Should you waste your time and money on the movie Anonymous?

Does it take a university education to be a great writer?

If yes, then we should cross out quite a few names from our lists, starting with Homer and going onto Shelley, Keats, Austen, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Eliot (G), Orwell and on and on.  Interestingly, Dan Brown, Danielle Steele and Stephanie Meyer all went to prestigious posh universities.

This brings us to the elephant in the living room, the one name that I have not included in the list. Did the Bard really write the thirty-eight plays that he is credited for? Or was Shakespeare merely a front man for other men of higher birth- such as Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford?

So, a man from a humble background and no posh education could not have written about foreign places and historical events. Only an aristocrat, a man of noble birth and education, could have written something as profound as “… the better part of valor is discretion.” It takes an aristo to understand that the plebs of London would only be swayed through bawdy jokes such as : “By my life, this is my lady’s hand: these be her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s; and thus makes she her great P’s.”

Yes, you have to be quite the cunt to miss the obvious, eh, you Shakespeare lovers?

Who among us would ever disagree that the Romantic poets wrote their own (profound albeit self-indulgent) verses? Would anyone think that Elizabeth Bennet had stolen her wits and disposition from Lady Catherine De Burgh? Would an aristocrat lady write the words of anguish: “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?” Would any aristocrat be able to depict the horrors of the poor house in Victorian England?

So why do we keep coming back to this absurd notion that Shakespeare did not write his plays?

We know that he was not an obscure behind-the-scenes figure. He was always credited as the author on stage. He had enjoyed friendships of Ben Jonson and quite possibly Christopher Marlowe- expert playwrights with substantive contribution to Literature themselves. Do you think that these gentlemen of immense ego would have tolerated as a friend someone who had no literary merit and yet claimed such a thing?

A man of humble birth from Stratford, having been married at the age of eighteen, went to London to earn a living. He became an actor and stage manager and began writing his own plays. They were designed to be crowd pleasers- full of dirty jokes and royalty and the most profound of human emotions: love, hate, jealousy and ambition. He made a fortune as a writer of these tales and then went home to enjoy the twilight years of his life in company of his family.

But this story is not enough for those who think that only rich people can accomplish great things. According to these people, Steve Jobs would have been the bastard child of a Rockefeller or a Kennedy. Einstein was probably stealing the work of a Rothschild.

Why not make a movie about those two?

Gilad Shalit’s Return Home

A rare thing happened today: celebration at both Gaza and West Bank and in Israel itself. Sgt. Gilad Shalit has been released after five years in Hamas captivity. This release was brought about after Israel agreed to release over one thousand members of Hamas. Palestinians are cheering at having their loved ones back and the whole of Israel is celebrating the return of their son.

Good news all around, you could say. Hardly.

First of all, the prisoners released under the agreement have all been convicted of violent crimes and attempts at acts of terrorism.  Israel just released a group of people who have gone the extra mile in proving their dedication to its destruction.  In terms of security risk alone this may have been an unacceptable price to pay.

However, the values of the Israeli society, particularly that of its military, are to be considered. No soldier is to be left behind in the field and Israelis would rather have their boy soldier back and face the consequences. The positive optimism of this act may have brought the whole country together.

Secondly, the political ramifications on both sides are going to be formidable. The release of the long held captive has bolstered the position and popularity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His hard line stances on the peace process and continuous expansion of the settlements have always been a major obstacle to the peace process. His Likud Party has allied itself with Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party and together they have taken an uncompromising stand on expanding the settlements on the Occupied Territories. The net result of the prisoner swap may be that the hardliners in Israel gain more political currency.

There is a glimmer of hope in this regard, though. Mr. Netanyahu had always been dismissive of negotiating with the Palestinian Authority. However, his willingness to engage with and pay the price asked by Hamas, the most hardline Palestinian political group is itself a positive sign. If he is willing to incur so much cost in negotiating with Hamas, he may be willing to do business with the PA after all. A surge in popularity may give him the wiggle room to distance himself from Lieberman and other hardliners.

