India Uncut

Anti-semitism is not "a form of racism or ethnic xenophobia," says that outstanding historian and writer, Paul Johnson. It is "an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive. It is a disease to which both human individuals and entire human societies are prone." In a fine essay in Commentary, Johnson writes:

What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense. In the whole of history, it is hard to point to a single occasion when a wave of anti-Semitism was provoked by a real Jewish threat (as opposed to an imaginary one). In Japan, anti-Semitism was and remains common even though there has never been a Jewish community there of any size.

Asked to explain why they hate Jews, anti-Semites contradict themselves. Jews are always showing off; they are hermetic and secretive. They will not assimilate; they assimilate only too well. They are too religious; they are too materialistic, and a threat to religion. They are uncultured; they have too much culture. They avoid manual work; they work too hard. They are miserly; they are ostentatious spenders. They are inveterate capitalists; they are born Communists. And so on. In all its myriad manifestations, the language of anti-Semitism through the ages is a dictionary of non-sequiturs and antonyms, a thesaurus of illogic and inconsistency.

As I begin reading this essay, it struck me that Communism, in its "fundamental irrationality," might also be called a disease then. And indeed, Johnson makes an analogy with it later in his piece when he invokes the confirmation bias that believers (or patients?) display. He writes:

Irrational thinking is common enough in each of us; when anti-Semitism is added in, irrational thinking becomes not only instinctual but systemic. An experienced anti-Semite constantly looks for “evidence” to confirm his idée fixe, and invariably finds it—just as a Marxist, looking for “proof,” constantly uncovers events that confirm his diagnosis of how the world works. (Not surprisingly, anti-Semitic theory as evolved by the young Hegelians played a major role in the evolution of Marx’s methods of analysis.)

Johnson's piece contains a number of interesting historical observations, such as the view that Hitler's anti-semitism was "an obstacle to electoral victory" that "repelled more voters than it attracted". Johnson uses Hitler as an illustration of how the disease can be self-perpetuating:

So central was anti-Semitism to his view of the world that the repugnance of others merely confirmed, for him, the existence of the very Jewish conspiracy against which he had warned for many years. It was this same conspiracy, he threatened, that would be to blame for any war that might break out, and this war would in turn provide both occasion and justification for implementing his “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.”

Johnson ends the essay by writing that anti-Americanism shares many qualities with anti-Semitism. He writes:

That anti-Americanism shares many structural characteristics with anti-Semitism is plain enough. In France, as we read in a new study, intellectuals muster as many contradictory reasons for attacking the U.S. as for attacking Jews. Americans are excessively religious; they are excessively materialistic. They are vulgar money-grubbers; they are vulgar spenders. They hate culture; they are pushy in promoting their own culture. They are aggressive and reckless; they are cowardly. They are stupid; they are exceptionally cunning. They are uneducated; they subordinate everything in life to the goal of sending their children to universities. They build soulless megalopolises; they are rural imbeciles. As with anti-Semitism, this litany of contradictory complaints is fleshed out with demonic caricatures of particular individuals like George W. Bush. Just as 14th-century Christians once held the Jews responsible for the Black Death, Americans are blamed for all the ills of today’s world, starting with (real or imaginary) global warming. Particularly among French intellectuals, such demonization has become almost a culture, a way of life, in itself.

For more on the subject of anti-Americanism, a couple of books I'd recommend are "Occidentalism" by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, and "Understanding Anti-Americanism", edited by Paul Hollander. Here's a review of the latter book by Victor Davis Hansen, in which he writes:

Indeed, it is almost as if people hate what they have become, aping American slang and informality and then decrying the erosion of global etiquette. Scapegoating America allows one in the concrete to enjoy jeans, birth-control pills, antibiotics, and video games, even while damning in the abstract the purveyor of both junk and life-saving appurtenances.

The world is so polarised, of course, that all of this is just preaching to the converted. Pity.

This post was first posted on Cloudburst Mumbai, a CollaBlog set up to deal with the aftermath of the cloudburst in Mumbai.

Mumbai was again hit hard by the rains today, but you wouldn't know it if you looked at the Indiatimes website. At the time of posting this, they mention the rain in Mumbai in just the sixth headline from the top. The first two are about cricket, but the headlines that stand out, because they are in bold text, are the third and the fifth one. And these are:

Countdown: India's top 20 socialites
Global girls: half-Indian, fully famous

I point this out because it evokes one of the important questions I think we need to ask ourselves at this time. Many of us have pointed out the ineptitude of the administration during this crisis. I think we also need to ask if our mainstream media (MSM) have let us down. While some of the coverage has been good, time and again in the last few days, we have been served up with stories centred around celebrities, and I think the news most of us want to see from our newspapers goes beyond Marc Robinson's trauma at having to wade home after a pedicure or Amitabh Bachchan's not having had a bath in three days. Or the "grumpiness all around" that comes from not getting a copy of the ToI.

Most of the bloggers who are part of this blog [Cloudburst Mumbai] have expressed similar sentiments in the last few days,and I do not believe that we are in a minority, and that the millions of people who subscribe to these MSM outlets actually prefer celebrity-oriented stories over good old-fashioned reporting in times like this. On the contrary, I think most people feel as let down as us, but have no way of expressing their feelings, and not enough choice (though that could be changing now). We are all, essentially, being taken for granted by MSM. And they no doubt believe that if a few of us vote with our wallets, it will make no difference to their bottomline.

So are they right? What is there that we can do, in practical terms, that will make a difference?

The question above is not meant to be rhetorical. Comments are enabled in the mirror of this post on Cloudburst Mumbai, feel free to give suggestions.

David Brown writes in the Washington Post:

Public health officials preparing to battle what they view as an inevitable influenza pandemic say the world lacks the medical weapons to fight the disease effectively, and will not have them anytime soon.

Public health specialists and manufacturers are working frantically to develop vaccines, drugs, strategies for quarantining and treating the ill, and plans for international cooperation, but these efforts will take years. Meanwhile, the most dangerous strain of influenza to appear in decades -- the H5N1 "bird flu" in Asia -- is showing up in new populations of birds, and occasionally people, almost by the month, global health officials say.

The word that strands out in the above extract: "inevitable". If or when a pandemic -- an outbreak of epidemics across continents -- does take place, most governments will shrug it off as an unforeseen calamity. But it is anything but unforeseen: check out this excellent special section on the possibility of an outbreak of avian flu in the magazine, Foreign Affairs.

(WAPO link via Primary Red who wonders if India would be ready to deal with such an epidemic. Ha.)

Richard Posner writes in the New York Times about the blogosphere:

The model is Friedrich Hayek's classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.

In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It's as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.

Read the full piece, which examines, among other things, the perceived threat that blogs pose to the mainstream media. Posner, by and by, blogs at The Becker-Posner Blog with economist Gary Becker. It is well worth your while.

(Article link via Instapundit.)

It's been raining heavily in many parts of Mumbai all night, so the blog meet scheduled for today is cancelled. Even if you stay in a part of Mumbai that isn't getting terribly heavy rain right now, please stay indoors, as more rain is forecast and it isn't worth taking a risk.

Updates on the rains will take place at Cloudburst Mumbai, and useful resources are listed at Mumbai Help. I'll focus my efforts for today on those two, so there might be no more posts on India Uncut for the next few hours.

I have never seen so many comments on a post as on this one by Prem Panicker: 1262 comments at the time of my typing this. Remarkable stuff. Prem posted just before the India-Sri Lanka game, and the comments were virtually a ball-by-ball interaction between him and his readers. Such interactions were common in the good old days when Prem would do ball-by-ball commentary for Rediff with a chat frame open on the side, and he's taking blogging to a new level here. As I'd mentioned once before with regard to Prem, this is like "a blog on steroids". Woof!

"Do we really need 24/7 rolling news?" goes the headline of a piece in the Hindu by Hasan Suroor. I find that a rather strange question. Who is "we", and what is meant by "need"? If there is a market for 24/7 news, then it'll exist, as it should. If not, it won't.

Mr Suroor seems to be trapped in the socialist mindset in which the state is mai-baap of everyone and decides what is right for its subjects, as its intellectuals pontificate self-importantly on these matters. Well, none of the major 24/7 news channels spend tax-payers' money, nor do they infringe on anyone's rights. Whether they deserve to exist or not will thus be decided by the people -- or, to use the term the Left uses as a pejorative, by the market. That is how it should be.

(Link via email from MadMan.)

Chandrahas Choudhury writes about a writer at work.

I'm very impressed by the latest Blog Mela, put up by Nitai. It has a nice format, and he's thought out-of-the-box, if I may get my monthly use of jargon out of the way. Good show.

You will no doubt spend all of today sampling the delights Nitai serves up. But what will you do tomorrow? Stop scratching your head, I have just the pleasurable activity for you. Come to the Mumbai Bloggers' Meet. As Ravikiram reminds us, it's at 3pm at Prithvi Theatre in Juhu.

"If you force the industry to compulsorily allow unionisation," writes Ravikiran Rao, "you will end up retarding industrial growth and causing massive unemployment, as they have managed in Kerala and West Bengal." He continues:

Here’s an idea - do away with our awful labour laws. If we need to have them, they should only provide for enforcement of contracts between workers and the management. Make the right to form unions and the right to strike presumptive rights - i.e. valid unless the workers agree not to do so, as a condition of employment. You will find that the lot of workers will improve from the only cause it has ever done - a tight labour market.

Here's the full post, in which he argues, as Nitin Pai had done earlier, that "the brutality in Gurgaon is a case for labour reforms, not against." I agree.

My earlier posts on Gurgaon: 1 and 2.

Beethoven pumps the Beatles, U2, Coldplay and every pop act on this planet when it comes to internet downloads. I wonder when he's touring.

There have been blasts in Srinagar, and five shepherds in Rajouri have had their throats slit by militants. Meanwhile, the police warns that terrorists are stepping up activity with India's Independence Day celebrations, on August 15, in mind.

Wouldn't you love it (if you're a man) if Rani Mukherjee said these things about you:

At times all he wants to do is lie in my lap like a floppy. You should watch him do that. He won't move a single muscle in his body, feels like a lump! And then there are times when he will just not rest. He is all over the place. Try getting a hold on him and he crawls and hides under the table. Such a mischief maker, I tell you.

Yes, wouldn't you love it if you were Rani Mukherjee's doggy? (Monstrously written piece, by the way. And it isn't even MSM, so what excuse do they have?)

The Indian Express examines the audit reports of the Sports Authority of India, and finds some bizarre expenses. They report:

For instance, in the 2002-03 SAI audit report (the latest), the auditors objected to the irregular manner in which SAI raised bills for hiring taxi for former ministers, BJP’s Uma Bharati and Vikram Verma, to the tune of Rs 87,483 for a single day, August 31, 2002. Interestingly, Verma who succeeded Bharati was the minister on that day.

The auditors noted: "All the bills are verified by Shri Ravinder Singh, PA to the Minister (Uma Bharati). Such expenditure could not be allowed as expenditure of the society as the Ministers of the Government of India do not travel in taxis."

[...]

Besides this entry for taxi bills, there are other entries of a "similar nature." Two other taxi vouchers for Bharati and Verma have been raised by SAI for Rs 98,479 and Rs 98,230—for October 31, 2002 and January 21, 2003.

And there's more. Note that this is our money, it comes from the taxes that we pay. I find it odd that so many people, especially on the Left, scoff at the opulent lifestyle of celebrities, who spend their own money, but don't cavil much about the monstrous misuse of our funds by the government. In fact, they often want to expand the role of government, giving it more discretion and thus more scope for corruption and wastage. Strange.

The Left can't decide which is the more important issue. Heh.

I've posted an update on the aftermath of the cloudburst in Mumbai here. More updates will follow on that blog, by a variety of contributors.

Um, this isn't me. But he's a good actor and I wish him well.

(Link via Vikram Arumilli.)

Peter Griffin has just started a CollaBlog called Cloudburst Mumbai, meant specifically to deal with "[n]ews and links to news about the cloudburst on the 26th July, 2005, and its aftermath." I'm pleased to be a contributor there, and if you would like to be one, please email me or Peter (zigzackly AT gmail DOT com). We can do with all the help we can get.

While Mumbai Help will hopefully grow to be an invaluable resource in times of trouble in Mumbai, Cloudburst Mumbai will deal specifically with this tragedy. You are welcome to be a part of both if you feel you have something to contribute.

Peter Griffin, the man behind Tsunami Help, has teamed up with Sunil Nair and started Mumbai Help, a CollaBlog (or collaborative blog; the neologism is Peter's) that intends to be an information resource for people in Mumbai, especially at times like this. In Sunil's words: "Here is an attempt to list articles, addresses, people, places, anything that will help when disaster hits Mumbai next time." Peter explains more here.

It is a fabulous initiative, and should you wish to be a part of it, write to Peter and he will send you an invite. His email id is: zigzackly AT gmail DOT com. People from outside Mumbai are welcome to join, as in times of crisis residents of the city might well be unable to blog, and people from outside could play an invaluable role in putting important information online.

PS: I've made my last update on the situation in Mumbai on my post "Words and pictures from Mumbai". For more updates and information, Mumbai Help is the place to go to. (Update: So is Cloudburst Mumbai. See here.)

I am clearly not intellectually equipped to read that bestselling newspaper, the Times of India. I cannot, to cite one example, understand this line:

[W]hy should cuckolded men insist on paternity tests when their spouses explore other relationship options, even as betrayed women do not seem as obsessed?

I fail to fathom what this means. Are there really women who take maternity tests to ensure that they actually are the mothers of the children they have given birth to? Chee, there is a lot I need to learn about the world. And now I know which newspaper to read.

(Link via SMS from Gaurav.)

I'm post-dating this post to make it sticky so that it's on top of this page for at least today. It will be updated constantly. Scroll down for new posts. Click here for my account of the rains, "Streets like rivers".

Of the many startling pictures of the devastation caused by the rain in Mumbai, this and this are worth looking at. They are part of a small slideshow put together by Rediff here.

Rediff has also collected first-person accounts from many people across Mumbai. Pictures on TV show people actually swimming through the water in some parts of Mumbai, as well as some makeshift boats.

Meanwhile, a fire has broken out on an ONGC oil platform near Mumbai, and rescue operations are on.

Update: More pictures here.

Update 2: The state government has set up a 24-hour helpline. The numbers are 22027990 and 22793551. (Numbers via Mumbai Mirror's useful information page.)

Update 3: Here are the latest reports from the Times of India, Mid Day, the Indian Express, and the Telegraph. Rediff has a whole bunch of stories on it as well.

Update 4: Uma has more here and here.

Update 5: One friend can't get out of Mumbai and another can't get in. Sonia has vivid accounts of being stuck in a plane, being deplaned and then another long wait in a hotel lobby before somehow managing to make it back home. Meanwhile, Rahul battles his way through the Konkan region of Maharashtra, which is quite as badly hit.

Update 6: "Mumbai limping back to normalcy," reports Rediff. The airport is operational again, reports Mid Day. The Times of India reports that the India Meteorological Department has warned that Gujarat may now face similar downpours. (NDTV reports that those rains have already begun.)

Update 7: Gaurav Sabnis hears water outside his door even though he lives on the fifth floor. He looks out through the window and finds himself "in the middle of a sea." He manages to get out, and finds "bloated carcasses of buffaloes" on the highway. Read his accounts here and here.

