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Monday, December 31, 2012 By

BBC reports what I wrote on my blog

I just heard a BBC correspondent report what I wrote on my blog. Reporting from New Delhi, the BBC correspondent said some analysts and commentators have compared the protests following the death of a Delhi gang-rape victim to the stir over the death of a Tunisian hawker that led to the Arab Spring. I compared the protests in India to what happened in Tunisia.

I wrote that while the 23-year-old medical student gang-raped on a public bus in Delhi was undergoing treatment in a Singapore hospital. I did not know then news analysts and other commentators were also saying the same thing.

In fact, I was so scared after publishing that post that I removed it yesterday.  This is not a political blog. I don’t want to get into hot water. But the protests following the horrific rape, reported across the world, reminded me how the Arab Spring started. And so I wrote it. Now that the BBC has reported others have also drawn the same comparison, I have restored the post. The BBC correspondent must have read others who made that comparison; my blog could not have popped up on the BBC radar.

I have great respect for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the ruling Congress party leader, Sonia Gandhi. But people are naturally appalled by the brutal rape. The Indian armed forces, to their credit, have cancelled New Year’s Eve parties and others in India are also doing the same as a mark of respect to the young woman.

Filed Under: India, Media Tagged With: ,
Thursday, August 19, 2010 By

Iraq war flashbacks as last US combat brigade exits

Remember Rageh Omaar, who reported from Baghdad for the BBC when the Iraq war began in 2003? This is how he reported the arrival of US forces in Baghdad and the toppling of Saddam's statue in April 2003. Here you can see President George W Bush claiming "Mission accomplished" aboard the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in early May 2003.

This is how the BBC showed Saddam Hussein's medical examination following his capture. And this is the CNN report on his execution. (I couldn't watch it).

All because of 9/11. This video shows the second plane hitting the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. You can hear the newscasters gasp. What a terrible tragedy. I remember watching it on CNN and couldn't believe my eyes. It was like the end of the world.

As the last US combat brigade pulls out of Iraq, leaving behind more than 50,000 US soldiers in the country, here's a moment of remembrance:

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Wednesday, March 24, 2010 By

Facebook, not news, reigns in Singapore

Singapore has more broadband subscriptions than people, according to the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA).

But the top Singapore news website attracts only 2 per cent of the total broadband subscriptions on any given day.

The Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) portal asiaone.com gets about 100,000 daily unique visitors, according to Google Trends.

Facebook, on the other hand, gets about a million daily unique visitors from Singapore, according to the same source. Twitter gets more than 60,000.

Singapore (population: 4,987,000) has a total of 5,257,800 broadband subscriptions, including 1,400,300 residential subscriptions, according to IDA.

Just over 1 per cent visit the second most popular news site.

Channel NewsAsia gets about 70,000 daily unique visitors.

Singapore's leading newspaper, the Straits Times' website gets a little more than 50,000 — less than a seventh of its print circulation. The SPH newspaper has a circulation of more than 380,000. Its citizen journalism site, Stomp, gets fewer than 25,000. And just over 15,000 visit the website of Today, a freesheet jointly owned by SPH and MediaCorp, which also owns the TV news station, Channel NewsAsia.

The BBC gets more than 40,000 daily unique visitors from Singapore while CNN gets over 20,000, Yahoo News over 100,000, and the New York Times and the Times of India over 10,000 each. Google Trends didn't show 2010 data for several sites, including the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Malaysian papers and Chinese news sites.

Asiaone_straitstimes_channe

You can create charts like this for other websites too on Google Trends. It shows the number of daily unique visitors, where they came from, what other sites they visited and what they searched for.

Just go to google.com/trends, type in the internet addresses of the websites you want to check, press enter, and see the charts appear on screen. Read here how Google collects the data.

Here are separate charts for each website so you can see the figures for the last 12 months.

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Filed Under: Media, Singapore Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Monday, March 22, 2010 By

Remembering Charlie Gillett

charliegillett_106_small I had the blues when Charlie Gillett came on the radio last night. Charlie Gillett, the World of Music presenter, who died a few days ago. He was 68. The BBC World Service was replaying one of the programmes he presented last year about Mountain Music. And one of the songs he played was Muleskinner Blues by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys — the one here on this video.

Here's the complete playlist of songs he played from charliegillett.com. There was music from Ukraine, Kurdistan, Kyrgyzstan, Peru and, of course, American bluegrass. Music full of abandon and a certain wildness with singers straining to be heard above plangent strings and pulsating beats in rousing songs that evoked wide open spaces and the sheer joie de vivre of being on top of the world. It was typical Charlie Gillett, wild bursts of music punctuated by his laidback introductions to the artistes and the songs.

