Room Service

I've generally never been much of a room service guy. But then I've also never been much of a hotel guy. I've been living in a hotel for a little over a week now. You'd think that this would be great, and to some extent, it is.

But here are some of the drawbacks. Ever notice that hotels have far fewer channels than real cable stations? Why is that? Fine, American hotels might promote pay per view (wink, wink), but puritan India doesn't have those options (heck, kissing is still seen as a no-no in videos, even if any amount of gyration is acceptable).

I have maybe 30 channels, but I could expect 80-90 channels or more if I had my own cable.

So you'd kinda expect, being in India, at a ritzy hotel, that they would show some channels unadultered, e.g., the CNN that's found in the US, the ESPN that's found in the US.

Nope, it's the one for India. That means, ESPN India has its own sports announcers. As they speak mostly in Hindi, I usually don't follow. Frankly, they don't look like they're saying "Booyah" or "Back, back, back, back--it's out of here".

I'll discuss how India has taken Western entertainment and dubbed much of it in Hindi later on.

For now, I want to talk about news on TV. It's true, American news is no great shakes, at least on television. Newspapers and magazines are the way to go. Network news is totally silly, barely having time to cover anything, and feeling the pressure to give "news" to the common man.

But it's even worse in India. You can get some news, but it feels like people reading press releases, as if any in-depth political analysis was taboo. And this is odd, because Indians, at least, educated Indians do seem opinionated about politics in India, yet, this never seems to come across.

The newspapers can be pretty bad, especially because of their flowery prose. While I was sitting at the airport last night, trying to make time pass, I was reading the paper (it seems, I can't find any in Hindi, good for me). Many articles barely count as news. The most interesting had to do with Scott Adams recovering from some loss of voice or something?

There was, what appeared to be a hard hitting article on murders that occurred about a hundred miles from Mumbai, where some woman and her child were paraded naked and killed, and two other brothers also killed by an angry mob, and yet, it seems superficially investigated, as if they had only one hour to talk to everyone before writing an article.

Then, a pretty awful opinion article of Brangelina (yes, even they use the term) being rude in India. Surprise, there. The author, needless to say, was indignant at their bad behavior. Cricket players show more class, she claimed.

And it goes on and on.

But this is about room service. So, I've been getting food in my room a fair bit. Partly because I can get smaller dishes. Partly because I don't have to dress up and to the restaurant. Sometimes I wish I had more adventure to find places to eat, but without reliable transportation, and without anyone to eat with, being in my room is fine.

I will say that five star hotels don't have a ton of amenities, and their hours are eh. For example, lunch starts at 12:30. Great, but what if I want lunch at 10? Breakfast starts at 7, but in the US, people want it even earlier. At least, dinners are available in the hotel til 11:30 at night.

I'm not sure what I want in a hotel. Certainly, a lot more channels would be good. I've been watching some History channel about Casanova, and one about Billie Jean King against Bobby Riggs. The guy who they got to play Riggs is great. I may not know how Riggs was in real life, but this guy captured his looks and demeanor as one might imagine. Ah, it's the amazing Ron Silver, who also did a great Deshowitz in Reversal of Fortune.

For anyone who knows tennis, and I mean, really, tennis history, this is a reasonably good, reasonably bad movie. It has many characters that mainly fans would know, such as Ted Tinling, the gay dressmaker who designed dresses for many a female star, and also longtime friend of tennis (before he passed away a few years back) and in a mostly non-speaking role, Dennis Van der Meer, who I believe got famous for coaching Billie Jean to a win (perhaps receiving too much credit for that).

The film tries to capture to look/feel of the 70s. The History Channel was showing this, even though it's five years old. Strange I had never heard of it.

Oh yeah, puritanical television. I think they must censor any flesh on movies. Fine, I'm not really in India to get all that, but it's interesting that US hotels want people to fall to their baser inclinations, while Indian television tries to avoid showing this stuff.

Heck, there's not even bad language. I think.

What I should really talk about, but maybe I'll postpone this to another post, is music videos.

Here's a teaser.

Everyone agrees, bizarre behavior aside, that Michael Jackson was an influential singer. But more than that, he became highly influential in MTV. Think about this. Jackson literally invented the dance video, which was elaborated by his sister Janet, and by others like Paula Abdul.

MTV discovered that people wouldn't watch videos, no matter how innovative, or how fun. Thus, they went to reality TV shows and games shows, until pretty soon, videos were hardly ever shown.

But there is one place where the music video is likely to flourish.

India.

In a society where it's obligatory to have a song and dance in any pop film, the music video seems to have a particularly good chance of doing well. Indeed, a music video becomes a small film, hitting only the dancing and singing.

Until then...adieu.

Or namaste.