The winner of the situation is clearly Hamas. They have demonstrated that their policy of non-stop violence against Israel has brought more results than the non-violent and cooperative policy of the PLO. They have reason to celebrate today because they have handed their rivals, the Fatah, a crushing political defeat (and this time they did not have to throw them off rooftops).  President Mahmoud Abbas was forced to have the West Bank leader of Hamas, Sheikh Hassan Yousef stand next to him during his speech welcoming back the prisoners. The next election of the Palestinian Authority may not bode well for the peace camp in both Palestine and Israel.

The greatest cause for worry is the small terrorist groups which are being tolerated by Hamas in Gaza. They have already vowed to make more attempts at kidnapping Israeli soldiers. They may be happy in Israel today but by accepting the terms of Hamas, they may have opened a whole new can of worms.

The frail and malnourished condition of Sgt. Shalit may give us a lot of pause as to how Hamas treats its prisoners. In the five years of his captivity, he was not allowed a single visit from the Red Cross- a severe breach of the human rights conventions as well as Geneva conventions. Hamas’ treatment of Palestinian prisoners who are political dissenters is even worse. Yet they may stand to gain the most from these circumstances.

Celebrate if you like, for today has been a rare good day for both sides. But don’t hold your breath for the peace process.

On Occupy Wall Street

It has always cheered me up to note that Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man was written as a direct response to Edmund Burke's derisive criticism of the French Revolution. Burke's reference to the people's revolt in Paris as the 'swinish multitude' was typical of the contempt felt by the ruling class towards the feelings of the poor on whose back they built their fortunes. Paine's passionate defense of the Revolution was the beginning of the intellectual fight back against the reactionary old order.

One could say that the spirit of Burke lives on, especially in the conservative media and its coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The scribes of right-tilting newspapers, magazines and cable TV stations poured scorn over the protesters and questioned their motivations, intentions and even rolled out the old chestnut of questioning their patriotism.

Political classes can get complacent and comfortable and often need a short sharp reminder of who and where their responsibilities lie. However, that is not to say that any political action in protest of the status quo is acceptable.

The movement that calls itself Occupy Wall Street has decided to stage a continuous protest at the Zucotti Park in New York City. They are calling for punitive measures towards the corporations and banks as a response to the downturn of the economy. The protesters are mostly college students, young graduates who are yet to find employment and professional political provocateurs. They are calling for all debt to be forgiven and higher taxes on the wealthy.

However, one thing that stands out to anyone who observes the protests is that they are incoherent and ill informed. The protesters are angry about the prospect of unemployment and a lowering of standards of living- a sentiment well justified given the circumstances. But they demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of how the economy works.

Their demands are fantastic and impractical: a 99% tax on the billionaires and a total debt forgiveness may sound nice but the consequences would result in the destruction of the global financial system and the subsequent destruction of the world economy. They are protesting but not getting involved with the political process that could bring about real and substantive change.

They say they want change but what they want is their life back. Given a choice between a fundamental political change or a well paid job, they would settle for the latter. They are riling against corporations but are happy to subscribe to technology developed by Apple or AT&T.

The overall mood of this protest is less of anger and more of petulance: a vague sense of being cheated out of the American dream and a feeling of entitlement sans the accompanying responsibility.

We have seen this before: barely had our 44^th President taken the reins of the government did the right wing began the Tea Party movement- a political storm based on the ideas to be found on the right side of Genghis Khan. The 2010 election was a vindication of the idea that if you yell loudly enough, you may get your way with the politicians too spineless to stand up to the political equivalent of bat-shit crazy.

The political left has chosen to imitate the success of the extremists on the right by launching their own version of extremism. Occupy Wall Street is clearly a mirror image of the gun toting, costumed hicks of last year, only with a more festive mood, better songs and topless dancers (an improvement in my opinion). The tea party was the visible reminder of a new political maxim of America: all politics is yokel. The political left is following it up with a aphorism of their own: all politics is petulant.

Star Talk Radio Show hosted by Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson

If you are into geek fest then you must never miss this: a radio show hosted by the Great Neil himself!

Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium is the host of Star Talk Radio Show. Astrophysicist in da house, peeps!

Okay, may be I am going a little hyped up about my favorite physicist hosting a radio show about the universe but what do you expect. Nerd? C'est moi!

Dr Tyson hosts this radio show on Sunday evenings at 6 pm and it is broadcast over all the major cities (I'll list the stations at the end of the post). He invites interesting people over and has a comedian as a co-host. His guests are usually scientists and they talk a lot about life, the universe and everything!

So what does life, the universe and everything include? (I'll hazard a guess: they do not ask what I six times seven) Well the show is quite topical. On the week of Valentine's Day the topic of discussion was the heart: from Aristotle's mistaken view of the heart to open heart surgery. During Superbowl, the topic was the physics of football.

One of the most entertaining episodes was when John Hodgeman was invited as a guest on the show on February 27. The range of conversation went from the obvious Mac vs PC (this is John Hodgeman after all) to the essential nerdiness of the President to the solution of the Fermi paradox: why aliens are not here yet. Sprinkle in a little bit of robots here and there and talk about Kirk vs Picard and the best way to cook a lobster and you have a memorable show.

During the first season Lawrence Krauss came to the show to talk about the science of Star Trek, sinc e the movie was out. The fact that Trekkies have their own culture that tends to spill over to real life culture and alter it (cell phones and instant soup) in a ways that cannot be ignored. The overall cultural aspect of the Star Trek influence is that it inspired a whole generation of young kids to be scientists and engineers.

Now those of you raising an eyebrow about what the point of the show is about, it is hard to define. All I can say is that this is a freewheeling conversation among very smart people where the range of topics are all over the place. What is so important about the show is that how cool it is to listen to intelligent people talk about really interesting topics.

But mostly, it is a show that is hosted by one of the most charismatic scientists in the world who continues take a huge interest in the universe and shows us why we should all be interested in the universe too.

Star Talk is broadcast over the following cities in these stations:

Boston 104.3 HD3

Seattle 96.5 HD3

Detroit 104.3 HD3

Pittsburgh 100.7 HD3

Pittsburgh 107.9 HD3

New York

AM 970 The Apple

Sundays, 6 PM Eastern

Los Angeles

KTLK AM 1150, ClearChannel

Sundays, 3 PM Pacific

Washington DC

Big Talker AM 1580

Sundays, 6 PM and Wednesdays, 2 PM Eastern

Neil Gaiman's Inventing Aladdin- A poem about stories

If you have to walk a mile in the shoes of Scheherazade, how would you do?

That is not a simple question to answer. You have to consider the very nature of the instinct of self preservation itself. How does it function and, given what life has to throw at us on a daily basis, why is it consistently successful?

But enough of pointless philosophy. Now answer the question: if you have to tell stories so that your life depended on it, how good a storyteller would you be? I remember my freshman seminar class where the professor asked us the question: if Star Wars is the answer, what is the question? We were studying feminism and science fiction and unfortunately, being eighteen year old noobs and culture Visigoths, none of us were able to answer that question properly. But I digress.

Ultimately, that is what the 1001 nights of tales is all about- the story of a brave and clever girl who is one of the most learned people in her country. She is public spirited enough to try and stop the practice of state sponsored kidnap, rape and beheading of young girls by royal fiat. She offers herself as a sacrifice to take a stab at the problem. But what we soon discover is that personalizing the problem had given her a whole new perspective. She can survive but only if her stories are good enough.

Such is the theme of Neil Gaiman's Inventing Aladdin, a poem about the process of story telling. We meet Scheherazade who , at the end of a story, gets a cue from her sister, Dunyazade for another. So, invention begins inside her head and she starts the story of a layabout lad in China called Aladdin. As the night wears on, she finishes on a cliffhanger: Aladdin trapped inside the underground treasure trove.

Remarkably, what we see is the development of the tale that takes place. This is a key aspect of the writing process itself that manifests within the entire poem: how does Scheherazade come up with her stories?

