Think 'nd Muse

2008-12-14T20:04:00.001+05:30

Reading something that you wrote a long time ago can be either like meeting an old friend you always liked after a long time or like meeting an old lover. An unrestrained aha or a restrained awkwardness.

But both have something in common that time stands still for a second. That things have changed stare at you in the face. You notice new wrinkles near her eyes. He is on a fast forward to paunched middle agedness.

But you are surprised as to how much things have not actually changed. She still laughs the same, throwing her head back, and squinting her eyes and still talks of issues at her work as if there is some big conspiracy. His bad and mostly lewd jokes have gotten worse but you still can't resist laughing at them.

But whether it is aha on finding you agree more or an eek on finding you no longer do, what the reading of old and the meeting of old does is that both allows you to look back at you and how you were and how you are now.

And that is something precious in the daily shallowness of life which tends to seep in no matter what.

Here are four entries dating from years ago to now. Earliest ones are from the time when I didn't even have this blog and hence was sent in a group mail to my friends (and are frankly boring :-) ).

(lst_pst4) Sara Joseph's trilogy - Aalahayude Penmakkal, Matathy, Othappu

2008-12-14T19:55:00.006+05:30

Recently written.

Great art replenishes the soul. Half the joy of great art is the realization that you are in the process of enjoying one. My favorite genre of art, if it can be called that, is literature and the least favorite are the various moving picture variants. It is just a personal taste and can undoubtedly be a personal bias and a prejudice even.

One, perhaps not enough acknowledged, fact about great art is that it is very rare. Still. There is a wrong assumption that due to the so called democratization of the tools, great art is now common.

Not true.

In fact, what democratization has done is that it has caused a deluge in the mediocre to good range and it is even tougher to find the 'great' ones from the bunch. Even some of the many hyped booker winners, while above average, and some even maybe closing on 'good, are not that special.

I recently read a trilogy of books from Sara Joseph which undoubtedly is among the best literature I have read in a long, long time and would undoubtedly qualify as great.

I should admit that though it was recommended highly to me, I was circumspect as I had found Ms.Joseph's 'social activism' pretty much all over the place, sort of reactionary and not well thought out. Sort of Arundhati Royish. Whatever that is, her literature is just great.

They are written with such skill, such deft control over the language, with such humanity and with such deep understanding and empathy of the female psyche and soul that I don't think any man could have written that.

Aalahayude Penmakkal, the most lyrical of the trio is the story of Annie, a six year old from Kokkanchira, a slum and a scavenger-colony on the outskirts of Thrissur. The fears, the dreams, the hopes and the innocence of a six year old girl is expressed as beautifully as is the complex society with its adult inhabitants around her and in the same beautiful and original language, a dialect that Ms.Sara Joseph skillfully recreates.

Matathy, the most sensitive of the trio, is the story of a young girl Susie who works as a maid in her aunt's house. It goes through the whole period in her life as she grows into a young woman. Her struggle to survive and her fierce determination to live a happy life in a world which doesn't care for her, which doesn't want her and which is openly abusive of her is written with such mastery and skill that would perhaps make this the most touching of the trio.

Othappu, perhaps the most brooding one, is the story of Margaleetha. The content is scandal worthy and I am surprised why none of the super stupid organizations which abound in kerala have not asked for its banning. Margaleetha is the young nun who decides that the life she lives is a farce and that she can't pretend to like it like others seem to. She defrocks herself and shocks the society around her, her own family and even her lover who is not strong enough to take such a step. The struggles both within her and those she has to wage with the outside world bent on destroying her points at the costs and the integrity needed for non-conformism.

Brilliant, wonderful.
Highly recommended.

(lst_pst3) Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising

2008-12-14T19:45:00.003+05:30

Written months ago. A wee bit rude frankly. Michael Moore-ish about Michael Moore. Anyway, not letting it lying around.

Micheal Moore is fat and ugly as is his new so-called documentary. Yes, that is a stupid ad-hominem attack, but stupid ad-hominem attacks should be morally justified on stupid people who survive on stupid ad-hominem attacks and double cheese burgers. Full disclosure - I loove double cheese burgers and I too tip the scale a bit nowadays.

It can be argued that there still exists one reason you should still watch his newest exercise in pomposity, Slacker Uprising. About 110 minutes into it, a breathtakingly pretty 67-year old woman - Joan Baez, sings the beautiful national anthem of Finland. Maan, Steve Jobs has incredible taste, not just in technology. Wink, wink.

Michael Moore calls himself a filmmaker. Hey, he's an Oscar winner dammit. But he completely lacks something any good artist should have - integrity and intelligence.

Okay, two things.

Slacker Uprising is a 'documentary' about a 'documentary'. The documentary inside the doc is Fahrenheit 9/11 which he had made in 2004.

In Fahrenheit 9/11 there is a remarkable scene - Neo Con Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz is standing before a camera, ready to go on air. He suddenly realizes he can look a bit cooler. He produces a comb from somewhere, wets it by giving it a good slurpy lick and then combs what remains of his hair. Moore took this bit of video and made it a part of his film.

Yes, it was as grotesque as it sounds.

First of all, in Wolfowitz's defense, saliva is perhaps the only bodily fluid he could produce in such short notice. Even if he could produce any other fluid, perhaps saliva is also the cleaner one. But all of that is a hygiene issue that should be a concern only to Mr. Wolfowitz's wife.

