immense world: 50 Interesting Science Facts

Here's for all ye science fiction lovers, something to chew cud on: immense world: 50 Interesting Science Facts. Did you know that:

In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf?
If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour?
Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m?

There are forty-nine more of such amazing scientific facts that would make you go, "Did I read right?" Yes, you read it, and, don't forget, you got the link on my blog.

Three Months after the Bomb Blasts in Bombay

Yesterday I passed over the spots that had recently (three months ago) been rocked by bombs that exploded simultaneously in many stations along the western route of the suburban Bombay railway. Stations such as Borivli, Andheri, and Mira Road where the bombs had ripped through steel compartments. There was fear in my heart as I passed these stations, crowded with people, their anxiety like a mask on their tired faces, returning from work, weary and exploited. There was nothing to remind one of these ghastly incidents, not even a trace. In fact, I was thinking, "God, don't let anything happen now, let not anything happen now." Security was visible only at the entrances, nothing to deter a determined terrorist.

I wondered how vulnerable we have become to hostage situations where bargaining is done under threat of killing innocents. How can they kill innocents and gain anything. I am talking of Gujarat as well as Bombay. Many theories have been bandied about about the causes of the explosions. If there is peace, it is an uneasy peace, a tentative calm. A few days before the explosions a communal party had burnt and looted many shops in Bombay as a statue of their founder's wife was desecrated by vandals. I guess the bombs were a sort of retribution for that, coming as it did immediately after the provocation, as a sort of "hands off" warning. I could be wrong here, I don't know.

Anyway, the deed has been done, the seeds of fear sown, and the harvest has been bitter, unproductive. There is smouldering bitterness in the look on people's faces, as I could gauge from looking at them. Today's papers front paged the news that the CBI (the Indian FBI) has found clear evidence of the the ISI's (Pakistan's Secret Service) hand in what they call "the 7/11 blasts." Ever since 9/11 entered the human conscience there has been no end to the "dash/dash" phenomena, most of them related to terrorist or natural calamities. I can hear mouths glibly verbalizing "7/11" as they dissect the acts no end, in a greed to get their own opinions across the hungry, and scoop-crazy media. "7/11 happened because of this, this and this," I can hear them.

What about the victims? Some of them are still in hospital, in a comma, some of them have had multiple surgeries performed and don't know whether they would be able to live a normal life again. Amen! (No offense is meant against any community or governmental agency from this blog posting.)
Tags: 7/11, Borivli, Andheri, Mira Road, Terrorism, Gujarat, Bombay, Victims, Media, CBI, ISI

Kiran Desai Reads from the Booker Prize Winner "The Inheritance of Loss"

To hear Kiran Desai read from her Booker Winning novel "The Inheritance of Loss" click here (sorry, the link on Johnwriter's Literary Show on the right panel doesn't work. I am working towards redeeming this, mucho gracias). Also here is the article by Pankaj Mishra that accompanied the reading in New York Times an excerpt from which appears below:

"This leaves most people in the postcolonial world with only the promise of a shabby modernity — modernity, as Desai puts it, "in its meanest form, brand-new one day, in ruin the next." Not surprisingly, half-educated, uprooted men like Gyan gravitate to the first available political cause in their search for a better way. He joins what sounds like an ethnic nationalist movement largely as an opportunity to vent his rage and frustration. "Old hatreds are endlessly retrievable," Desai reminds us, and they are "purer . . . because the grief of the past was gone. Just the fury remained, distilled, liberating.""

My grouse with diasporic writers is that they tend to denigrate, or, patronize India by writing long passages about the exotic India where Indian live in an antique world full of superstitions, mangoes, pickles, run down neighbourhoods without actually learning about the hearts and minds of the people who inhabit them. They try to exoticise without really understanding the undercurrents of Indian society. What Desai calls "shabby modernity" is also what is turning out brilliant programming code that runs most of the world today. Thus Jhumpa Labiri's "Namesake" which I am reading now, is full of India though it is set in the US, about customs of a Bengali family, and a lot of visuals that would be a treat for people who say they like India.