Update 8: Ravikiran Rao, who had many of us worried, blogs about his experience in the rain, and how the road that led to his home simply got "washed away". It's a vivid account. Meanwhile, the government dispels rumours of a tsunami hitting Mumbai, and Arun Simha constructs a tongue-in-cheek narrative of what will happen next, part of which stars Ravikiran.

NDTV has an update on Thane, and things look bad in Ahmedabad. Here's the latest update on the ONGC fire, and here's an estimate of the economic costs of the incident. Also, Amardeep Singh, guest-blogging on Sepia Mutiny, rounds up events and starts an interesting discussion. And Reuben Abraham points out that Mumbai received more rainfall on Tuesday than London does in a year.

Update 9: Anup examines how "different infrastructure systems including drainage, power, telephones, transportation collapsed in a short amount of time." And Rashmi Bansal expresses her outrage.

Update 10 (July 29): Uma is rightly aghast that our largest newspaper has lost all sense of proportion. The Times of India behaves as if the worst part about the rains was that some people couldn't get a copy of ToI, and quotes Ajit Wadekar as saying: "Only when I didn't get the Times of India on Wednesday morning did I really realise the full fury of the rains." Other luminaries chip in with similar comments, no doubt not wishing to endanger their Page 3 coverage.

Meanwhile, 16 people died in a stampede caused not by the ToI turning up at a nearby newsstand, but by rumours of a tsunami. And bodies are still being excavated from Kalina, one of the worst-hit areas. And since we're obsessed with celebrities, the Indian Express gives us an account of what some of our favourite people were up to.

Mumbai Mirror tells us about the city's disaster management plan, created in 2003 with the help of the World Bank but not implemented when disaster struck. It also takes us through the events that led to Mumbai High catching fire. And Jitendra Mohan recounts his own experience of being part of a much smaller fire on a different platform.

Update 11: AFP reports that the latest death toll in Maharashtra is 900, as the meteorological department warns that more rains are expected to strike Maharashtra. Maharashtra's chief minister has defended his administration against charges of ineptitude. Meanwhile, PTI has reported that a dance-bar owner begun the rumours of a dam burst and a tsunami, that led to a stampede and many deaths. "[T]hree bar girls [and] two eunuchs" were also allegedly involved.

Gaurav is collating incidents of generosity by Mumbaikars here. Jitendra has pics of Bombay High North: before, and after (here, here, here and here.) And Rediff has collected a bunch of riveting first-person accounts here. Also, Marc Robinson describes his trauma of having to wade home after a pedicure and manicure. (Link via Sonia.)

Update 12: This is the last update I shall post here. For more on this tragedy, please check Mumbai Help, a CollaBlog started by Peter Griffin and Sunil Nair. That will be constantly updated with news and lists of resources.

Update 13: One more update: Peter has started another CollaBlog called Cloudburst Mumbai, specifically to deal with the aftermath of this tragedy. All further relevant news updates will be made there, while Mumbai Help will be where important information is collated. If you would like to become a contributor to Cloudburst Mumbai, please email me or Peter (zigzackly AT gmail DOT com).

There was at least one explosion on the Shramjeevi Express while it was travelling from Patna to Delhi, and at least two deaths have been reported. No news yet of who was behind the blast.

It's been a violent week.

That's what Indian singers are made to do at the US Consulate.

Daddy gets sacked. Irfan Pathan's father, Mehboob Khan Pathan, has been fired by the mosque where he worked for 35 years. His diagnosis: "They are jealous because of my sons' fame and success in cricket." Quite likely.

Mr Mukerjea had to walk home. Can you imagine?

Balamurali Krishna schmoozes Amma.

(Link via GreatBong.)

She felt terribly sorry for people who suffered from constipation, and she knew that there were many who did. There were probably enough of them to form a political party -- with a chance of government perhaps -- but what would such a party do if it was in power? Nothing, she imagined. It would try to pass legislation, but would fail.

From "The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency" by Alexander McCall Smith. An utterly charming book.

More Nuggets and Aphorisms here.

A number of Indian bloggers have weighed in after I last posted on the violence in Gurgaon. Kunal Sawardekar is worried that "misplaced rants about workers rights" will enable the miscreants among the workers to go free. Ravikiran Rao argues that "the policemen should be punished more than the guilty workers [my emphasis]." Nitin Pai sees this as "a wake-up call to the Indian government to speed up labour reform." And Primary Red of Secular-Right India laments that we, the people, have "rarely made good policing an issue in our elections."

Meanwhile, spokespersons of the Left like Brinda Karat have been all over the airwaves talking about workers' rights and oppressive capitalists and so on. In this regard, the Indian Express wisely comments:

The Left obviously sees political potential in bringing militant trade unionism to Delhi’s doorstep. It is a sobering thought that the very phenomenon has reduced the stretch from Kanpur to Kolkata to an industrial wasteland. That is why it is important to recognise the Gurgaon violence as a horrible aberration — not a televised episode of class struggle.

Dead right.

Update: Here's another Indian Express editorial that wonders if the Left will target sushi bars next.

It’s amazing how activity in a major city like Mumbai can be so suddenly disrupted, its people cut off from each other, within a matter of a couple of hours. Yesterday we planned to make a trip to our CA after lunch, but cancelled it after hearing thunderclaps. Nevertheless, I thought I’d go for a coffee to In Orbit after doing a little blogging. It started raining. I did my blogging, looked outside, and saw that the streets were flooded. Knee-deep water. The rain was coming down so hard that the buildings on the other side of the road were hazy, uncertain shapes. I could have been imagining them. Had I gone out anywhere, getting back would have been difficult.

By evening, the water outside was thigh-deep. We turned on the TV for news, all we got was static. It was a wonder that we still had power, and life isn’t wonderful for long, so the power went as well. We were stuck in darkness, trapped in our second-floor apartment, high enough to stop flood-water coming in, low enough to avoid the inevitable leaks from the roof of the building.

My mobile phone battery was running out, and the signal it received was intermittent. The news I got wasn’t encouraging. One blogger friend was stuck in an aeroplane at the airport, waiting to take off as the runway got more and more flooded. Another was travelling in the Konkan region of Maharashtra, where I heard things were so bad that food packets were being air-dropped. I couldn’t get through to him. Yet another one told me that these were the worst rains he had ever seen in Mumbai, a diagnosis confirmed today – this was India’s worst-ever rainfall. And it would last 48 hours, we were told. The electricity supply had been switched off because of the flooding, and would not resume till the water level got back to normal.

For a while in the evening it stopped raining. Young men and children came out to frolic in the water, which was muddy and filthy. Bits of garbage floated on it, and a few plastic bags. The afternoon air had been filled with the crying of street dogs,who ran from one corner of the street to another, trying to get to higher ground. The hour in the evening when the rain held up was filled by the noises of excited children. Some sat on the road divider, dangling bare legs into murky water, still at the age when they enjoyed the water and did not think of the dirt and disease it carried. Then the rains came down again.

The night seemed unreal because it was so dark outside. Even at night we are used to little bits of light here and there: streetlights in the distance; glimmers from windows of buildings; at least stars. The only light we saw, besides the candle inside and the sporadic lightning outside, was from the occasional car gliding through the water, one-third of it submerged, its headlights warning of its arrival in front of our window from a distance. The dark, still water would be disturbed by first ripples and then waves of light and dark, and then the car itself, resolving no doubt to never make fun of boats again. One car broke down in the middle of the road, and the driver abandoned it, leaving its indicator lights flickering all night, so people would know it was there.

Every year in Mumbai there are at least one or two days when life comes to a halt and streets are flooded. If you happen to be in office when it happens, you are invariably stuck there overnight. If are unlucky enough to be commuting, you could spend hours in whatever mode of transport you choose, though often walking makes more sense. Walking 30-40 kilometres in knee-deep water isn’t unusual. Once, when I lived in Chembur, my room-mates had to walk all the way from VT to Chembur through flooded streets. At King's Circle, they waded through chest-deep water. One of them needed to pee, and he did it in his pants. When I expressed surprise at this later he asked, “So how would you have done it?”

And yes, I also slipped into a manhole many years ago near Chembur station. Wading through thigh-deep water, I suddenly felt no ground beneath my feet, and found myself slipping. A couple of men immediately behind me caught me and pulled me. It could have been them slipping through instead of me. That’s one thing about Mumbai: people help each other, because they know that we’re all in it together. You look out for the guys around you, and they look out for you. It’s self-interest.

The rains had stopped by mid-morning today, though the lights took till evening to come. I read some, slept some. The streets were no longer flooded by afternoon, so we went out and had a coffee at a Café Coffee Day that was open nearby. The electricity was coming back to the city in phases, and that welcome clicky sound, and the whirr of the fan starting up, came in the evening, after more than 24 hours without power. We turned on the TV, and the pictures were pretty scary: streets like rivers; thousands of cars abandoned in the highway; and everyhere, brown muddy water. Our city had become its drainage system; soon, that would go underground again, and life would be normal. Until next year.

Note to readers: more rains are forecast, the power may go again, so my blogging may be irregular for a day or two. For further updates on the rains, check Rediff, Mid-Day and NDTV.

Update (July 28): I've been keeping track of things here.

"[T]he sex ratio for cattle is an extremely good indicator of the state’s level of economic development," writes Bibek Debroy in Business Standard, in an article where he introduces us to the delightful acronym, CSR (Cattle Sex Ratio). It's an excellent piece for more than just bovine reasons, though, as Debroy examines innovative ways to measure economic development. Read it if you're not distracted by the sounds of orgasmic moos in your mind's naughty ear.

(Link via email from NS Ramnath.)

Previous posts on cows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13.

A fat accompli.

Heh.

Check out this nice essay by Janaki Nair in the Telegraph examining how repressive moral codes and "[r]egional cultural nationalism" are eliminating the freedom of women across the country.

She also notes that Kolkata is that rare Indian city that tolerates couples in public spaces. Well, I've noticed one such enclave cropping up in Mumbai itself. The In Orbit Mall in Malad, Mumbai's biggest, has a food court on the third floor that is, well, fairly large by Indian standards. The main section of the food court is generally crowded and noisy, and I prefer to go and sit at the far end, which is quieter. Well, recently I got myself a sandwich and a frappe and went over and sat at my usual place, and suddenly noticed, to my immense embarrassment, that I was surrounded by young couples, some of them snogging with abandon. My quiet corner had become a couples zone, and here I was, all alone with hordes of couples all around me.

Instantly I put my lips around my sandwich.

Aishwarya Rai has just won The Next Step World Diversity Champion award, according to IndiaFM. The report informs us:

The actress is honored and hopes that people will stop labeling her as giggly and frivolous beauty. (Sic.)

Ok, sorry, we'll stop now.

"Ro mat, ro mat," he said. "Is boat mein motor hai."

(Apologies to non-Hindi speakers; this PJ is untranslatable.)

For the last three hours or so, the news channels have been full of pictures from a clash between agitating workers of Honda and the Haryana police in Gurgaon. They're brutal pictures. In some of them, the workers thrash policemen mercilessly with lathis, with one of them begging for mercy at one point. They ae also shown burning a police jeep after first trying to bash it up with sticks.

In the other pictures, the police thrash workers, some of them defenceless and cringing on the ground, with lathis, as berserk as the workers had been in the earlier scenes. It's quite monstrous, a complete breakdown of humanity or, as Hobbes would perhaps say, a demonstration of it.

It is unclear, at the time of writing, exactly what happened, and which events sparked off the confrontations. Either way, it is irrelevant whether the workers attacked the policemen first, as Star News indicated was the way it happened (and so did Randeep Singh Surjewala, the Haryana minister), or the police made the first move. All the beatings were unnecessary, and all the guilty men, with or without uniform, should be punished.

The opposition parties are already trying to politicise this issue, which is sad, because the principles of the case go beyond party politics, and the Haryana government has responded suitably. They have announced a timebound enquiry into the incident (15 days, I heard someone say), focussed their efforts on treating the wounded, and have promised to punish those guilty of violence, including policemen whose actions went beyond the call of duty. That seems fair enough to me, and we should withhold judgement on what they do next until those 15 days are up.

Sections of the opposition are trying to make it a brutal-police-v-oppressed-workers issue, which is unfortunate. George Fernandes came on Aaj Tak and said (rough translation from Hindi):

One must understand that these workers did not have a job, and must have been hungry. We don't know what troubles they were facing. In such a situation if a few stones get thrown, what's the big deal? The police are used to that anyway.

Well, firstly, it was far more than "a few stones". Secondly, to condone any kind of violence is just plain wrong, even if it is retrenched factory workers who are the perpetrators. (Fernandes was a disruptive union leader in his youth.)

The larger problem here is of the large number of under-educated and unemployed young men in this country, whose frustrations, which often find outlets like this, need to be addressed. That cannot happen through mere redistribution of wealth, for economics is not a zero-sum game, and redistribution never works. It can only happen if we enable all these people to become part of the free markets that have benefited some sections of the country, but not others. As I'd mentioned here, a complete removal of the license raj and a rehaul of our labour laws are essential if this is to happen. Entrepreneurship will get a big boost, the manufacturing sector will grow as it should have decades ago, and employment will consequently zoom.

But I suspect the larger issues here will be ignored, and in the coming days we'll just see politics in parliament, not statesmanship of the kind needed to take India forward.

Update (July 26): Subra Srinivasan has more here.

Arun Simha writes in pointing out an error in the Jerry Rao piece I'd linked to here. At one point, Rai had referred to "Manmohan Singh’s first budget where he quoted an Urdu poem offering to sacrifice his head." Arun informs us that Singh had actually said:

Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil mein hai
dekhna hai zor kitna bazuen qatil mein hai.

[I have the zeal of valour in my heart.
Let us see how strong the rival is!]

That is, Arun writes, a couplet by Ramprasad Bismil.

Moments ago it wasn't now yet.

Isn't that amazing?

Jerry Rao writes:

Clearly we need an unambiguous platform that calls for a minimalist non-predatory state, a platform that recognises that but for Avadi, we would today be as rich as Korea or Malaysia. We would not have barefoot children begging in the horror-stricken moonscapes of contemporary urban India. We would not have two hundred million citizens, or shall we correctly call them “subjects” of our socialist state, going to bed hungry each night.

We have no money for a well-paid police force or a well-staffed court system or for well-paved roads or for working schools or for employment for the rural poor giving them wages, mind you not doles! We have plenty of money for Ministries of Steel, Fertilisers, Coal, Chemicals, Petroleum, Civil Aviation and Banking with dozens of ministers, scores of secretaries, hundreds of joint secretaries and thousands of deputy secretaries. We never have shortage of funds for growing malignant government cells, but are always short of money for pursuing the proper ends of government.

Later in his piece, Rao echoes the sentiment I'd expressed here, when he writes:

We all know that radical reforms make an impact only after some lags. We are today reaping the benefits of the reforms of fifteen years ago. But the Congress party seems to be shifting back to weak-kneed socialism. It is as if the embrace of reforms was entirely under duress, not a matter of conviction. Keeping Luddite coalition partners happy seems to take precedence over economic sanity.

Yes. Read the full piece, in which he hopes for the emergence of a party like C Rajagopalachari's Swatantra Party, and for "a Thatcher-Reagan revolution".

My musings on a similar subject: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

That's how these two are behaving.

I am baffled by two kinds of people:

Those whose love goes to strange extents, like this vegetable vendor who watched a Rajnikanth film for 100 days in a row.

And those who hate without rational reason, the kind Githa Hariharan writes about in this nice essay in the Telegraph.

