India Uncut

Keep your distance. Avoid eye contact. And even if it looks cute, never hug a Swiss cow.

Responding to numerous "reports of unpleasant meetings between hikers and cattle" along Switzerland's picture-perfect Alpine trails this summer, the Swiss Hiking Federation has laid down a few ground rules.

"Leave the animals in peace and do not touch them. Never caress a calf," the group's guidance, posted on the website www.swisshiking.ch, reads.

There are certain books that are so similar to one another they almost beg to be grouped together. This is largely true of Indian novels. Look closely at the ones published in the past, say, 25 years, and you'll see that they're virtually identical, in theme if not in style and content.

For me, Midnight's Children is indivisible from A Fine Balance, which in turn cannot be separated from A Suitable Boy. Directly or indirectly, all three books - and there are other notable examples - are concerned with the same thing: the state of Indian society in the wake of independence and partition.

De Waal: There's plenty of intrigue going on beneath the surface. To help each other acquire power, chimpanzees form alliances based on giving and taking. It's the same thing with people. For example, unless US President George W. Bush doesn't give (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair, his biggest supporter, something significant soon, Blair will probably eventually withdraw his support for Bush.

SPIEGEL: You mean that the power game Blair and Bush are playing is essentially ape behavior?

De Waal: I'm convinced that that's the case. In people it starts already in childhood. If you put a group of two-year-olds in a room together, they quickly figure out who's the boss -- using fists, if necessary.

A man in Orissa was so shocked after he heard that his wife had given birth to a girl child that he fell to the ground, hit his head against a wall and succumbed to his injuries.

A restaurant that failed to take action against an employee who chased a female co-worker with a sausage dangling from his fly has been ordered to pay damages and lost wages to another woman who witnessed it.

Monsters on the Right of me
And monsters on the Left
My nightmares get the fright of me
Oh, I'm so bereft!

A 6-year-old orphan from Austria ecstatically embraces a brand-new pair of shoes just given to him by the Red Cross.

The first time Joan Baez heard Dylan sing one of his own songs—he played “With God on Our Side” for her—she was floored. “I never thought anything so powerful could come out of that little toad,” she said. She proceeded to fall madly in love with him, and bought him a toothbrush.

Remember me telling you I don't remember the US Open moment Wallace talks about in the beginning of his piece? It so happens that I don't remember it coz it never happened - i researched youtube and found the rally he is talking about - check this out (rally starts around 8th minute). It's nowhere like what Wallace has described - it's Federer who is attacking and Agassi who is scrambling.

They said first of all it’s too lengthy and the in thing is that everybody changes their name. Like, for instance, Madhubala, Meena Kumari, Nargis, even Dilip Kumar, even men change their names. I said they are them and I am me. My mother also said I don’t like the idea of her changing her name. Then they said it is too lengthy, who’s going to call you Waheeda Rehman? I said you don’t have to call me Waheeda Rehman, you only have to call me Waheeda. on the screen it’ll come as Waheeda Rehman because Rehman is my father’s name and I am really very proud of my name which my parents gave me. So then they said, you see, it has to be very juicy and very sexy.

The BJP has accused Union HRD Minister Arjun Singh of surrendering to anti-national forces by declaring that there would be no compulsion on schoolchildren to sing the national song [Vande Mataram].

Carnegie had a brutally mechanistic view of human nature. He believed that words and deeds are largely shaped by genes, upbringing and circumstance. “You deserve very little credit for being what you are,” he tells the reader. “And remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.” [Itals in original.]

At his trial this summer, his former court reporter, Lisa Foster, testified that she saw Thompson expose himself at least 15 times during trial between 2001 and 2003. Prosecutors said he also used a device known as a penis pump during at least four trials in the same period.

Austin Powers comes back from being cryogenically frozen, takes a really long pee, and then when he goes to take back his stuff (a la a prisoner being released after years of incarceration), and there is a long sequence there with him being embarrassed (in front of Liz Hurley) as a penis pump is one of the things being returned to him.

This is ridiculous - One agency (UPI) carries a report with a typo, calling Pakistan, "Paskistan". And then it spreads:

Starts from here - UPI.
Then: The Washington Times, The Daily India, Political Gateway, Monsters and Critics, North Korea Times

You do a google search for Paskistan, and... this

Due to unprecedented raids on the cable operators for carrying satellite movie and entertainment channels having Adult content, All Maharashtra cable operators have shut down the channels till further directions from high court. Kindly bear with us. CODA.

