Adam Apple or Adam's Apple - Which Is Right?

Strange. Someone asked me which websites I have written and I am stumped. I have written content for many websites, I mean, written their entire content from A to Zee. But none of them are in the form in which I had left them. All of them have gone out of business, disappeared, facing technical problems (like my own domain name which my effing service provider has difficulty renewing), or, are defunct in the way only technology can be.

Strange are the ways of online entities. I guess the technology has something to do with it. Look at it like this, there is this large, humongous, world where we can connect, chat, enter into friendships or other relationships and it’s so disorganised and chaotic that web entities just die and are never resurrected or resuscitated. I spend a lot of time online, that is more time than I give to my family, friends, or even to writing. They say the age of publishing on paper is gone and it’s the era of hand-held e-book readers like Kindle. Recently, the venerable British Council Library shifted to online lending and borrowing. I don’t know if these are good or bad trends but truth be told there isn’t the joy in a Kindle that can match opening a book yellowed with age, smelling the glue and perusing the typefaces of old, the style, the indentations, the matching of lines, the drop capitals, the italicisations, etc. all of which were standard instructions for a sub-editor (which I was) entering the world of publishing. Typesetting and sub-editing (or, subbing) was an art then. Alas, no more. The caption writers of a popular newspaper these days write "Adam Apple" instead of "Adam's Apple". There's a subtle difference, you see.

Year End Reviews - My Own Too!

What do I write? What do I write today? I am fumbling for words, for thoughts. It is rarely that I don’t have three or four subjects flitting about like butterflies in my mind, trying to find an outlet in my blog.

There are several issues of newspapers and magazines doing year-end, decade-end reviews. I like them. The reviewers are all erudite fellows giving profound pronouncements about the markets – stock and commodities -, political uncertainties, the terror attacks, the future of the world – meaning the environmental catastrophe that we have been ignoring – the ice-thin  sheet of environmental safety over which we have been skating at high speeds. Defaults are high (e.g. Nakheel Group, the Dubai group that's building the world's tallest tower - The Al Burj), many more financial entities are going bust a la Lehman Brothers. There’s a tendency among money managers to pay themselves high salaries. Have you observed? Look at any organisation, the finance guys who manage the company’s funds always get away with high salaries and perks. Come on guys, what a selfish thing to do. Well that’s going to change. It has to. We should have looked at our marketing and production guys, they are where the company’s real excellence is, not the guy who totals it all up.

It’s as if the brakes are difficult to put on the way we are progressing, like a “runaway train” as Elton John sang in his song of the same name. The lyrics that accompany it go thusly:

“When we break out of this blindfold

I am gonna take you from this place.”

Noble thought, but take you where? Yes, breakneck speed and blindfolded we are progressing towards a destiny we don’t know where it will lead. In fact, there’s nothing finite about anything anymore. We all tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to control people and the way we think. Marx and Engels did, Mahesh Yogi did, Beatles did, Elvis did, Jim Morrison did.

Coming back to year-end reviews I guess the ones I liked are: Forbes and Crest. The first tries to harness several things in its ambit and succeeds, and Crest (May this newspaper from the Times of India group survive is my fervent wish) sounded very knowledgeable and upbeat in its prognostications. Its contents are well balanced and for once I really like a Times Group publication. Good for them. It seemed well written and edited. As for me I did my year end review long ago. Go back and see.

In the Chromo Today: അയലത്തെ ഇയെങ്ങര്ക് മൂന്നു കൊമ്പ്

At the Chroma store in New Bombay today I see this rare sight. It’s an Iyengar, a very distinguished looking gent – yes I can make this out from the three vertical lines on his forehead – in a longish angavasthram and bordered with red and green strip stippled with gold filigree work. His top half is bare except for an end of the vasthram drawn around his neck. He looks learned and I could guess immediately that he wore that dress out of conscious choice, not as a gimmick, and looked graceful in it. I almost break out into a Malayalam ditty we sang in our school. (Pardon my insolence, please, if I sound that, by any chance. I have no intention of hurting the sentiments of my Iyengars friends. We had a very generous Iyengar family as our neighbour in the suburb of Chembur and I owe a lot to them.) The ditty goes thus:

വീടിലെ പശുവിനു രണ്ടു കൊമ്പ്

അയലത്തെ ഇയെങ്ങര്ക് മൂന്നു കൊമ്പ്

Veetile pashuvinu randu kombu

Ayalathe Iyengarku moonnu kombu!

Roughly translated, it reads thusly:

The household cow has two horns

The neighbouring Iyengar has three horns!

(The Iyengars can be distinguished from their equally venerable cousins, the Iyers, by the three lines they draw vertically on their foreheads with sandal paste. Hence, the horn analogy.)

