William Safire, of the Nixon Administration, not the “howling pack of conservative pundits: Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter and Malkin” according to Maureen Dowd, is no more. I liked to read his rather simplistic style and threadbare analysis. Here’s a tribute she wrote to the multi-faceted etymologist, grammarian, and English-usage expert. Excerpt:
“The only time I ever saw a shred of doubt was after the famous dust-up when he wrote that Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, was “a congenital liar.”
"A congenital pot-stirrer, he acted delighted with Bill Clinton’s subsequent threat to punch him in the nose. But, as a famous expert on etymology, he must have known he had used the wrong word. Congenital usually connotes a condition existing at birth. Was that really what he intended?”
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
Salman Rushdie on “Slumdog Millionaire”
This is rather late, but what the heck, better late than not at all. Slumdog won a lot of appreciation for its provocative content, which were trumped up by a director who didn’t understand his subject and a screenplay writer who probably hadn’t even read the book on which it is based (what explains the glaring mismatch with the book's contents?). Actually it made millionaires and celebrities out of a few people, among them: Danny Boyle, the scriptwriter Simon Beaufoy, Frieda Pinto, etc. If jealousy could have compensated for the loss of my time and movie ticket cost, then I would be a jealous guy. No, I don't need such entertainment, even with a gun pointed at the back of my head. How do I classify such phenomena in rational terms: come out with something which shows the wretchedness of poverty, show a lot of violence, gore and injustice, shock your audience and critics and then disappear into the night with your millions.
This is what Salman Rushdie writes about Danny Boyle and “The Slumdog Millionaire” in The Guardian:
"In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion. But for a first world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away."
Has post colonial attitude to former colonies and their inhabitants been tempered with respect for a people who are no longer serfs but are independent? Having worked with the British in the Persian Gulf I know it hasn’t. The same mindset prevails, whether it is in Newcastle or in New York.
Having seen the film I can vouch that Danny Boyle doesn’t know anything about India, hasn’t read the book, and hasn’t even bothered to have the film vetted by an Indian, least of all the book’s author. He even has the audacity to admit it. For an Indian director this would have been lethal, a case of being torn “limb from limb” as Rushdie mentions above.
My own review of this controversial, yet unbecoming film appears here.
This is what Salman Rushdie writes about Danny Boyle and “The Slumdog Millionaire” in The Guardian:
"In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion. But for a first world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away."
Has post colonial attitude to former colonies and their inhabitants been tempered with respect for a people who are no longer serfs but are independent? Having worked with the British in the Persian Gulf I know it hasn’t. The same mindset prevails, whether it is in Newcastle or in New York.
Having seen the film I can vouch that Danny Boyle doesn’t know anything about India, hasn’t read the book, and hasn’t even bothered to have the film vetted by an Indian, least of all the book’s author. He even has the audacity to admit it. For an Indian director this would have been lethal, a case of being torn “limb from limb” as Rushdie mentions above.
My own review of this controversial, yet unbecoming film appears here.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
How Climate Change Affects Civilisation; What Are the Effects of Global Warming? Will We Become Extinct?
Ah the October heat is almost upon me. The mind goes dithery, the body sweats a lot of fluids, a vague disorientation, the mouth dries, the fingers don’t move on the keyboard, mistakes are made and generally speaking, October heat is here.
Read a book “The Long Summer” by Brian Fagan about how climate changed civilisation which is about the dramatic changes the environment made in entire civilisations with people progressing from hunter-gatherers to subsistence farmers and then to organised citizens living in city-states and then into kings and kingdoms. The book was an eye-opener in that it chronicled how the species originated in Africa (I had my doubts, but it has been set right by this book), moved to Europe and Central Asia, then to Siberia and through the Alaskan tip to North and South America. Yes the entire landmass then was one. There’s no justification in thinking that the Indians of America were a different species of people, they are actually originated from the same genes as ours. One breakaway faction came to the Indian peninsula and moved to Australasia through the Malaysian isthmus. (There still are hunter-gatherer people in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, now part of India, who live the way their ancestors did thousands of years ago.)