How dare they allow Cartoon Network to be shown on cable? Cartoon Network has been showing nudity for many years now and the government has done nothing! I can't begin to recall the number of times I've turned it on and seen naked mice and cats running freely in shows named "Tom and Jerry".

As “Camus at Combat,” a new collection of his editorials—he was a working journalist—makes plain, the experience, first, of the Nazi occupation of France, and then of the struggle of Algerian independence against France led him to conclude that the “primitive” impulse to kill and torture shared a taproot with the habit of abstraction, of thinking of other people as a class of entities. Camus was no pacifist, but he deplored the logic of thinking in categories. “We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction, or, to put it another way, the representative of an ideology,” he wrote. Terror makes fear, and fear stops thinking.

It is not the personal that is political, but the political that is personal. People with unusually thin skins ascribe the small insults, humiliations, and setbacks consequent upon human existence to vast and malign political forces; and, projecting their own suffering onto the whole of mankind, conceive of schemes, usually involving violence, to remedy the situation that has so wounded them.

Updike’s Terrorist has much in common with Conrad’s The Secret Agent, published 99 years previously. In both books, a double agent tries to get a third party to commit a bomb outrage; in both books, the secret agent ends up slain. In both books, the terrorists operate in a free society unsure how far it may go in restricting freedom to protect itself from those who wish to destroy it. The terrorists in Conrad are European anarchists and socialists; in Updike they are Muslims in America: but in neither case does the righting of any “objective” injustice motivate them. They act from a mixture of personal angst and resentment, which easily attaches itself to abstract grievances about the whole of society, thus disguising the real source of their consuming but sublimated rage.

Her fast has inspired hundreds of people to join her in prayers and bhajans (devotional songs). Parveen's family, which includes her five brothers and sisters, says that she is determined to starve herself until "Lord Indra smiles" and ensures rainfall.

"Her tapasya (meditation) will not go in vain," say villagers, worried over the scanty rainfall in some districts of western Uttar Pradesh.

British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny - refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed.

The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic.

Gyms are populated by beefy, thick-skinned but strangely charming young trainers who resemble the Deol boys in muscle structure as well as in their shy smiles... I’ve never been so unqualifiedly happy at a book launch or discussion. What could this mean?

While Karan Johar is quite superstitions about number 8, Priety Zinta gets goose bumps when black cat crosses her way and Rani Mukherjee frequently says 'touch wood'.

I have been reading a lot of late, and according to the great spiritual healers the post-1980s generation will be the harbingers of Satyug. This is a cool, chilled-out and open generation that is not stuck-up. Within them however there are two kinds - the Crystalline, who are the emotional lot who will bring in this change through persuasion, and the Indigos, who will achieve it with rebellion.

I was doing my usual research on environmental toxicities and found myself so obsessed with it that I once again lost sight of everything else. I learned about chemicals that are used in pajamas, such as flame retardants, and the toxic levels our children inhale throughout the night. I immediately got rid of anything that was flame retardant, including his mattress. This was followed by installing organic carpeting in his bedroom, and placing air filters in every room. Someone then told me I needed to change the paint in his bedroom to nontoxic paint. So I was at the store five minutes later buying paint that was edible, and then stayed up half the night painting the bedroom walls. I changed the pool water to Ozone, and even had a chakra balancing done on my house. What finally pushed me completely over was when I found out about electromagnetic toxicity.

When he hanged himself, he left a note saying he was committing suicide not because he was mentally unsound but with all his wits about him.

... Premier’s has the most cultivated tastes of all the bookshops I know in India. It is only here that works of literature and history outnumber (and outsell) books designed to augment your bank balance or cure your soul. When it comes to fiction, Mr Shanbhag stocks not merely the latest Booker winner but the back-list of the author (if he has one). When J.M. Coetzee won that prize, even the pavement seller was selling Disgrace, but only in Premier’s would one find The Master of St. Petersburg as well. Mr Shanbhag keeps more, and better, hardback history than any other Indian shop I know; more, and better, literary fiction; and more, and better, translations.

• "I cannot give the exact time when I admitted the hospital after the incident".

• "I was fallen down at my residence"; "I detained conscious at hospital".