This rather distinguished Iyengar has hair as white as snow and his angavasthram was also thusly coloured (hm, if white can be called a colour). I would place him somewhere as, at least, Chief Financial Officer, in a blue-chip company which offers a lot of perks. Anybody with the name of Iyer or Iyengar just shoots to the top is my theory, just like thairu-sadam shoots to the brain soon after it is imbibed. This Iyengar gent went on to buy so many electronic equipment that it boggled my mind to just look at him carrying all those stuff, while my mouth was watering at the light-weight Sony Vaio Zero sitting there like a Kareena Kapoor on the shelf. Oh, why wasn’t I born an Iyengar?

Cluttered Website and a Walk in the Wild

Hm. Today I am confronted with another common problem. Has anyone faced this? You surf a website or a social networking site and suddenly you observe that the icons have been changed, the links don’t appear where they usually were, the colours have changed, you can’t remember the username and password, you try different combinations and are frustrated and, sad to say, a few hours have passed, too much clutter, you give up.

I was at my domain registration site trying to renew my website’s thingamajig. Innocently, I clicked, clicked and clicked again. Nada, nothing doing. Clutter upon clutter fills the screen. I can’t find that page where I had renewed the domain last year. Why did they have to change the website every now and then? They lost business and I, a lot time, valuable time I could have spent elsewhere and god alone knows what damage I have done to my liver, pancreas, heart, arteries and veins. Yeah, sitting in one place for a long time can damage these organs.

Yes, websites have this habit of changing their look as they grow big. They add on this and that, and before long there is too much clutter, while the mantra should be very little clutter. Google could have filled its homepage with a million links, thank god, they kept only very little. That’s the secret of a good website.

x-x-x

After this episode I go for a walk. I am fortunate enough to be living somewhere close to a pristine rainforest. I decide to skip the tarred roads and take a walk in the wild, a one-person-only path that leads into the centre of the Artiste Village valley. It's eerily silent and I can hear the sound of insects and crickets over the pond in the centre of the concavity. The tall grass on either side, now dry, graze my legs, the silence is awesome. It is as if I am alone with nature, a bit frightening, no doubt. When I reached the middle of the valley I paused and looked at the looming Parsik Hills, so majestic that it looked overwhelming. The thick forest clung to its base forming a green canopy, where leopards and wild hogs are said to hunt. This valley is rich in bio-diversity, having as many as 379 identified species and will soon be developed into a nature park by the government.

The walk did a lot of good, it requires skill to walk in the wild and it invigorates. Felt a lot fresh after I returned. Guess, I am lucky to be living so close such a beautiful place, that too, in proximity to a beauteous forest.

It’s Boxing Day, Stupid!

Ah, boxing day, not boxer's day, sorry for the gaffe of a few day's earlier post in which I referred to it as boxer's day, duly corrected by Peter Griffin (thanks, Peter, guess you are an authority on these subjects, and thanks for reading what I write on my blog), so accepted, boxing day it is. Today is boxing day, traditionally, the day of giving gifts to the needy and less privileged, which term, would also include employees, dependents, knowing as how underprivileged (and underpaid) this blogger is. Alas, no one gave any gifts, or, presents, so I will let it pass.

Spent Christmas at home, writing, what will be my second novel, completed a difficult chapter, i.e., chapter nine. The day outside was beautiful, the sky an inexplicable and indefinable blue, only known to the color palette of an artist, not common writers of my ilk. The valley was green as usual, myriad shades that merged and emerged, only to please the eye by nodding and waving playfully at me, as I sat writing on the small balcony attached to my bedroom. Have set myself a deadline of completing the novel by year end, which I am sure I can do, if I am freed from stupid stumbling blocks.

The "Christmas Truce" and a Murder that Turned into a World War

Thank God, the wishing and saying of “God bless” and “take care” are over. Empty, facile, unoriginal, insincere, it seems. But we say these words all the time. Do we care? Some do but some don’t. A few thoughts in this time of forced jollity and superficial caring, where we depend on messages on Facebook or on the mobile phone to make our day, not live conversations with friends and relatives. I called up all my siblings, with whom I am on good terms: a brother and sisters. No, they didn’t call. The onus is on me I guess. I am a little upset about that. I believing forgiveness and forgive a lot to a lot of people. But there are a few hurts that cannot be forgiven.

Read this on Ratna Rajaiah’s blog “Choti Mooh”. It’s the story of “Christmas Truce” when around 1,00,000 British and German soldiers fighting the First World War came together in the battlefield to sing hymns and celebrate Christmas as well as they could. This was the war that escalated into a big battle of nations because one trivial event led to another and then another. Led me to research the First World War a bit and, serendipitously, I found a lot of information online.