Or maybe it's just one kind, and not two?

That's because there's a North Korean ship carrying arms and ammunition heading towards India.

Every male bibliophile's dream: to go to a book sale and meet two cute girls who pat you continuously for half an hour. That's just what happened to Whisky.

Reacting to this post, Ammani sends me this poem by John Agard:

You'll be greeted
by a nice cup of coffee
when you get to heaven
and strains of angelic harmony.

But wouldn't you be devastated
if they only serve decaffeinated
while from the percolators of hell

your soul was assaulted
by Satan's fresh espresso smell?

Nice. And how would you react if you saw a new coffee shop in your neighbourhood named "Satan's Fresh Espresso"? Me, I'd pop right in.

There's been a fairly big earthquake, measuring 7.2 on the Richter Scale, off the Nicobar coast. No loss of life or property has yet been reported, and the government has said that there is "no threat of a tsunami".

George Fernandes, reacting slightly late, describes Manmohan Singh's qualified praise of the British Raj in his speech at Oxford as an "insult to martyrs".

Listen George, I just had an ouija board session last night with a whole bunch of martyrs, and they didn't feel insulted by the speech at all. They were complaining, though, that they can't get expresso in heaven because it's the colour of hell. Now that's a problem. But what do you care?

Chandrahas Choudhury writes about "The Kiss", a short story by the incomparable Anton Chekov. Good stuff.

JK of Varnam is rather amused by Azim Premji's blabber about Infosys here.

Meanwhile Sify reports that Premji, who is India's richest man, has taken a housing loan. Must be some house he's buying.

"This is a country of big, of mega, and these are megastars having megabreakdowns, and we are megainterested," writes Vanessa Grigoriadis in a superb article about celebrity in America. The accompanying pictures rock as well.

In my essay about short attention spans, I'd written at one point: "One of the reasons that blogs are gaining in popularity along the world, in fact, is that they cater to the short attention span: the most popular typically have brief, pithy posts that efficiently encapsulate the subject they’re on about."

Well, reader Rajeev Sivaram writes in to give me a contrary point of view. He writes:

With regard to blogs in this context, somewhat ironically perhaps, at least from my perspective, I've found them causing in me the opposite phenomenon. Thanks to the pithy observations of bloggers such as yourself, I think I'm ending up reading a lot more interesting articles and essays in their entirety now than I would have if I depended exclusively on samachar.com type gateways (which I used to rely almost exclusively on before). Machine extraction of article headlines falls way short of human precis in the information conveyed, and like a good blurb, that information in blogs serves to cause more reading from me than less. Not only that, with blogs I can now read good writers write in depth without the external editor-enforced brevity.

Good point. In a way, in fact, it reinforces my point about blogs being ideal for people with short attention spans, or not much time to spare. If you like to read a lot, but don't have the time or the patience to scour through the web for articles of interest every day, it is useful to find a blogger whose taste is similar to yours, and who'll pick out the best stuff for you, and that too for free. I began reading a lot more on the net after I discovered Instapundit, and blogs like Marginal Revolution and the outstanding Cafe Hayek have also, in indirect ways, expanded my reading. So go find your blogger, and let him serve you. Or become a blogger yourself.

If you're reading this from Delhi, I hope you're happy now. You won, ok? But don't gloat too much, we'll strike back next year. We're going for some shopping therapy now.

The Hindustan Times reports:

This may come as good news for Mallika Sherawat. The Mumbai Police claim to have busted a well-organised gang which was producing and distributing X-rated videos in MMS and other digital formats, and passing them off as those involving former and reigning Bollywood actors.

The seized clips have the faces of well-known Indian and Hollywood stars morphed on to original blue films. In some cases, lookalikes have been used instead of the usual "cut and paste" job.

So if Aishwarya Rai's waxwork is stolen from Madame Tussauds, you'll know who took it. It'd act a whole lot better than her, of course, and a drunk Salman Khan could have long conversations with it. "This is just the way I like you," he'd say at the end of the conversation. "You didn't contradict me even once. Now may I, um, drive over you once please. Please pretty please. Or I'll tell bhai."

TN Ninan writes:

They say about people that you learn about them from studying their behaviour as they climb up the greasy pole. The gap between what they say and do when they are low down the pole, and what they say from the top, gives you the measure of the man.

If so, can the same thing be said about countries? Whether the thesis is valid or not, India presents an interesting case study.

Read the full thing. It's one of those pieces that does not give you answers, but helps you ask interesting questions.

Because she was made to undress Akshay Kumar.

So writes Anupama Chopra in the New York Times, in an article that features the bogeyman term "consumerism", and quotes an academic describing Mallika Sherawat as a "postfeminist icon". Makes me want to cry, I tell you, such pretentious twaddle.

(Link via email from Olinda DoNorte.)

Narayan Rane has resigned from the Maharashtra state legislative assembly and has joined the Congress party. One line in the Mumbai Mirror report intriugues me: "Sources said Rane declined Sonia's offer to work in the Union government as a central minister."

I thought Manmohan Singh was the head of government. Anyway, Rane refused. According to a Congress member, "He wanted to be in Mumbai and complete his work in demolishing the Sena."

Well, good luck with that.

Mumbai Mirror reports:

After conventional protests failed to stop the Thane Municipal Corporation from dumping garbage at a vacant plot near their houses, 627 families of Saket Complex in Thane earlier this week badgered the concerned TMC officers with SMSes. So intense was the onslaught that began on the morning of July 19 that the TMC changed some of its officials' cell numbers.Not to be outdone, the protestors took just two days to get hold of the new numbers and unleashed a fresh flurry of messages.

Heh. So you can change the world with instant messaging.

Take a look at the bucket of water in the picture that accompanies this article. It's been certified safe to drink by the BMC, despite a wave of illnesses in the area where it's available.

Mumbai's firemen also have a problem with water availability.

Things aren't too good with water supply in many parts of Mumbai: water comes at my house three hours a day, and we have to make sure that someone's at home at that time to fill the overhead tanks. My building is worse off than some others because the khadoos power-tripping secretary of my housing society refused, out of misguided principle, to give a bribe to a BMC fellow. That was two months ago, and we've been screwed since.

Maybe I should go off on a holiday. The Roach Motel sounds like fun.

You just wait for the next world, you civilians, then we clergy will show you who's going to be saved. You may have the upper hand now but later on you're really going to be in the shit.

Père Marais, a French priest, teasing Julian Barnes about his atheism during a stint Barnes had as a lecteur d'anglais at the Collège Saint-Martin in Rennes in 1966-67. Quoted in Barnes's fine book of essays on France, "Something to Declare".

I'm an atheist, by the way, and I think we're all in the shit. Let's have fun while it lasts.

More Nuggets and Aphorisms here.

The piece below has been published in the latest issue (30/07/05) of Tehelka in a slightly shorter form. It has my photo along with it, and thankfully you can't see my paunch.

A couple of years ago, a tabloid in one of India’s metros called in a consultant to help them make the newspaper more reader-friendly. “Keep stories short,” he advised. Shorter stories, snappy paragraphs, simple sentences; suck the reader in and spit him out before he gets bored. This is the age of the short-attention span, and we see it all around us.

It’s there in the journalism. Tabloids keep their stories brief. Agency copy often consists entirely of one-sentence paragraphs: news for dummies. Magazines have found that the pages that readers turn to most are the snippetty ones, that don’t make demands on the reader’s time – like the last page of India Today, or the second- and third-last of Outlook. One of the reasons that blogs are gaining in popularity along the world, in fact, is that they cater to the short-attention span: the most popular typically have brief, pithy posts that efficiently encapsulate the subject they’re on about.

We see this also in the way we consume music. Soon, all music will be sold in the form of digital downloads, which is convenient because most people prefer to buy songs rather than albums, preferring to listen to a familiar song they like over and over rather than explore an artist’s oeuvre. It’s all a-la-carte now, and concept albums might soon be the dinosaurs of music. Television channels have also recognised this: MTV India found years ago that their maximum-TRP shows were their so-called vignettes, the two-to-three minute snippets that viewers can consume easily, like MTV Bakra and Filmi Fundas. We are hungry for the easily digestible. Ten-course meals? Sorry, no time, could you summarise please?

Television, in fact, is often blamed as a cause and not a symptom of this. Camille Paglia recently wrote: “The jump and jitter of U.S. commercial television have demonstrably reduced attention span in the young. The Web too, with its addictive unfurling of hypertext, encourages restless acceleration.” But when we talk of attention spans, are we referring to the amount of time we choose to spend on any one thing, or the amount of time we are able to spend on it. Paglia infers that it is the latter; I am not so sure.

Consider that over the last century, there has been a drastic jump in the IQs of humans, across races and gender. There has also been a tremendous increase in productivity, and advances in science and the arts – if we consider new art forms like cinema and popular music. And while every generation moans about “how good things were in our time”, every generation equally, if grudgingly, admits that kids today are smarter than they used to be. Our children will, in most cases, end up more accomplished than us. If short-attention spans are on the increase, and if that is a bad thing, why have we kept moving ahead as a species, and at such a rapid rate?

Scholars like to point to how cases of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), the medical term for the disease that people with chronic short-attention-span problems have, are on the increase. But there are two reasons for this: one, reporting and diagnosis of the disease have increased, not the disease itself; and two, Americans have tended, in the last couple of decades, towards excessive pharmacology, treating even minor deviances from normal behaviour as medical conditions. If a kid doesn’t pay attention in class, it’s because kids sometimes are like that, and medication isn’t necessarily the solution. Are we going to medicate kids next because they don’t listen to their parents, or men because their eyes rove, or women because they like to shop?

In short, what I am postulating is this: the genuine medical condition of ADD is not necessarily on the rise, and that most of us who have short attentions spans have them because of a lifestyle that we have to adopt to navigate the modern world efficiently.

The world is full of more information than ever before. Sensory information, intellectual information, information about information. Close your eyes for a second and imagine that you‘ve been taken back in a time machine to 1900. Now think of all the things that you can do to entertain yourself: books you can read (if you’re part of the elite that does), movies you can watch (ha), music you can listen to (live concerts or bathroom singing?), and so on. You get the picture (or not). Today, on the other hand, we are constantly in the middle of a sensory overload.

This is not just true in the case of entertainment, but in every facet of our lives. In this information age, no matter what job we hold, we deal with far more information, from many more sources, and we need to cope with all of this in order to deal with it effectively. The only way to handle it is in a modular way: break up what we have to do into discrete slices and handle them one by one.

In a typical half-hour of leisure, for example, you could have a watch-Coldplay-video module, dash-off-an-email module, fix-up-a-meeting-with-friends-at-Barista-by-SMS module, read-a-post-or-two-at-India-Uncut module and make-coffee-in-microwave-cause-it’s-quicker module. (If you’re a man, these modules would probably be sequential, because men can’t multi-task.) You might find all these activities desirable, and the only way to fit them all in would be to have a short attention span – even if you wouldn’t consciously choose to be that way.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book “Blink”, wrote about how humans tend to do “thin-slicing”, often making decisions by focussing on a few important variables, and moving on. For example, you switch on MTV, new video is playing. Do you like the song? Your decision is quick: you don’t listen to the song carefully, but quickly, without even being aware of it, evaluate it almost instantly: the kind of melody, the tempo of the song, the voice of the singer, and many other variables you may not even be aware of. (You may not like songs in a minor key, for example, because they depress you.) Don’t like the sound of it? Switch channel. Total time taken: three seconds. Short attention span? If you insist. Impractical? No.

Practicality is the crux of the matter. In the times that we live in, with the lives that we lead, we can no longer devote the kind of time to single activities that we could have 100 years ago. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Because there is much more around us, we can take in much more in shorter bursts, and if we learn to do it well, our lives can be richer as a result. Short attentions spans, apart from those that are chronic and part of genuine ADD, are actually necessary in our times.

If it helps us navigate the chaotic world around us, it also deprives us of older pleasures. Because we don’t have all the time in the world, because we cannot fix too much of our attention on one thing, we want instant gratification. An art critic told me recently of how the manner in which she views art has changed. Earlier, she would linger in front of a painting and give her mind time to absorb all that it could be about. Now, she wants instant gratification. What is this about, in one sentence please? Ok, good. Move on.

This lack of patience on our part is great for marketers. We don’t take the time to explore new things, so we don’t acquire new tastes. We revel in the familiar, which helps music companies and film producers dish out mainstream entertainment that is based on formulae. A rehashing of the familiar demands less effort from us, and is easily digestible; thus, audiences lap it up.

We no longer have the time, and some of us might even have lost the ability, to immerse ourselves in something. Opera, classical music (Indian and Western), classical dance, ballet, all demand immersion, one reason why they are all in danger, in same cases, like opera in the UK, needing state subsidies to survive.

Of course, there is another side to this. Kids today do read Harry Potter books, after all, which are considerably more demanding than Dr Seuss. And could there be anything more demanding than some modern videogames, which are played patiently over months, and even years? It could be argued, thus, that the immersive abilities of young people today, their attention spans, haven’t changed – merely their tastes have. The jury’s out on that, and it’s young, and quite smart. And in a hurry.

"The Gujarat government has asked courts not to register marriages unless there’s parental consent in writing," reports the Times of India. "This has created problems for love marriages."

I'm speechless. What is this, we're going backwards?

After reading these posts by Charu and Uma, I have just one thing to say: of course it's not bloody ok, as Uma puts it. And it can't be said often enough, or loudly enough. We live in a country where the law is largely dysfunctional, and what makes it worse is the apathy that most of us have have developed towards it, and the sense of resignation. There is so much around us that deserves our outrage that sometimes the easy thing to do is just to shut it out and get on with our lives. I applaud the commitment of the people who refuse to do that, like the courageous Hemangini. And I hope their blogs can make a difference.

Again, someone confuses correlation with causation.

(Link via Vikram Arumilli.)

Desi Pundit has a suggestion.

Ravikiran Rao writes in:

Remember when Georgia abolished its traffic police because they were too corrupt? If you missed the story, in 2004, the President of Georgia dismissed all its traffic police officers. There was absolutely no impact on the accident rate, (naturally, because the police were not doing the job at all.) Then he replaced them all with freshly recruited officers. The situation has apparently improved a lot there.

Now Ukraine is doing the same. [Link in the original.]

Here's an International Herald Tribune story on the reforms in Georgia, and another one by the New York Times. The second link is via a post by Reuben Abraham on the subject a few months ago.

Imagine if this happened in India, and all traffic cops got sacked. You could have this scene at a signal:

(Pot-bellied policeman stops car)
Driver: What happened, why have you stopped me? Here, see my license. (Tries to hand over license with 100 rupee note in it.)
Cop: No, I don't need to see your license. (Starts sniffling.)
Driver: Hey, what happened, why're you crying?
Cop: I got fired. All the traffic policemen got sacked today. The chief minister says that he doesn't want Mumbai to be like Shanghai any more, but like Gurjaani. (Starts sobbing.)
Driver: What? Gujarat?
Cop: No, Gurjaani. It's a city in some place called Georgia. Now I'm out of a job, and I have three wives and one... I mean, one wife and three children to feed. (Starts wailing.)
Driver: Oh my goodness. So what will you do now? Why are you still at this traffic signal?
Cop: Well, I have to think of an alternative profession now, and a traffic signal is the only habitat I know. Do you have any old saris? (Starts clapping and saying, "De na Raju, main tere shaadi pe naachegi" in a hoarse voice.)