• "They assaulted with the help of hands and legs".

• "Ganesh Chauvan tried to assault me to my face but I prohibited through my left hand."

I have a woman before me who has a milk sucking baby. I have personally verified her sex and found that she is a woman and thus be given bail.

While scores of railway projects wait to take off, work on the 20.9-km stretch between Hathua and Bathua Bazar on the Hathua-Bhatni section of North Eastern Railway is moving at a breakneck pace.

The reason: On completion, it will connect Union Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav’s ancestral village, Phulwaria, with that of his wife Rabri Devi, Salar Kalan, just 2.9 km apart.

[...]

Rabri is learnt to have requested Yadav to get both their villages connected by rail some time back.

A group of Indian television journalists gave a man matches and diesel to help him commit suicide in order to get dramatic footage which was later broadcast on the news, police said on Thursday.

The man died from severe burns to his body in hospital in Gaya town in the eastern state of Bihar on August 15, India's Independence Day.

[...]

"We have seized footage clearly showing a group of journalists handing over matches and some inflammable substance -- which we later verified to be diesel -- to the victim," acting Gaya police chief P.K. Sinha told Reuters by telephone.

[L]ike forests, animals are renewable resources. If you think of tigers as products, it becomes clear that demand provides opportunity, rather than posing a threat. For instance, there are perhaps 1.5 billion head of cattle and buffalo and 2 billion goats and sheep in the world today. These are among the most exploited of animals, yet they are not in danger of dying out; there is incentive, in these instances, for humans to conserve.

So it can be for the tiger.

People with good passport photographs get picked for interviews over the rest of us, because they look like the kind of people the recruiter would want to work with. People like me get their resumes forwarded to the Department of Homeland Security as a safety risk. As a result people who photograph well gain more valuable and varied experience, and before you know it they're heading major multi-nationals while their less fortunate brethren are still hanging about boring other people with their baby pictures.

People talk of the Big Bang. If there was a beginning, there must be an end. But there is no linear time, so where is the end? I call it the Big Laugh. Someone laughed ‘ha, ha ha’ And between the first and the second ‘ha’s, came a few billion years.

At 68, he is still discovering himself. When he was a boy, his mother drew a veil over the family's past. There had been a Jewish grandmother, she said, and this was why they had to leave Czechoslovakia. Only relatively recently did he learn the fully story.

His whole family was Jewish. Most of his relatives had been murdered in the death camps. His father, once the house doctor at the Bata shoe factory in Zlin, had been killed in a Japanese air raid. Some years ago, after a visit to Czechoslovakia, he wrote movingly of meeting an elderly woman, a former Bata employee, whose gashed hand had been stitched by Dr Straussler. "I touch it. In that moment, I am surprised by grief, a small catching up of all the grief I owe. I have nothing which came from my father, nothing he owned or touched, but here is his trace, a small scar."

One man spent half the film with his cellphone aimed at the screen, taking photos or videos; he recorded the entire “Where’s the Party Tonight?” song and then, irritatingly, played it back later, drowning out the sound from a subsequent scene.

Young boys in my row burst into orgasmic yelps each time there was anything resembling an innuendo in the dialogue, or if a woman appeared in a low-cut blouse. At one point Rani tells Shah Rukh, “Sorry, galti se dab gaya.” (She made an unintended cellphone call.) “Galti se dab gaya!!!!” screamed the lads ecstatically, and the collective outburst reminded me of Arthur Clarke’s short story “Love that Universe”, wherein billions of people are asked to synchronize their love-making so that the combined orgasms send out a crucial energy signal to a distant civilisation.

I recollect on March 12, I was sitting in Mantralaya and at about 12-12.30 pm I heard a big noise, it was the explosion in Air India’s office. Within ten minutes I got a message that explosions had happened in 11 places, more than 365 people had died. I immediately realised that all these places were essentially dominated by Hindus. I guessed there must be some design, and that design must be that Hindus should react against the minority.

[...]

So I straight went on television and I misled people, deliberately misled people, instead of 11 bomb explosions I said 12. And one of the places that I mentioned was Masjid Bandar, an area dominated by minorities. So I spread the message that it’s not only in Hindu areas, it’s in a Muslim area also. I also said that I had seen - because I’d immediately visited the Air India building - and I said I’d visited it and the type of material that had been used was used essentially by some of the southern Indian side terrorist organisations. And I tried to (point a) finger at the Sri Lankan side...