Showing something like this (and this is just one grotesque example) is not just something which shows poor taste. By showing this Moore did a most despicable violation of artistic integrity.

If you are going to do a polemic and critique of someone's politics, it is NOT fair game to take an out of context and inconsequential thing like this and use it to pander and slander and mock and then expect to be taken seriously.

Moore carries on in the same vein in this documentary about that documentary. While the documentary lacked more in the integrity department/requirement the documentary about the documentary is shockingly lacking in intelligence.

The whole content of the document can be surmised as 'Michael Moore the great hero fights for the pussy democrats against the evil republicans. People love him, people loooooooooovvvvve him. And he is winning; he is changing the tide on George W. Bush, almost single-handedly. Did I say people love him... hey, he even declines to sign on the boobies of a chick who pleads with hero Michael to do it.

After an hour plus of the same thing the hero Michael fails but not unheroically. He managed to make the pussy Kerry win in all the 68 places he goes to and among the slackers who are his audience. Phew if not for him...

Well, there is a law of human nature which can be stated thus - you are 'liberal' about your girlfriend but you are conservative about your daughter ie you want your girlfriend to 'fool around' with you but the same you will later want to cut the balls off any guy who will fool around with your daughter. Michael Moore's politics or his intelligence is not sophisticated enough to understand something as nuanced as this.

For Moore, everything is a conspiracy against his 'team' who is always right. It is sad in its own way.

He should read Jefferson.

Anyway here is the short analysis.

Pretty women who can sing beautifully are good. Middle aged, ugly, pompous men are bad.
Or
not worth the bandwidth required to download it.

(lst_pst2) The 2005 British Elections

2008-12-14T19:42:00.001+05:30

Before coming here, I never knew there was a major third party in Britain. The Liberal Democrats trace their roots to the Liberal Party which once held power in the latter part of 1800s. Their history is of challenging the crown and one of Keynesian economics.

In the 90s, after the young Tony Blair re-branded the old left wing 'Labour Party' to 'New Labour' and moved it to the center, the Liberal democrats were left without a political space as all their major policies were now Labour's. They themselves admit that they are left of old labour and right of new labour. But they have now come back strongly due to the strong anti-Iraq war sentiment. They got the highest number of seats that any third party had got from 1929.

The British economy is doing very well. And it is the fear of the public of not wanting to upset that apple cart that really put back Tony Blair to power. Blair is no longer as popular as he was, but remains a brilliant communicator and a great campaigner. In the last days of the campaign his only message was 'if you don't vote for me, you will get a Tory government'. That got the British frightened enough to go and vote for him.

The heir-apparent, Gordon Brown, now the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the Finance Minister) is actually senior to Blair in the Party and is expected to carry the New Labour a little bit more leftward. In fact, he never uses the term 'new labour' and sticks with 'The Labour Party'.

After the French and Dutch electorate's snub to the changed EU constitutional vote, their leaders could not agree on the EU budget and the summit ended with the French calling the British names. The French seems to be living in another century. The politico-cultural attitude which thinks farm subsidies should make up 40% of the EU budget and in which a glamorous poet who has never fought an election can be made the goddamn prime minister does make it look like 'an assisted living facility with Turkish nurses' as Tom Friedman pointed out.

(lst_pst1) Lila by Robert Pirsig

2008-12-14T19:18:00.002+05:30

(written long time ago - 19 Jun 2005 1 am as per text)

Lila is a sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig develops a complete and integrated philosophy-metaphysics in it - the Metaphysics of Quality. A book like this takes time to settle down. In my experience it is in the second and sometimes the third reading that I can say, I have learned and abstracted from such books. I am writing this after my first read itself. I think soon, I will tend to disagree with much if not most of this.

I am writing this just after seeing a movie 'All the President's Men' at 1 o'clock in the night of the 19th of June 2k5. The movie deals with the Watergate scandal. And something which has again caught on the public imagination as the 'Deep Throat' has revealed himself. The film stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the two young Washington Post reporters who unearthed the scam of the Republican committee for the Re-election of President Richard Nixon tapping the phones and spying on the Democrats.

Robert Redford is someone who appears in the book.

Redford, for the uninitiated is a Hollywood superstar who has made three generations of American women go weak in their knees. He is an Oscar winning director, a traditional supporter of the Democrats and a staunch environmentalist. (He had even threatened to emigrate from America if George W. Bush won his re-electing bid.- don't know what happened to that).

One of Redford's biggest hits was 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)'. Redford's plain speaking cowboy would obtain cult status. Pirsig 'uses' Redford to explain two things - the plain-speaking American male characteristic and 'celebrity-hood' in the modern society.

He says and with not little anthropological evidence that the American white frontier man's plain speaking characteristic is derived from the American Indian. The way that an American male views a European - 'all flair and no substance', is the same way that the American male is viewed by an American Indian. And the way that the American male is viewed by a European 'uncivilized' is the same that the American male views the Indian.

That celebrity business is another whole phenomenon that's related to Indian-European conflict of values. Pirsig says its a peculiarly American phenomenon to catapult people suddenly into celebrity, lavish praise and wealth upon them, and then, at the moment they at last become convinced of their worth, try to destroy them. At their feet and then at their throat. He thought the reason was that in America you're supposed to be socially superior like a European and socially equal like an Indian at the same time. It doesn't matter that these goals are contradictory.