And one can never forget the fact that the stakes have never been higher. If the stories stop coming or become less interesting, she has to pay for it with her life. So it is literally a matter of life and death- the reward of the storyteller is to be spared each day. Her advances and royalties are to be counted in the currency of hours.

Neil Gaiman often talks about the process of the constructing stories. The creative act is wrapped in mystery to those who are not writers; however, those who are would tell you that it is all about hard work and unpredictable directions of exploration. The whole exercise is demonstrated admirably in the poem. It is a metaphor about metaphors, a story about stories- where they really come from.

Cultivating anticipation and building to an anticlimax are the hallmarks of a good storyteller. Unlike other writers, Scheherazade does not have the option of a rewrite and therefore must rely on putting on a show spontaneously: a veritable exercise in improv that never ends.

What interests me most is the question of psychological impact. One of the most important question about the mythology of comic books in the Twentieth Century was asked by Alan Moore. Moore simply took on the idea of a vigilante in costume (the essence of every super hero comic) and asked: how psychologically warped do you have to be to put on a costume and then put yourself in harm's way only to earn the anonymous praise of an indifferent society?

Similarly, one can ask the question: what would the effect of livingn the edge every night for three years or more would have on you if you had to come up with a gripping bestseller every night? Would that scar you for life, the trauma of anticipation of doom? How would that affect your world view of everything? Would you look at every individual you meet, every object you come across, as a source for stories?

Would that not make you into a vampire of sorts, someone who feeds on the life stories of others only to preserve her own? But then again, authors are by nature emotional vampires who feed on the life energies of other people, twist them into narratives of their own and make them their own stories. And as written word survives the flesh, that in it self is a transformation no less permanent than that of the un-dead.

But ultimately, it is about staying alive by telling stories.

Israbel- A Short History of Vampires

How do you deal with a vampire who has an existential crisis?

Well, if you think that vampires have more in common with Camus and Sartre than Stoker, then certainly. It may be funny at the first glance, but think about it for a moment: you cannot ever venture into sunlight, can feed only on humans and have to see everyone else grow old and die while you remain forever young. But, you can never see your own reflection.

Enough to drive any egocentric creature like a vampire to complete neurosis.

Thus begins the story of Israbel in the BBC Radio 7's A short History of Vampires. Israbel has remained sixteen for a hundred years or more. She has had a full life of seducing the rich and the powerful and then she meets Plinter the painter. He recognizes her for what she is and then she commissions him a painting. Israbel has not been able to see her reflection in over a hundred years.

Plinter became obsessed with her and soon found it impossible to focus on the painting, Israbel has consumed his mind.

Towards the end of the portrait Israbel told him the story of how she had become a vampire. She was a poor girl in the ghettos of pre-revolutionary Paris. She rarely had an opportunity to see her own reflection, mirrors being a rarity among the sans culotte. A man had given her a small mirror to look at herself and then threatened to cut her if she did not give in to him. Afterwards, he wanted to beat her and she ran, through the dark streets of Paris she ran for her life and came across a leopard sized cat. She felt the warmth of the cat and felt content and found herself traveling very fast and in front of the Notre Dame. She walked in to the lair of the leopard where she gave herself to it. Afterwards she woke up in the street, full of vitality and energy and discovered that she had become a vampire. She never saw her sire again.

Israbel was content to leave the portrait unfinished- as a symbol of her own state of being. She offered payment and Plinter asked to be like her. She warned him of the loneliness that comes with it but he insisted and so she agreed.

After the seduction ritual was over, and Israbel had taken his blood and given him hers, Plinter woke up in his own apartment. He was hungry for Israbel's company, eager to learn from her the ways of his new life. Would he ever find fulfillment and happiness now that he had immortal life? Would Israbel finally view him as an equal?

The twist in the end is truly remarkable and emotionally satisfying. I have to be hard pressed to find any short story where I found the ending to be so interesting. I think you should listen to the story- not read it- the radio rendition is truly phenomenal.