Yeah, wouldn't I love to see that day?

Where will I dance now?

Arnab aka GreatBong writes about "Bongo ladies", examining reality while demolishing myth. Two fine lines from his post that I cannot help sharing:

1. "Bengali girls cannot generically be considered as experts in the art of making men mad with lust."

2. "[A]ccording to urban legend, Punjabi girls had figures to die for, knew the art of seduction, had malleable morals and in general never said 'no' to anything."

I also enjoyed the bit about how "[t]he arts girl" dances. Nice. Read it.

Update: Just by the way, I'm half-Bengali and half-Punjabi. But I'm not a girl.

In response to this post, reader Vimalanand Prabhu writes in:

Where does the Indian "south" and "north" actually start. For Mumbaites, it is simple. North of us are "North Indians" and south of us are "South Indians". I wonder where the line starts in different states. The northern parts of Karnataka and some parts of Andhra are not really that south.

Some of my friends from Kerala hated to be called Madrasis. For them South Indian or "Mallu" seemed to be much better. For Andhras, it is "gultis". North Indians are referred to as Bhaiyya. But for the (Mumbai) suburban moms, bhaiyya is the one who sells vegetables and fish at their door-step or the doodh-wala bhaiyya. White collared bhaiyyas from UP love to be referred to as Bhaiyyas, but hate the typical Mumbai stereotype. But for suburban moms, they are north Indians and not bhaiyyas.

As regards Maharashtra, they are referred to as "ghatis". But within Maharastra, ghati is referred to be a rustic person, not from Konkan but towards the leeward side of the Sahyadris. So a Marathi person from non-ghati land will feel offended when called "aye ghati".

Yeah. And when I went to Chennai last time someone disparagingly referred to Mumbai as being in North India. I tell you.

This is bad news? What can I add? What I said the last time stands. This shall pass.

These fellas shouldn't write a motivational guidebook. And the gents who put them in jail are way too uptight. Yes, insurance salesmen can sometimes be irritating, but this is too much.

It turns out that it isn't Mallika Sherawat in that infamous MMS everyone's been talking about, but a Mexican actress named Lolly. Hmmm. I wonder she calls her orgasms Lollypops. "Give me a Lollypop, honey," she'd plead, and then...

Salman Khan, for all that he allegedly revealed in those infamous conversations recorded by Mumbai's police, or the policemen, who illegally tapped his phone for the sole purpose of blackmailing him?

Vikram Arumilli writes in:

Seven Lenins, six Stalins, two Gagarins, two Brezhnevs, a Krushchev, and a Gorbachev got together in Kerala. Must have been fun. [Link in the original.]

Heh. I wonder if they got high on Molotov Cocktails.

BR Prakash examines folk wisdom:

[W]isdom has been imparted in the North for those going South:

'Don't call them Madrasis. Every South Indian is not a Madrasi'.

'If you see someone rolling up his lungi in Madras, don't look alarmed. It is as natural to them as rolling up the sleeves and they don't mean any harm'.

'Two by three coffee in Bangalore means that three small tumblers of coffee are consumed but you are charged only for two'.

And its reverse in the South:

'Don't stop at a red light if you are driving in Delhi, you will be hit from behind.'

'Don't say nonsense ever to a Bengali. It is the highest form of insult.'

'Don't be alarmed if you are invited to snake bitings in Ahmedabad. You will get dhoklas, kachoris and such other snacks.'

Such fun. Though a Bengali would no doubt think it nonsense. (I'm half-Bengali, by the way, so the previous sentence is self-deprecatory, not insulting.)

(Link via email from Ravikiran.)

Not the King, Sonia Faleiro finds out, as she loses internet connectivity. I like the bit about the clunk.

In a characteristically sharp piece of analysis, Ashok Malik writes:

What does America want of India in return for nuclear fuel, and the slew of agreements from space to agriculture to defence?

The answer is simple enough: India has to keep its reforms going and its economy growing. Everything else is secondary. Nothing — not weapons systems, not nuclear plants — can make India a global power and an alternative role model to China if it reverts to being a slowcoach economy, if liberalisation doesn’t continue, if retail and banking don’t open up, if infrastructure is not seriously upgraded, if leading cities are allowed to waste away and die.

These are the nuts and bolts of great power status; the nuclear-tipped missiles are only the gleaming showpieces.

Dead right. As I've written before, we haven't liberalised nearly enough, and much much more needs to be done. The reforms need to be far more wide-ranging, and they need to enable all of India to enjoy the fruits of personal and economic freedom. There's a long, long way to go. Anyway, read Malik's full piece.

I got up in the morning, stretched my arms, and my legs, and my teeth (yawning, it's called), and said to my marital companion, "You know, if India conquered the world, the Milky Way would be renamed Mahi Ve."

"Yes," she said. "And if Maharashtra conquered the world, it would be called Chhatrapati Shivaji Doodh Ki Dhaara."

(Apologies to foreign-language speakers for this desi PJ. A translation wouldn't capture the flavour of it, so I won't go that way. Sorry.)

Reuters reports:

A Ugandan member of parliament has pledged to reward girls for their chastity by paying their university fees if they are virgins when they leave school, a local newspaper said on Wednesday.

Bbaale County MP Sulaiman Madada said any girl in his district who wanted to take part in the scheme aimed at promoting girls' education would be given a gynecological examination by health workers to check they were virgins.

[...]

The MP did not extend his offer to young men.

I hope RR Patil isn't reading this. He'll get ideas.

(Link via email from reader Ravi Srinivas.)

... don't blog about your students. Or this could happen.

Ravikiran Rao caves in and finally announces the venue and time for the next bloggers' meet in Mumbai. Briefly, the details:

Venue: Prithvi Theatre, Juhu
Time: 3pm, July 31, 2005

For more details, click on over. And if you blog and are in Mumbai, come on over.

Accounts of previous blogmeets (in chronological order): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Too often when I type out a url, the .com comes out as .vom, and then I backspace and change. It is one in a category of automatic mistypings that happen with me. For some reason, instead of typing Michael, I often type Micahel. My fingers substitute "es" at the end of some words with "ed", and "proposes" becomes "proposed", spoiling the tense and the romance entirely. For words that end with "in", my fingers sometimes add a "g" at the end, and Stalin becomes Staling. And I thing of how lucky I am that I wasn't born 40 years earlier, when writers used typewriters, which didn't have backspace buttons. I mean, I think.

Be that as it may, viewed dispassionately and without getting too much into the vortex of morality (since indecency, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder), I, for one, cannot escape the conclusion that the sight of disgustingly ugly naked bodies, with misplaced pretensions to attractiveness, is positively repugnant, even to a philistinee judge of works of art — or of the human anatomy, for that matter — like yours truly.

Khalid Ansari, writing in the tabloid he owns, Mid Day, in an article expressing displeasure at this installation. One of my old friends, and a blogger to boot, took part in it, and I applaud her courage and her spirit. And I am appalled that anyone can condemn it in the manner Ansari does: you may think of it as pretentious or bad art, or as gimmickry, but to want to impinge on the personal freedoms of the people who took part, and the artist who put it together, is more "repugnant" than the bodies Ansari tastelessly deplores. There is something very ugly in Ansari's article, and it isn't in the photograph.

Update: On a tangent, Arun Simha points to this nice comment by Andy Rooney.

What business is it of the Times of India, and how is it remotely a matter of public interest, that Rahul Gandhi likes power biking and go-carting? Is there really nothing better to write about?

Update: Alert reader Aparna points me to this story of urgent national importance. I especially love the box at the end.

The Telegraph, the Indian Express and Gaurav Sabnis believe that Indo-US relations have reached a new high, more or less backing up Nicholas Burns's assertion that this was "the high-water mark of US-India relations since 1947." Pratap Bhanu Mehta strikes a note of caution, though.

Meanwhile, here's the text of Manmohan Singh's speech to the joint session of the US Congress.

Singh has been enormously smart during the last few days. Just as Pervez Musharraf cites domestic pressures as the reason to not do everything the US wants him to, Singh must have used the excuse of the Left to not toe the line on many of the US's requests, such as putting troops in Iraq. But wherever a win-win situation arose, he grabbed it. It's great that India's hyphenation with Pakistan in international relations finally seems to be ending, but it is important, as Mehta warns, that we don't align ourselves too strongly against China in the US-China game of poker, but pursue good relations with both, positioning ourselves as a strong and confident regional leader that looks other superpowers proudly in the eye. India has much to gain from both America and China, and the gains from one do not need to come at the cost of the gains from another.

Update: Here's Nitin Pai's analysis of Mehta's article.

Part of the menu for Manmohan Singh.

I can just imagine this scene:

Bush: Hey, Mandarin, see this! (Drops a plate on the floor. It breaks.)
Manmohan: Um, Mr Bush, it's Manmohan not Mandarin.
Bush: Sari, Manmoham. See this! (Drops a plate on the floor. It breaks.)
Manmohan: Um, Mr Bush, it's Manmohan, not Manmoham. I'm not a pig.
Bush: Sari, Manmanmo. See this! (Drops a plate on the floor. It breaks.)
Manmohan: Um, Mr Bush, it's Manmohan, not Manmanmo.
Bush: (Turns to Condi) Hey, Condo, this guy's got an even tougher name than that general fellow. Maybe we should just have called Sophia instead of Manmotor.
Manmohan: Um, Mr Bush, it's Manmohan, not Manmotor. And it's Sonia, not Sophia.
Bush: Ok, ok, for the last time, see this. (Drops a plate on the floor. It breaks.)
Manmohan: Um, Mr Bush, what exactly are you doing?
Bush: Can't you see, Manmoslem? I'm breaking Clinton. And I'm smashing China at the same time. Har har har.

Well, I presume the next president will have bushes in his garden, so what's wrong with Clinton China?

And they all pretend they're Orphans
And their memory's like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away
And the things you can't remember
Tell the things you can't forget
That history puts a saint in every dream

From "Time" by Tom Waits. It's track 9 of Raindogs, one of Waits's finest albums, and its lyrics contain some haunting images, though they seem to mean nothing overall. I also love the bit where Waits sings that "the wind is making speeches/ And the rain sounds like a round of applause." Lovely stuff.

And while I'm on Waits, here's a bonus nugget from another great song called "I Don't Wanna Grow Up", from the album Bone Machine:

Well when I see my parents fight
I don't wanna grow up
They all go out and drinking all night
And I don't wanna grow up
I'd rather stay here in my room
Nothin' out there but sad and gloom
I don't wanna live in a big old Tomb
On Grand Street

When I see the 5 o'clock news
I don't wanna grow up
Comb their hair and shine their shoes
I don't wanna grow up
Stay around in my old hometown
I don't wanna put no money down
I don't wanna get me a big old loan
Work them fingers to the bone
I don't wanna float a broom
Fall in and get married then boom
How the hell did I get here so soon
I don't wanna grow up

Me neither, but it's too late.

More Nuggets and Aphorisms here.

Here's one fairly mindboggling statistic, among many such: "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" has sold more copies in one day after release than "The Da Vinci Code" did in one year.

JK Rowling can now truly be called a meme-saab.

Get through this, if you can, for the harm that governments can do through mindless over-regulation.

(Link via Cafe Hayek.)

Prashant and Ashma should team up.

Arun Simha just drew my attention to this article written a few days ago by Amir Taheri in the Times. An excerpt:

Moments after yesterday’s attacks my telephone was buzzing with requests for interviews with one recurring question: but what do they want? That reminded me of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker, who was shot by an Islamist assassin on his way to work in Amsterdam last November. According to witnesses, Van Gogh begged for mercy and tried to reason with his assailant. “Surely we can discuss this,” he kept saying as the shots kept coming. “Let us talk it over.”

Van Gogh, who had angered Islamists with his documentary about the mistreatment of women in Islam, was reacting like BBC reporters did yesterday, assuming that the man who was killing him may have some reasonable demands which could be discussed in a calm, democratic atmosphere.

But sorry, old chaps, you are dealing with an enemy that does not want anything specific, and cannot be talked back into reason through anger management or round-table discussions. Or, rather, this enemy does want something specific: to take full control of your lives, dictate every single move you make round the clock and, if you dare resist, he will feel it his divine duty to kill you.

Why is this so? In the rest of his piece, Taheri tells us. Also, again courtesy Arun, here's a reaction to it from Ardeshir Cowasjee in Dawn.

James Surowiecki, New Yorker columnist and author of the excellent "The Wisdom of Crowds," writes about the right approach to foreign aid.

India FM quotes someone as saying:

I used to watch my cousins all thin and reedy and go green. Here I was fat and stubby struggling to squeeze into anti fits while the girls would flaunt their handspan waist!

Ok, make a guess, who said these words?

Clue 1: She's a Bollywood actress.

Clue 2: She's married to a Bollywood actor

Clue 3: She likes reading Mills and Boon.

Click here for the answer, if clue 3 wasn't a complete giveaway.

One of the most fundamental misconceptions about our world is that wealth is a zero-sum thing. There's only so much wealth in the world, the mistaken belief goes, and therefore if the rich are getting richer the poor must be getting poorer, and the only way we can battle poverty is if we redistribute some of that wealth. Well, Arnold Kling had recently linked to an excellent essay by Paul Rubin that explores the possible origins of what he termed "folk economics", and Warren Meyer of Coyote Blog examines the same subject in a post titled "Physics, Wealth Creation, and Zero Sum Economics". Meyer writes:

My guess is that this zero-sum thinking comes from our training and intuition about the physical world. As we all learned back in high school, nature generally works in zero sums. For example, in any bounded environment, no matter what goes on inside (short of nuclear fission) mass and energy are both conserved, as outlined by the first law of thermodynamics. Energy may change form, like the potential energy from chemical bonds in gasoline being converted to heat and work via combustion, but its all still there somewhere.

In fact, given the second law of thermodynamics, the only change that will occur is that elements will end in a more disorganized, less useful form than when they started. This notion of entropic decay also has a strong effect on economic thinking, as you will hear many of the same zero sum economics folks using the language of decay on human society. Take folks like Paul Ehrlich (please). All of their work is about decay: Pollution getting worse, raw materials getting scarce, prices going up, economies crashing. They see human society driven by entropic decline.

So are they wrong? Are economics and society driven by something similar to the first and second laws of thermodynamics?

Read the full post, it's outstanding.

(Coyote link via email from Jim. Kunal has also blogged about it.)

Ian Buruma writes in the Financial Times:

Just imagine the results if the advocates of immediate western withdrawal from the Middle East got their wish. There would be a Hobbesian mayhem of battling warlords in Afghanistan and an all-out civil war in Iraq. This might well enable a small number of bloodthirsty religious fanatics to achieve what has so far eluded them, namely to grab the power of a major Arab state, with all its resources, to carry on their holy war against all those who do not submit to their totalitarian fantasies.

Yeah, and the Taliban would probably say: been there, done that. Buruma's piece, "Homeland insecurity", is a superb analysis of how difficult fighting extremism will be for the West. He avoids simplistic traps and explores the nuances of the issue quite well.

Also, in case you haven't already read it, do check out his fine book (co-written with Avishai Margalit) "Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies".

[T]he new American home is a residential SUV.

Robert Samuelson, in a fine article on homes in America.

More Nuggets and Aphorisms here.

An idiot congressman makes a stupid comment about tactics in the war on terror.

(Link via email from reader Ravi Srinivas.)

