More importantly, the article tells us that Leslie McFarlane hated the Hardy Boys, hated writing the books, and only did it because this was the only work he could get as a writer.

Leslie McFarlane, the author of the article tells us, was a fine writer, and could write really well.  The syndicate who paid him to write the Hardy Boys novels, though, wanted formulaic stories and poor Leslie felt completely demeaned writing the stuff they wanted.  He knew he was above this garbage, he could write much better, he admired F. Scott Fitzgerald and he was as fine a writer as Fitzgerald was.   In his diaries he complains about writing the Hardy Boys books – “the ghastly job appalls me” and refers to the first book as “accursed”.  Clearly, he hated the books.

He also wrote other short stories on the side, works where he was free to write as he chose. Unfortunately, though, no one else seemed to appreciate his better works, and poor Leslie, in order to put food on the table during the great Depression, had to continue writing the Hardy Boys books.

If this was really Leslie McFarlane’s attitude (and his diaries do seem to indicate that it was), I have three problems with it :

First, what about the legions of teenagers (and precocious pre-teens) who read the Hardy Boys books?  They hadn’t read F. Scott Fitzgerald, and they didn’t know what “good writing” was supposed to be.  The Hardy Boys, pedestrian writing and all, were among the first books these kids read, and what led them to a lifetime of reading.   As the author himself mentions, it wasn’t until he went back and read the Hardy Boys books as an adult that he realized how bad they were – as a teenager, he was oblivious.

Second, while I can see that the syndicate must have had rigid strictures on story lines and what characters can and cannot do, I am not sure how they can actually make anyone write badly.  As the WaPo article author himself mentions, there are portions of text where McFarlane really comes alive (like when he describes Aunt Gertrude).  So what prevented Leslie from showing his writing skills in the rest of the book ?

Third, the Hardy Boys’ books’ storylines may have been intellectually undemanding, and none of the works will ever be compared to  Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby.  But if it is being remembered as a good writer that one cares about, writing serious, intellectually demanding fiction is not essential.   There will always be two kinds of authors – those whose books sell in the mass market, and those who achieve critical acclaim but sell much fewer books.  To say that critical acclaim is more important than mass appeal does indicate a certain level of snobbery.  I love my P.G. Wodehouse and Terry Pratchett as much as I love those Nobel winning authors, and sometimes the Nobel winning authors turn out to be sad disappointments.  Critical acclaim is not everything.

The sad fact is, Leslie McFarlane as Franklin W. Dixon made more of an impact of millions of lives than F. Scott Fitzgerald did, but he never realized the true worth of what he was writing.

CNN-IBN had an article a few weeks ago about how 10 million tons of wheat and rice are at risk of rotting in India, as they are stored in the open under tarpaulins.

This isn’t new, as we know. Every few years, some newspaper publishes a picture or a news article about rotting foodgrains, and the story dies down a few days later.   There is rarely much outrage over the wasted foodgrains.

Suman Sahia writes in Tehelka that “The government acknowledges that food worth nearly Rs 60,000 crore is destroyed every year due to poor and insufficient storage facilities. This lost food is keeping millions of Indians hungry. To add insult to injury, the government spends about Rs 2.6 crore of the tax payers’ money to get rid of food grain that has rotted during storage.”

Rotting grains (Pic courtesy: IBNlive.in.com)

On this note, I love what the Minister of State for Agriculture K V Thomas said in his interview to Tehelka :  “There were 11,708 tonnes of damaged and non-issuable food grain in Food Corporation of India (FCI) depots. However, the whole lot hasn’t become spoilt. This quantity has become non-issuable to beneficiaries of the public distribution system because of various reasons.”

Ah, so they weren’t spoilt, they were just wasted.  I’m sure that is an important distinction.

FCI, for its part, has been in the business of storing foodgrains in the open for years.  The IBN article says “The amount of food grain wasted was 9.4 million tonnes in 2008, 16 million tonnes in 2009 and 17.8 million tonnes in 2010.“

But how many tons of foodgrains were spoiled due to improper storage in 2000 or 1990? What about the years when we imported wheat when we could have used stored foodgrains if only they hadn’t rotted?

-  Here is a report from the Hindu, dated March 19,2002, about FCI floating tenders for building 70 godowns across 13 states to store foodgrains.  What happened to those godowns – were they ever built, or were they inadequate?

