leaders to a clumsy and condescending monologue, which he made public in an awkward attempt to display his benevolence". The student leaders did not relent. Nixon was convinced that the students were under external communist influence and decided to gather incriminating intelligence against the anti-war-student-movement through legal or illegal channels - a habit that would bring down his presidency years later.

Vanity, Thy name is...

He is so simple.
His world is so different from mine.
So separate are his dreams and his preferences.
He says very little.
He writes
this morning I saw some lovely flowers
in the lawn and thought of you.
I know I am at that dishevelled stage of life
when my face is not much like any flower.
But I wish
—whatever he says—
I could believe it a while.

Suggested read : Parveen Shakir

Hot Line

How he used to complain to me!
So many people come between us we cannot talk.
In the season’s first rain, first snow,
full-moon nights, evening’s mild fragrance,
morning’s blue cool, how helpless!
How the heart aches!
Today between him and me there is no third.
There can be contact with a slight movement of the hand.
But how many seasons have passed since hearing that voice.
It is not hard for me to call upon him,
but the truth is the voices and the accents do not have the same tones.
The tune is the same but the hearts are not close enough.

Suggested read : Parveen Shakir Translated from the Urdu by Alamgir Hashmi

the face of God

JENSEN suddenly wheels to his audience of one and roars
out:


JENSEN :
You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale,
and I won't have it, is that clear?!

You think you have merely stopped a
business deal—that is not the case!
The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and
now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is
ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations
and peoples. There are no nations!There are no peoples!
There are no Russians. There are no Arabs!
There are no third worlds! There is no West!
There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and
immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national
dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!,
Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels!

It is the international system of currency that determines
the totality of life on this planet!
That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic,
subatomic and galactic structure of things today!
And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature,
and you will atone!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
(pause)
You get up on your little twenty-
one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy.
There is no America. There is no democracy.
There is only IBM and ITT and A T and T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide
and Exxon.
Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think
the Russians talk about in their councils of state—Karl Marx?
They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical
decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost
probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do. We
no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale.
The world is a college of corporations, inexorably deter- mined by the
immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It
has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr.
Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and
famine, oppression and brutality—
one vast and ecumenical holding
company, for whom all men will work
to serve a common profit, in which
all men will hold a share of stock,
all necessities provided, all
anxieties tranquilized, all boredom
amused. And I have chosen you to
preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.


HOWARD :
(humble whisper)
Why me?


JENSEN :
Because you're on television, dummy.
Sixty million people watch you
every night of the week, Monday
through Friday.


HOWARD slowly rises from the blackness of his seat so
that he is lit only by the ethereal diffusion of light
shooting out from the rear of the room. He stares at
JENSEN spotted on the podium, transfixed.


HOWARD :
I have seen the face of God!

Suggested DVD : NETWORK