Ravikiran Rao chooses a time and venue for the next Mumbai blogmeet. Or does he?

Michael Higgins asks: "why has obesity become such a problem in America and other countries in the early 21st century?" And then he answers it, in an excellent post that also uses economics to search for a solution.

One mark of a great tabloid is that the headlines are far more fun to read than the stories themselves. I wouldn't dare to suggest that Mid Day is there yet, but gosh, just cast your eye upon their headlines for today:

Mentally ill man bites constable
Thief strips man of underwear, cash
Shiv Sena corporator held for firing
HC orders proper care for zoo animals
Couple rescue people from manholes
Salman, act karo

And the one I liked the most:

Aporna returns to haunt Anurag

Masterful. These are headlines elevated to the level of (an admittedly perverse, and possibly unintentional) art. Great fun.

Chandrahas Choudhury is back from a break, and treats us to a fine review of "Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth" by Naguib Mahfouz, which shows us, among other things, "what a rocky and difficult road is the pursuit of the truth through patient scrutiny and inquiry." As usual, it's an outstanding post, and leaves me gasping with envy.

Chandrahas's posts on books are also often frustrating to read, because he writes so evocatively and lucidly that you want to rush out and buy the book that he's talking about, and it's never available. In fact, for all the malls and mobile-phone models in India, the sign of true progress that I await is the existence of book shops as good as those in the West. How long must we wait? How long?

One alarmed phone call and a couple of mails have come asking me why I haven't blogged all day today. Sigh. Well, here's my explanation. First, I woke up late, at about lunchtime. Second, when I did I found that my phone had been disconnected by the MTNL. No, I am not going to complain about statism here: it was entirely my fault, as I hadn't paid the bills on time. Serves me right. I've paid the bills now, and the phone's working again.

Had this happened a month or two ago, I would probably have gone to my office or a cybercafe, but today I just wanted to chill for a few hours in a blogless world. You know, read a book, listen to some music, have a nice cup of coffee, maybe even write a few pages of something with pen, on paper. I did all that. I enjoyed the break. Now I'm back.

In an excellent post, Don Boudreaux writes:

Why do people tolerate arbitrary power exercised by other people – and endure the barbarism that the exercise of such power inevitably unleashes?

I have no answer, just this thought: Castro, Chavez, Mugabe, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini – you name the head-of-state thug – derive much of their power from childish sentiments.

We in the west today romanticize childhood. We think of young children as innocent, frank, and cute. Of course, they are these things to a large degree, especially when being raised in protective middle-class homes. But children naturally, even more than most adults, hold simplistic notions of reality.

Read the full thing. "Simplistic notions of reality" perfectly describes the driving force of both the socialist left and the religious right in India, and I hope one day we figure out how to give them a spanking.

Update: In case you haven't already read it, do check out "Lord of the Flies". Fine book.

And Severus Snape will help him defeat Voldemort.

No, these aren't spoilers for this book, but my predictions of what the next book in the series will have in store for us.

Sumeet Kulkarni, in the first of a series of posts about the "unwieldy socialist economies of Old Europe," comes upon an interesting statistic: the average cow in the European Union receives a daily subsidy that is greater than what most Africans make in a day.

Now, despite my fondness for cows, clearly this is not a desirable state of affairs. So what should be done? Sumeet states it very well when he writes:

Listen Europe, the poor farmer in the third world does not want your monetary aid to make progress. He wants an equal opportunity to succeed. So stop your agricultural subsidies.

The poor meat worker in Poland does not want your EU development subsidy. He wants to be able to work as an EU citizen in the country of his choice at the wages mutually agreed upon by him and his employer. If those wages are below your inflated labour policy-defined wages, then so be it. That's how a free labour market should settle on the "correct" wage.

Stop your condescending know-all attitude and give free trade and globalization the chance to succeed. That's "social justice". Not your bloated socialism. [Emphasis in the original.]

Well said. Empower people instead of subsidising cows.

Previous posts on cows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12.

One of the bits I liked in the 350 pages I've read so far of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince".

Now I must go and finish the book.

Vir Sanghvi writes in the Hindistan Times:

It has long been an article of faith among Western politicians that while there may be the odd extremist organisation in Pakistan, the government is clean as a whistle and that General Musharraf himself is a kindly, philanthropic figure, fighting the good fight on behalf of his Western mentors.

In fact, as India has been warning for nearly two decades, this view of the Pakistani establishment is not only dangerously naïve, it can also have fatal consequences for helpless civilians in the West and in India.

Sanghvi's article deals with the double standards of the West when it comes to terrorism; a common subject, but he makes the case especially well. Read the full piece.

Salim Khan writes an open letter to his son in which he diagnoses Salman's problem:

You know son, you have a weakness, which is that you are too gullible. Everybody around you, is using you. Your niceness works to your disadvantage. You have a million girls after you; it does not matter if one out of those millions has abandoned you. More so, you cannot lose control over your life for that one girl.

Link via Sonia, whose sharp sarcasm I can't match, and what more can I say about Salman anyway? What a guy.

Update: Oh, and here are more transcripts. My previous posts on this issue are here and here.

Manmohan Singh finally gets pissed off by the poisonous and irresponsible rhetoric of the left. Rediff reports:

Reacting sharply to the allegations of a "sell out" to the United States, levelled notably by the Left parties, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared on Saturday that he would safeguard national interests "till the end of my life".

En route to Washington for discussions with President George W Bush, he told journalists on board his special aircraft that such allegations were an insult to the Congress.

"Can you imagine any prime minister consciously or unconsciously selling India? Nobody can sell India. India is not on sale," he asserted adding, "nobody has to teach us lessons on patriotism." [Hyperlink in original report.]

On a related note, Shekhar Gupta points out that "the people of India never voted for the CMP [common minimum programme]", which is effectively being imposed on the people against their will. Gupta also analyses how the Left's gameplan may be to "pull down the UPA government at the 'right' moment, on some high populist issue, and then put together a third front-type coalition after another election."

In another good piece, TN Ninan writes about how "the worst fears that had been aroused by the Left's initial sabre-rattling have come true and the general expectations of what the UPA government can do by way of economic reform have now reached minimalist proportions." And yet, he points out, the stock market is booming. "[T]he economy," he writes, "will do well even if the government does precisely nothing."

Well, yes, the momentum of the reforms that have already happened may sustain itself, but we could so easily be growing at 10-12 percent instead of seven percent if reforms had been adequately carried out. The fault for that not happening, alas, must lie with more than just the left parties.

Nitin Pai tells us all about the Jihadus pakistanii. (As also the Jihadus alqaedus, the Jihadus talebanus, the Jihadus kashmirius, and more.) Good stuff.

Jai Arjun Singh visits a film festival and is harassed and tormented all the way through. (As he'd mentioned in an earlier post, sometimes the films do that.) A familiar tale to all those of us who've grown up in India.

That's the secret behind the otherwise inscrutable headline, "Girl overhears man as he attacks friend".

TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan writes in Business Standard:

[I]t is testimony to the British conquest of Indian minds, a theme explored marvellously well by Ashis Nandy, that they have left us thinking that they did us a favour. As con tricks go, this one is impossible to beat. In any case, it is hard to comprehend how a system of governance designed to plunder and pillage could be called good in any normal sense. Why, as the Prime Minister himself pointed out, “India’s share of world income collapsed from 22.6 per cent in 1700, almost equal to Europe’s share of 23.3 per cent at that time, to as low as 3.8 per cent in 1952. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th century, the brightest jewel in the British Crown was the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income.”

Nor was the plundering for just a short while, as is usually the case when one country rules another. It lasted, if you must have end-points, from the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to Independence in 1947. That is 190 years. From the Roman Empire down, no other empire, except perhaps the Spanish one in South America, visited as much misery and brought such ruin to its subjects.

Read the full piece, in which Srinivasa-Raghavan says that Manmohan Singh showed bad judgement in praising imperial rule in India recently, not because he should not have praised Britain, but because he got the facts wrong.

Also, here's an old post by Ravikiran Rao that examines both sides of the argument about whether British rule was good for India or not.

For decades we have murdered Chinese food. Now the Chinese are mauling Indian food. This is the real battle.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of India's finest thinkers, has a superb essay in three parts on this subject in the Indian Express. Here you go:

Regulating Higher Education
Critiquing the Regulatory Regime
How to build Quality Institutions

So says Sitaram Yechury.

Narayan Rane lectures Bal Thackeray.

A Maoist leader gets a message through to the West Bengal Government. And to all of us.

First, here are some more transcripts of conversations between Salman Khan and Aishwarya Rai, in which he boasts of, among other things, his conquests of Preity Zinta and Dia Mirza, and abuses Aamir Khan, who he suspects of having a scene with Aishwarya. Pathetic stuff. What surprises me in all these conversations is that Aishwarya takes his shit, and lets him talk. Is she scared of hanging up?

Second, here's Sahil Khan telling us why he's divorcing Negar Khan. It's because of a wardrobe malfunction. Here's what he has to say:

[H]er [Negar's] recent topless pictures, which were splashed in magazines and newspapers all over the world, cemented my decision to leave her. I don’t know if she did it deliberately or it happened by mistake, but I cannot stand my wife being shown naked in public. It is just not a part of my upbringing.

Funky chicken monkey.

Update: Here's Salman elevated to comic strip. (Link via email from Vikram.)

Update 2: Sonia has more detail here, and the comments are interesting as well.

Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek writes about child labour:

[I]f the alternative to working in a factory is working on a (probably subsistence) farm, two thoughts should spring immediately to mind: (1) in societies in which child labor is prevalent, children will labor somewhere, even if regulations and trade sanctions remove them from factories producing goods for export to rich countries – locking children out of factory work does not thereby send them home to watch tv, practice piano, read Roald Dahl, or help grandma bake muffins; (2) farm work isn’t necessarily safer or more pleasant than factory work – perhaps it is better in some dimensions (maybe even in most dimensions); my point is that farm labor shouldn’t be romanticized just because it’s done outdoors with furry or feathery critters (who kick, bite, defecate, and attract vermin and insects). If reliable data could be gathered, I'd bet that they'd show that farm labor in such countries is almost as dangerous and unpleasant as is the typical job performed by a child laborer in a factory.

Good point. And a similar one can be made about sweatshops. People who work in sweatshops do so because it is the best option available to them, and they'd have a worse job if the sweatshops weren't there. After all, they work there out of choice, nor coercion. Ditto with call centers and BPO units.

Satyajit 'Beatzo' Chetri tells us about the instinctive and intricate choreography that takes place at panipuri stalls. Good stuff, though a bit frustrating to discover at 2.43am, when no panipuri stalls are open in the city.

(Link via Gaurav.)

Old pal Ammani, who writes an exceptional blog of micro-fiction, emails from London:

On Monday, for the first time since we came here, I worried about wearing a salwar kameez and boarding the tube. Would the public know that I'm not an extremist? Should I wear a bindi so they don't take me for a Muslim? (I have no problem in being thought of as one but in the present islamaphobic climate, I didn't want to take a chance.) Will they notice the difference? Will I be sized up when I get into a carriage? Will the co-passengers wonder what I'm carrying in my bag? Will they be wary of me? I worried and worried before slipping into my kurta. I needn't have bothered. The evening was smooth as ever. There were no hushed whispers or racist taunts. People were polite and went about their business. Someone even went out of his way to give me directions. I don't think he noticed my bindi.

It'll take more than a few bombs to shake London. Or to change it.

No, that's not my kitty's diet. Instead, it's the daily quota for each of the 480 rat-catchers employed by Mumbai's municipality, for which they get Rs 133 a day. (That's Rs 4.43 per rat, or approximately 10 cents, for those of you who are USD-inclined.) Not the most enthralling of jobs.

Gautam Chikermane writes:

All active acts of card issuing companies seems to lie in acquiring new customers at high costs and indulging in downright criminal activities while seeking payments — sometimes due, mostly not — out of them.

This is an old peeve a lot of us have - Chikermane himself wrote more about this here - and I hope once the proposed RBI regulations kick in things will improve. It baffles me, though: why are banks in India so incredibly customer-unfriendly? Competition doesn't seemed to have changed that much.

Not the government of India, it has been deemed.

The Hindustan Times has just launched in Mumbai, and although I haven't seen it yet, excited friends inform me that this inaugural Mumbai edition contains transcripts of taped conversations between Salman Khan and Aishwarya Rai in which the man, well, goes bonkers. The article doesn't seem to be online, but that's never stopped bloggers, has it? Here are Uma's and Sonia's posts on the subject, with hilarious, and worrying, excerpts from what Salman has to say.

Update: Arun Simha, S Jagadish and Chandrachud Basavaraj have been kind enough to inform me that the story is now online. Here's the link. As Arun writes, "PG-13".

The conflicts:

Sulking Shatrughan hits out at BJP
BJP tells Fernandes to shut up
Ram Gopal Varma takes on Aamir Khan
FDA prohibits sale of Red Bull drink

And the confession:

Sallu is my jaan and I love him to death: Sush

I like.

Well, no, he doesn't. Not yet. But if Aishwarya Rai can win the national award for best actress, Kim can hope, can't he?

Update: After numerous reports that Aishwarya had won best actress, revised reports are now tumbling out that it was actually a Kannada actress named Tara who won that award, for a film called Hasina. Someone made a mistake somewhere when the news broke, it seems, and most of the original news pieces on the net that announced Aishwarya as the winner have been corrected, making bloggers like me who linked to them look rather silly.

Sorry Kim. And don't worry Ash, acting awards come and go, but how many of your contemporaries can boast of being a doll?

Jai Arjun Singh writes about Baghdad Burning.

Michael Higgins innovates.

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution looks at the bright side of global warming.

And here's a post I'd written on the subject a few months ago.

Suketu Mehta writes in the New York Times:

My father came to America in 1977 not for its political freedoms or its way of life, but for the hope of a better economic future for his children. My grandfathers on both sides left rural Gujarat in northwestern India to find work: one to Calcutta, which was even more remote in those days than New York is from Bombay now; and the other to Nairobi. Mobility, we have always known, is survival. Now I face the possibility that my children, when they grow up, will find their jobs outsourced to the very country their grandfather left to pursue economic opportunity.

Unnecessary alarmism, all of this. Outsourcing might be a political hot button in the US right now, but it won't hurt America, and it baffles me why Mehta thinks he might have to teach his kids Hindi, as he speculates in his piece, to prepare them for employment later in life. All the outsourcing work coming to India is in English, and it constitutes less than one percent of jobs in India so far. Small change.

(Link via email, separately, from Olinda and Avinash.)

PTI reports:

India has said terrorist camps are still operating in Pakistan and New Delhi has photographic evidence to prove it.

"I have told the Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz that the terrorist camps have not been dismantled. We have the photographs and I have told him that we can provide photographic evidence," External Affairs Minister K Natwar Singh told the BBC here last night.

Natwar Singh, who was here to attend a meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the G4 countries, hoped the peace process with Pakistan would continue unimpeded, "unless there is a terrorist attack like the one witnessed in London."

Now, if this is not an invitation to attack, what is? Natwar is effectively saying:

Dudes, terrorists, we know where you are but we are not coming for you, we will merely request your patrons to remove you. We will continue the peace process, and we know you oppose it, so here's what you need to do to derail it: just attack us again. Swagatam, lads.

(Link via Varnam.)

Pooja Bhatt is upset, reports Mid Day, because the title of a film she was planning has allegedly been stolen by a producer named Vinod Mukhi. And what's the film called? Cabaret.