-  There was also the case of 17,000 tons of rice that were taken from FCI godowns in Karnataka over a 15 day period in 2004 and were found at Mangalore port awaiting export to Kenya by a private company.  This was happening at the same time that Karnataka was reeling under a drought.

My question is – why has so little attention been paid to this issue by our esteemed Members of Parliament/ ministers/ politicians all these years?

Why have our NGOs not protested?  Why do newspapers not make a bigger issue of this?

Is it that people believe that this issue doesn’t affect them, since FCI foodgrains are only going to be distributed through the PDS?  Do the rich and the middle class not care because they don’t buy PDS rice, and the poor don’t have a voice anyway?

I’m not going to preach about how we need to be more sensitive to issues of the poor. (We do). But this issue is not a poor man’s issue.  FCI’s incompetence does not just affect those dependent on PDS food grains.  It affects all of us, and here are two examples how:

1.  What happens when the PDS cannot supply enough rice or wheat and those dependent on the PDS are forced to buy foodgrains in the open market? Does it not impact the middle class when food grain prices increase as a result?

2.  What happens in years of drought when the Government, without a surplus of stored foodgrains, is forced to import foodgrains? Again the market price goes up and yes, the middle class is impacted.

The Supreme Court order asking the Government to distribute free food grains to the poor is a great idea, but is only a stopgap measure.  We will have the same problem of spoiled food grains next year, and (going by history) the year after that.

Unless the middle class, the media and the NGOs realize that this is not a poor man’s issue alone, and unless they start protesting more.

This fascination with fairy tale weddings is perhaps not surprising, after all, we are brought up on stories of such weddings – right from Cinderella to Sleeping Beauty to any number of princesses who kissed frogs / lived in drafty, leaky turrets / made their suitors slay dragons.

Unfortunately all our fairy tales end with the wedding.   Why is that? Is it because the story doesn’t sound anything like a fairy tale after the wedding?

Is that when the Prince discovers that Sleeping Beauty is always sleepy because she has sleep apnea and she snores?

Does Cinderella find herself firing every maid in the palace because none of them do as good a job as she used to?

Does the famously nitpicky Goldilocks get irritated every morning because her husband does not leave his toothbrush in exactly the right way in the bathroom? (Does she fire her cook because the salt in the porridge is never just right?)

Do Rapunzel and her Prince have a fight when she decides she really likes a short bob rather than those high-maintenance long tresses? Does she call him a male chauvinist and say he is worse than the Witch?

I’m trying to think of other fairy tales and how they would have really ended, if only people told the whole story.

Any other fairytale story suggestions ?

The next time you plan to renovate the only bathroom you have in your apartment, consider these options:

1. Please stay in a hotel;

2. Stay with friends/ neighbors/relatives;

3. Take a vacation and travel somewhere;

4. Did I mention – stay in a hotel?

Whatever you decide to do, please do not decide to use the kitchen as a bathroom.  That sort of thinking should usually disappear at age 3.   If you are even thinking about it seriously, you need to see a therapist.  Since you live in NYC, you can find one in every block, right beside the Starbucks.

If you are going to do something this gross, though, please don’t tell the world about it.   Please DO NOT write an article in the NYT about how to soap yourself while showering in a storage box.  Or even worse, about pouring your urine down the kitchen sink. I really don’t want to know. Yes, really.  I’m sure the rest of NYT’s readers too, would rather live out their lives without this information.

(Although, tell your landlady.  Any person who plans to lease the apartment next might be very interested).

Bathtub in a Box - Pic courtesy New York Times/Tony Cenicola

Dear New York Times,

1. What were you thinking?

2.  Did you think this article was

(a) educational ?

(b) funny ?

(c) interesting ?

3.  If this is going to be a regular feature, what will you publish next on these lines?   I cannot even begin to imagine.

Just so you know, I like to read your newspaper over my morning tea, and I also like to read it without gagging.

It looks like I now have to choose between the Times and my tea.

I heard your circulation is decreasing every year.  I wonder why?

I wanted to tell him that some people would say that the lawn actually belonged to me, not to him.  I could have told him that I did have a piece of paper saying so, and that I pay an enormous sum in mortgage every month for the privilege of mowing this lawn and removing every last weed.  But I didn’t tell him anything.  For one thing, he would have probably asked me how any land can belong to an individual, a deeply philosophical question for which I have no answer.  For another, he does not understand English.  Neither do I  understand his language, which, for want of a better word, I shall call red-winged blackbirdese.

