India is to play host to the 2010 Commonwealth games in New Delhi Oct. 3-14. There have been several stories of late chronicling the tremendous waste and poor management of the preparation for the games. If the stories are credible, the Commonwealth games intended to be a coming out party on the international stage for India on the order of the Beijing Olympics, is shaping up to be quite the opposite, an embarrassing debacle in the making. The theme song and video for the games may well be emblematic of the problem (play the video before reading on):
The video itself in this intro section is clumsily executed to begin with, but not terrible, but the music? Beautiful! I could hear the very soul of India calling to me in that first 46 seconds. I wanted to catch the next flight. Contrast that however with what follows that first 46 seconds however. The remainder of the song makes you want to stop listening doesn't it? What comes next savagely buzz kills that beautiful "I feel the spirit of India" vibe you were feeling in the first 46 seconds. A terrible miss, the rest of the song is just horribly executed. I could have rolled with a more contemporary, uptempo version of the intro section, but they went overboard and the hard rock transition is just too jarring. Given what I've heard about the preparation for the games, I think the badly executed themesong itself may be a foreshadowing of a poorly executed Commonwealth games to come.