(not quite) The last post

2008-12-11T18:53:00.006+05:30

Seems eons ago that this blog became a part of my life, though it is not that old. I intended it to be a place where I could grok on stuff, to try to understand the world , to know what I really think and indeed whether I do think at all. It has always been about me and what I think and not any place to discuss or to engage.

It seems it has run the course.
In a lot of ways, time seems right to end it.

The next one will be the last post.

Thanks for reading and I hope reading me has helped you a wee bit.

teck.in and anandtranslated will be more active in the mean while.

My fav 10 among my own :-)

The myth and truth of a balanced life

2008-12-11T14:54:00.001+05:30

Too much God in his country - On the religious radicalization of Kerala

2008-12-09T18:52:00.003+05:30

In his 'The Afghan', a so called 'thriller' intended as a beach-read for a post-9/11 western audience, Frederick Forsyth mentions the unnoticed radicalization of Muslim youth in a place called 'Kerala' in south India. Indeed, two 'terrorists' in the never ending and forever winding plot are two impoverished boys, gulf immigrants' from there.

One should indeed be happy that not many people seem to have read it in my homeland, else we would have been bombasted with essays as to how the thriller writer is yet another pawn in 'anti-islamic American imperialism' and a purveyor of 'neo-liberal globalization.' Most probably, they would have appeared in a Jamaat-e-Islami magazine (which, I also have to admit sometimes contains very well written stuff), but could also have appeared in more 'progressive' ones.

Swami Vivekanandan, who, in a cruel twist of fate, has turned into an icon for the hindutva movement, had once called Kerala an asylum, commenting on the practices of the caste system of his day. But the progressive movements that would sweep through the land at the beginning and during the middle of the last century, some linked with the national movement and some not, would change, improve and indeed make it a livable place.

All that is at stake now.

How do I know and who am I to say ? Err, nobody other than a citizen who keeps his eyes open and tries to be intellectually honest.

The signs are absolutely everywhere.

The Hindutva forces are fast acquiring acceptance in the mainstream discourse, despite their lack of electoral success and extremist Islam is rapidly finding acceptance among the impressionable, mostly poor Muslim youth.

Meanwhile the mainstream left is still debating grammar and treats dissent with its version of stalinism while the wimpy center aka the Congress is still waiting for instructions from the 'high command'.

While the Hindutva forces, esp. the RSS has always been there, electoral success too has always eluded them. What is new is that especially through 'cultural' organizations, they are suddenly a big part of the mainstream discourse in a much larger extend than before. The role played by the detestable godmen and godwomen also has contributed immensely to this growth.

But even more alarming is the radicalization of the Muslim youth and the militarization of Muslim politics. Muslim League, while definitely communal was never militant. It is being co-opted by agents of 'purer' and more militant Islam. Again, while Jamaat-e-Islami and even NDF to an extend, have been part of Kerala politics, what is new is their undeniable gaining of strength over Muslim League and their newfound electoral ambitions.

It is back to middle ages in the age of Youtube.

Speaking of Youtube videos, watch this video and shudder (its in Malayalam).... I am afraid, not feeling optimistic.

On the ethereal insensitivity of the rulers and on unparliamentariness of 'fucker'

2008-12-03T13:14:00.005+05:30

(And don't get offended by the 'unparliamentary' title please. Read through, there is a case - if discussing on it is good enough for a state legislature, it is surely good enough for any blog.)

Law and Order is a state subject in India. So, if terrorism is to be handled as a 'criminal' and 'law and order' problem as a lot of unthinking people say, the buck stops with the Home Minister of the State. So, the man on whom the buck should stop at the first level is Mr.R.R. Patil, the (soon to be former) Home minister of Maharashtra. When asked too many times whether he is going to resign from his precious chair by a pretty but pesky journalist, Mr.Patil was so irritated that he had to say "Such things happen in big cities. You can't say it is a complete intelligence failure. No question of me resigning." What he actually meant was -
" Some guys came, killed people in this big city. You know, stuff happens. What the fuck should I do? "

For once, the Indian English News channels which on normal days make FOX News and MSNBC of US look like fucking documentary networks full of deep thinking scholars, did not have to manufacture anger from their audience.

The next day,someone belonging to the other end of the political spectrum, Mr.Muqhtar Abbas Naqvi, the Muslim face of the BJP and more noted for his carefully groomed beard than for his articulateness, sneered at women with lipstick and powder on their face staging demonstrations with lighted candles against politicians. What he actually meant was that the pompous westernised urban elite can kiss his fucking ass.( err, not that many votes, you know).

Then my communist Chief Minister, Comrade Achuthanandan, did not like the welcome he got at the martyr Major Sandeep's house. Then, giving a completely unnecessary interview and led by a stupid and dishonest leading question, he thought he should 'get back' at the dead commando's father. "Were he not a martyr, even a dog, wouldn't have gone." and went on to comment on the lack of self-control of an old man who had just lost his only young son. What he meant was "I am Chief Minister. No one can be disrespectful to me. And what the hell, I din't kill him, did I? (also, I see a conspiracy here.)"

And we expected an introspective and wise polity looking at finding systemic and administrative solutions at a moment of pain and crisis.

...And fuck, it doesn't end. The leader of the opposition has got a name which nicely rhymes with the word for 'Fucker' in Malayalam. So, the new allegation is that during the Legislature session discussion regarding his 'unparliamentary' remarks about a martyr's family, the Chief Minister called the leader of the opposition an unparliamentary 'Fucker Chandy'. The Chief Minister has denied it, it seems but anyways, both the words (Oomban and Oommen) are so close together that right from the start it seems this is gonna be a controversy which can never end.