The male red-winged blackbird is a beautiful creature – those orange-red  epaulettes are especially striking (and he knows that, for he takes care to fluff them up every once in a while). He is as vain as any male model would be, and he is territorial and aggressive.  He also a hoarse cry that makes you wonder if he has chronic laryngitis.

Red winged blackbird in my garden

There was a time, not long after we built this house, when I lamented the lack of any birds in my garden.  There was just a bland green lawn in the backyard, and a few young trees here and there.  Not too many plants, certainly no butterflies, and no birds.  A few years later, the butterflies are still not too common, although there are plenty of bumblebees, honey bees, dragonflies and those pretty blue damselflies that make you wish you had your camera with you.

In time the birds have come.  The pond has its resident mallard ducks (with visiting geese, hooded mergansers, gulls and egrets).  The garden too, has its admirers -  the deep-blue necked grackles and the orange-breasted robins, there are the occasional goldfinches,  pheasants, starlings and hummingbirds. I’ve heard barred owls hoot at night and more rarely, heard a barn owl or two. But the birds I am guaranteed to see every time I step into my backyard are the red-winged blackbirds – specifically, the male blackbirds.

The females look like overgrown sparrows and if you see them at all, it’s when they are timidly hopping on the very bottom of the backyard lawn, right by the rushes, never venturing too far.  The males, though, will come right up to a  few feet away from you and pretend nonchalance.  As self-appointed sentries of our garden, they like to sit at the very top of our young, 20 foot-tall maple trees and screech at anyone who passes close to them.  Sometimes, they will even fly down to the nearest tree beside us and let us know that we are trespassing on their property.

You can see why they would write a rhyme saying “Down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose” – these blackbirds do look like they would peck my nose one day.  Still, don’t you think that nursery rhyme was unnecessarily cruel? Where was PETA and SPCA when you needed them?  They baked 420 blackbirds in a pie?  I’m only glad the birds could fly out and peck people.

We now have at least three families of blackbirds residing in our garden, none of whom, I assure you, came from any pie.  (Any pies I may make will only have blackberries, not blackbirds.)  But I still worry – only now, I worry that the blackbirds are driving away all the other birds.  In hindsight, I think when I wished for birds in my garden, perhaps I should have been a little more specific.

This week, I summoned up some outrage and went to speak to the blackbird.  “Seeyee, Conkaree“, I said in a poor imitation of its call.  “This is my lawn and I am going to weed here now.”

“Seeyee”, the blackbird replied. “You are living in my land and you don’t even bother to learn my language properly.”

At least that’s what I think he said.

1.   There is the casual, drive-by racism:

One kid I knew in high school drove down an Indian-dense street yelling for its residents to “go home to India.”  In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if “dot heads” was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.

While Stein’s lame attempt at humor falls flat here, I wonder whether he would even dare to make fun of Jesus or Mohammed in this manner. What’s even more curious is the way he implies that the New Jersey residents who called Indians “dot heads” were somehow not going far enough. Does he not remember the gang of “dotbusters” who prowled the streets and killed Indians in hate crimes in  Jersey City and Hoboken?   What’s his point – that the “dotbusters” should have changed their name?

There are Indians in NJ who can still remember those terrible times, and no, they will not find the “dotbusters” any funnier if they had a different name.

2. There is the casual ignorance of history:

Whenever I go back, I feel what people in Arizona talk about: a sense of loss and anomie and disbelief that anyone can eat food that spicy.

Of course, by “people in Arizona”, he means the people who displaced the original inhabitants – the Hispanics.  Surely Stein knows that what is now Arizona was once part of Mexico ?  So the new people of Arizona feel a sense of loss of what, exactly?

Besides, (as others have noted) what’s his point in bringing up Arizona in the time of SB 1070?

3.  There is the casual attitude to offense and racism:  (from his response on twitter)

Didn’t meant to insult Indians with my column this week. Also stupidly assumed their emails would follow that Gandhi non-violence thing

Now, if I had written an article that was unintentionally racist, demeaning, malicious and offensive to a lot of people, I would be horrified, and I would apologize.  The words “I am sorry” would be part of what I would say.  What I would certainly not do is turn around and ask readers why they weren’t following Gandhi and turning the other cheek.   That’s a classic blame-the-victim strategy.  Besides, of all the wrong things to say, playing on one more stereotype (Gandhi = all Indians)  should rank  among the worst.