The first city-state was situated in modern Iraq and its name was Ur and from this we got our city names: Kanpur, Nagpur, Solapur, and even my native village name of Kidangannoor. Ur simply means in Tamil, native village. I don’t know in other languages. So we aren’t a racially disparate people as we once thought, at least, I thought, though external characteristics would make us think so. Scratch the surface of certain acquired customs and beliefs and we are still one. Pretty obvious, isn’t it?
Now an important observation here: if climate changed civilisations as we know it, will the present warming give rise to huge repercussions and lifestyle changes for our progeny, even threaten its existence? Yes it will. During the last Ice Age millions perished, even hundreds of species became extinct. If heating of the landmass and icecaps continue (the earth's temperature would rise by 6 degree C by end of the century, according to today’s newspaper), the melting ice would lead to inundation of most of the world as we know it. But civilisation will adapt and survive for many centuries more. Most of our major cities are built around the sea or rivers (Bombay, New York, Tokyo, London, etc.), due to proximity to ports and access to aquatic life. This would mean, with rising sea levels, we would be deprived of most of our modern cities and civilisation will continue with the progeny of farmers in remote hilly areas, who have learnt to adapt to climatic changes as the inhabitants of the Steppes and Tundras did during the Ice Age in northern Europe.
Not very happy thinking, especially for my friend Anthonybhai. He says, “Eat, drink and be merry, men, who is bothered about what will happen a hundred years from now. I, tho, don’t care.”
Read a book “The Long Summer” by Brian Fagan about how climate changed civilisation which is about the dramatic changes the environment made in entire civilisations with people progressing from hunter-gatherers to subsistence farmers and then to organised citizens living in city-states and then into kings and kingdoms. The book was an eye-opener in that it chronicled how the species originated in Africa (I had my doubts, but it has been set right by this book), moved to Europe and Central Asia, then to Siberia and through the Alaskan tip to North and South America. Yes the entire landmass then was one. There’s no justification in thinking that the Indians of America were a different species of people, they are actually originated from the same genes as ours. One breakaway faction came to the Indian peninsula and moved to Australasia through the Malaysian isthmus. (There still are hunter-gatherer people in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, now part of India, who live the way their ancestors did thousands of years ago.)
The first city-state was situated in modern Iraq and its name was Ur and from this we got our city names: Kanpur, Nagpur, Solapur, and even my native village name of Kidangannoor. Ur simply means in Tamil, native village. I don’t know in other languages. So we aren’t a racially disparate people as we once thought, at least, I thought, though external characteristics would make us think so. Scratch the surface of certain acquired customs and beliefs and we are still one. Pretty obvious, isn’t it?
Now an important observation here: if climate changed civilisations as we know it, will the present warming give rise to huge repercussions and lifestyle changes for our progeny, even threaten its existence? Yes it will. During the last Ice Age millions perished, even hundreds of species became extinct. If heating of the landmass and icecaps continue (the earth's temperature would rise by 6 degree C by end of the century, according to today’s newspaper), the melting ice would lead to inundation of most of the world as we know it. But civilisation will adapt and survive for many centuries more. Most of our major cities are built around the sea or rivers (Bombay, New York, Tokyo, London, etc.), due to proximity to ports and access to aquatic life. This would mean, with rising sea levels, we would be deprived of most of our modern cities and civilisation will continue with the progeny of farmers in remote hilly areas, who have learnt to adapt to climatic changes as the inhabitants of the Steppes and Tundras did during the Ice Age in northern Europe.
Not very happy thinking, especially for my friend Anthonybhai. He says, “Eat, drink and be merry, men, who is bothered about what will happen a hundred years from now. I, tho, don’t care.”