Reiterating - and we expected an introspective and wise polity looking at finding systemic and administrative solutions at a moment of pain and crisis.....

But on this, I should admit that I sort of disagree. I say if fucker is not parliamentary, it should be.
Sort of suits the moment.

To capture it all in a phrase

2008-11-30T21:16:00.000+05:30

it took a Cricket writer

....killing with the blind rage that the sinister aged can so easily create in the idealistic young.

A jihad for critical thinking

2008-11-27T14:15:00.007+05:30

" It cud have been me. I was planning to leave late frm office. If i had my landing at VT wud have coincided with the shootings.

The leopolds where the shootings happened, that was psychotic, i mean, most of us journos are regular at leo's and mondy's (next to it). "

Someone dear wrote that to me today. My near and dear are okay. But I still couldn't sleep much yesterday night. One of the worst things in life should be when you have that sinking, helpless and nervous feeling AND you can't do anything about it.

The problem with the discourse being exclusively focused on the macro policies, say GWOT, (in addition to the horrible acronyms that is) is that it indeed makes us, the common people, feel powerless, helpless, dependent. In addition, what any elected government in any open society can do will always have its limits.

The micro, the individual is important.

Perhaps more.

In fact, more.

And I thought of him - the other.

So, picture him for a second. A 17-21 year old middle class boy. Frustrated - dissatisfied with his life, frustrated emotionally, sexually, spiritually. It is quite easy as most of us were that boy once. For most, the frustration is sort of channeled at the hapless middle aged parents, sometimes the 'system'.

He is their target.

He is an easy target. He does not have any life experience. He does not have any perspective. He has seen very little of the world, of life. Enlisting him is exceptionally easy for any demagogue. Pretend he is respected, he is important, that he is part of something important, part of something historic. Promise him future salvation.

After he gets enlisted, almost always he is lost to us. He becomes the other. Most of the time there is no compromise. We, our agencies, our governments have to kill him. To pretend otherwise would be to lie too.

He is our target too. With our thoughts, our art, our work, being us, reaching out to him, we have to enlist him in our jihad - our jihad for critical thinking.

We have to teach him that philosophies, thought systems, 'faiths', religions are all for Man.

Man is not for them. Man is their standard.
That there is no higher standard.

We have to teach him that philosophies can be life affirming or death cultish. That nothing can remain unquestioned as any word of god.

We have to convince him. We have to enlist him.

To a man who once helped me imagine. Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

2008-11-07T20:19:00.008+05:30

On your planet you have an animal called a bear. It is a large animal, sometimes larger than you, and it is clever and has ingenuity, and it has a brain as large as yours. But the bear differs from you in one important way. It cannot perform the activity you call imagining. It cannot make mental images of how reality might be. It cannot envision what you call the past and what you call the future. This special ability of imagination is what has made your species as great as it is. Nothing else. It is not your ape nature, not your tool-using nature, not language or your violence or your caring for young or your social groupings. It is none of these things, which are all found in other animals. Your greatness lies in imagination. The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence. You think the ability to imagine is merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem or making something happen. But imagining it is what makes it happen. This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you—the ability to imagine.

From 'The Sphere'

I should have read that a hundred times. Thought whether it is true, whether it is false, what it means, what it implies. Yes, I was a kid then and for the teenager me, Michael Crichton was nothing less than a hero. I read, nah, devoured all his books. Even into my early twenties I would be first in line from my lending library to get hold of a new release from him.

He was someone who could transport you along with an Arab and the first Vikings that he meets on their battles with the last Neanderthals which existed on earth. He could make you passionate about something like the Chaos theory and some giant lizards. He could make you start to look at Africa and your ape cousins with new eyes. I can still quote that beginning sentence in Congo.

Only prejudice, and a trick of the Mercator projection, prevents us from recognizing the enormity of the African continent. Covering nearly twelve million square miles, Africa is almost as large as North America and Europe combined. It is nearly twice the size of South America. As we mistake its dimensions, we also mistake its essential nature: the Dark Continent is mostly hot desert and open grassy plains.

Hell, he even wrote a book which hare brains in both hollywood and bollywood could use to make another one of their grotesque movies. While his book had made you think about the technology industry, its manufacturing processes, the politics of sex and indeed of 'sexual harassment', after the movies you thought - yeah Priyanka Chopra is even hotter in a swimsuit and yeah Michael Douglas is even uglier with longer hair.

Of course, Crichton was no George Orwell or Umberto Eco. He was a populist and unapologetically so. But he could make you interested. And that is indeed the first step. It is said that he would start the research on his book with an empty file and by the time that he was done with his book, it would have grown to an unmanageable bundle of scraps, book pieces, articles etc. His books sometimes did reflect that amateurism and sometimes you were left with the feeling that he did not go as deep as he should have, but then you realize, he is doing what he wants to do, and what he is great at. Now YOU go deep.

Slowly, I had come to think that I had outgrown him. And frankly, his later works were far from his best. The global warming piece was more of how much he hated lawyers. Even the biotechnology novel was below par. And then I came across his internet presence. It was my fault that I had come across it only recently. I had never put in his name to a search engine and of course, he never frequented the mass media which he thought were bad and also dead. It is sorta choking when you find that the ideas you know that you vaguely think have been expressed much more deeply and lucidly by one of your favorites - whether it is his piece on the death of mass media , the one on men's feelings or on how to fight with your woman intelligently, he was like Virender Sehwag was on Jason Krejza yesterday - audacious, unafraid and yeah, sometimes wrong.