If I have to change the zonal system, I have to amend the constitution. And ultimately if I have to amend the constitution, then I have to get support from zonal representatives. (Laughs).

Now Hansdehar farmers hope they will be able to get better prices for their crops by trading online through the National Commodity & Derivatives Exchange Ltd., cutting out middlemen.

Carpenters and masons will tout their services online. Others will upload their resumes to job hunting Web sites when the village's first Internet point is hooked up in Kanwal Singh's mother's house in the coming weeks.

Most of the districts in Tamil Nadu have embraced IT for quite some time now. TN government is serious about e governance. For example, check the Cuddalore village site. You can check your name in electoral rolls, check the infrastructure projects and their budgets, download government forms, send an email to the collector. Almost all the districts in the state have embraced e governance.

Whether all of them [the TN districts that are online] are truly functional and facilitate response is an issue that I would not want to get into, but yes, as far as districts go, we have websites for each one of them. Notable, certainly, yet not in the league of Hansedar, which is truly an instance where technology has been harnessed by the masses. Let us hope MS Swaminthan's Mission 2007 - Every village a knowledge centre - makes a true difference.

I-Day is just two days away. There will be thousands of fluttering flags all over India — on masts, cars, houses, in the hands of joyous children... And yet, the real flags used on this historic occasion in 1947 are missing. Three of them, in fact. Shocking, but true.

You have to treat your inbox like you treat your mailbox at home. You wouldn't store your bills inside your mailbox. And leaving spam in your inbox is like leaving garbage in your kitchen.

... I will advise those who want to come in the film industry that unless you complete your basic education, don't think of trying your hand here. A great look and hot body may make you successful but you will not become a successful actress but a successful bimbo. You will never get the credit for a hit film, because your contribution in the film will be nothing more than just being an on-screen bimbo.

A delegation headed by Renuka Chowdhury, in charge of the ministry of women and children, went to meet home minister Shivraj Patil recently to draw his attention to the rising violence against women.

[...]

Patil and his officials were far from agitated. Instead of giving the delegation a sympathetic hearing, the officials fired questions as Patil kept quiet. Why do women go out at night? Especially, why do they go out unescorted? Even worse was to come.

The officials started picking on the way women dress. Why do they dress provocatively? Their clothes are such that they invite male predators.

This is exactly what Bal Thackeray’s paper Saamna had written earlier after a rape in Mumbai.

A Japanese man was arrested this week after making 37,760 silent calls to directory inquiries because he wanted to listen to the "kind" voices of female telephone operators. [...] "When I made a complaint call once, the operator dealt with it very kindly, so I wanted to hear these women's voices," the paper quoted him as telling police in Hiroshima, western Japan.

Husband: Darling, come, let's have dinner.
Operator: No, I'll have dinner. You stay hungry, no dinner for you.
Husband: [Baffled] Hey. What's up with you, why're you behaving like this? You're normally such a kind person.
Operator: Kind, kind, kind. I'm sick of being kind. I will never be kind in my life now. Never ever.

Many experts, including Seymour Hersh, believe that the then Pakistani foreign minister, Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, came to India to ‘defuse’ tension but actually unveiled a nuclear blackmail for the first time. In conversations with Indian leaders he threatened that they should not count on their conventional superiority if war broke out because Pakistan had the nukes and intended to use them in the very beginning.

[...]

It is unlikely that V.P. Singh and Gujral will tell you more on this. But Gujral will probably not deny that one conversation went something like this: Sahibzada told him that if there was a war now, it won’t be an ordinary one, that there will be flames rising from the mountains, the valleys, the plains and the rivers. And Gujral, gathering his nerves — and wits — quickly, replied, “I hope not, but please do remember, we have also been drinking the waters of the same rivers as you.”

The Pakistani establishment has a chronic compulsion to test the waters whenever they think Indian politics is passing through a phase of confusion and weakness. They chose the summer of 1965 to start the war because they thought India’s armed forces were still punch-drunk from their defeat by China and Shastri had not yet had the time to fill the vacuum left by Nehru. Internally, they were also enthused, as so much of the subsequent literature by key Pakistani players in that war shows, by delusions that the Naga insurgency, the Dravida movement and even the vocal opposition of sections of the Left to India’s cause in the China war had all weakened India sufficiently for them to risk an assault on Kashmir. It is possible that they saw the fall of Rajiv Gandhi, and the arrival of a very weak V.P. Singh coalition as a similar opportunity.