Is that why he targeted Indians in his article, though – because he believed they would turn the other cheek and not object?

(If he is actually receiving any threats, that would be different, but doesn’t seem to be the case here).

I also wonder if he would have dared to write a similar article about any other demographic – like say, Jews, Muslims, or WASPs ?

When I first read Stein’s article, I thought it was a very lame attempt at humor, and only served to showcase his ignorance and prejudices.  I was willing to believe, though, that Stein himself wasn’t racist, even if his article did sound rather racist.

But after reading his unapologetic tweet, I wonder if Joel Stein is really racist.  Either that, or he is completely clueless, insensitive, will write anything to stir up controversy, and is unapologetic about his rudeness.  Not someone whose column I will read anymore.

Either way, I can see why Joel Stein will never apologize for this article.  He is obviously incapable of seeing how offensive and racist his words are, whether or not he intended the insults/ racism.

Even more surprisingly, TIME magazine has chosen to take the same unapologetic attitude – as the Wall Street Journal notes:

On the scale of apologies, “We’re sorry” is the strongest, “mistakes were made” is the wishy-washy version preferred by politicians, and “we regret you are offended” is the not-so-apologetic apology. That last option appears to be the route the magazine took with its official response Wednesday: “TIME sincerely regrets that any of our readers were upset by Joel Stein’s recent humor column ‘My Own Private India.’ It was in no way intended to cause offense.”

I hear though, that the article is not part of TIME’s International edition which gets sold in India. I wonder why?

How many of us have found our bags torn, broken or opened in Indian airports? How many of us have found items missing from checked bags?

I think everyone knows someone to whom such things have happened (if they haven’t happened to us, that is).

Indian airports have a practice I haven’t seen in any US or European airport.  By the time the bags reach the carousel from the plane, they have already been X-rayed and their contents “noted”. A fellow passenger once pointed out to me a “X” mark made in chalk on a bag in the carousel.  “That bag has some valuable stuff”, he said. “They have marked it so the customs guys can ask for extra money from whoever holds that bag.  If this passenger is clever, he will simply wipe the mark with a wet tissue and move on”.

But most people don’t know about this chalk mark trick.  I certainly hadn’t.   As I watched, more bags circled around with “X” marks.  My bag wasn’t one of  them.  My bag, it turned out, was winging its way to another city, but that’s another story.

Baggage Carousel (Pic: Robert S. Donovan/ Flickr)

I don’t see why checked bags need to pass through an X-ray after arriving in India.  After all, these bags have passed through an X-ray in the originating airport, after which no one apart from airline employees have had access to them.  So it certainly cannot be for reasons of security.  But as this column in the Financial Express indicates, the bags do get X-rayed.

The article asks the same question that’s on my mind:

Why do we have this business of X-raying baggage at the time of entry? In some airports, the checked-in baggage will be X-rayed before you can walk through customs. In all airports, hand baggage will be X-rayed. If there is a security issue, surely that is pertinent before you board an aircraft. What is the security issue after you have left the aircraft?

I can understand customs officials passing bags through the X-ray after you have retrieved them, to check for food etc.  when you are with the bag. Isn’t that the best way to do it anyway?  If you think a bag has a quarantined item (like food or plants) or say drugs or weapons, is it wise to merely mark it with an easily erasable (and very visible)  chalk mark and let it go?

The chalk mark trick appears to be well-known in flyer forums and so is the wet tissue wipe-off trick. The popular view in these forums seems to be that the chalk marks are the work of corrupt Customs officials who want to pocket a bribe.  My fellow passenger thought the same way too – why else would they put an easily removable chalk mark, he asked, instead of  say, a sticker or some kind of hard-to-remove tape?

What is clear, though, is that the X-raying does help unscrupulous baggage handlers to filch valuables from bags (now that the X-rays tell them what to look for). And yes, there are lots of unscrupulous baggage handlers out there, as many of us who have found items missing from checked bags know.  But has anyone ever been caught so far?

Well, perhaps because no baggage handler before has managed to steal Rahul Gandhi’s cellphone from his checked bag?