To Michael Crichton.
In case both of us were wrong and now you are in 'heaven' and you are reading -

Thanks for your work sir. Highly appreciated.

My suggested Chricton reads to any of you who haven't. In order - Sphere, Congo,
Eaters of the Dead, Jurassic Park,
Disclosure, Rising Sun.

Essays -
How to fight (with your other half) ,
Men's hearts
Mediasaurus

On 'real change'

2008-11-05T17:36:00.005+05:30

Republican democracy is just a few moments old in the wide sweep of history as a mode of human political organization. And if history is any guide, 'real change' within its framework is achieved only by men who are there around its start. If the nation state happen to be lucky, they get wise old men with a minute understanding of the history and culture of their lands and indeed, of the human condition to write the framework and set the trajectory. After that, the most that is achieved are nudges and corrections.

One good example, but on the other extreme, would be the sister state across the border. 'The Land of the Pure and Clean'. Designed to fail - and from the start.

Of course, that doesn't mean this American election was not important. But not in terms of the creation of the new possibilities but of prevention of sliding back to the bad.

Indeed, the new constitution which was written for the peoples of Mesopotamia a few years ago is more important politically and historically than this 'mother of all elections' for all our shared human history. This became the mother of all elections as it helps sell mass media all around the world.

Many a time, there arises instances when the unbelievably stupid and ill-informed get a shot at destroying all and of corrupting the idea itself. If the citizens of the new world had elected this ill-informed, scary nutcase who talks of tasks from God, someone who is associated with a religious cult which believes in 'faith healing', and someone who bans books she doesn't agree with, then they would have proven that they don't deserve their founders.

One of the biggest slaps in the face of the legacy of Thomas Jefferson would have been this woman occupying the chair which was once his.

Good riddance.

anandtranslated updated

2008-10-22T21:51:00.005+05:30

Puritanism and male supremacy

Head counts and Democracy

On Sport ...and (a bit) on reality TV

2008-10-10T18:14:00.008+05:30

something i wrote a long time ago.

Sport allows us to observe the naked soul of man. No pretenses, no facades, no excuses. Men trying to do stuff, competing, failing, succeeding, doubting,choking, panicking, scratching through, living up.

Sport ultimately is enriching to its participants. It forces the best of them to look inside themselves at a very young age. Of course, they may not like the answers, but it leaves them better equipped to handle reality.

It is an interesting exercise to compare sport to its mass media counterpart - the moving, talking picture and all its forms ranging from movies to reality television. Some of the more thoughtful of the thespians have remarked that making your living by pretending to be someone else is inherently dissatisfying and degrading to self.

While movies can be great art, reality television in almost all its forms is inherently vile. It promises to celebritize everyone with giving out two minutes of manufactured fame. Admittedly, there are exceptions, but on closer look, the ones which are good are similar to sport with the camera being a capturer of action, not the creator.

Again, not all sport does all that. Women's gymnastics seems to be nothing more than using children for misplaced national pride. The bat and ball games, though not popular as their ball only cousins, have more of the real life components interwoven into them than just pure athletic ability and hence are more human, more interesting.

----
Hoping for a great series.

Religulous - the wait is over...

2008-10-03T23:34:00.010+05:30

The posters are brilliant. :-)

A Statement from Bill Maher

.... it has been my pleasure over the last decade and a half to make organized religion one of my favorite targets. I often explained to people, “I don’t need to make fun of religion, it makes fun of itself.” And, then I go ahead and make fun of it too, just for laughs.

With religious fanatics like George Bush and Osama bin Laden now taking over the world, it seemed to me in recent years that this issue — this cause of debunking the man behind the curtain — needed to have a larger, more insistent and focused forum than late night television. I wanted to make a documentary, and I wanted it to be funny. In fact, since there is nothing more ridiculous than the ancient mythological stories that live on as today’s religions, this movie would try to be a real knee slapper. Unless, of course, you’re religious, then you might not like it.

As a comedian, religion has always interested me — it was the single easiest subject to make jokes about. I think that tells us something: comedians look for things that don’t make sense, that are illogical.

Even as a young comedian, routines I did that got the biggest laughs and got me invited back on the Tonight Show were the religious ones — like the one about being half Catholic and half Jewish and bringing a lawyer into confession: “Bless me father for I have sinned — and I think you know Mr. Cohen . . .”

Politics is a rich area, but even politicians, although they promise some ridiculous stuff, don’t approach the level of, for example, the Mormon practice of promising couples a planet to rule over in the after life if they have a really good marriage on earth. They give you a planet — kinda like when someone gives you a certificate that says a star has been named after you — except here, they really give you the star!

Join me in the final battle between intelligence and stupidity that will decide the future of humanity. Coming soon to a house of false idols near you.

–Bill Maher

Random pompous assertions

2008-09-22T00:17:00.016+05:30

.... from a recuperating man with a healing collar bone

I am reading stuff on and by two great men - Thomas Jefferson and Jawaharlal Nehru.
Wow. Two wise, supersmart men. A huge chunk of humanity owes so much to the legacy of these men.

Jill Greenberg is a very good artist. It is not often that you see a visual artist who is a great photographer and is also great with Photoshop. Someone who uses all the opportunities of the digital media.

Some of her work is exquisite.