BBC Horizon: What Happened Before The Big Bang?

Why is there something and not nothing? Where did all the stuff we see come from? Did the Universe have a beginning? If not, why not?

Such are the questions facing cosmology today. One may say that philosophers have squabbled over these problems for milennia but may be for the first time we are on the cusp of an answer.

About a hundred years ago, Edwin Hubble looked through a telescope and saw galaxies moving away and concluded that the Universe is expanding. In the 1960s, Penzias and Wilson found empirical confirmation of an explosive beginning of the Universe, otherwise known as the Big Bang.

But what we would like to know is: what happened before the Big Bang?

That is a question that has remained unanswerable for many years and often cosmologists would refuse to even consider the possibility that there was any causality event before it. The Big bang was considered to have began from a singularity and it is impossible to predict anything beyond a singularity. What happened before the Big Bang? We do not know and very possibly cannot know.

Until a few years ago, that was the great cosmological consensus.

Until now.

BBC Horizon explors the many new ideas and opinions of a new group of scientists who are challenging the very idea that the Big Bang was any kind of a beginning. Horizon focuses on the Perimeter Institute – a radical group of physicists who are seeking to challenge the idea that the beginning of the Universe was from the Big Bang. In fact their work has gone a long way to make such radical notions into mainstream ideas.

One of the problems involving the Big Bang is the idea of inflation. According to the principles of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, the Big bang could not have turned the universe into what it is today. To solve that problem Andrei Linde came up with the idea of inflation- the rapid expansion of the Universe from a point to a size greater than the solar system within 10^(-34) seconds after the Big Bang.

The physicists of the Perimeter Institute, Neil Turok, Param Singh and Lee Smolin each have their own ideas. Turok thinks that a collision of membranes that each contained three dimensions and were separated by the time dimension gave rise to the Big Bang. Singh's idea is a little more radical: he proposes a Big Bounce- where the beginning of our universe comes from a previously collapsing universe. Nature, Singh argues, is cyclical- the end of one universe creates the beginning of another. Smolin argues that the origins of the universe may have preceded the Big Bang. In fact, he argues that the Universe has evolved into what it is today through natural selection. The universe is born through another universe procreating it.

Radical stuff, but even the once stalwarts of the Singularity idea are beginning to change their minds. Sir Roger Penrose, after a lifetime of asserting that we cannot know beyond the singularity is coming round to the idea that pre-singularity could have some credibility. He argues that since a very large universe would only contain photons and would be mass less, it could technically be equivalent to a very small universe. This could be the beginning of a Big bang for the next universe.

If that is not quirky enough, then we have Laura Mercini-Hougton arguing that the Universe is just one of many parallel universes. Using string theory, she could demonstrate that many inexplicable phenomena can only be explained in conjunction of a multiverse theory. Of all the views put forward, Mercini-Houghton's position is a little stronger since her theory requires very little assumptions.

In England, Bob Nichol is building one the world's largest radio telescopes that would be able to test the inflation theory of Linde. If the distribution of matter within the universe is random, then inflation would be proven correct. On the other hand, in Louisiana, Joe Giaimi is looking for gravity waves that would tell us about the aftermath of the Big Bang. These experimental approaches would shed light on the truth of the theoretical claims made by the cosmologists.

Whatever the truth may be, we can be sure that it would be overwhelmingly stranger and more wonderful than we ever thought possible.

What Happened Before the Big bang is the third episode of the 49^th season of Horizon on the BBC.

Hero Dust- A Short History of Vampires

What if you brewed a tale that involved Lord Byron, the Shelleys, Van Helsing and a hint of Buffy?

Hero Dust, a short story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is the subject of BBC Radio 7's A Short History of Vampires. Presented by Natalie Haynes, it begins by paying an homage to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Haynes talks about the importance of the slayer as well as that of the monster: without both, we do not have a story. From Grendel to Count Dracula, every monster must meet their own Beowulf and Van Helsing if we are to fulfill the tale.