The report quotes Bhatt as saying:

My production company (Fish Eye Network) registered the film under four names with two spellings — Cabaret, Kabaret, Cabaret — The Dance of Love and Kabaret — The Dance of Love. I have the necessary documents to prove that I am the owner of the title.

She also accuses the film industry of having "a herd mentality and no originality".

And no, the reporter did not ask her if she had seen this particular film directed by Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minnelli.

Advani stays. Rane goes. Dog bites man.

Here's the text of Manmohan Singh's speech at Oxford. The bit that raised an anthill of a controversy:

Today, with the balance and perspective offered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian Prime Minister to assert that India's experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences too. Our notions of the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age old civilisation met the dominant Empire of the day.

And, he later adds, cricket as well.

"Punjabis are liars," it seems.

I couldn't care less about whether it really is Mallika Sherawat in that MMS I haven't seen, but it seems to matter a lot to everyone else in Mumbai. Mid Day has a story on it today, and there are some hilarious reactions by celebrities at the bottom. Bipasha Basu asks why "the man always goes scot-free," as if a crime has been committed, while Mahesh Bhatt informs us, "A sex symbol has mystique, but once everything has been seen, it’s all over." (Um, what about Pamela Anderson then?) But the reaction I liked best was Rakhi Sawant's, who said:

Oh God! An MMS clip of Mallika? Oooh, I want to see it! Please send it to me ASAP. I think it must be Mallika. She is a bindaas girl and Sawant can do anything.

Heh. Sawant can do anything, it seems. Yes, I know it's probably a typo, but that's the fun.

Snake bites priest. Snake dies. Guess who gets the credit.

Yet another quick tale from Ammani.

In an excellent essay in Tech Central Station, Arnold Kling of EconLog points out that contrary to what many of the stars behind Live 8 seem to believe, redistribution is not the solution to poverty, but market institutions are. Kling writes:

Two years ago, economist Paul Rubin published a paper called Folk Economics (note: payment or subscription required). As this description points out, Rubin suggests that in a hunter-gatherer tribe, goods are exchanged mostly through sharing and reciprocal altruism. There were no visible gains from impersonal trade or economic growth. In this zero-sum environment, people evolved an instinct to resent and punish those who took too much.

Rubin's thesis is that the instincts that evolved in prehistoric tribes account for the misguided "folk economics" that many people believe today. Anti-globalization and opposition to free trade reflect the fear of strangers that was inherent in tribal society. Resentment of the rich and a belief in redistribution reflect the hunter-gatherer's zero-sum thinking.

In a well-functioning modern economy, wealth is created rather than stolen. People develop new technologies, new ways of satisfying human wants, and more efficient ways of producing and distributing goods and services. As the quote from Lucas [earlier in the piece] indicates, we owe our well-being to this process of economic growth, not to redistribution. [Links in original.]

Kling's essay is superb, and Folk Economics is also worth a read. I followed Kling's link, and was able to download a free pdf. Good stuff.

(TCS essay link via Cafe Hayek.)

Indian's abroad are becoming an increasingly important segment of the market, reports Barbara Kiviat of Time magazine. She writes:

Welcome to the next marketing frontier. For years, Western companies have understood the potential of 1 billion consumers in India, but now they are slowly starting to realize the purchasing power of people in the U.S. who trace their roots to the subcontinent--a group known as desis. MTV India has aired overseas since 1996, but MTV Desi--a channel for Americans of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Bhutanese and Nepalese descent--is brand new, launching this summer. And MTV isn't alone as it chases desi dollars. South Asian marketing is still in its infancy, but early adopters like General Motors, Citibank and GlaxoSmithKline are advertising in ethnic newspapers, buying airtime on satellite channels, sponsoring cultural festivals, underwriting minority scholarships and even creating new products, like MTV Desi.

Not just marketers abroad but also those in India are catering to overseas Indians. Bollywood producers to start with.

(Time link via Sanjeev.)

André Béteille bemaons "a distinct and pervasive feature of our public culture": Dignitary Culture.

Narayan Rane, a friend informed me recently, was a strongman in the Konkan region before he became a politician. He was apparently called Narya, and his gang inspired terror across the region. It was natural, then, that he became one of Bal Thackeray's key men when he joined the Shiv Sena. He brought muscle with him.

And now that he is trying to split the party, he is preparing to flex his muscle again. Mid Day reports:

Narayan Rane has brought in a veritable army for his first encounter with loyal Shiv Sena legislators since he was sacked by Bal Thackeray a week ago. The monsoon session of the state legislature begins today, and Vidhan Bhavan is likely to resemble a battleground.

Rane’s supporters, from his bastion, Sindhudurg district, will pour in to the city in a whopping 20 buses and 150 Tata Sumos today. Scores more will arrive by train and in state transport buses.

[...]

The Sena too is preparing for war. All its 221 shakhas (ward-level units) have been ordered to provide as many people as possible for a show of strength at Vidhan Bhavan.

Such fun. I wish someone would organise a live webcast.

Jerry Rao writes in the Indian Express that he believes in astrology. Why does he do so? Well, not because it is true, but because of two other reasons. One, it is comforting to believe in it. And two, belief in it is as effective as pyschotherapy. I argue with none of those points (psychotherapy is as fallacious as astrology), but neither means that astrology has any basis in fact. At one point he writes:

The question that is often asked is whether astrology is compatible with a modern rational sensibility. I find this particularly humorous. After all, if we can live with electoral psephology, post-modern social psychology, the politics of victimhood and the passing fancies of numerous dietitians and health-gurus, why should astrology which provides so much comfort to people and which above all directly links us to the cosmos, be looked down upon?

Well, all the things Rao names there are, in my humble view, incompatible with "a modern rational sensibility". Just because X and Y are pseudo-scientific, and are accepted by some as credible, it does not follow that Z, which is equally pseudo-scientific, deserves credibility.

Sigh. I agree with what Rao writes most of the time, but this particular piece is distressingly bizarre and badly argued. Maybe Saturn is messing with his Rahu or Ketu, or whatever.

Previous posts on astrology: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Salman Rushdie writes in the New York Times:

The "culture" of rape that exists in India and Pakistan arises from profound social anomalies, its origins lying in the unchanging harshness of a moral code based on the concepts of honor and shame. Thanks to that code's ruthlessness, raped women will go on hanging themselves in the woods and walking into rivers to drown themselves. It will take generations to change that. Meanwhile, the law must do what it can.

Yes, but who makes the law here? And who upholds it?

(Link via Abi.)

In response to my post praising Ramachandra Guha's article on the BJP, Atanu Dey writes in:

I agree with Ram Guha that BJP should treat all Indians equally regardless of their personal faith. I suggest that the BJP drop their opposition to a Common Civil Code for all Indians. I also support the Congress in their secularism and their insistence that people of different faiths should not be treated differently. I commend the Congress for not instituting subsidies for religious travel given to only some people based on their religion. It is heartwarming to see the totally unbiased opinion of secularists like Ram Guha.

Heh.

Atanu, for those of you who haven't yet discovered him, run the blog Deeshaa, which won the award of Indiblog of the Year at Indibloggies 2004. Here's an interview of him on that site.

Tavleen Singh lashes out:

The young men and women who are blowing themselves up are trained not by terrorist groups but by mullahs and Islamic seminaries and until we acknowledge this we cannot win the war against terrorism. That the madrasas in Pakistan have the support of the Pakistani government is understandable since Pakistan is an Islamic republic. Much less understandable is our own government’s inability to admit that religious schools have no business to exist in secular Bharat that is India. And, please, let us not have any trash about how these madrasas are the only chance for indigent Muslim boys to get an education.

Singh also writes later that "most [madrasas] have come up in the past 15 years and that the money comes from the same Middle Eastern countries that funded last week’s bombings in London and 9/11."

Now, I agree with Singh that madrasas are a problem, but I'm not in favour of banning them, unless they're explicitly encouraging their students to take up terrorism, which is mostly not the case. On the contrary, we should enable competition to these madrasas to spring up in the form of private schools. Currently, the goverment stands a barrier to free enterprise in the education sector, as I'd mentioned here. If the government is allowing madrasas to spring up, it should get out of the way of all entrepreneurs who want to start schools. Schools will then spring up, and the ones that will thrive will be the ones that most enhance the professional prospects of the students, and which provide the best value for money. It is also likely that once bribery and corruption are disabled, by removing government discretion in this matter, many of the schools will be eminently affordable.

Given a choice between a chance to be prosperous and to get religious education, most poor families will opt for prosperity. Right now, however, that choice does not exist for them, with the municipal schools that most poor people can afford being no good. Enable that choice, and madrasas will fade away due to market pressures. The best way to handle extremism.

Update: Vikram Arumilli writes in to point to a Business Week article that gives a counterpoint to Singh's: "Korans, Not Kalashnikovs at Madrassas".

In an excellent historical essay about how the Congress party tried "to incorporate representative members of all of India’s human species" in the years after 1916, Mukul Kesavan writes:

The Congress in the Twenties didn’t really believe that it represented the Muslims, but it had begun to believe that perhaps mobilization was a better route to roping in wary political constituencies such as the Muslims rather than negotiations with elitist organizations. From the late Twenties this was certainly Nehru’s position and it wasn’t an unreasonable one. The Congress may not have had the Muslims at that time, but neither did any Muslim party. The League was dormant, the Khilafat Committee, thanks to Ataturk’s abolition of the Sultanate, had fallen through one of History’s many manholes and there were no new candidates in sight.

Read the full piece, part of an ongoing series. I was particularly intrigued by the bit where he writes about Mahatma Gandhi "ruthlessly pressing [BR] Ambedkar with a fast-unto-death till Ambedkar agreed to give up separate electorates in exchange for more reserved seats." What fun.

Celina Jaitley shares with us how she began reading, why books make excellent life partners, and why she enjoys Adolf Hitler but not Jackie Collins, unlike Bollywood actresses of the 80s. She also likes, surprise surprise, Mills and Boon, like Kajol but unlike Namrata Shirodkar, who prefers books that give her "an insight into the beyond". Jaitley complains, "[E]veryone wants to build a gym. Why can’t they build libraries as well?"

Hmm. Now I will breathe in and tell you all about how I got to have such a superb body.

Or maybe not.

Ramachandra Guha writes in the Telegraph:

The BJP cannot, will not, rid itself of the bigots and bigotry of the RSS. It cannot, will not, remodel itself as a party that treats all Indians equally regardless of their personal faith.

This is the conclusion of an excellent article, and one that might dismay those who would like to see the emergence of a secular-right party in the Indian polity, the kind that C Rajagopalachari once led. The past is not always an accurate indicator to what will happen, though, and small acts we ignore today may have unintended consequences. It'll be fun to see how the political scene in India shapes itself in the years to come.

Shekhar Gupta wonders if India has become "a weak, confused state", and if the terrorists have sensed it, and are emboldened by it. He writes:

Terrorism by itself may be an approach of total madness and irrationality. But terrorists are clever, calculating people. Also, they are human and read the mood, signals and the threat from the other side in pretty much the same way that the good guys do. In both these cases, it seems they waited long enough until they concluded the security establishment had become lazy and complacent enough for them to dare such major strikes after a long gap when the heat was on them.

As Gupta points out, it's not just the terrorists from across the border that we are going soft on but the Naxalites across the country, and the ULFA. The Congress has left many shameful legacies in this country's history – heck, every party has – but this might end up being the worst of them all. Read the full piece.

The Indian Express reports:

After being asked by Rajiv Gandhi Foundation chairperson Sonia Gandhi to get all research papers vetted by her executive committee, Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies director Bibek Debroy has resigned.

Gandhi’s instruction follows Debroy’s report on economic freedom in Indian states which gave top ranking to Gujarat. The report was cheered, celebrated and publicised by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

This is disgraceful. Debroy's report is by no means an endorsement of Modi's government: it looks at data that was sourced before Modi's time, and in any case marks only economic freedom, not social or political freedom. Modi might have been opportunistic in celebrating the report, but there is no reason to punish Debroy for that. If Sonia could have pointed out flaws in the report and then come up with her diktat, it would have been justified.

She is, of course, the chairperson of the foundation, and can do what she wants with it. But this incident won't do its credibility any good.

Incidentally, here's an earlier piece by Debroy on the report.

Iran won't let India import two cheetahs to India in order to clone them.

At least we look after our cows and sheep. (These two links via Vikram Arumilli.)

Heh.

That's a sound that a mobile phone and a cash register share. Reuben Abraham, that excellent blogger over at Zoo Station who had done his doctoral research on whether the proliferation of mobile phones aids economic development, finds his conclusions backed up by the Economist and the Financial Times. Read his post here.

Surjit Bhalla is delighted that Jean Dreze has discovered the difference between intention and outcome. Heh.

First Imrana. Now this.

I hope this wasn't deliberate.

The British don't give in to fear, writes Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal. He says:

An assertion was made yesterday on the Web site of an al Qaeda affiliate claiming responsibility for the terrorist bombings in London: "Britain is now burning with fear."

This is not true; and it cannot ever be true, because it is alien to the British character to "burn." And even if ardor were not so damned un-British, "fear" would never make for kindling in Britannia. Some nations are too stoical, too suspicious of disarray, to panic or wilt in the face of hostility.

Read the full thing.

Update: Shom Biswas finds an exception to this rule. He writes in:

[The British don't give in to fear] even when fear has a name? Or maybe more than one names? Even when it is called Thomson-Lillee? Or for the matter Marshall-Garner-Holding-Croft-Roberts?

Heh. Come come, let's not get cricket into this.

Also, reader Tajinder Pal writes in from London to second what Varadarajan says. "Londeners have handled themselves remarkably well," he writes. "People are just doing their normal work as if nothing has happened."

Mumbai Mirror buys one. Good journalism; sad, sad story.

Sudheendra Kulkarni burns his bridges:

Many well-meaning people who fervently believe in communal harmony, and who were understandably horrified by the hooliganism of self-styled Ram Bhakts on December 6, tend to deny the wide-scale temple-demolition and idol-breaking binge of several Muslim rulers in the past. Nothing good will come out of this attitude of denial, this attempt to falsify history. At the same time, nothing good, and only unmitigated harm, will come out of the bigoted misadventurism of Hindu extremist elements who thought that they were correcting a historical wrong by pulling down the Babri Masjid. They didn’t correct a wrong; they committed a new one. That "Talibani" performance was the mirror image of the totally unacceptable act of religious hatred and iconoclasm of certain Muslim rulers, who created a bad impression among Hindus about the great faith of Islam. Therefore, both the construction of the Babri mosque at Ram Janmabhoomi and its demolition centuries later constitute an affront to the spiritual and cultural ethos of India, which has always upheld tolerance and respect for each other’s faith as one of the highest human ideals. [My emphasis.]

Well said. But by effectively comparing the Sangh Parivar to the Taliban, Kulkarni has either ensured that they will not allow him a way back into favour in the BJP, or asserted that they no longer matter so much as the BJP moves towards the centre. Which is it? My heart says the latter, but my head says that Mr Kulkarni's sung his swan song. Pity.

Update: Anand of Locana writes in:

The demolition of the masjid in December 1992 took place in front our eyes, and it's a fact that no one can deny. That's not the case with the construction of Babri Masjid. From the historical material available to us, archaeological or from literary-religious texts like Ramcharitmanas etc, it cannot be concluded that the Babri Masjid was built over a temple. The claim that it's built over a temple is a shaky one. I think that was a deliberate equating from Kulkarni's part, and I think it's of significance to distinguish this difference between events of 1528 and 1992.