But she is a pompous jerkess (=female jerk, I don’t like the word ‘bitch’ though in her case I am tempted to make an exception) who has not thought through anything. The text she has given as the intro to her artwork on crying babies is a boatload of cringing platitudes.

She should read more. And may I suggest Thomas Jefferson and Jawaharlal Nehru.

And of course, she did a super stupid thing recently (link) which only a self-righteous, pompous person with no perspective will do. She may as yet go to the grave with this as being the most google-juicy thing she has ever done.

But to come back, she is a cool visual artist.

The initial decision of the Communist party in Kerala before the last elections was that Paloli Mohammad Kutty will become the Chief Minister.
They didn't have enough balls to go through with that decision and it will go down as another historical blunder.

House MD is back. House is television at its absolute best. Hugh Laurie is perhaps the best actor I have seen after midcareer Mohanlal.

But if they are going to milk the franchisee for half a decade more,the writers are going to have a very tough time coming up with great scripts which won't feel repetitive. Some of the episodes in season four itself felt a bit repetitive to me.

The ‘national’ (ie south delhi) television news media in India is pathetic.
And I hope the word ‘pathetic’ doesn't take offence.
Most of the anchors are pompous jerks with verbal diarrhea.
And most of the correspondents are clueless young girls with verbal diarrhea.

Almost all of them have not thought through what they are doing.

Fox news in US is a propaganda machine. But at least there is propaganda. What the Indian ‘national’ News media has is sensationalism, soft porn and Barkha Dutt.

Fox news does have soft porn but that is, as far as I have seen limited to when a pretty white woman with a non-white boyfriend gets is missing. You can then almost see the anchors winking – ‘she should have known better’ and trying to say what they want to say without seeming racist, but well, you get the message. But other than that it is papa bear O’Reilly beaming down his worldview, which is fun to watch.

The Malayalam news media is a wee bit better and that is primarily due to the seemingly greater presence of the print journalists who do topical programs. Programs like Kannadi.

Prof. Sukumar Azhikode, the darling intellectual of the malayali media never fails to play to the gallery. In the most recent interview he has given, he keeps his record for superficial analysis and ad hominem attacks.
Even Anand, of all people, is a target this time.

The accidental Guru is what Fastcompany calls him. Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most important thinkers of our times. He does not simplify the complex or complexify the simple. He does not pander. He is uber-great.

Accident :-(

2008-09-08T20:30:00.005+05:30

I have had a motor accident.

Not serious. But the collarbone is fractured. And so my left hand is in a sling. And there is another thingy which restricts my upper torso movement.

This text has been dictated using Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

I don't think I would be able to respond to any e-mails in the near future. Except to any urgent ones.

Feel free to send anything to read. In fact would appreciate that.

Apologies to the four of you whose marriage/engagement I was supposed to attend. I don't think I will be able to make it.

I'm actually starting to like this speech recognition thing!

Celebrity ... from Lila

2008-09-04T13:29:00.011+05:30

From Lila by Pirsig

Politics... mixes celebrity with static legal patterns and isn't a pure study of celebrity. In fact, the way political science is taught now, celebrity is made to look incidental to politics. But go to any political gathering and see what's making it run. Watch the candidates jockey for celebrity. They know what's making it run.

This whole business of celebrity also had something perceptibly degenerate about it. Vulgar and degenerate and enormously fascinating and at times obsessive, very much in the same way that sex seemed to be vulgar and degenerate at some times, and enormously fascinating and obsessive.

....

So what you get is this tension, this business executives' tension, where you're the most relaxed, smiling, easy-going guy in the world - who is also absolutely killing himself to beat the competition and get ahead.

.....

The old Indians knew how to handle it. They just got rid of anything anybody wanted. They didn't own property, they dressed in rags, some of them. They kept it down, laid low, and let the aristocrats and egalitarians and sycophants and assassins all look on them as worthless. That way they got a lot accomplished without all the celebrity grief.

The smell of T

2008-08-31T23:46:00.006+05:30

The smell of moist earth might be the most universally liked smell that there is.

Across cultures, ages, any barriers that we may share.

Maybe there is something natural, something primitive about our like for that.

If you are a heavy tea drinker like me another smell you really like is the smell of fresh hot tea.

But then, yet another smell which is always present in your life but is one you dread is the smell of stale tea.

The smell of the tea left say, an hour or more after you drink it.

Of course, solutions exists in the form of moving the cup to the sink as soon as you are done, using disposable cups and tossing them quickly to the bin, using covered flasks rather than cups...

But all of them sort of take away from the pleasure of drinking the tea. At least they do for me.

I wish someone would make a type of tea which would turn off its odor once it is stale.

My Fabulousness

2008-08-24T17:49:00.009+05:30

Scene :- A coffee shop somewhere in urban india. About eight months ago.

"So, you mean to say you want a guy who... say, looks like one of your favorite movie stars, agrees with you in everything but is able to write poems like one of your favorite Latin American writers, is well established in his career and earns good money but spends most of his time with you. Also, he is always saying how great you are.... ...hmmm.."

Kuttanpilla had his social anthropologist hat on (hey he was rereading Jared Diamond) and was the only one ready to listen to Giro, the only female in the group.

"He should also smell good. And no cologne. I hate cologne. And of course, no facial hair." Giro continued with a dreamy air in her voice.

Kuttanpilla "Errrr, have you wondered whether someone who is like that would prefer I don't know, maybe a Manisha Koirala with say, Medha Padkar's social conscience? I am just askin'..just brainstorming out loud, eh.."