With my love for rock 'n' roll, however, I will always remember him first and foremost as the author of The Sound of the City, a history of rock 'n' roll published in 1970. It's a must-read for anyone who loves that music. The Telegraph has more about how he became a DJ after writing that book. He was treated for Churg-Strauss syndrome, a rare auto-immune disorder, a few years ago, it says.

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Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
Thursday, October 8, 2009 By

TS Eliot Britain’s favourite poet

 Eliot_donne_yeats+dylanthom
 
TS Eliot is Britain's favourite poet, according to a BBC online poll. More good news: John Donne came in second and Yeats and Dylan Thomas also ended up in the top 10. I am surprised Auden didn't make the list. How couldn't he?

More than 18,000 votes were cast and the top 10 favourite poets are:

  1. TS Eliot
  2. John Donne
  3. Benjamin Zephaniah
  4. Wilfred Owen
  5. Philip Larkin
  6. William Blake
  7. WB Yeats
  8. John Betjeman
  9. John Keats
  10. Dylan Thomas

Other contenders included Simon Armitage, WH Auden, Robert Browning, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wendy Cope, Carol Ann Duffy, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ted Hughes, Rudyard Kipling, Roger McGough, John Milton, Sylvia Plath, Christina Rossetti, Stevie Smith, Lord Tennyson, and William Wordsworth.I have never read Zephaniah.

Here one can hear TS Eliot reading from The Waste Land and Four Quartets. The Poetry Archive site also has readings by Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Larkin and Betjeman.

It's revealing that Keats was the only Romantic to make the list and none of the Victorians did. The fact that Blake is also on the list suggests people today still like the kind of poetry that was popular in the 1960s and '70s.

Personally, I would have included Auden, Wordsworth and Kipling in place of Zephaniah, Owen and Blake.

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Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
Sunday, August 23, 2009 By

The enduring appeal of Roger McGough

Roger McGough, who stands a chance of being voted Britain's favourite poet, has another claim to fame. He was a  member of the band, The Scaffold, that topped the BBC Top 20 chart with the hit single, Lily The Pink, in 1968. The trio also included Paul McCartney's brother, Mike McGear (real name Mike McCartney), and John Gorman.

McGough is the curly-haired, bespectacled one who sings solo the the verse beginning "Jennifer Eccles had terrible freckles" at the end of the first minute in this video.

McGough, with fellow Liverpool poets Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, also wrote the biggest-selling collection of postwar English poems. Their Penguin anthology, The Mersey Sound, has sold more copies than any other postwar poetry collection, says the Guardian. First published in 1967, it has been reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic. I loved it at first sight and have written about it before (here and here).

Now McGough is one of the 30 poets BBC website visitors can vote for in the poll to choose Britain's favourite poet. The shortlist prepared by a panel of judges includes:

The current poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, TS Eliot, WB Yeats, WH Auden, Dylan Thomas, Milton, John Donne, William Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Kipling, Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, Philip Larkin, the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, and the late poet laureates John Betjeman and Ted Hughes. (Visit the BBC Poetry Season site to read some of their poems.)

But not on the shortlist is the previous poet laureate Andrew Motion.

That's only poetic justice, McGough might say.

He can't forget the former poet laureate did not include him in The Penguin Book of British Contemporary Poetry, published in 1982.

McGough told the Guardian:

When Motion and Morrison edited the Penguin Book of British Poetry, we were totally omitted…Those years when Motion was editor of Poetry Review, and Craig Raine was poetry editor at Faber … I felt we were always in the position of having to defend ourselves. We got cheesed off at being referred to as small-town Mantovanis, or the pop brigade. I suppose because we didn't do English at university, or because the poetry I was writing could be appreciated by my mother or my aunties. It came out of a sort of naivety.

By "we", he meant the Liverpool poets: Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and himself.

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Tuesday, August 18, 2009 By

BBC poetry site polling for Britain’s favourite poet

Carol_ann_duffy_bbc_thumb_aug18 Carol Ann Duffy is the poet laureate, but who is Britain's favourite poet? The BBC poetry site is running an online poll which closes on September 1.

Voters can choose from a shortlist of 30 poets selected by a panel of judges. One can vote for

TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Dylan Thomas, WH Auden, John Donne,  Milton, Blake, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Christina Rossetti, Kipling, Hardy, Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, Betjeman, Larkin,Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Stevie Smith

as well as contemporary poets such as

Simon_armitage_bbc_thumb_aug18 Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney, Roger McGough, Simon Armitage (left), Wendy Cope and Benjamin Zephaniah.

It's interesting Shelley didn't make the shortlist, nor did Matthew Arnold, while Christina Rossetti did.

The winner will be announced on October 8, Britain's National Poetry Day.