... India would be a very different place if a cross-sectional consensus on the desirability of banging the maid had not existed for centuries. Entire sub-castes are composed of little bastards, legitimised over time. These were all created by the tradition of banging the maid.

Indian history would be far less turbulent. So many of the protagonists of all those wonderfully fratricidial succession struggles would not have been conceived. Millions of sex-starved young bachelors would have gone virgins to their respective suhaag raats.

Prince Klemens Von Metternich, foreign minister of the Austrian Empire during the Napoleonic era and its aftermath, would have no trouble recognising Google. To him, the world's most popular web-search engine would closely resemble the Napoleonic France that in his youth humiliated Austria and Europe's other powers. Its rivals—Yahoo!, the largest of the traditional web gateways, eBay, the biggest online auction and trading site, and Microsoft, a software empire that owns MSN, a struggling web portal—would look a lot like Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Metternich responded by forging an alliance among those three monarchies to create a “balance of power” against France. Google's enemies, he might say, ought now to do the same thing.

[The evidence] is everywhere that the literary era has come to an end. The evidence is the culture, the evidence is the society, the evidence is the screen, the progression from the movie screen to the television screen to the computer. There's only so much time, so much room, and there are only so many habits of mind that can determine how people use the free time they have. Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.

The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we're not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it'll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us--we won't stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn't follow.

Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road. [Men, however,] have O'Hare Airport as a hub for processing thoughts about sex, where women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes.

Thoughts about sex enter women's brains once every couple of days; for men, thoughts about sex occur every minute.

Women use 20,000 words per day; men use 7,000 per day.

Women excel at knowing what people are feeling; men have difficulty spotting an emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm.

I’m uncomfortable with the idea of saying that workplaces should accommodate employees who are mothers because women, according to Brizendine, “are wired to take care of children, and they want that time and need that time.” There are plenty of things that people are wired to want to do, and that in no way obligates anyone else to help them do them. [My emphasis.]

The daal situation here is really grave. So bad that "Ghar ki daal murgi barabar" is the first thing that comes to mind when I look at caviar-priced daal.

Needless to say, hopelessly amateur economists like me are watching the effect all this has on Indian buffet lunches with bated breath.

Language buffs take note — Page 7 of the contract states: The agreement “shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.”

There is massive, widespread adulteration in virtually every food item consumed today in India. The levels of pesticide in coffee is 190,000 times, and in apples, 100,000 times, according to some estimates. By contrast, the levels in colas are twenty-four times [emphasis in original].

Because they pay me $1 million to wave at crowds!

PP: Please, Ms Hilton, please come and wave at crowds in Poland.

PH: How much will you pay me?

PP: We can pay you $800,000.

PH: 800k? That's nothing. Austria pays me 1 million, and they throw in free beer.

PP: Ms Hilton, we were a communist country not long ago, we're still recovering.

PH: No, I'm sorry. I need more than 800k to wave at crowds.

PP: Could you at least wiggle a finger at them then?

I have pledged that in any of my forthcoming films I will not give a lip kiss. I am not comfortable doing that. I belong to a traditional family and my values do not allow me to indulge in such acts.

I can kiss only Emraan [Hashmi] comfortably. If I had to do a kissing shot with any other actor, I would have literally cried.

It's really painful to shoot smooch shots in front of dozens of people while shooting. What's irritating is the actor's stubble, which rubs with my skin when I touch him. This is the reason I finds a clean-shaven man much more kissable.

I always use some good quality cream and after every shot, I apply it on my face and body parts for a soothing effect after such UNPLEASANT EXPERIENCE. [Caps in original article. Why?]

Who said 'Christians have the right to convert?' - Sonia Gandhi, Sister Nirmala, Pope Benedict, Father Prakash.

After whom has Narendra Modi named India's biggest gas project on the Krishna Godavari basin? - Maharana Pratap, Dr Hedgewar, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay.

Which day is observed as 'Black Day' by minorities and 'Victory Day' by RSS? - September 11, July 2, January 26, December 6.

1) You get called “the talent”.

2) Other people pay for your sandwiches.

3) You get to take a lot of taxis.

