Bloggers discuss how the celebration passed. They were so widely advertised and loads of public finance was spent on the tenth anniversary of the capital, that most of the citizens - and bloggers - sighed with relieve when the whole fuss was over. A big noise was caused by a publicized Concept of celebration, adopted by the city administration, which included a strange passage saying that one of the goals of the whole festivities is “sacralization of Astana” - and a week before the Day X, the parliament made July 6th a state holiday!

Stupid holiday. Mobile networks are overloaded, people don't work, traffic jams are all over the city, rattling fireworks at 11 p.m., crowds of drunk people, crazed policemen, beggars are convoyed out of the public view. A feast in time of plague…

mymiyden from Astana is complaining [rus]. And here is the video of the fireworks from banzay-kz. Geomart watched the festival on TV, and has sad feelings as well [rus]:

How much money was spent on this filth. Organizers had to make everything properly. It's a shame, many artists [who came to perform on the celebration's concerts] now look so cheap.

ia-robot comments on Whitney Houston's performance in Astana and on the level of organization [rus]:

I felt so bad about her, she was obviously mad about how it was set up. She was wearing a beatiful dress and high heels, almost horror-stricken balancing on the mirror-like slippery stage. The microphone was buzzing… And when [Russian singer] Anita Tsoi was on the stage, the electricity blacked out! Instead of making series of lame concerts, they should have done one, but properly.

Cross-posted on neweurasia

Vinodh, one of the core members, just can’t disengage himself from this passion he shares with his bunch.
He writes:

“Come weekends and we’re at our efficient best in rehearsals. Memorizing dialogues, working out the sound ideas, imagining our costumes, and rehearsing our scenes. Pages and pages of lines to memorize in the weekends for the folks who type lines and lines of codes during weekdays. Coffee and colas keep us awake between shots. Playing pranks on each other keeps us all charged up, after all we are in the serious business of making people laugh.”

The countdown for their next production “Once upon a time in Arabia” has begun and they are working overtime for this magical journey to be staged on July 26 and 27, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. If you happen to be in Chennai, if you’d like to catch the show you can get your tickets at ticketsnew.

Deepa, from Bangalore is calling the recent play she watched, ‘The women in me’, as ‘An intense and absorbing play’. The play is about a man whose wife is dead and he is deeply troubled by that and has lost his emotional balance. Based on the concept - ‘There is a woman in every man and vice versa'. Reviewing the play on Metblogs, Deepa is astounded by the use of Shadow to portray a particular scene and the rapid-fire delivery of dialogue in following sequences.

“The play disturbed me and made me think hard; I am very impressed that such a young man is able to delve so deeply into the male and female psyche and bring out the nuances of how men do not even understand when they are raping their own wives…”

Tanya Behera reviews a play titled ‘Lucknow 76′ organized by Alliance Française de Bangalore, at her blog Remainconnected.

“The plot of the play was based on politics and history, shifting between two time frames of 1876 and 1976 looking at Lucknow city through the eyes of the common man. 1876 was a milestone for the Britishers, as that was the year, when Queen Victoria took over the command from the East India Company. 1976 was also significant in history because during that time, the once proud democracy, India was under the clutches of tin pot dictator, Indira Gandhi who had declared a state of Emergency as the Prime Minister of the nation.”

She goes on to give more information on why the play was named after ‘Lucknow’, not ‘Delhi’, ‘Bombay’ or ‘Calcutta’.

“But then why ‘Lucknow' and why not ‘Delhi' or ‘Bombay' or ‘Calcutta' or ‘Madras' or ‘Bangalore'? Because the director and playwright of the play, Abhishek Majumdar (AM) had spent some part of his childhood in this city. During AM's visits to Lucknow, his grand uncle, a scholar of history and geology had inundated his mind with tales and chronicles about the city from an old bungalow.”

Geetali Tare, writing for HimVani under the post ‘The Shimla tragedy: Missing theatre, missing drama’ wants the following for Shimla:

Unlike films, plays are not a passive, one-way, pre-packaged experience. In plays, as in films, there are rehearsals. But once the show gets going, a theatre artiste does not have the opportunity to give another ‘take’ – to make another attempt at mouthing a dialogue: what has been said, has been said. Audience reactions affect acting as it happens. The warmth in the tone of a speaker travels directly to the viewer; a glimmer of a tear in the performer’s eye immediately causes the spectator to respond. A skilled actor, through the blend of voice, tone, gestures and outfits succeeds in creating a world and transporting his audience to it. The actor’s energy expands and fills up the space which is also occupied by the viewer; the energy flows from one to the other. The viewer feels the despair of Mahatma Gandhi at Pyarelal’s delinquency; he feels Zulfi’s longing for Amrita; he laughs with Dhanjisha Batliwala & quibbles with Madhukar Kulkarni.
Kay Kay, Naseruddin Shah, Dinesh Thakur, Aul Kulkarni, Shabana Azmi, Boman Irani, Mehrbanoo Mody Kotwal, Rahul Da Cunha, Feroze Khan, Sanjana Kapoor, Shernaaz Patel, Rajit Kapoor, Jayati Bhatia: they allow you to enter their world and experience, in the span of two hours, many highs and lows, rapture and anguish, a whole world of moods and happenings.
I want this in Shimla. I want this for Shimla.