Best of all, one can read more than 100 poems on the website, representing all the contenders.

Wendy_cope_bbc_thumb_aug18 I loved three poems I had never read before:  You're Beautiful, by Simon Armitage; Valentine, by Carol Ann Duffy; and Bloody Men, by Wendy Cope (left).

Bloody Men is bloody funny, so I will take the liberty of posting it here:

Bloody men are like bloody buses –
You wait for about a year
And as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear.

You look at them flashing their indicators,
Offering you a ride.
You're trying to read the destinations,
You haven't much time to decide.

If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.
Jump off, and you'll stand there and gaze
While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by
And the minutes, the hours, the days.

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Filed Under: Books Tagged With: , , , , ,
Friday, March 20, 2009 By

Singapore newspapers censor PM’s BBC interview

It’s amusing to see the Singapore newspapers have not run the complete BBC interview with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. The broadsheet Straits Times and the freesheet Today have not published the last question asked in  the interview, which can be heard in a five-and-a-half-minute audio clip on the BBC World Service website.

The interviewer said: “Finally, Prime Minister, I read that you are apparently the highest paid head of government in the world. Your salary is about four or five times what President Obama gets. Are you worth all that money?”

PM Lee laughed and said: “I am not comparing myself and I don’t look at these rankings.We go on a system which is open, honest, transparent – what is the job worth, what is the quality of the person whom you want. We need the best people for the job and these are jobs where you make decisions which are worth billions of dollars. And you cannot do that if you are pretending and you just say, ‘Well, we are all in it for the love of King and Country’. We want it to be honest, we want people not to come in for the money. But at the same time the sacrifice cannot be too great. And at times like these, you want the best possible government you can have.”

Why on earth did the Straits Times and Today censor the Prime Minister’s interview?

The Prime Minister did not hesitate to answer the question.

So why did the Singapore newspapers  not run the question and the answer?

It looks silly because people visiting the BBC World Service website are likely to come across the interview and discover that the Singapore media are still censoring the news.

Filed Under: Media, Singapore Tagged With: , , , , , ,
Sunday, March 1, 2009 By

U2 and the Beatles

Thanks to YouTube, anyone around the world can watch videos of this U2 concert on top of the BBC’s Broadcasting House on February 27.

A crowd of around 5,000 people gathered to watch the Irish four-piece as they played the songs Beautiful Day and Vertigo, reported the Telegraph.

They also aired Get On Your Boots, the first single from their forthcoming album No Line On The Horizon, and another new track called Magnificent.

The 20-minute gig was reminiscent of the Beatles' famous concert on the roof of Apple HQ on London's Saville Row in January 1969.

“The Beatles started it all with their rooftop gig at Apple in 1969, famously halted by over zealous London constabulary,” recalled Neil McCormick in the Telegraph. “These days the police are to be found putting up crash barriers and redirecting the traffic. Presumably if they objected to this use of their resources, Bono would just call the mayor. Or the prime minister.”

As an old Beatles fan, I would say the Beatles were definitely better. And younger too at the time. They certainly rocked, as this clip shows.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , , , ,
Sunday, November 23, 2008 By

David Mamet on poetry, music and free speech

David_mamet_bbc_alistair_cooke
“Someone said that TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alred Prufrock is not unlike a rap song. They miss the point. It is a rap song. It’s just not a very good one,” says playwright and film director David Mamet, quoting from TS Eliot’s poem:

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

Mamet says: “Our great American poets are not Longfellow and Robert Frost, our great American poets are Hank Williams and Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly), not our literati but our songwriters.”

Music and poetry lovers will enjoy listening to David Mamet giving the Alistair Cooke Memorial Lecture at Santa Monica on the BBC World Service. Longtime BBC listeners will remember the late Alistair Cooke, who broadcast his famous Letters from America on the BBC.

Fittingly, Mamet talks about language and culture, exploring poetry and American popular music.

And he ends by defending freedom of expression.

This is not just a speech but an essay which can be compared with Orwell’s writings on language and politics and culture.

Unfortunately, the BBC does not provide a transcript of the speech. But please click on the link and listen to the audio.

“Language, it seems to me, always has only two uses,” says Mamet, “poetry, which is an attempt to understand, and obfuscation.”

“A play is only a long, carefully structured poem,” he adds.

The magnificence of the American language like that of the Hebrew and the Bible is that it is punchy and to the point, he says.

“The chain gang chants, the jailhouse roasts, the slave songs and the blues… make up the majority of what is known around the world as the American idiom.”

“The great American writers have not been intellectuals,”  he says, “the people who shaped the language were the songwriters… They write because they got the blues.”

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Filed Under: Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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