4) You get free clothes, chosen by the producer, who is fresh from producing What Not to Wear.

This is when you suddenly become an expert on every subject in the known universe. You know you know everything and you want to pass on your knowledge to anyone who will listen. At this stage you are always right, and, of course, the person you are talking to is very wrong.

Is it just that in an age obsessed with menus, with choices, with the drop-down box, we have turned even love into a multiple choice question? "How do you feel about this person? Are you a) a friend b) a lover c) a brother or d) a father". What about none of the above? What about Other (please specify)? What about feelings that are open-ended?

Or is it that we have been so poisoned by reason, by our quest for explicability, that the apprehension of another human being in his or her specificity has become impossible for us, and that we can only love people (as we may only hate them) by converting them into abstractions, into the idea of the other rather than the other itself? That having to face up to the reality of who the other person is, to their infinite humanity, is more than we are capable of, so that just as we must ignore what is human about someone to hate him or her, we must also ignore the details of the person we care for, in order to love them? Is this why we give names to our feelings - because we cannot experience them unless they are made intelligible to us, like a child who cannot eat his dinner unless it is cut into bite sized pieces?

The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.

The faster flow of information and the waning importance of location—which blogs exemplify—have made it easier for economists from any university to have access to the best brains in their field. That anyone with an internet connection can sit in on a virtual lecture from Mr DeLong means that his ideas move freely beyond the boundaries of Berkeley, creating a welfare gain for professors and the public.

I so much believe that God woud use you to financialy come to my rescuse! [Sic.]

Customer Service Person: Yes ma'am, how can we help you?
God: That's an ironical question, my child. Anyway, I need to open an account with you.
CSP: No problem, ma'am, just fill out this form. Once we do an address verification, we shall activate your account.
God: Address verification?
CSP: Yes ma'am. We'll have to send someone over to where you stay to verify that you really do live there.
God: You want me to tell you where I stay?
CSP: Um, yes ma'am, we need that. Why, you don't want to tell us?
God: No, I could tell you... but first, I'd have to kill you.

A famous story (explicitly denied by Mailer) has Tallulah Bankhead meeting Mailer and saying, "Oh, you're the young man who doesn't know how to spell 'fuck.'"

Declare the old way over. Declare a new U.S.-Cuban relationship, blow open the doors of commerce and human interaction, allow American investment and tourism, mix it up, reach out one by one and person by person to the people of Cuba. "Flood the zone." Flood it with incipient prosperity and the insinuation of democratic values. Let Castroism drown in it.

[A] couple -- married for 12 years -- say that for a while they communicated through weblogs without ever discussing their feelings face to face.

The Net is a boon for people who are verbally shy, and provides a great way to resolve disputes about facts, say some fans. Some couples play online games together, and computing seems to be a zone where men can be manly.

"For my birthday, he upgraded my RAM and I thought it was incredibly romantic," writes Jess.

Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile.
You're twenty-six, and still have some of life ahead.
No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I'll
Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.

The world is too opaque, distressing and profound.
This twenty minutes' rendezvous will make my day:
To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,
Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.

With an infant in my lap and a toddler at my knee, I read the first story, “An Astrologer’s Day.” I turned the page once, then just once more—already, white space was signaling the finish. How could this be? I wondered. We’re just getting started. I anticipated a sketch, a vignette at best. But in spite of their signature shortness there is nothing scant about Narayan’s stories, no sense of having been deprived as we feel these days on airplanes, when we are handed Lilliputian meals in the name of dinner. In the course of four and a half pages, “An Astrologer’s Day” erects, complicates, and alters a life, and this is the difference between mere description and drama.

About that "immigrants suing to get in" post - it should be clarified that these are people who are already living in the US as Green Card holders (permanent residents.) It's not like they are "aliens" who are waiting to enter the country. The govt. would not give a rodent's ass for their lawsuits, of course.

There's a fear that the cynicism I see in older journalists will one day touch me. These are not frustrated journalists, but good ones. You realise it through their eyes: after 30 years in the business they're not upset because they haven't succeeded, they're upset because they see sad things everyday. It's unnerving because this cynicism seems inevitable. One by one, people slip into that state of knowing how things happen, of expecting things to go down a depressing path. They've gone past the stage of looking at suicide attempters as novelty and bad directors as entertainment. Here they see something deeper and sadder.