Here's an earlier post by Anand on the subject. I don't enough about the subject of how the construction of the Babri Masjid came about, and am offering no comment on the issue.

One of the most pernicious denials of freedom in our country affects poor people who try to earn an honest living in the cities of India, but are not allowed to do so by government functionaries. This is superbly detailed in "Law, Liberty and Livelihood", brought out by the Centre for Civil Society, a Delhi-based organisation. I have written about this here, here and here.

Well, CCS has been carrying out a campaign on this issue for a while now, and, among many other things, are currently preparing an excellent petition to the government of India. I have just signed this petition, and if you care about this issue I urge you to do so as well, and to spread the word. If their campaign works out, it will have a real and immediate impact on the lives of millions of people in the streets of India. In fact, we will all benefit, as Metcalfe's Law will ensure. Please do sign the petition if you agree, and spread the word.

Mumbai Trains = MT

Niti Bhan has eyewitness accounts from London, here and here.

Tony Blair said after the terror attacks today:

Our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their [the terrorists'] determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people.

Well put. This isn't just an attack on the UK, but, like the attacks of 9/11, they're an attack on a way of life and a value-system, one that is dear not just to Western countries, but to millions in the developing world, like me. Concepts like personal freedom, equality of women and, in fact, human rights are alien to those behind the attack, and they must be defeated. In that sense, the battle that al-Qaeda - I am assuming they are behind this attack - is waging against the world is more significant than any other terrorist movement in history, both in its scope and in its final objective. It must not be allowed to succeed. And other grievances that one has against the USA or Britain should not become a reason to gloat at such attacks, as I have seen happening in the past.

Also, I hope the organisers of the Tour de France are watchful. Terrorists could hardly find something more appropriate to attack than a global sporting event, and the Tour takes place along hundreds of miles of open roads, making it a vulnerable target. This is a time for vigilance.

The Tour de France is on, and guess who got hurt in a cycle accident.

Update: J Ramanand writes in:

I have a theory that the only reason the US Presidency exists is to give [Jay] Leno some laughter material. The writers for the Tonight Show were already on the job. (See here.) Undoubtedly, the wheels of the Leno factory will run a month on just this one news item.

The best one from that was:

The ironic thing was Bush could have avoided the collision, but you know Bush, he refuses to go left.

This isn't the first time Bush has fallen off. In fact leading upto the elections last year, both Kerry & Bush fell off bicycles. IIRC, one of the jokes on Leno that week was to mention this fact and say "shouldn't we get someone who can do a simple thing like staying on bikes? Someone like..." and cut to Lance Armstrong. More here and here.

Such fun, I tell you. I wonder if they allow Saddam to watch these shows.

... might well be breaking news tomorrow. If this can be news, anything can.

I have a slight cold today, in case anyone is interested. No? Ok.

Ila Patnaik writes in the Indian Express:

The agenda for economic reforms in India today consists of turning the clock back to 1969. Economic policy of the 1969-1976 period consisted of enormous powers being usurped by the state. From 1969, Indira Gandhi turned left seeking political support, and India witnessed an unprecedented increase in control raj. Economic enterprise and private initiative were sharply restricted. Most of the policies of the period are still with us.

Read the full piece. It emphasises that it was during the Indira Gandhi years that the government stripped the people of economic freedoms, and that we need to undo the damage Indira caused before we can move forward.

I often hear talk from people about how India is losing its identity. "We are shamelessly aping American culture," say some, while others bemoan shopping malls, mobile phones, the large number of cars on the street and so on, as they eventually conclude that globalisation must be a bad thing.

Well, in response to a similar lament about Ireland, Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek has a fine reply that I recommend you read in full: Blarney.

Update: Gaurav Sabnis has more on the subject.

The Economic Times reports:

If you thought the ‘flight’ party has just begun for the Great Indian Middle Class with low fares of the no-frills type, here’s a wet blanket. Stung by the competition unleashed by low-cost players like Air Deccan and SpiceJet, bigwigs of the domestic aviation industry have unleashed a hushed campaign for introduction of stiff entry barriers which will prevent competition from intensifying.

While the civil aviation industry is yet to take a view on this, legacy carriers are pushing strongly for higher investment limits and fleet strength, which will deter entry of smaller players. Infrastructure constraints are also being highlighted to seek more regulations on entry of new players, highly-placed sources in the civil aviation ministry said.

In other words, the big players are asking the government to protect them from the smaller players, who are giving them a tough time with their low prices. They're running scared of competition that will, of course, benefit the consumers: you and me. Hopefully the government will tell them just where they can, um, get off.

(Link via MadMan's LinksMatic.)

In my post on Sarkar I'd mentioned my delight at the scene in which Abhishek Bachchan's character reveals that he does not believe in God. Well, it so happens that the main character in a film being an atheist isn't as unusual as I'd thought. NS Ramnath writes in:

[D]id you know that a good man being an atheist is not uncommon in Tamil movies? It probably has to do with the Dravidian movement, which was atheistic and had a huge influence on Tamil cinema. But then, as Kamal Hassan once said, 'devotional' movies also played a big part in converting many of us here to atheism. (I believe in God myself.)

Also, reader Srihari Narasimhan writes in to point out that Ram Gopal Varma himself has had an atheist protagonist in an earlier film: Satya was an atheist in Satya. And Nandan Pandit writes in that Abhishek's father, Amitabh Bachchan, played an atheist in Naastik, but "fell at God's feet" at the end of the film.

The videogame continues, as the Sensex hits yet another new high.

Meanwhile, PTI reports that LK Advani will have to face trial in the case of the Babri Masjid demolition.

Only correlation, of course. No causation. Advani and the BJP are becoming irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.

This might just be fake.

Celebrating its certification as the largest-selling broadsheet in the world, the Times of India writes:

What TOI's latest accomplishment really highlights is the importance of establishing a connect with readers' immediate lives. Of shedding traditional journalistic biases in favour of a reader-centric approach to news reporting. It is a victory, therefore, for individual readers like you.

Ha. The piece also says that this reflects "a victory for India". On the contrary, I would say that it reflects our lack of discernment, that such a substandard newspaper should be so widely read by us.

(Link via email from reader Ravi Srinivas.)

In Kerala it's the communists, writes JK of Varnam. They could also be called The New Mafia, in fact. And they're naughty boys.

... are not advisable if you're a man. Nor are "incomparable proportions".

Cricket teams outside India breathe a sigh of relief.

Amrita Shah, examining "a deep disillusionment among those in the media", quotes Ian Jack in a piece in the Indian Express. In an interview with her, Jack had once said:

I think very good journalism which changes things — journalism at its best, in fact — has to have a note of outrage in it. [Such journalism has its roots in] a Westernised, liberalised society in which things like corruption, cruelty and massive inequality stand out. In a society (India) in which massive inequality and corruption do exist in an everyday way, it’s difficult for a newspaper to campaign against it.

The problem, in other words, is not with the newspapers, but with the readers. We have become so apathetic, and so accepting, of the shit around us that we're not interested in reading about it any more. Pretty page 3 pictures and gossip about how Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan are allegedly fighting with each other are more juicy, and attract more eyeballs, as the jargon goes. So that's what the newspapers give priority to. (Another factor, of course, is that India lacks an intellectual culture, as VS Naipaul once said. More on that later.)

Shah ends her piece on a note of hope, though. She writes:

We are on the cusp of a communications revolution. Given the high costs and epic scales involved in running today’s newspaper and television channels, it seems unlikely that any except the brave few will be willing to take risks, to shake the status quo. Perhaps, then, we need to alter our expectations from the traditional media and expect in the coming years the teeth to lie elsewhere.

Will the teeth lie in blogs? Maybe. The audience for blogs today is too limited in India, but that is certain to change in the years to come. And my prediction is that blogs in the Indian regional languages will proliferate, and will be at the cutting edge of India's journalistic renaissance. Fun will happen.

The Hindustan Times reports:

Gone are the sweeping restrictions on the use of national flag as a portion of costume or uniform for the public. For sports-persons, in particular, donning the national flag as part of their dress is to be allowed.

However, as undergarments, uniforms or accessories worn below the waist, it is a no-no.

Hmm. I can just imagine cops marching into a girls college and demanding to meet the principal.

The principal arrives. "Yes," she says.

"Madam," the head cop says, "please call all your girls out into the square and ask them to [drool drool] strip."

"What nonsense," barks the principal. "How dare you? I will do no such thing. Why should they strip?"

"Madam," the head cop says, "we have received information that someone here is disrespecting the national flag by wearing it as a g-string. It is a punishable offence. We must protect the honour of this country. The girls must [drool drool] strip."

"Preposterous," shrieks the principal. "I will not allow such a thing."

"Madam," the head cop says, "May I ask a question? I can see your bra strap peep delectably out of your blouse, on your shoulder. Why is it [drool drool] saffron?"

For readers who are often bewildered by the large number of Indian blogs that they’d like to keep track of but can’t, here’s a solution: check out Desi Pundit. This is a blog started by Patrix (aka Desi Pundit), he of Nerve Endings Firing Away, and four others: Ash, Kaps, Vikram and Vulturo. It aims to be a filter blog for Indian blogs, picking out the best posts for you to read.

India Uncut wishes Desi Pundit the best.

I was out all day (not inspecting hooch, sadly), and thus did not blog about the terrorist attacks on Ayodhya when they were reported. You surely know the news by now: six terrorists killed in the attack, the Lashkar-e-Taiba suspected to be behind it, a security alert sounded around the country, the usual words from the prime minister about crushing terror, and a story about how the government had intelligence reports about the attack. There is also some needless hyperbole from the BJP about how the incident was an attack "on the Hindu faith itself".

Such rhetoric is needless. The attack was, first and foremost, a crime against the Indian state, which is reason enough to treat it with the utmost seriousness. Religion should not come into it. As Nitin Pai says in a characteristically lucid and pithy analysis:

Coming during a time when the BJP is attempting to reinvent itself, the attack is a brazen attempt to keep alive the communal divide that is the bane of India’s politics. If it is L K Advani’s desire to re-position the BJP as a mainstream centre-right political party, he would do well to avoid fanning the flames. His call for nationwide public protests is not only dangerous in its own right, it will play right into the hands of the terrorists. [Links in the original.]

Bang on. As Primary Red of Secular-Right India writes, "India needs to show maturity commensurate with its claims as a great power."

I want to be a hooch inspector.

I should be India’s designated hooch inspector, and my job should be to go from city to city, town to town, and inspect hooch. And oh, to villages also, with pretty belles.

Like I could go to this small village and ask for the panchayat to convene. After it does, I could ask the sarpanch, “Excuse me, do you, like, have any hoooch here?”

And the sarpanch would say, “I’m a sarpanch. Please call me ‘Sir’.”

So I’d say, “Ok, excuse me, do you, like, have any hoooch here, sir?”

And the sarpanch would say, “No.”

Then I’d stride to a hut nearby, fling open the door, and reveal that the hut was full of hooch, wall to wall, ceiling to floor. The sarpanch would look at me sheepishly and blush.

“I see that you do have some hoooch here,” I would say. “But not to worry, send me some belles, and I’ll handle the matter.”

* * * * *

Three weeks later, 400 brass bells would land up at my home.

First Gujarat, now MP.

Sagnik Nandy examines this common sentiment.

Jai Arjun Singh gets a phone call from Airtel:

Customer Care Executive: Hello, Mr Jai Arjun ji se baat ho sakti hai please?
Jai (annoyed at people who call on your cellphone and assume it isn’t you on the line): Ji haan, boliye.
CCE: Madam, I want to speak only to Mr Jai Arjun.
J (adopting gruffest, manliest tone): Boss, this is Mr Jai Arjun speaking!

Heh. Love these transcripts.

This is not going to be a movie review: I thought Sarkar was quite a gheesa-peeta film. (For my non-Hindi-understanding readers, hackneyed.) But there was one moment in the film that jolted me upright in sheer delight. That came when Abhishek Bachchan's character tells a sadhu, who is also a villain, that he doesn't believe in God. There is no rhetorical flourish after it; it is said in a matter-of-fact way, as if it is a trivial matter. I can't remember a Hindi film before this in which the good guy is an atheist. Excellent development.

BBC reports:

A Russian astrologer is suing NASA for crashing a probe into a comet, claiming it has distorted her horoscope.

Marina Bai is seeking $300m (£170m) in damages, saying the probe's impact on Comet Tempel 1 violated her "life and spiritual values".

[...]

"It is obvious that elements of the comet's orbit and associated ephemera will change after the explosion, which interferes with my practice of astrology and deforms my horoscope," Ms Bai told the Izvestia daily newspaper.

One more fine excuse for predictions not working our right: blame it on NASA. Maybe they should just send Ms Bai out to Comet Tempel. Or is that not in her horoscope?

(Link via email from reader TG Vasu.)

Previous posts on astrology: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

AFP reports:

Hong Kongers usually rank near-bottom of the international list of lovers and a social worker may have discovered why: they don't know what to do between the sheets.

Grace Wong of the southern Chinese territory's Family Planning Association said the number of inquiries at her agency rocketed 50 percent last year, with many clients claiming to have no idea how to have sex.

"Some married couples are not familiar with their body parts," Wong was quoted as telling the Sunday Morning Post. "They don't know where their sex organs are.

Yes, they must be confused by all those self-help books that say that good sex takes place between the ears. Scratch scratch scratch, they go, and no pleasure comes. Could it be the dandruff, they wonder?

(Link via email from MadMan.)

When the legal system is dysfunctional, people sometimes take the law into their hands, as in this case. Many of us would say that justice was done. But should it be done in this manner? I don't think so. What is the solution, then? Can our legal system, which would take 350 years, by some estimates, to clear its existing backlog of cases, possibly be reformed? How?

Quit. Quit. Quit and then get fired.

Some interesting political realignments are in the air.

Ajay Mehndiratta dies in Bhopal.

I believe that writers lose a lot when they are seen in the flesh. In the old days the really popular writers were totally anonymous, just a name on the book cover, and this gave them an extraordinary mystique. [...] I believe that this is the ideal condition for a writer, close to anonymity: that is when his maximum authority develops, when the writer does not have a face, a presence, but the world he portrays takes up the whole picture. Like Shakespeare...

Italo Calvino, in "Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings".

More Nuggets and Aphorisms here.

Naveen Mandava writes:

We are three friends: Pandu, Chandu and Bandhu. One evening we decide to have a drink. We add a little complication to the usual routine of menu selection.

Pandu pays for the drink; Chandu chooses the particular drink but finally Bandhu consumes. How will the event roll out?

Once you have answered the question, read the rest of the post.

So says Salman Rushdie, and rightly so, in the context of intelligent design and the position that "godlessness is equivalent to amorality".

No, it wasn't the government that rescued the trapped passengers of the Shanti Express.

It's getting worse.

AFP has a story on an American who came to India more than two decades ago, changed his name to Rampuri, lived the life of a sadhu, and has now written a book about it all. The report says:

Rampuri, 54, says he is a rare western witness to a demise of the ancient sadhu culture in India. The perch led him to realise that as a foreigner he could never fully understand the ways of the vast country, but equally he could never rejoin western culture back in the United States.

The traditions of sadhus in story telling, ayurvedic medicine, yoga and in giving aashirvad (blessings) played an important role in India's ability to withstand 20th century commercial trends as many people found the holy men a potent reminder against middle-class desire, Rampuri says.