Saturday, September 26, 2009
"Managing your online afterlife"
Time issue dated September 14, 2009 has an interesting article “Managing your online afterlife”. So what happens after one kicks the bucket, er, well, sort of? We think about these things, don’t we? Just as we look out of a train window and think how many people passed this arid landscape that's nothing but sand and dust and how many of them are dead. Same as I do when I pass the dry areas of the Deccan Plateau when I visit Kerala. Yes, our boundaries blur, we fantasize, we go into the netherworlds of the imagination.
The article delves into the issue of the hereafter, based on the experience of one Pam Weiss who logged on to Facebook to trace photographs of her dead daughter and found many, in fact, a whole lot that would identify with her life, recreate it for her, in the absence of the records she in her old-fashioned way hunted: diaries (now replaced by blogs), letter (now replaced by emails), photo albums (now replaced by online albums). Life changes, so does various aspects of it, sometimes unconsciously, I might add. So she got plenty of material she didn’t know existed, before, um, Facebook actually deleted her profile. I am not sure they do.
Acually Facebook has a policy of putting a person’s profile on “Memorial State” if the person has deceased, so that people know the person is no more. No one can post a status update but can post a comment if he/she is a confirmed friend. Facebook also will delete a profile if the person’s immediate kin approaches them with a death certificate and a copy of the person’s email to the said kin.
People spend a lot of time on their online networks (I do); it’s a trend that has caught up. So all we can do is catch the trend and stay with it. What does the future portend? A life lived purely on an online forum? A life full of Facebook comments and no real conversations? Prescient? Don't know.
The article delves into the issue of the hereafter, based on the experience of one Pam Weiss who logged on to Facebook to trace photographs of her dead daughter and found many, in fact, a whole lot that would identify with her life, recreate it for her, in the absence of the records she in her old-fashioned way hunted: diaries (now replaced by blogs), letter (now replaced by emails), photo albums (now replaced by online albums). Life changes, so does various aspects of it, sometimes unconsciously, I might add. So she got plenty of material she didn’t know existed, before, um, Facebook actually deleted her profile. I am not sure they do.
Acually Facebook has a policy of putting a person’s profile on “Memorial State” if the person has deceased, so that people know the person is no more. No one can post a status update but can post a comment if he/she is a confirmed friend. Facebook also will delete a profile if the person’s immediate kin approaches them with a death certificate and a copy of the person’s email to the said kin.
People spend a lot of time on their online networks (I do); it’s a trend that has caught up. So all we can do is catch the trend and stay with it. What does the future portend? A life lived purely on an online forum? A life full of Facebook comments and no real conversations? Prescient? Don't know.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Bloggers to the Fore. Product Launches, What Next?
So what’s up in the blogging community? Am a bit dense here because I haven’t attended any of their meet-ups or bothered to network, really. So the following comes as a bit of a surprise as it comes on the back of the revelation that India is among the top ten blogging nations of the world. This article on Campaignindia.in sheds a little bit of light about what has been happening behind the back of this blogger. Excerpt:
“For example, Marico’s chain of skin care services Kaya Skin Clinic targets beauty and fashion bloggers who try out their skincare packages and blog about them. In return, Kaya experts write guest posts on a monthly basis. Auto major Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) has used blogs to release the first look of its vehicles. Not just that, M&M ensured that along with the mainstream media, bloggers were also invited to the press conference of the Xylo’s launch. Some weeks back, producers of a recent Bollywood release Toss, upset at how mainstream media had “completely ignored” the film, reached out to bloggers who could review the film on their blogs.”
Wonder who will invite me to the launch of their premium brand. Wonder!
“For example, Marico’s chain of skin care services Kaya Skin Clinic targets beauty and fashion bloggers who try out their skincare packages and blog about them. In return, Kaya experts write guest posts on a monthly basis. Auto major Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) has used blogs to release the first look of its vehicles. Not just that, M&M ensured that along with the mainstream media, bloggers were also invited to the press conference of the Xylo’s launch. Some weeks back, producers of a recent Bollywood release Toss, upset at how mainstream media had “completely ignored” the film, reached out to bloggers who could review the film on their blogs.”
