I’m not an Indian film buff, so have no idea which movies these clips were taken from, but they’re both soooo funny!!

note: WordPress was mangling the embed code, so use these links to view the videos on YouTube until I figure it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Pjo0WjBcs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlZFMnX0xxA

I watched the Leo DiCaprio movie, Blood Diamonds, last night and it shed some light on what was happening in Sierra Leone a few years ago. I was pretty horrified. There was a scene where they were axing off people’s hands and arms — the choice was left to the victim, “short sleeves or long sleeves” meaning above the wrist or above the elbow. This was being done so that people couldn’t vote — “The future is in your hands… no more hands, no more future.”

I came across an article today at the NY Times web site that seems to continue from where Blood Diamonds left off. In a nutshell, it’s basically saying that things aren’t a whole lot better after it became difficult to sell conflict diamonds to the west.

An international regulatory system created after the war has prevented diamonds from fueling conflicts and financing terrorist networks. Even so, diamond mining in Sierra Leone remains a grim business that brings the government far too little revenue to right the devastated country, yet feeds off the desperation of some of the world’s poorest people.

“The process is more to sanitize the industry from the market side rather than the supply side,” said John Kanu, a policy adviser to the Integrated Diamond Management Program, a United States-backed effort to improve the government’s handling of diamond money. “To make it so people could go to buy a diamond ring and to say, ‘Yes, because of this system, there are no longer any blood diamonds. So my love, and my conscience, can sleep easily.’

It’s a pretty sad situation for a country that’s selling something that is prized in most parts of the world.

Sitting in Karachi, surrounded by cricket buffs, my ignorance about the sport often makes me feel a little awkward. But I have to admit that Bob Woolmer’s death has suddenly got me curious about the sport. Given how regularly illegal things happen over here and get passed off as normal (or ignored), my first assumption when I heard about the death on Geo News was that someone was behind it, rather than it being something that just happened naturally.

Now, to be honest, that kind of cynical thinking isn’t something that I’m exclusively prone to. We’re a nation of doubters who are suckers for conspiracy theories, because there’s so much more here, than elsewhere, that isn’t on the level.

To read that his death is being stated as caused by strangulation doesn’t at all seem to surprise me in the “Oh my God” sense, but more in the, “Aha, I was right!” way!

You just have to figure that some overzealous fan or player decided that it was the coach’s fault that the team played like shit and lost twice in two matches. There’s even talk of match-fixing (again) being involved. I can hear the speech right now, “Let’s lose to the Irish today guys, because it’ll be fun to make all those gamblers drop a bunch of money.”