The Mumbai Theatre Guide is a dedicated site for reviews and different theatre related events happening in the city of Mumbai.

Links to this post were contributed by Ramya & Sandhya.

Malath sets the scene:

Ali Al Mulla too is astonished at the popularity of Noor:

Then Malath looks at the reasons for the drama's appeal:

But her own interest in it is waning:

At the end of her post Malath asks:

This is not the first outbreak of technophobia in Macedonia (MKD). Traditional media have been portraying computer geeks as a threat in the past on many occasions. A case in point was the 2002 affair when many citizens complained about inflated phone bills, and titles such as “Citizens ripped off by computer geeks' hot line talks” (MKD) blamed some generalized hackers, “burying” the possibility for mishap by the Telecom deep in the bowels of the text.

The latest technophobic trend includes articles with almost identical structure. They first advocate the thesis that gaming is a waste of youth's time, making them antisocial and aggressive, supported by anonymous statements by gamers or internet café owners, as well as psychologists or sociologists who confirm the thesis, even though they haven't actually made any empirical research about the issue. Use of stigmatizing terminology “suitable” for the demonized, marginalized groups in such articles is particularly worrisome.

For instance, the article “They leave their girlfriends and jobs to play” (MKD) equates gaming with “addiction” leading to “abandoned workplaces; stalled or ruined studies, and broken loves.” The most alarming thesis is that “violent games cause aggression,” for it portrays gamers as potential murderers who could snap at any time.

A similar story titled “Internet cafes are full of gamers” (MKD) incited numerous reactions on the Macedonian web, especially on the link sharing service Kajmak.ot (MKD). The article quotes a sociologist who seems to forget that children used to play “shoot them up” games such as “cowboys and Indians” or World War II-inspired “partisans and Germans” way before computer games were invented:

Experts warn that such games are dangerous. The aggression in front of the computer continues in the games outside the internet cafes, because when they exit into the real world, they are incapable of communicating in any other way.

“I had an opportunity to observe several internet cafes and a group of children who spent a lot of time there. They constantly played war games. They got so carried away, they even screamed, they were so immersed,” stated university professor Ilija Acevski.

“At that time I asked myself what the connection with reality was, when they faced real life after that. Will there be negative consequences? Of course!” said Acevski.

Placing a comment after the article on the A1 website, Darko Buldioski, one of the authors of the Komunikacii blog, wrote (MKD):

I still don't understand how the same old stories get repeated without any effort to dig a little deeper.

Such observations by this expert do not make him an expert. He should make his views public after conducting a scientific research on the subject, not an estimate at a glance.

In stories of this type, journalists continuously claim that “scientific research done worldwide justifies the fact that this way of communication represents addiction, an addiction which is the same as all types of vices.” Where are these scientific researches, why don't you show them to us…

Damjan Arsovski, the editor of the portal IT.com.mk, also reacted by vivisecting the news with responses paragraph-by-paragraph in his article “Macedonian media are full of stupidities” (MKD):

“To spend 5, 6 or more hours per day on the computer playing games or surfing the net, to live in cyberspace in a spaceless time.” (sic)
- I spend 5-6 hours per day on the internet every day, and in this “unreal” world I communicate with my peers, with businesspeople, receive information from all over the world, work on my education…

But even he could not muster a comment to the qualification from the conclusion of the article:

Gamers are regular people. They are children, fathers, husbands, brothers, but behind the computer screens they have another face–to use geek speak–they most often become cyber beasts.

FOSS advocate Arangel Angov posted a link to a scan of similarly absurd article from an old American tabloid as his reaction.

Treating this subject in such a way can be correlated with the lack of will to explore the underlying reasons for the increasing number of crimes, which is one of the dominant topics in the Macedonian media. Experts do not even attempt to explain the psychological or sociological motives affecting the perpetrators of the violent incidents during the parliamentary elections in June. It seems it is far easier to attack the gamers, even though so far no gamer has been pointed out as perpetrator of an incident involving violence.

However, it must be noted that some positive portraits of gamers have appeared in the same media outlets in the past, but only in the context of participation of teams from Macedonia in world cybersports championships (MKD).

Blog Politique au Senegal thinks Dia's candidacy is hardly serious [Fr]…

…il ne cite personne, ne se fâche avec personne, ne se positionne par rapport à rien et n'a pas l'imagination débordante vu le programme qu'il se fixe.

…but neither is politics in Senegal!

Blog Politique au Senegal posts this cartoon, which reads: “When politicians are buffoons, it's only natural that entertainers become involved in politics.”

Of course, the phenomenon of entertainers, actors, rock stars, footballers, getting involved in politics is hardly unique to Senegal.  Chrisou, a reader, comments:

Je ne suis pas sénégalais… mais l'affiche et le slogan me plaisent beaucoup! On pourrait même l'adopter dans pas mal de pays…

There's not a lot about Demba Dia online, but here is one of his music videos on YouTube, posted by a member who calls Dia “the King of Mbalakh Rock.”