Ubergeek former colleague Lala, interrupted the conversation he was having and added "And Lindsay Lohan's libido?...maaan, did u read, she just can't get enough....damn...definitely, that is my type."

Giro said. "Lala, please kiss my ass...and you too KP. I love your honesty but not this much please."

The others two on the table, along with Lala, got busy again making plans for some weekend trek or something.

Sometime later, Giro said "Well,sigh, tat was just a teenage dream. Now I am a twenty six year old woman. I know most men are jerks and worse, I am a jerk magnet. I am ready to compromise....sigh..."

Lala was intrigued enough to look up. "Hmm, tell us more.....also, that uncle over there looks lonely and he has been gawking at you for the last hour...is he good enough? "

She ignored and started....sorta thinking out loud to herself than to anyone else.

Kuttanpilla tried to postpone the emptying of his full bladder but the requirements were again starting to travel to latin america. By the minute it was getting clear he won't be able to last till she comes back to the Indian subcontinent he moved to the loo.

When he came back to the table, Kuttanpilla could feel the acidic chill in the air. Something had happened. The guys were trying to control the laughter and Giro had steam coming out of her ears.

Lala said with a straight face "Okay KP, we've figured it out. She actually wants another Giro,but with a dick
... and of course no cologne."

Kuttanpilla had to keep a straight face and pretend not to hear. He was the only certified 'non-misogynist' in the group and was keen to keep the tag.

So, he put his head down and wrote this on a paper napkin.
Which he found back recently.

Anand Translated

2008-08-18T01:43:00.008+05:30

I wanna announce AnandTranslated to my dear readers. For a change, comments are welcome :-)

Me@teck.in - Courage, Innovation , Gmail

2008-07-29T17:49:00.002+05:30

Courage, Innovation, Gmail - a few thoughts.

Every Tuesday, I'll have a longish articles focused on Technology at Teck.in

Previous
5 insanely great WIRED cover stories
5 books on technology that you should read

The Other India 2 - 'The Shape of the Beast' by Arundhati Roy

2008-07-03T18:30:00.007+05:30

Arundhati Roy is a great writer. She has the ability to use prose to transport you, make you empathize, live somewhere else for some time.

'The Shape of the Beast' conversations with Arundhati Roy is a great read.

I really liked the book but I just can't get over a particular paragraph. It is like when you have a cavity in a tooth. Your tongue gravitates to it all the time. You cannot think of anything else. The rest of your dental equipment might be perfect, but that becomes immaterial. The one who is not just nags you no end. It is irrational and even unfair. But you can't help it.

And before that we discuss that there is Speaker K. Radhakrishnan. Radhakrishnan is the first dalit speaker of the Kerala assembly. Softspoken and young (for a politician that is) Radhakrishnan is one of the most likable characters in Kerala politics. Recently he gave an interview, discussing everything from his early life, when he owned only a single pair of clothes every year, to activism and politics. Here is an extract (translated).

" (Implying that) Just the Adivasis (should) keep their 'originality' while everyone else moves forward with the times is making them show case pieces."

Urbanization ,change in customs and 'traditions' are all part of human evolution. Have always been. Roy, unfortunately, does not seem to have done a study of the cultures, backgrounds, prejudices and outlooks of the dispossessed whom she wants to defend. As a polemicist, she can afford to do that unlike Radhakrishnan who as the SC/ST development minister in the previous left government had to deal with the nitty gritties of making the policies to help the downtrodden.

Okay, Here is what Roy says.

"I saw a news report about two adivasi girls getting married to each other. And the whole village was saying: If that's what they want, it's fine. They had this ceremony, with all the rituals and customs, and they let them get married. That's a moment of magic. It reveals their level of modernity, of their sophistication. Of their beauty."

Selectively extracting a single incident and using it to romanticize adivasi life is patronizing to say the least. Painting the adivasis as icons of liberalism who allow two of their lesbian daughters to marry each other is intellectually dishonest. It is a known historical fact that most tribal societies including the ones in India practice stringent marriage laws for preserving their tribal solidarity and any act which goes against that is the shortest route to exclusion with no chance of appeal. There is no doubt that more than a few adivasi customs exist which impinge on individual rights and are remnants of the past. As there are in Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Oriental, western, middle eastern, whatever backgrounds and cultures.

Now that I have got around that tooth, here is the a great description that the author herself has given about her own celebrated first book in one of the interviews.

" The God of Small things is a book connects the very smallest things to the very biggest. Whether it's the dent that a baby spider makes on the surface of water in a pond or the quality of moonlight on a river or how history and politics intrude into your life, your house, your bedroom, your bed, into the most intimate relationships between people - parents and children, siblings and so on. If you lose these connections, everything becomes noise, meaningless, a career plan to be on track for tenure."

Doctors 1 'Better - A Surgeon's Notes on Performance' by Atul Gawande

2008-06-23T23:38:00.007+05:30

When faced with the opportunity to read a book by someone who isn't by profession a writer, I always go for the doctor. It is the rare book by the businessman or entertainer or politician that I thoroughly enjoy; and lawyer-writers may be the worst of the lot. But doctors! Often, I love them. Arthur Conan Doyle was a marvel. Walker Percy was very good. Chekhov was phenomenal.

....