A seeming perfection of the hero slayer figure is Buffy- she is a teenager who has to juggle classes, cheer-leading tryouts, dates and hangouts, all the while carrying out her function as the bane of existence for all the un-dead in Sunnydale, California. We do admire her tenacity- for that is the consistent trait of every hero slayer in the history of the horror adventure genre. But you have to ask, what about other slayers?

Read by David Horowitz, Hero Dust begins with an old man, Bram, walking into a lecture hall in an American college campus. The lecture is on the topic of the hero and the nature of heroism. Bram is not seeking knowledge on the topic, far from it. He is looking for someone- a person who would, given enough encouragement, be willing to believe what he as to tell him or her. Someone who could willingly suspend his disbelief and actually become a hero.

Bram is in the heroism business himself- he had been at it for two hundred years. He began back in 1816 at a villa in Switzerland when he worked as a gardener while observing the residents. The three residents who lived there were also experts on telling tales of the supernatural and the un-dead. They are familiar to us today in other forms: romantic poets and writers of fantastic fiction. But you would not connect them with fighting the un-dead: Lord Byron, Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Bram himself is no less famous: he is after all the famous Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, an old man who is looking for a successor to replace him. In the lecture hall he meets a young lady who reminds him Mary Godwin. He remembers her capacity for darkness and the ability to believe in the nature of evil and her ability to fight it. The young woman, Clarissa, seems interested in talking to him. So he takes her to the university cafe for a chat. Her capacity for understanding the darkness and her thirst for a life of adventure may go a long way to convince him that she may be the one.

Has Van Helsing found a successor after all?

Hero Dust is part two of A Short History of Vampires on BBC Radio 7.

BBC Radio 7's A Short History of Vampires: Dracula's Guest

Now who would have thought Jonathan Harker is a walking target for vampires before he even met the illustrious Count? Would that not bore a little hole into his exuberant rational attitude while he travels towards Transylvania? One would certainly think that his previous experience with the un-dead would give him a little clue as to how to cope with his ordeals.

Well, if you are to take the Coleridge prescription and bear with Mr. Stoker, then you are treated with a great short story about creatures of the night. It is all part of the BBC Radio 7 series A Short History of Vampires. The first episode is taken from a Bram Stoker story Dracula's Guest, published in 1914. The dramatization, like any other Radio 7 production, is just superb. It will keep you fixed to the chair, your ears locked and your blood chilled.

The plot begins with an Englishman, presumably Jonathan Harker, traveling through Munich on his way to Transylvania. He had stopped at Munich and was rather eager for a little sight seeing. The innkeeper had warned him that it was Walpurgisnacht, the night of the witches. He was rather put off by warnings of local superstitions and was eager to prove his English mettle against the ignorance fo the local yokels.

Having stepped out with a guide for the sight seeing, he questioned him extensively about the area. The guide, Johann, was rather reluctant to go to certain places- abandoned villages that had not been lived in for centuries. The Englishman's curiosity was piqued and he asked to see the village. Johann replied that the places were cursed and “unholy”. Dismissing the man's concerns as nonsense and ignoring his pleas to return to Munich before sundown (it was Walpurgisnacht, after all!) the young man carried on exploring and asking questions.

What he gleaned from Johann was the following: long ago, people were buried but sounds were heard from the grave and when they were opened up the men and women were found alive. People fled from the village and moved to other places where the living lived and the dead stayed dead and not un-dead.

The young man wanted to explore the village but Johann insisted that they leave. After a brief argument, Johann left him and took the carriage back to Munich. But as he was leaving, he was accosted by a stranger and the horses took fright at the sight of him and galloped away, with Johann barely able to hold on to them. But as the young man looked for the stranger, he seemed to have disappeared. He continued his trek into the accursed village.

A snowstorm had begun to gather while this was happening all around him. He could hear the cry of the wolves- although this part of Germany was not known as a habitat for the lupine population. He was faced with the problem of worsening weather and lack of shelter and he went seeking shelter among the abandoned village.

