Mind the gap

The camellia hedge out the back has been declared a failure. Most of it has grown up nicely: tall, bushy, and with pretty white flowers. But there are rather big gaps. For some reason we can't get parts of it to grow up properly and provide the privacy screen both we and the neighbours were wanting. I blame the rock platform on which the house and garden sit. It makes for a very stable house foundation, but the topsoil layer is thin - in some spots too thin for much to grow.

So what to do? Here I am trying for size a fan trellis thing. Maybe the gaps can be bridged with appropriate jasmines or other climbers. Maybe they won't then get too out of control and strangle the camellias or annoy the neighbours.

The back courtyard is looking rather good these days, mind you. That one's a definite success story.

N

Homework

This week's Hindi homework was to go and see a Hindi movie. A nice change from trying to memorise the alphabet and struggling with word lists.

As it happened, the latest Bollywood blockbuster opened this week in Hornsby.

The movie was called, 'My Name is Khan' and frankly, it's hard to know what to make of it.

The main character, as well as the story, is very much like Rain Man, Forest Gump and Chauncey Gardiner (Being there) all rolled into one.

Our hero (played by ShahRukh Khan, who turns up in almost every Bollywood movie we see) has a disability. Aspergers Syndrome. Yet, despite this and his many idiosyncracies - "My name is Khhhan...from the epiglotis" - he makes a success of his life in America, even managing to fall in love and get married to an amazingly beautiful hairdresser (Kajol Devgan).

No Bollywood movie is complete without a wedding, and this is where you'd expect the movie to end. However, in this case it was only the beginning.

From this point on our hero, a Muslim, is thrust onto the world stage, haplessly caught up in the events of 9/11, heroically rescuing hurricane victims in Georgia and finally, after a very long quest, fulfils his ambition of meeting the President himself. "My name is Khan", he tells a very un-Obama like President, "and I'm not a terrorist". And so this movie epic finally ends.

F

(Images courtesy My Name is Khan official website/Flickr.com)

Over fifties zone

If you've ever wondered where Sydney suburbanites go for a good night out, you'll find that all roads lead to the local RSL club. It didn't take us long to discover that RSL ('rissole') clubs hold the monopoly on entertainment out here in the 'burbs. Cool and trendy they're not (except Castle Hill, but that's another story). Despite our inner objections we must confess our wallets hold little plastic cards that allow us into at least five such places.

Pokie palaces really, where inexpensive food and drink, entertainment and the chance at the jackpot lure the punters in, and others, like ourselves, who don't object to a simple meal in a clean, safe environment. As well as the RSLs (originally for returned servicemen), there are the Rugby Leagues clubs, the sports clubs, the tennis and bowling clubs - they're all variations on a theme. In many cases these licensed clubs don't have much to do with their nominal raison d'etre.

There's a dark side to this story. The clubs have special favourable tax treatment because of the claimed community benefits they produce. Along with the huge revenues generated from the poker machines, largely fuelled by a pool of less well off gamblaholic customers, the clubs have grown rich and politically powerful. They have often bullied the state government and seemed to dictate licensing and gambling policies. The superb facilities we enjoy come at a cost to some.

Under the Licensed Clubs Act, visitors can sign themselves in if they live more than 5km away (lots of strange rules, and the dress codes can be stranger), so if you're visiting NSW, don't forget to research the 'pokie capital of the world' while you're here.

F & N

Learning Hindi

Who's idea was this one? We seem to have enrolled for another evening course at the Macquarie Community College, and this time it's Hindi.

Teacher Savita apparently thinks that after 16 hours of this we'll know how to speak, write, do sentences and grammar, hold conversations, and be conversant with customs and culture. Gosh.

Here I am trying to get my mouth around the sounds, and my mind around the Devanagari script, which the book says is quite an easy one. As it says, there are no capital letters and you go from left to right, but there are some devilish tricks about half letters, inherent vowels, and little squiggly bits that pop up in funny places.