Wonder who will invite me to the launch of their premium brand. Wonder!
Of "Cattle Class" and No “First Class” in India
What do you say to a man who comes and stands in front his ample and polyester-clad behind wiggling at you, prodding the book you are reading, shifting from leg to leg, talking loudly to his companion, unmindful of the dirty looks I give him, which he can’t see, of course? He seems like a run-of-the-mill well-paid executive in a company that pays a decent salary for him to wear the seemingly expensive polyester jiggling in front of me.
All this happen in this morning’s commute to work, in “cattle class” or the “first class” compartment of Bombay’s famed local trains. I don’t know if “first class” is the right term, it doesn’t feel like “first class” at all. It’s hot, the upholstery sags (giving me a backache), there are people towering in front of me where my feet should be resting, and there’s no air circulation. And the bad manners that accompany the crudeness and the churlishness is more distasteful than I can tolerate for the one hour it takes me to reach my place of work.
Actually, I think, there is no “first class” in India. I swear. There’s only one class in India and that’s “Monkey Class.” It means a class where you can brush anyone, even touch forbidden parts, talk loudly, disturb people reading books, litter at will, spit, urinate, leave toilets dirty, after all, “what does your father lose?”.
All this happen in this morning’s commute to work, in “cattle class” or the “first class” compartment of Bombay’s famed local trains. I don’t know if “first class” is the right term, it doesn’t feel like “first class” at all. It’s hot, the upholstery sags (giving me a backache), there are people towering in front of me where my feet should be resting, and there’s no air circulation. And the bad manners that accompany the crudeness and the churlishness is more distasteful than I can tolerate for the one hour it takes me to reach my place of work.
Actually, I think, there is no “first class” in India. I swear. There’s only one class in India and that’s “Monkey Class.” It means a class where you can brush anyone, even touch forbidden parts, talk loudly, disturb people reading books, litter at will, spit, urinate, leave toilets dirty, after all, “what does your father lose?”.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
The Largest Wave of Suicides in History
This is from a blog called Progressive Rural India Forum, here’s an excerpt:
“The statistics are staggering. From 1998 to 2006, over 100,000 farmers have committed suicides. In Vidarbha, 3,000 farmers have taken their lives in the 1999-2006 period. Since June 2005, 2-3 farmers have been committing suicides every day. Yet you wouldn’t know that from the Indian media. Reports of farmer suicides and protests do appear in fits and spurts, but most of the media appears focused on the glitzy malls, the phoren fast-food chains, the luxury cars, the call centres and the hip lifestyles of the rich and famous.”
Wonder why we keep reading about the suicides by farmers in forsaken corners in our newspapers and not on the front pages. None other than crusading journalist P. Sainath calls it “the largest wave of suicides in history” in this article.
“The statistics are staggering. From 1998 to 2006, over 100,000 farmers have committed suicides. In Vidarbha, 3,000 farmers have taken their lives in the 1999-2006 period. Since June 2005, 2-3 farmers have been committing suicides every day. Yet you wouldn’t know that from the Indian media. Reports of farmer suicides and protests do appear in fits and spurts, but most of the media appears focused on the glitzy malls, the phoren fast-food chains, the luxury cars, the call centres and the hip lifestyles of the rich and famous.”
Wonder why we keep reading about the suicides by farmers in forsaken corners in our newspapers and not on the front pages. None other than crusading journalist P. Sainath calls it “the largest wave of suicides in history” in this article.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Recession's Silver Lining
According to livescience.com, recession may have had an unlikely silver lining. According to this article recession has resulted in low carbon dioxide emission. Excerpt:
“It may not exactly be a silver lining to the global recession, but greenhouse gas emissions have fallen sharply as a result of the world's current economic plight, according to a study by the International Energy Agency.