Technorati tags: Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Pankaj Mishra, New York Times, Namesake, Inheritance of Loss

Cricket Commentary Now and Then

Saw the West Indies – Australia Champions Trophy match last night on television. The match was played at the Brabourne Stadium, yes, the Brabourne Stadium. (Brings fond memories of Vijay Merchant’s stentorian voice piping over the All India Radio, stressing every syllable carefully as some Gujaratis do, “This is your commentator Vijay Merchant from Brabourne Stadium.” It was another day and age, long , ago. There was no television those days and the only way of relaying the proceedings on the pitch was the trusted All India Radio. They knew their cricket and cricketing history and could immediately quote statistics and what match was played where and who scored what. There were some colorful characters and one was JRF Taleyarkhan (What do you think “Jimmy?” Vijay would ask), another was the statistician fondly called “Mama” and another was Polly Umrigar, all have faded away from memory to be replaced by Mandira Bedi, Charu (something), and, Sidhu.

That brings me to what I am waffling towards, has become a habit these days, these waffling, I mean. What purpose do Mandira and Sidhu serve. Firstly Mandira has no knowledge of the game, and most of the time she is completely lost, pouting, blushing, batting eyelids, and saying inane things like, “Isn’t that how it is supposed to be,” to Charu, who can easily bring out the most obvious comments that can ever be thought about. They add nothing to the viewer’s knowledge, absolute nothing.

And now I come to Sidhu. Well Sidhu has his Sidhuisms, for which he has become world famous, but should he be overdoing it the way he is doing. No offense. I like some of his Sidhuisms like, “Bicycles falling” and “Light at the end of the tunnel is the train coming toward you,” but, God, should he be in the overdrive that he is in, at present? When a bowler took a wicket, he said, “He is over the moon.” Come on, slow down the train a bit will you?

Ode to a Stolen Mobile Phone!

I don’t have a mobile phone, I feel cut off, I feel alienated. It happened thus, I guess it had to. I was boarding a bus at Andheri East. There was a crowd at the entrance, an unyielding mass of people, not budging an inch (which is usual for people as me who commute to make a living). I tried to make my way inside, and was hanging by one hand, almost out of the bus, quite precariously. I decided that I would have to get down and not carry on this way. So I got down.

Then I felt my pockets to see if my wallet, credit cards, ATM cards (all desiderata of modern life) are safe. But no, my mobile case was empty. I couldn’t believe it! They had stolen my mobile phone. The realization was shattering, mind-numbing! I had all my contacts’ telephone number and hadn’t bothered to keep what is called a “hard copy,” i.e., a written copy.

I felt like sitting down there and crying! Oh, God, no, not to me, not to me. I had heard of other people losing their mobile phones. Not my Nokia color mobile phone with internet surfing features, games, FM radio, the gizmo had everything. And the last installment wasn’t even paid up. In short, I was inconsolable, my rage and disappointment was, needless to say, immense.

But then thinking about it a bit more, a poem occurred to me. I wrote my mobile phone a poem, a sonnet.

Sonnet for Stolen Mobile Phone

You were small, curvy, and cute,

Full of lively chatter and, sometimes mute,

For hours I would wait for your ring,

That set my pulse racing.

 

You spoke to me in several lingos,

Mallu, Hindi, English, Bambaiya patois,

A ventricle and aorta full of feelings,

Elations, greetings, glad tidings.

 

Then one evening, I know not,

Who stole you from me, my Camelot,

Are your rings dead, are you still alive?

Has he de-SIM-ed you, would you survive?

 

Please come back to me, I miss you,

Without you, I am not me, without me, you won’t be you!

Commuting Blues!