"This cynicism seems inevitable?" Wipe that smile off your facelike thing, schmuck, this cynicism is inevitable, and that's because death is inevitable and there's no God or afterlife. Deal with that, dumbass!

Now let's go get some frappe.

If I wrote a book, I’d have a lot to say, because the Indian film industry is like that.

... books play a crucial role in influencing our opinions of strangers. Half of those asked admitted that they would look again or smile at someone on the basis of what they were reading ... A third of those surveyed said that they "would consider flirting with someone based on their choice of literature".

Quite an interesting point - many a nerd has sat with a tome hoping to be noticed by a literary-minded belle, not many have been successful.

To share a tale, though, I once encountered a lady in a Dallas pub who was reading Michel Foucault, and my recognition of the author was beneficial, to put it thus. Thus, the approach cuts both ways, it seems.

[In a sleazy French accent, with a drawl] Good evening mademoiselle. Are you aware that Monsieur Foucault was once paid for a television debate with a chunk of hashish? Well, I have a chunk of hashish with me as well. What say we partake some of it while we discuss Monsieur Foucault's work? I would love to tell you all about my forthcoming illustrated version of The History of Sexuality. He he he.

Maity then made three paper-balls, placed them on their hands and set them on fire.

"Whoever is guilty will throw the balls," Suresh told them. This happened in front of three other teachers who did nothing to stop him.

Anushree and Bilkis panicked and dropped the paper-balls. Halima froze in fright and clutched it tightly, burning her hand till above her wrist.

What followed was worse. The three were made to wait in the teachers' room while their parents were called. No first aid, no medicine for the sobbing Halima. For one-and-a-half hours, she waited in agony.

If you don't milk your cow fully it falls sick, and if the cow falls sick the farmer goes sick.

Their solution? A self-timing egg imbued with the powers of heat-sensitive invisible ink that turns black the minute that it is ready. All you need to do is decide whether you prefer your eggs soft, medium or hard-boiled, and buy accordingly.

ONCE I LIVED IN CAPITALS,
MY LIFE INTENSELY PHALLIC,
but now I'm sadly lowercase,
with the occasional italic.

Lal Beni, who perhaps never went to school and works as a sweeper in National Thermal Power Corporation, draws an annual package of Rs 8,68,146. One Safal Ram working as a helper in the company enjoys a handsome package of Rs 8,98,369 per annum, according to the annual report of the Corporation.

[...] Satbir Singh, a driver who discontinued studies after 8th standard, earns Rs 9,18,941 per annum which is few thousands less than R D Kapoor, Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical) and holds an MBA degree, and serves as Director in the same company and takes home Rs 10,62383, the report says

Why is it okay to argue that redder lips make you more beautiful, but not that fairer skin makes you lovely? How is Fair and Lovely any worse than eyeliner or lipstick?

On his Las Cruces, New Mexico, campus, Johnston designed a computer-graphics video that illustrates the spectrum of human beauty, starting with the “hypermasculinized” face (think Schwarzenegger) and morphing gradually to the other extreme, the “hyperfeminized” face (think Kidman). Johnston has shown the video to thousands of test subjects, both men and women, and asked them to choose at which point along the spectrum they find their ideal face. Men, it turns out, unanimously pick as most attractive the face with the most feminine features, which corresponds to a woman with the most accentuated “hormonal markers.” These are facial characteristics developed during puberty from the release of estrogen, which causes the lips to swell, the jaw to narrow and the eyes to widen. These features indicate fertility, and because they’re biologically programmed, they’re common to all cultures.

Women perceive beauty in a more nuanced way. They aren’t always attracted to the hypermasculinized, bushy-eyebrowed, wide-jawed caveman type, flush with testosterone. Their choice of a mate is informed by evolutionary complexities involving not only potential fertility and health but perceived ability to protect the female’s offspring through wealth and power.

He [Gandhi] wasn’t sure, and that is probably what hurt me the most, that he wasn’t sure that I was not making power-play. He had grown so used to a system and a structure where everyone was making a power-play. And he said to me in those very words, that we are two old friends, you can have any job you want. And I left with much bitterness, and much emotion, because I told him that that was the greatest insult to me. I didn’t want a job. And perhaps one reason for going so far away was to prove to him that I wasn’t interested in power.

I have never had the opportunity to say this... I loved the man, I had no intention of hurting him, but he thought I was.