“The IEA found that the drop in carbon dioxide emissions over the last year will be larger than any drop in the past forty years, including the decline in 1981 that resulted from the oil crisis.”
Hat tips: Prem Panicker.
“It may not exactly be a silver lining to the global recession, but greenhouse gas emissions have fallen sharply as a result of the world's current economic plight, according to a study by the International Energy Agency.
“The IEA found that the drop in carbon dioxide emissions over the last year will be larger than any drop in the past forty years, including the decline in 1981 that resulted from the oil crisis.”
Hat tips: Prem Panicker.
Goodbye Rains!
It had to happen. This monsoon (the word is derived, so I read, from the Arabic/Urdu word “mausam” meaning “season”) I had taken a solemn vow to not let the forces of nature, in this case: rain, defeat me. So apart from losing two umbrellas and similar other minor catastrophes, I had come to the end of this monsoon, untarnished and untrammelled. So when the dry spell came I heaved the necessary sighs of relief and said a prayer to the Almighty for having spared me. The monsoon disappears usually around mid-September, and here we are nearing end of September. So, I had got rid of the unwieldy umbrella, trusting it not to rain. But yesterday something happened that was to shake that firm resolve, i.e., that I would be unfazed in the face of the onslaught from heaven, and all that.
It rained!
It rained rivers, streams, seas, oceans. I sought shelter in a South Indian restaurant and sat over hot tea to let all the watery hell pass. But when it rains in Bombay it rains for hours and days. One hour passes and the rain doesn't show signs of subsiding, so I come out and try hunting for a taxi to take me Victoria Terminus train station.
Bombay taxis won’t stop for you when it rains!
They see this desperate-looking, bald man soaking wet and up goes all their noses. Their preference during the best of their seasons, the monsoon, is the posh areas of Cuffe Parade and Malabar Hill where madams in sheer chiffon with feather boas tip hundred rupees in addition to your choice of taxi fare! Bastards!
I don’t wear chiffon and am a man, what to do? So I tie a kerchief around my head and walk. Proud head erect, and all, I walk so as not to appear fazed, not leaning forward, straight, so as not to lose all self composure now that it was a last of all showers, the very last burst. I walk in ankle-length water, the shirt starts clinging after a few paces, the shoes squelch, the glasses mist, I am slowly losing... losing my, what shall I say, avoirdupois.
The journey to CBD Belapur takes one hour and I sit and shiver in the cold of the sudden wetness deep into Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” which details the privations of the Buendia family in the godforsaken village of Macondo. It says it rained for four years in Macondo. God forbid! The story narrates the hopelessness of life in this South American hell and it depresses me. But I am seated erect, backache and all, and unfazed.
Then I reach CBD Belapur where I live. Damn, it’s raining here too! There’s a long queue for the rickshaws, the omnipresent small beetle-shaped vehicles that would take me home.
When it rains rickshaw drivers don’t drive!
So I join this long snaking queue. A boy around my son’s age is holding this big multi-coloured umbrella above him, in front, and he deliberately turns it away from me, so I get wet all over, also the water flowing down his umbrella tumbles on me. Who says kindness is a middle-class virtue? Or, maybe, I am seeing things negatively. I stand straighter, hold my head higher, the rain pelts, the rivulets flow. I am as wet as a dish rag by now. A few rickshaws arrive and the queue grows shorter, the rain falls continuously, no respite, no abatement.
When you need a rickshaw you won’t get them!
Yes, no one, none. Other days they would all be tooting-teeting-cursing-lolling around with their bodies twisted in varying shapes on their front seats. Today, guess they have all gone to sleep or are drinking their moonshine hootch in their shabby watering holes.
I am at the head of the queue!