You have, of course, read the post that appears below this about the human traffic jam. Today’s experience was equally weird. Now I am working in Andheri which is one and a half hour commute from home, and on the other side of Bombay. I commute to Kurla by train and then board a rickshaw, the ingenious creation of the Indian mind, to Andheri East.Now, Kurla is always, has always been a crowded place, from as long as I can remember (that is from the age of eight, when I came to live in Bombay). Rickshaws, people, beggars, cars, buses, handcarts, hawkers, anything and everything can be found there. The result is a traffic jam that would boggle the mind every time a bus overtakes another, or, a rickshaw turns turtle (yes, they do sometimes!). I was in the midst of such a mess up, rickshaws, cars, buses all lined along the road in one unyielding, roaring, mass of steel. Indian vehicles, I mean, all Indian vehicles, make a lot of noise. Their engines aren’t efficient enough to run smoothly, may be, my biased opinion. This is considering I have lived abroad and know that their engines make less noise. I was sitting in this huge roar that issued from rickshaws from all sides, and some drivers were merrily leaning on their horns, some were cursing and some were yelling at the top of their voices, yes, as much as they could raise their naturally loud voices. Deafening, maddening, vicious and inconsiderate, that’s what I thought of all the noises virtually deafening my ears. In the midst of it all was a cute girl, totally lost to the world, listening to FM radio stations on her mobile phone. Why do we love noise so much? We are a noisy people. Without noise we feel lost and at a loss. We are loud, our music is loud (anyone who has heard Himesh Reshamiya would attest to this) and we are a nation of talkers. Or, would you agree, considering HR is such a rage these days?Another scary thing happened, this time, on Saturday. I was wearing my salvar-kurta for the office lunch party at Rodas Hotel in Powai. I was returning after a hard day of work and as I entered the train at Kurla, people stared, yes, they actually stared at me. A man refused to budge when I requested to be let into the seating area, another preferred to offer a seat to another man, though I was standing near him, another gave me a look – the sort people give suspicious ones, supercilious, mouth curled and all that – from the head to the toes. Profiling! They were profiling me, and that was a scary thought. What were they thinking? The Bombay bomb blast has made a lot of train commuters rather finicky, I think. But this was over-reacting, wasn’t it?

My Futuristic Short Story 2100: The Long Commute

Read my science fiction story 2100: The Long Commute. The story’s gist, if you please, is this. It is the year 2100 and there is a long commute the protagonists has to do from New Bombay (where he lives) to Bangalore (where he works). He meets his friend Shashi who madly in love, but Goohoo (the corporation formed by the merger of Google and Yahoo), the corporation he works for, isn’t kind to lovers and, love, in general. Pliss to be kind enough to excuse a few typos. As you know the keyboard devil has been haunting me quite a lot these days. I am working on a re-write. Meanwhile, you can comment there, or, here.

Vignettes

Have you been in a human traffic jam? You have heard of a motor vehicle traffic jam where the cars, buses, lorries and other hoggers of road space pile up and stick their fingers in the air to display their inner urges.

It happened to me today. I was at Kurla from where I change to Andheri to the place of work. While climbing the steps to the bridge that would lead me to the west of Kurla, there was this absolute mass of people, unmoving, unbudging, as if the whole thick mass of flesh was one entity. I waited. Then again the whole mass moved a step, just as it does in a traffic jam. Then it stopped. Then it went ahead a step and then it stopped.

Now, about the moral of the story, and a little sermonizing which I am fond of. After all, when you are my age (which you will be) you always compare these things with what it used to be. Young people who are living in the present adapt immediately, but older people question everything that has the label of newness on it. Overpopulation, over-stressed resources, bugbears of modern living: anxiety levels were high, a man was touching me patronizingly on the shoulder, “Take your hands off,” I almost shouted.

My first blog from Word 2007

This is my first blog from Word 2007.

Kiran Desai winning the Booker is good news. Here's the New York Times article that praises her cross cultural saga. I have no issues with that. But what had rankled me once was her mother Anita Desai deriding the lot of struggling Indian authors.

True, we Indian authors aren't up to the mark, we aren't that publishing savvy, our manuscripts return with editorial comments like "what crap" scrawled in the margin, and editors write, "If it was somebody I could have helped, I would definitely meet," and crap like that to struggling authors.

To published authors who hold their noses in the air and look down upon struggling authors, I have one thing to say: "There is a lot of talent out there, but it's only that in the daily struggle of making a living we don't have the time to focus on our writing. So we would be content, for the time being, shall we say, with writer's networks like Caferati and Shakespeare & Co.