Here is my question – if any of us ordinary souls had reported an item missing from our bags, what are the chances the authorities  would have found the item, or  admitted it was a baggage handler who stole it?

I have gone on record in the past saying that I am glad Wimbledon has a “no 5th set tie-break” policy.  After watching the match between Frenchman Nicolas Mahut and American John Isner,  I wonder whether it is time to rewrite the rule.

My objection to deciding the fifth set with a tie-break was that it would mean that both players could hold their own serves, all through the tie-break, and one player could win the set and match by virtue of winning just a couple extra tie-break points.  In other words, each player could hold their serve, no one breaks the other’s serve and just a couple of tie-break points decide who wins the match.  Imagine a championship being decided like that.

But consider the drama that has been happening in Wimbledon for the last three days.  Mahut and Isner have been engaging in a epic battle in a first-round match (the kind that sometimes get decided as 6-4,6-3,6-1).  At the end of the second day of play, the score read 4-6,6-3,7-6,6-7, 59-59 (or 6-4,3-6,6-7,7-6, 59-59).   Wimbledon’s scoreboard gave up after 47-47, the website reset to 0-0 after 50-50.   The match has lasted 10 hours so far, and it’s still not over.   At over 7 hours, the 5th set alone is longer than any match in history.  When the players come on court today, they will have been playing for 3 days.

No physios were called, no one suffered a cramp,  no curses were uttered, nobody argued with the umpires.  You could be forgiven for thinking you were watching a match from decades ago.

John Isner during the Mahut-Isner epic battle. Look at the scoreboard! Pic courtesy: AELTC/Wimbledon.org

I am going to be very sorry when this match ends today.  It is certainly not fair to whoever loses this match.  Not that the winner is going to be much better off – having played the equivalent of three games in three days, he is going to be at a disadvantage to whoever he meets next.

But here is the clincher – in that mammoth 5th set, where each has won 59 games, they have still won those games by holding their serve.  They have not traded breaks.  So in the end, when this match does come to a close, it will be decided by the result of  a single game, which seems a small thing when you consider that 120+ games would have been played in the 5th set alone.

When I think about it, that’s not very different from winning a set after winning a couple of tie break points.  Rather, given how these two have battled, it seems a rather unfortunate end.

So maybe we do need to have a 5th set tie break in Wimbledon, like we have in every other Grand Slam the US Open (as an alert reader has pointed out, only the US Open has a 5th set tie-break rule).  But I still don’t think it should come into effect at 6-6.  The players should be given a chance to battle it out, otherwise would be ever have games like this, which truly show the spirit of human persistence/ endurance and determination?

So maybe a tie-break should come into effect after the players are tied 12-12 in the fifth set?  (or maybe 25-25?)

We gaped at him. He said “football” which could only mean NFL.  Surely he meant “soccer”?

R told him about how Japan lost to Netherlands and went on to describe the Ghana – Australia game. I chipped in about the red card and the equalizing goal.

The post office employee seemed to regret he couldn’t watch the game.  “I missed it”, he said again and again.

Suddenly I heard a voice behind me. “Ghana won?”

I turned around to see a woman in full African headgear who had just entered the post office.

Football or Soccer ball? Suddenly red hot?

The post office incident is not unique; I have been having many similar conversations of late.  A lot more people in the US seem to be interested in the World Cup this time around.  We do seem to have come a long way from the 1994 FIFA World Cup which played to empty stadiums here.

Surely it cannot be just because the networks are telecasting every match live ? Or that the games are being played during daytime in the US?

Is it because there are many more immigrants in the US than in 1994?  I can see that all of Africa seems to be supporting Ghana (possibly even more so now with Cameroon crashing out of the World Cup).

There are obviously millions more Hispanics than in 1994, and that is another football-loving demographic.

But there seems a lot of interest even among  fourth and fifth generation white Americans (i.e. the ones who don’t consider themselves immigrants).  What could explain this?

I don’t think Americans have suddenly decided to embrace the popular sports of the world.  There is still hardly any interest for cricket (not even the 20-20 kind).  But one could argue that football is a much bigger sport internationally than cricket is.

But still, the number of people who play football/ soccer in the US is probably the same amount as those who play lacrosse.

So why the sudden interest in football?  Any thoughts?