Wish us luck!

N

It's all go at Research Central

We closed down for a few days over Christmas and New Year. Then I came back for my favourite week of the year (all by myself, plenty of useful work to do, no distractions). Now that Australia Day has been and gone we're, like most of working Australia, pretty well back to normal.

Not that we're all that normal at the best of times. We're a nice little workplace though. There are only five of us, we choose our own hours and pace, and we've forsaken the lure of high office, spectacular reward, and the fame and glory normally associated with life in the ink and printing industries. (Not!)

Here's my colleague Paul, demonstrating his unique skills with the ink band. You should see me juggling my Pruefbau printability tester and my Thwing-Albert inkometer!

N

Jai Ho!

He's an Indian superstar, he's been called the Mozart of Madras and the Sachin Tendulkar of music, and on Saturday he arrived in Parramatta in spectacular Bollywood style.

A R Rahman is a singer, composer, choreographer, and musician who's a master of inumerable instruments. He's best known, in this country at least, for winning two Oscars for the movie Slumdog Millionaire.

We thought he and his show were sensational. Think Michael Jackson, Robbie Williams, Madonna or Pink Floyd and you have some inkling of the scale, showmanship and professionalism.

Along with 70,000 others, we turned up in Parramatta Park for the free concert he had instigated, in partnership with the Sydney Festival and the state government. He called it the Indo-Australian Peace Concert as a way of smoothing tensions between expatriate Indian students and the local community.

In recent months there have been a number of nasty incidents where Indian students have been subjected to violent assaults and this has become a massive issue in the Indian media. It has been very contentious here as to whether these were really racist attacks, or just an unfortunate aspect of life late at night in Australian cities, with Indian students particularly likely to be working in 24 hour convenience stores and fast food outlets. This debate was overtaken when the Indian media went into hysterical hyperdrive, leading to all kinds of political and diplomatic toing-and-froing. Enrolments at our tertiary education institutions were plummeting, and their business is worth billions, after all.

All this was put aside when the singing and dancing started. The majority of the audience was young and Indian and seemed very familiar with his music, singing along to the many hits and dancing happily. We loved it all and even bought the T-shirt. 'Jai Ho' it said, which means "victory to you".

Jai Ho is also the theme song to Slumdog Millionaire. You'll remember the very last scene in the movie had hordes of people dancing on the railway platform. While Parramatta Park was not a railway platform, the venue in some ways replicated the scene, being a long stretch of lawn with the stage 500 metres in front of us. When the joyous strains of Jai Ho rang out as the inevitable finale to the concert, we too were on our feet. Accompanying fireworks completed the event.

Time to put on the T-shirt. Not made in India, not made in China, but would you believe, made in Haiti! We've never seen anything with a 'made in Haiti' label before and so it seemed like an extraordinary coincidence in the week of the massive Haiti earthquake, with the unimaginable death and destruction it had caused. It was very sobering and somehow put all these other problems in perspective.

F & N

On the way to the festival....

Sydney Festival Opening Night holds a lot of promise and each year we mean to join the throng of festival-goers. It's arranged to give us all a free taste of the big list of fabulous local and international cultural treats in store for the next few weeks. Somehow though we never got round to it - or at least we haven't for a few years now.

This year we actually got to the event, big crowds, several concert venues, party atmosphere and all, but along the way we had some colourful distractions.

For instance the giant thought bubble that almost consumed Fenella (see picture). The thought it clearly seemed to be articulating to its hungry victim was 'EAT STEAK'. So being famished we followed the telepathic instructions and did so. It was a rather chewy steak but it was cheap, so we were happy. And it was hot, so appropriate refreshments were imbibed.

By the time we got to the first of the concerts it was almost time to go home. Which was OK, because it was all a bit like hard work, with the big crowds and the small patches of grass available for seating. So we headed off home again. Maybe next year will be our festival year.

N & F