"But the sadhus who were plugged into that, that's coming to an end. This is what really impressed me. These were people who could basically wander the country with no clothes, no money, nothing between you and the Earth. That is now in a tremendously rapid decline," he says, dressed in an embroidered kurta pajama in an interview at a luxury hotel in New Delhi.

Ha.

Soli Sorabjee, a former attorney general of India, writes in the Indian Express that the Uniform Civil Code is not the issue in the Imrana case: the fundamental rights guaranteed to her by the Indian constitution are. He says:

Personal laws are recognised by the Constitution as Salman Khurshid reminds us. Unfortunately, he forgets that it is those personal laws which are in conformity with the mandate of the Constitution. Personal laws do not enjoy any immunity from compliance with constitutional obligations guaranteeing fundamental rights. Besides one of the fundamental duties prescribed by the Constitution is “to renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women” (Article 51-A (e)). The fatwa indeed is destructive of the woman’s dignity.

Meanwhile, Gaurav Sabnis has a couple of posts on the subject here and here, and Ravikiran Rao has something to say here. Both raise an interesting point: if Imrana and her husband are willing to abide by the fatwa, monstrous though it may be, does the government have a right to go against their will?

My opinion on that: individuals are sometimes irrational, especially when under immense stress, and they have a right to take their own decisions. But crimes need to be punished for the greater good of all of us. A rape victim may decide to marry her rapist; I'd say, let her do so if she really wants to, but the rapist must do his time in prison first (by which time, one hopes, the victim would have come to her senses). Allowing the perpetrator of a crime to get away because the victim reconciles to it is, in effect, condoning the crime and increasing the chances of it happening again.

It is, as Gaurav puts it, a dilemma for libertarians. Can the state keep its role to a minimum when certain sections of society are so backward, or should it play the part of an enlightened and firm moderator? In my view, as far as criminal behaviour is concerned, the state has a necessary role to play. And right now our state is failing Imrana.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray writes in the Telegraph that we should call the USA's bluff.

Meanwhile, Bharat Karnad worries in the Indian Express that Manmohan Singh will allow India to be turned into "a US client state in the region".

In response to this, which was a response to this, Suresh Venkatasubramanian of The Geomblog writes in:

[T]here have been recent reports of the Air Force academy enforcing a 'de facto religion': evangelical christianity, on its cadets, with cadets of other faiths feeling discriminated against.

Religion is a far stronger presence in the US than it may appear in 'liberal enclaves'.

Well, we've never heard of corresponding pressures in the NDA, have we? I used to think that as societies grow more and more prosperous and advanced, the hold of religion decreases. But clearly it isn't quite as simple as that.

Update: Moments after I put up this post, Suresh wrote in again:

[I] went back and re-read the article and your post. Now that I think about it, I really strongly disagree with the sense that religion is not a big deal in the US. It is in fact a huge deal, and in many ways has always been this way. Richard Hofstadter's book "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" is a tour de force that links the vibrant evangelical community that developed in the US very quickly after colonization with anti-intellectual forces that stood opposed to the 'high church' of the north-eastern protestant groups.

Today's brouhahas over evolution and the like are mere windows onto this ferment: now with a supreme court spot open and abortion in peril, you'll see even more of it.

Welcome to the Blog Mela, the third hosted by me. (The first two are here and here.) As usual, putting this together took a lot of time, but was worth it. I discovered some new blogs, rediscovered some older ones I'd stopped going to, and had a good time, though my neck now hurts. As usual, I've kept editorial comment to a minimum. All these posts are worth checking out, and this mela, I hope, will have something for everybody. Without further ado:

Society: Hemangini Gupta finds her personal space invaded on a train, but instead of ignoring it, takes action. NS Ramnath has some piercing thoughts on citizen journalism. Sumanth writes about the abuse of elders in India. Roshan Revankar writes about vibratory condoms. Dina Mehta shares the Louisiana Manifesto with us. Secular-Right India writes that courts should not legislate.

Business and economics: Ravikiran Rao writes about the Ambanis and game theory. Ashish Hanwadikar writes that "many regulations in India and elsewhere are designed for corruption". Surya writes about what we can do about microfinance. Vikram Arumilli tells us what American grocery stores can learn from Blockbuster. Subra Srinivasan muses on the bottom of the pyramid. Reuben Abraham examines the emigration tax idea.

Music and Films: Samit Basu gives us some inside dope on how Parineeta was translated. Rakesh Chaudhary remembers Nana Patekar's Prahar. Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta describes how the folksy elements wins over the folk in Amol Palekar's Paheli. S Anand describes how Steven Spielberg created the sound effects in some of his films. Soultan of Swing gets nostalgic about "Kokomo" by the Beach Boys. J Alfred Prufrock 2 writes about writers who rock. Lazy Geek is unimpressed by War of the Worlds.

Literature: Jai Arjun Singh finds much to like in the work of Alexander McCall Smith. Amardeep Singh finds Norman Mailer's comments about Michiko Kakutani distasteful. Arun Simha writes about "Babul Mora", a thumri by Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh. J Alfred Prufrock 1 writes about, well, words.

Creative writing: Chandrahas Choudhury gives us "The Ring". Ammani writes about where the heart is. Manjula Padmanabhan gets Sudoked. Ravages finds himself near death. The Bride says, "Give the Bong a Fish". Kingsley Jegan reports that God has sued Google. Aditya Bidikar writes about India's greatest resource. Bridal Beer shares with us "A Potential Advertisement". Ramya Kannan writes about the transformation of Akila. Rajesh Advani, remarkably, finds 100 things to rant about.

Politics and foreign affairs: Nitin Pai asserts that "[w]hat passes for ’secularism’ in India is largely political expediency". Ajay Bhat writes about how this US government "has done more than any in the recent past to weaken the position of the US in the world". Harini Calamur finds herself agreeing with the RSS on at least one matter. Ennis of Sepia Mutiny writes that Henry Kissinger apologized for the wrong thing.

Sports: Prem Panicker exposes the logical leap made by the ICC. Gaurav Sabnis yearns for a great tennis rivalry. The Great Bong remembers June 25, 1983. Tifoc wonders if sports "has been the silent benefactor in the liberation of the Indian economy." Sonia Faleiro finds occasion to write about Sania Mirza and Shane Warne in the same post.

Technology: J Ramanand finds himself getting sceptical about application technology. Kiruba Shankar writes about how he uses Gmail as his personal diary. (In addition to his blog, of course.) Aadisht Khanna writes about the bottomless buckets of Reliance. Dilip D'Souza discusses artifical intelligence. Patrix's blog speaks while he's away on vacation. Swaroop CH writes about Apple's Mac OS X.

Places in time: Ramakrishnan Parasuraman observes a line at the US Consulate at Anna Salai in Chennai. JK of Varnam examines "the only world that matters". Arnab Nandi writes about the "shameless bus conductors" of Bangalore. Nandan Pandit sees the suburbs of Mumbai stick their tongue out. Sameer Gharat writes about monsoon craters. Annie Zaidi steps into a hall at Doon School and is awed. Neha Viswanathan tells us what she misses about the Delhi rains. Roshan Paul is surprised by the birdlife in Uday Park in Delhi.

Education: Vikrum Sequeira finds that "a child's demographic information almost exactly forms him or her as a student". Cipher writes about a problem that blind students face. TA Abinandanan shares some ideas on Real Universities with us. Charukesi Ramadurai asks whether rural schools should insist on a school uniform for their students. Alexandra Mack introduces some kids to India. Shivam Vij asks some larger questions through the prism of Manoj Rawal. Atanu Dey says that Vipassana might just be the model for a new education system.

Miscellaneous: Rajesh Jain gives advice on life to a 2005 baby, in five parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Tony Tharakan find that India's stray dogs are the world's sexiest. Nilu wonders how the cow made it through natural selection. Varun Singh remembers some forgotten heroes. Kunal Sawardekar finds that he's erudite. Saket Vaidya writes about the phenomenon of crapblogging. Anand of Locana shares some excerpts from his father's memoirs with us, in three parts: 1, 2 and 3.

aNTi introduces us to his sitcom alter ego. Leela Alvares shares with us some of the Google searches that have led to her site. Vinod of Sepia Mutiny examines the Pew survey on International attitudes towards the US. Sunil Laxman writes on "The Quest For a Perfect Dosa". Jitendra Mohan writes about a train journey where something almost happened. Shanti Mangala points out the perils of living in the past. Manish of Sepia Mutiny writes about waiting in line. Amrit Hallan tells us that he likes it when the mobile phone does not buzz..

"All bloggers hope to be Shilpa Shetty one day," writes Megha Murthy. Anita Bora writes about the Honnemardu Blogout Weekend. So does Suman Kumar, here and here. Peter Griffin blogs about Peter Griffin. Rashmi Bansal writes that it's perfectly okay not to have a boyfriend. Zainab Bawa writes about Comrade Tara. Rahul Bhatia bemoans that he belongs to "Bombay radio's forgotten generation".

Phew.

Update: Nilu is hosting the next Blog Mela. Go here for details, and here for Blog Mela schedule, and to volunteer for one.

Mid Day reports:

A desperate Sneha Joshi (29) attempted suicide on June 25 because her children refused to study.

Sneha has two sons, Ajay (11) and Akshay (5). According to the police and her husband, Rakesh (40), the children’s indifference to their studies drove her to attempt suicide.

[...]

A shaken Rakesh says he has no idea how things got so bad. “She always used to complain that the kids don’t study properly and that they harass her,” he says, “but I never dreamt it bothered her so much.”

He adds that Sneha wanted a better life for their children. “I’ve studied till Std XII, while Sneha is SSC pass. She dreams of her kids doing well in the future, but look what the dream has done,” he says bitterly.

That's one sad story. And while very few mothers would go to such an extreme if their kids didn't study, there's something universal in there. No?

The Financial Express reports:

Banks, co-operative societies and public companies with interest income below Rs 5,000 on deposits will now have to file quarterly return of non-deduction of tax, as per a finance ministry notification issued on Tuesday. The government intends to use this information to track assessees evading tax through multiple accounts.

MadMan, who pointed to this story via email, wrote:

They [the government] already track interest income above Rs. 5000 through TDS returns, and now they want to track income below Rs. 5K. So now they're effectively tracking all interest income on fixed deposits.

The sad part is that the government has nothing close to the IT infrastructure or even computerised records to make any use of all this data. All it does is create volumes of extra paperwork that will rot in some rat-infested government cupboard.

Well, even rodents need food.

Priya Ramani goes down the slippery slope as she ponders the implications of Vijay Khole's distractions.

Your sense of self can get shaken by the Indian media if you're a writer. Rana Dasgupta discovers as much in this piece in Tehelka. (Subscription link sadly, but you can read some excerpts in Sonia Faleiro's post on the subject, from where I got the link in the first place.) Hilarious... and sad.

Here's a wake-up call that is more eloquent than anything I could think up.

The Hindustan Times reports:

For those who believe that corruption in India is almost an industry, here’s proof. A survey conducted by Transparency International India (TII) says Indians paid bribes amounting to Rs 21,068 crore [US$ 4843 million appr] in the past year. And no one would have guessed it, but the biggest chunk of this money goes to schools till the Class XII level.

“The money was paid for either getting admission or certificates,” said Navin Sarangpani of the Centre for Media Studies (CMS), which carried out the study. The police (crime/traffic) were second in terms of collecting bribe money, accounting for Rs 3,899 crore.

This is not to say that schools are the most corrupt. That honour goes to the police who have been ranked the most corrupt according to a ‘corruption index’ prepared by the CMS. The reason schools receive the biggest chunk of bribe money is that “(the) proportion of citizens interacting with schools is much more than the police or municipalities,” said Sarangpani.

Bihar has been rated as the most corrupt state in India, and Kerala as the least. The article ends thus:

The CMS asked service providers for the reasons behind corruption. The excuse: a heavy workload, outdated infrastructure, political interference and lack of performance incentives.

Well, yes. But the biggest reason is discretion. Too many public servants have too much discretion over our activities, which is, in many areas, an unwarranted intrusion into our personal freedom. The more power the state has over its citizens, the more inevitable corruption is. Other factors do matter, but this is the grandma of them all.

(Link via email from MadMan.)

Mid Day has a report today on four thugs who lured a maidservant into their apartment and raped her. They also took pictures with their camera phone and threatened to "distribute the rape photos" if she complained. Well, she went downstairs, was emboldened by what other residents said, and went to the police. Hearing that the police were on their way, the four men quickly escaped.

But the saddest part of the story comes in the last line of the report:

Sources said that two of the four accused had raped a mentally challenged girl a couple of years ago, but the matter had been amicably settled.

What on earth, I wonder, can "amicably settled" mean here?

Jim O'Neil and Olinda DoNorte write in responding to my post about the NY Times article about a summer camp for the children of atheists and agnostics. Both want to correct the impression in my sentence, "Strange, I didn't know religion was such a big deal in the US. In India it doesn't interfere with my daily life..."

Jim writes, "The same is pretty much true here in the US as well, Amit." And Olinda elaborates:

In large urban areas it's a non-issue. (Though Christianity, like Hinduism in India, has certainly seeped in deep enough to be noticeable anywhere.) It's just in places like Louisiana and Kentucky where they get all tied upin knots over Jesus as Your Personal Saviour.

Well, that clears it then. The NY Times perhaps overstated the "bigotry" atheists and agnostics face by just a bit.

Secular-Right India points to a Financial Express article that reports:

According to the report, ‘India and the Knowledge Economy: Leveraging Strengths and Opportunities’, released on Tuesday, the World Bank says by imposing an exit tax on IIT graduates and other professionals, who leave the country after receiving subsidised education, the government can collect over $1 billion (about Rs 4,400 crore) per annum. This figure is from students going to the US alone. Take into account professionals leaving for the Gulf and other countries, and the total could well exceed the collection from the education cess, which was around Rs 5,000 crore.

The money thus generated, FE says, "would be enough to sustain the mid-day meal scheme, plus there would be cash to spare for building schools in villages and strengthening the elementary education structure." Intention and outcome never match with our government, though, and putting extra fuel into a busted car will hardly help it down the highway.

Also, as Suman Sinha points out in this piece, the so-called brain drain is actually good for India in the long run. Don't disincentivise it.

(Sinha link via email from Varun Singh.)

Update: Reuben Abraham has an excellent analysis here.

Update 2 (July 1): Gaurav Sabnis writes that there is a better option to this proposal: Stop subsidising higher education.

The plural of virus is viruses. There's actually a wikipedia page dedicated to this, and Gaurav Sabnis becomes (surely) the first person to link to it in a post on the ISI. Dude...

Rahul Bhatia writes:

Finally the plane lands at Bombay but it doesn’t feel like a full stop as I thought it would. It is reinvigorating to be among brown faces, speaking a language that was an exception yesterday and the norm today. Somewhere outside, family awaits. They have moved here recently, so we are all strangers here. This city, we realize later, does not accept or reject strangers, it merely throws up obstacles; the acceptance and rejection is left to us. Along the way home we pass by several places that have no meaning to me then, but will play important roles later. It is an unnerving thought and, if you are accepting, a delightful one; that the roads and places we take for granted might gain significance for us one day. I’d imagine it’s closely connected to that line, “Where have you been all my life?”

It's a beautiful post, aptly titled "Transition". Watch this man.