Yes, it takes half-an-hour. But I am at the head of the queue and the availability of the god’s-gift-to-Bombay rickshaws drops to the nadir of all known extents, meaning the absolute of absolute zero. Then one comes puttering out of the rain and darkness and I board its wet interior and it takes me home. I am on my way.
I walk the few paces to my house, my head erect, my pride still intact. Yes, I kept the promise: I wasn’t fazed a bit by the rains. Goodbye rains!
It rained!
It rained rivers, streams, seas, oceans. I sought shelter in a South Indian restaurant and sat over hot tea to let all the watery hell pass. But when it rains in Bombay it rains for hours and days. One hour passes and the rain doesn't show signs of subsiding, so I come out and try hunting for a taxi to take me Victoria Terminus train station.
Bombay taxis won’t stop for you when it rains!
They see this desperate-looking, bald man soaking wet and up goes all their noses. Their preference during the best of their seasons, the monsoon, is the posh areas of Cuffe Parade and Malabar Hill where madams in sheer chiffon with feather boas tip hundred rupees in addition to your choice of taxi fare! Bastards!
I don’t wear chiffon and am a man, what to do? So I tie a kerchief around my head and walk. Proud head erect, and all, I walk so as not to appear fazed, not leaning forward, straight, so as not to lose all self composure now that it was a last of all showers, the very last burst. I walk in ankle-length water, the shirt starts clinging after a few paces, the shoes squelch, the glasses mist, I am slowly losing... losing my, what shall I say, avoirdupois.
The journey to CBD Belapur takes one hour and I sit and shiver in the cold of the sudden wetness deep into Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” which details the privations of the Buendia family in the godforsaken village of Macondo. It says it rained for four years in Macondo. God forbid! The story narrates the hopelessness of life in this South American hell and it depresses me. But I am seated erect, backache and all, and unfazed.
Then I reach CBD Belapur where I live. Damn, it’s raining here too! There’s a long queue for the rickshaws, the omnipresent small beetle-shaped vehicles that would take me home.
When it rains rickshaw drivers don’t drive!
So I join this long snaking queue. A boy around my son’s age is holding this big multi-coloured umbrella above him, in front, and he deliberately turns it away from me, so I get wet all over, also the water flowing down his umbrella tumbles on me. Who says kindness is a middle-class virtue? Or, maybe, I am seeing things negatively. I stand straighter, hold my head higher, the rain pelts, the rivulets flow. I am as wet as a dish rag by now. A few rickshaws arrive and the queue grows shorter, the rain falls continuously, no respite, no abatement.
When you need a rickshaw you won’t get them!
Yes, no one, none. Other days they would all be tooting-teeting-cursing-lolling around with their bodies twisted in varying shapes on their front seats. Today, guess they have all gone to sleep or are drinking their moonshine hootch in their shabby watering holes.
I am at the head of the queue!
Yes, it takes half-an-hour. But I am at the head of the queue and the availability of the god’s-gift-to-Bombay rickshaws drops to the nadir of all known extents, meaning the absolute of absolute zero. Then one comes puttering out of the rain and darkness and I board its wet interior and it takes me home. I am on my way.
I walk the few paces to my house, my head erect, my pride still intact. Yes, I kept the promise: I wasn’t fazed a bit by the rains. Goodbye rains!
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Pain - II
Was looking around for some poems to read on “pain” which I underwent during my recent backpain episode mentioned here.
Came across this one by William Wordsworth on Bartlesby.com called “ If This Great World of Joy and Pain" that nearly describes what I went through.
Pain comes and goes like a ghost, a wraith, a spectre. One is relieved, as I am now, but there were times when I was enduring that I thought very dark thoughts indeed. Anyone share my experience?
Came across this one by William Wordsworth on Bartlesby.com called “ If This Great World of Joy and Pain" that nearly describes what I went through.
Pain comes and goes like a ghost, a wraith, a spectre. One is relieved, as I am now, but there were times when I was enduring that I thought very dark thoughts indeed. Anyone share my experience?
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