The spark that ignited the war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo in Serbia on 28 June 1914. Here’s a film footage of Ferdinand’s arrival in Sarajevo. Austro-Hungary asked Serbia for an explanation.

Then started a chain of bizarre events that led to an even macabre massacre of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, which is documents in the website firstworldwar.com:

• “Austria-Hungary, unsatisfied with Serbia's response to her ultimatum declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914.

• “Russia, bound by treaty to Serbia, announced mobilisation of its vast army in her defence, a slow process that would take around six weeks to complete.

• “Germany, allied to Austria-Hungary by treaty, viewed the Russian mobilisation as an act of war against Austria-Hungary, and after scant warning declared war on Russia on 1 August.

• “France, bound by treaty to Russia, found itself at war against Germany and, by extension, on Austria-Hungary following a German declaration on 3 August.  Germany was swift in invading neutral Belgium so as to reach Paris by the shortest possible route.

• “Britain, allied to France by a more loosely worded treaty which placed a "moral obligation" upon her to defend France, declared war against Germany on 4 August.  Her reason for entering the conflict lay in another direction: she was obligated to defend neutral Belgium by the terms of a 75-year old treaty.  With Germany's invasion of Belgium on 4 August, and the Belgian King's appeal to Britain for assistance, Britain committed herself to Belgium's defence later that day.  Like France, she was by extension also at war with Austria-Hungary.

• “With Britain's entry into the war, her colonies and dominions abroad variously offered military and financial assistance, and included Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa.

• “United States President Woodrow Wilson declared a U.S. policy of absolute neutrality, an official stance that would last until 1917 when Germany's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare - which seriously threatened America's commercial shipping (which was in any event almost entirely directed towards the Allies led by Britain and France) - forced the U.S. to finally enter the war on 6 April 1917.

• “Japan, honouring a military agreement with Britain, declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914.  Two days later Austria-Hungary responded by declaring war on Japan.

• “Italy, although allied to both Germany and Austria-Hungary, was able to avoid entering the fray by citing a clause enabling it to evade its obligations to both.  In short, Italy was committed to defend Germany and Austria-Hungary only in the event of a 'defensive' war; arguing that their actions were 'offensive' she declared instead a policy of neutrality.  The following year, in May 1915, she finally joined the conflict by siding with the Allies against her two former allies.”

Before anybody knew it, it became a global war, and hundreds of thousands got killed, for no apparent fault of theirs. But the spirit of “Christmas Truce” in the trenches of France made heart-melting reading. Thanks Ratna. If only people decide what they want politically, and whether they want to get killed in a foreign country, or celebrate the spirit of love, which is the theme of Christmas. I wish; I wish.

Happy Yuletide; Happy Christmas!

Yuletide greetings! For those who don’t know yuletide is the season before Christmas and Boxing Day is the day after Christmas (thanks, Peter Griffin for the clarification). Time for a bit of introspection and retrospection, which is what I generally do before Christmas. The church carols are over; a carolling party came home and went. I bought plum cakes from the Sassanian bakery at Dhobi Talao which is nearby the office. A Parsi man objected to my bag touching him, he also laughed a typically Parsi laugh as he told me so. Trust the Parsis to be gentle with criticism, too. I love this community, their quirkiness, their cosmopolitanism, their spirit of brotherhood, their cultural assimilation; the protagonist of my novel is one.

So, what next? Next is what is Christmas; the joyous occasion of the birth of Christ, the season of joy, as it is termed. But thousands are dying of the cold and adverse conditions throughout the world. And, most importantly, Jesus was born in a cold manger not in a five-hotel resounding with the strains of dance music and the merry laughter of flirting couples. Ahem! My intention is not to sound holier-than-thou, but to think of people who don’t have a ceiling over their heads, as we do. Poverty is never more felt than during Christmas. What is trumpeted is the feeling of joy, but it is also the time of intense sorrow and depression. Many commit suicide, many descend into addiction, many are the homes that break up during this season.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding, nonetheless, a happy Yuletide and a happy Christmas!

Some Thoughts for Christmas. Can’t Believe It’s That Time of the Year to Be Jolly!