He discovered himself in a graveyard and found a large tomb where he came across a beautiful woman, sleeping on a bier. The inscription on the tomb was an enigmatic phrase: the dead travel fast. To his horror, he saw the woman rise from the tomb and he lost consciousness.

If I tell you the rest, then I would give the story away. What would happen to the young man? Would he fall prey to the un-dead? It might be safe to assume that he may be rescued from his plight otherwise he may not be bale to make his journey to Castle Dracula. However, rest assured that the un-dead in the story has nothing to do with the name of the story. Count Dracula is involved in the story in an indirect but significant manner- although he has nothing to do with the un-dead of Walpurgisnacht.

Dracula's Guest is available on BBC 7 as part of the A Short History of Vampires series and was aired on February 13, 2011.

Scrubs- A review

Okay, may be you have had enough of medical shows. ER, House, and (Grrrrrr!!) Grey’s Anatomy, you name it, network TV is swamped with medical shows. Why would one more make any difference in our lives?

Because it is funny, that’s why!

So let us talk about Scrubs, the show that will make you laugh all over. It is a show about doctors and nurses in a wacky, surreal and slapstick environment. There are workplace comedies and then there are workplace comedies. Before the advent of The Office there was Scrubs and believe me, they can go head to head if you compare them. Not that you need to, they are both really entertaining. All I can say is, hilarious!

Scrubs centers around the character of Dr. John “J.D.” Dorian (played by Zach Braff).  He is a new intern at the Sacred Heart hospital along with his friend and roommate Chris Turk. JD is in internal medicine while Turk is in the surgical team- the latter being, in JD’s words, “The Jocks” while the former is the equivalent of the “Chess club”. JD and Turk have a very deep attachment, having been through college and Med school together. The third intern is Elliot Reid on whom JD has a not-so-secret crush. 

JD is your basic wimpy kid who grew up to be a doctor but still remains a wimpy kid at heart. He is easily intimidated but despite his diminutive manner, stands his ground for principle. He is always between a rock and a hard place- between the Chief of Medicine Dr. Bob Kelso and renegade Dr. Perry Cox.  However, JD is not unique in his position, in fact the entire hospital is torn between these two.

Kelso is the administrator, a heartless man who cares more about the patient’s ability to pay rather than their well being. He is very much at home with using his position to intimidate and bully the interns into conforming to the behavior of his liking: taking care of the bottom line. He is abusive, manipulative and sexist- conforming to all possible stereotypes of being the bad guy bureaucrat.

Dr. Cox on the other hand is devoted to his patients. His gruff and apparent indifference towards everyone belies a caring man who has dedicated his entire life for the welfare of the sick. He is very much the antithesis of Kelso but he is not beyond being manipulative. Using dead patients insurance, he would order tests on patients who did not have insurance. However much he may belittle the interns with verbal abuse, he is secretly proud of them. He is your basic macho good guy with a porcupine complex. JD views him with complete admiration and thinks of him as his mentor.

Turk and Elliot, like JD are new interns. Elliot is like JD, she cares about her patients but she is very bad with her bed side manners. She never fit in anywhere in her life so it is little surprise that she finds it difficult to fit into the hospital. She is always stressing about her lack of friends- although she has JD, Turk and Carla to fall back on. Her biggest problem is her foot in the mouth disease. She has the unusual knack of saying absolutely the wrong thing at the wrong place and at the wrong time.

Turk is dating Carla Espinosa, the head nurse. They have a very combustive relationship whereby Turk’s flamboyant personality is equally matched by her no-nonsense attitude. They have been a couple since the beginning of the show.

Then there’s the janitor, who is the bane of existence of JD. They have had an adversarial relationship since the pilot episode which spirals into enmity. The janitor enjoys taunting JD at his most vulnerable moments. JD, having tried to reconcile with the man several times, have given up and just takes his lickings from the man.

All in all the show is very entertaining and though the season has no particular story arc it does unfold in terms of character revelation. The humor lies in the everyday situations combined with the character contrasts and the development of relationships. It is a rather unique approach to comedy and judging by its success, it has fulfilled its aim.