So why do these doctors write so well, and so much better ... than other non-writers? Perhaps there are elements of doctoring that lie in harmony with writing: peeling back the layers to get to the core of an issue; confronting the obvious but being willing to look beyond it; ... and, more than anything, recognizing that this object before you in one case a human body, in the other a manuscript is on a certain level a miraculous object with the power to astound, and on another level is a complex, dynamic system which can (and must be) reduced to a schematic, laid out on paper or x-ray film.

Stephen Dubner in Freakanomics blog.

A personal narrative first. Just to sort of bring in a context. And I promise not to bore you even though I am not a doctor.

I have had a complex relationship with doctors. My folks had wanted me to become a doctor. THE universal middle class parent aspiration for their kids. But becoming a doc implied you needed to take biology for your pre-degree. And that implied I would have to draw pictures of insects, cockroaches, spiders and plants. Naah, the teenaged I was adamant - the most complex picture I ever drew was that of a house -a rectangle for the body of the house, a trapezium for the thatched roof, and two small squares inside the rectangle for windows. Drawing a cockroach was a stretch from there.

Anyways, I was never interested in becoming one.

One of my cousins was enrolled in med school in my city and he used to come over sometime for a more 'peaceful' atmosphere to study than a college hostel. I used to have a glance at his text books and the close to obnoxious number of facts he had to know by heart for the exams. I guess the kid in me felt a visceral dislike for it then.

My doc readers, don't get offended, I am just saying that when I was a kid I had a visceral dislike for the 'fact by hearting' I saw. That does not mean that now I am not happy that you know all the different types of lung infections and their treatments by heart when I ask you for advice.

But over the years, I have made a few doctor friends and I have almost always been impressed by them. Okay, it is always bad advice to generalize about a group from a few random examples you know. But now I am going to - hey, this is my place in the end.

From what I have seen, they are perhaps the direct opposites of say a John Rawls like Phd in Philosophy who ponders 'what really is justice' in a five hundred page book. Maybe because they deal with the reality of human life in such a personal level every day which makes them die hard practicals about getting on with it, with attention to detail and a sort of compartmentalized detachment. One of my doc friends once admonished me in a memorable quote when I asked her how she could be so insensitive 'Oh pardon me for not being a bleeding heart. I'd probably have a nervous breakdown by now what with everything that I see'. That is maybe the reason why that when they write non-fiction, doctors can be the best writers to read.

I finished 'Better - A Surgeon's Notes on Performance' by Dr. Atul Gawande a few days ago. Malcolm Gladwell, Dr. Gawade's colleague in New Yorker calls it a 'Masterpiece'.

Actually, it is one.

I was mesmerized by it.

Dr. Gawande takes us to the heart of the problems that the flesh and blood human beings in medicine face. Their challenges, their dilemmas, their successes, their mistakes. He takes us inside battlefield tents in Iraq where almost inhuman amount of effort is called for from the so called Forward Surgical Teams who travel behind the troops in Humvees. We travel with him through the dusty by lanes of Bellary in Karnataka in the midst of a polio outbreak where seemingly insurmountable odds are fought against with diligence and then inside the medical malpractice courtrooms in America where one of the lawyers who sues the docs is actually an accomplished former doc who calls himself, 'The Law Doctor'.

There are no sacred cows. He examines why still so many people die around the world because Doctors and Nurses don't wash their hands. Yes, you read that right - 'don't wash their hands' and hence transmit infections from other patients. He takes us through the history of hand washing campaigns - one of them which caused a super gr8 results CEO of my former client Alcoa to throw up his presumably unwashed hands after trying to fix it.

He muses about the deep intimacy of a physical examination of another naked body by a human being, the questions it raises about trust, propriety and culture and how a lack of appreciation of this can go on to ruin a career.

He analyzes the bell curve of performance (which is true for almost all industries) - of how some doctors and institutions are super good and some plain suck while most are just mediocre - and how choosing one at the top can make all the difference. And why is it that so. One of them is so meticulous and tuned in that he extracts the actual story from a teenager who is loose with the facts and shows the wisdom to not get pissed off at her but to use her rebellion to make her take her drugs.

Then the biological miracle of the anatomy of human childbirth. (Err, too much detail there if you ask me. I really did not wanna know all THAT. Eeek.). He writes bout the history of using forceps to deliver a baby and why the use of this method is going down. And why more and more children around the world are being delivered by cesarean than by natural birth and why it is seemingly a trend which is irreversible.

He argues against the use of medical personnel for administering the death penalty. He interviews four who actually do it and talks about their motivations and circumstances.

He writes about Virginia Apgar, a path breaker for women in medicine who was told to take up less prestigious anesthesia over surgery which she had trained for as a female surgeon of the time had little chance of attracting patients. Apgar went on to device a supersimple method which forced people to look at the health of newborn babies health more objectively and hence drastically reduced infant mortality all over the world dramatically. Her method? well, she made people look at the baby and put down a number as to how healthy it is over five factors - skin color, heart rate, irritability, movement and breathing. Yeah hardly nuclear physics stuff but newborn survival rate before and after are drastically different because it turned something abstract like the condition of a baby into a number which could measure, compare and try to improve.

He deals with the fact that now applying consistently what is known has become a far bigger challenge to modern medicine than finding new cures and treatments.

And he signs off with some super great advice. On how to become what he calls 'a Positive deviant'.

Buy and read this book. It is super cool.

Three of the essays are available from the NewYorker archive.

The Score - How Childbirth went Industrial

Piecework - Medicine's money problem

The Bell Curve - What happens when patients find out how good their doctors actually are?