It's Christmas once again! I don't know how time has passed, and the songs on my lips, as I take my shower (disclosure: I am an unashamed bathroom singer) are: "Deck the halls with boughs of holly", "I am dreaming of a white Christmas", "Christmas is the season", etc. I love to sing them, out of key, out of harmony. But what a changed Christmas: moved into my new house, the shadow of the recession hasn't lifted from my head, work, well, work is work, never ending. I haven't seen my novel to the end. Don't get the time to steer it towards the end, though I am so charged up with ideas, I only have time to drop into bed after the day and dinner is done. Guess, it will have to wait. Meanwhile I am at a crucial juncture when my protagonist mulls if he should or shouldn't have sex with his secretary. Any suggestions? Ideas? Is it ethical? He is not a very ethical person, too. Consider that.

Hm. How do I celebrate the spirit of Joy that is Christmas, then?

I used to send a lot of cards during Christmas, to my brother, sisters, cousins, friends. But now, we make a phone call, not send cards. And, here too, we make compromises. We put off calling, or, when we call the other party is either busy, else, his or her mobile is dead. Technology gives you a lot of choices, but we are left confused by the choices we are given. Most of my business contacts phone me on my cell phone rather than my office extension. The result is that they find it convenient to disturb me when I am commuting and when I am in the bathroom. Damn! I can't hear a thing when I am in a train, because of the background noises, and the constant jabber of my fellow passengers. It's good we have mobile phones, but we communicate even less and less. A friend got upset that I had disturbed him on his holiday. I don't know in what critical dilemma he was in when I called. But he later made up, so it's okay.

Both Anthonybhai and Kuriachen Kuriakose, regulars in this blog send their greetings to my readers for Christmas. But maro friend Dhansukhbhai Jethalal Shah, one of the biggest money bags of Bombay, is sulking because the market is going through a volatile phase. His company's shares have dropped like the burnt remains of the fireworks of Christmas.

Of Copenhagen and Prostitution of the Media

So? Now that this blogger has left the big folly that was Copenhagen behind, he is at a loss to understand and reconcile with what happened. A lot of powerful people gathered there. Sure. Surely they all had children – Obama has Malia Anne and a second daughter, Natasha; Berlusconi has a few: Pier Silvio Berlusconi, Barbara Berlusconi, Eleonora Berlusconi, Luigi Berlusconi; Sarkozy has: Pierre Sarkozy (by Culioli), Jean Sarkozy (by Culioli), Louis Sarkozy (by Ciganer-Albéniz). Now didn't any of them think of their children and their grandchildren when framing the terms of climate control? Hm. What I am asking is rhetorical in the extreme, I know, I know. But don't they realize they are cheating their children and grandchildren out of a good life, a reasonably good and honest life enjoying the bliss of nature and its produce.

Duh, there I go all preachy and maudlin sentimental. But Copenhagen, people, readers of this blog, was a big disappointment, and I can't get over it.

Vir Sanghvi, whose gastronomically delightful shows I sit through out of habit on discovery travel and living – though I don't like his accent which starts with a treble in every sentence and tries (um, unsuccessfully) to end in a base tone – has this to say about the prostitution of media space, considering that most politicians bought editorial space – as distinct from advertisement space – in the recently concluded Lok Sabha election.

Copenhagen – “A First Step in Several First Steps”

Says Anu Jogesh from Copenhagen in this article in business.com:

"To me, it's the first step in a series of first steps over the last 17 years. Kyoto, which couldn't get the US on board, was a first step, Bali where any semblance of a global emission target disappeared was a first step, and Copenhagen where no country signed up is being seen as a first step."

Clearly shows there wasn't an accord. Why don't they realize that the environment not a single country's responsibility - not poor, not developing, not developed - but that of the entire earth, the whole jing bang world? The article also shows Barack Obama as an old man in 2020 saying, "I am sorry. We could have stopped catastrophic climate change… we didn't." Exactly. The man won the Nobel Peace Prize not the Nobel Prize for Environment. They were supposed to reiterate the fact that the problem exists for the thousands of "nay sayers" who don't even believe that we are sitting on complacently on a powder keg about to explode, a boiler that is about to go, "boom." Guess, the leaders who were in Copenhagen didn't agree on cutting down on emission of gaseous carbon, but, instead, produced a lot of gas, ho hum, I mean of the verbal variety. No, not that, puhleeeze!

So be prepared to re-locate to higher ground, put on raincoats, wear bare minimum clothing (because of the sweating), cut hair closer to the skull (like some clones do) or wear a pony tail, which I am thinking of doing as I keep my hair rather long. From now the shadow is upon our children, we have robbed them of this beautiful world, a unique world, the only living, thinking world we know of in the universe, the only evolved culture and civilization we are aware exists, the only body of knowledge gathered scientifically and methodically, the only concept that worships a being bigger than them. From now on it's only extremes in this world: stifling hot or biting cold, drought or floods, riches or poverty, passivism or extreme fundamentalism, etc., etc., I could go on…. I will stop for now.