Rumi Nations

It's time to perform one of my irregular news roundups as I seem to be coming across a variety of interesting stories. Here's a sad story about the continuing tragedy of unmarked graves in Kashmir from the BBC. Hopefully, a full investigation will happen and the truth come out. It's clearly not difficult to imagine the police or the military being involved in certain amount of torture upto and including custodial killings of civilians. Very sad reality in a democracy. Ok. Have some fun watching this stand up act by an Indian in the UK. And here's a good, inspirational speech by a young man who was raised by a gay couple. And here's an old article about the shocking tale of AIDS in Africa . Life is very strange. Agreed. An obituary .

Think of the spectacular imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope. I continue to marvel at all the wonders of the universe this single scientific instrument has revealed. And I think of the tiny number of humans who work at the Space Telescope Science Institute who’re responsible for this. A few hundreds of men and women whose work reveals to all seven billion of us humans on this planet the true splendors of the universe far surpassing anything contained in any mythological tales. The world owes a great deal to the Hubble Space Telescope … for opening our eyes, for expanding our horizons, for showing and proving again and again that the zaniest predictions of theoretical astrophysics are commonplace occurrences out there in the cosmos. And Hubble has also revealed phenomena that have left the theorists stunned before they started to contemplate about it and could barely believe that such stuff was really happening.

It isn't as absurd an idea as it might appear at first sight. Which is to say, it would be easy to find folks who might peddle this idea or believe in it. Of course, you better just listen to such ideas without your jaws hitting the floor and not try to argue or anything. Others blame Gandhi for the partition of India. I don't know what they wish for ... a Great India encompassing present day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh perhaps. Which would translate to a current population of a cool billion and a  half  people. Some people praise the great deed of the great hero Godse. They do not see him as a killer or a murderer. They see him as a great scholar intellectual who had authored Great Books. So, with a few million published books out there to choose from, people seek out Godse's book to read.

Banking in India, still remains a somewhat boring profession. For a generation and more, nationalized banks have offered job security, something poor Indians value a lot. So, there used to be (and continues to be) a lot of preparation and competition for Bank P.O. exams and Bank Clerical exams. Some got selected and joined their lifelong, drab vocation as a teller or something or the other. Some, in the executive cadre, become managers and chief general managers, etc. in these PSU banks. They're the Deciders who decide on loans running into thousands of crores. Sometimes, these gentlemen (almost exclusively men) have been found to be involved in various illegal activities such as lending to persons with rather dubious reputations such as Harshad Mehta or other third-rate businessmen or stock traders or gangsters or mine owners or whatever.

There's one cruelty, one injustice, which trumps all others in this world — it's the sight of kids having to work. But we let this endure, don't we? We in India. I've been witness to some cases of child labor. Luckily (is that even a correct word), I've never been personally responsible for child labor. Which is to say, I've not kept a kid at home on a 24 X 7 X 365 basis like some folks do. I don't know if that exonerates me entirely though ... for I have surely BENEFITED from child labor. Let me tell the few stories that I have witnessed and I remember. I hope these are ALL that I've seen. I hope I've n't forgotten any.

So we have a real-life slumdog millionaire now. What's the problem with a fiction just remaining in the realm of fiction? It was a good movie . Oh, BTW, didn't any smart-ass MBA professor type get the idea to use the movie's story to teach some mumbo-jumbo to the bozos? Remember that guy who used Lagaan to teach management? How shameless. But then the MBA business is all about cheating and making money. So, smart cheaters (which is an anagram, interesting enough, for 'teachers') cheat some MBA students who must eventually wise up and realize that it's all about maximizing cheating. Anyway, I digress. I've a bone to pick. I'm somewhat suspicious of this story being peddled of this commoner guy suddenly showing smarts and winning a million dollars on a game show. I think the show is fixed. Pretty.

Every Monday morning, there's a universal outpouring of groans — that it's MONDAY again! It's as if everybody's mom-in-law AGAIN was about to come to visit them on Monday. This deafening noise is heard in specific parts of the world. It comes from the office-going class of people. In India, the young generation of IT and other professionals make this noise through all available means such as Facebook and Twitter. I suppose it's the same in the developed world where people have been caught up in this vicious cycle for a generation or more now. I don't know about rural America or rural Europe, but in rural India, villagers don't start groaning on Monday mornings. There's hardly any difference between Mondays or other days of the week. Their life-cycle is not a weekly one. Conversely, there's invariably an exuberant outpouring of joy come Friday. It starts in the morning itself and rises to a crescendo by the afternoon by when the youngsters i...

I am confused. I am perplexed. About many things. I’m confused just thinking whether it’s just me who is like this or everyone else feels some of these emotions as well. I feel confused when I see people going about their daily lives. I see people being busily busy and I am left bewildered. What occurs to me is that there are so many rules of the road about how to live one’s life. And these rules differ from society to society. They vary widely and people in each society follow those implicit rules. Are people undiscerning or is it that those rules make sense to most people? Individuals tend to have an identity of their own in advanced countries such as the United States/Canada and in the countries of Europe. Old civilizations such as India are still quite old-fashioned. Here, society tends to predominate over the individual. Individuals are supposed or expected to mold themselves as per the long-held and therefore (so it’s claimed) tried-and-true norms of society. ...

Nilanjana Roy's excellent blog article persuaded me to write the following response: A well-written and deeply meaningful essay. This particular instance of book banning is too obviously silly to merit much discussion. Oh, BTW, I think interestingly enough, 'universities, publishers, art galleries, and bookshops' are all for-profit businesses and we need not be too surprised if they show a disinclination towards fighting for lofty ideas of intellectual freedom or freedom of thought and expression. (I think there's really no need to elaborate how running universities might be profitable affairs for the old men so engaged.) More broadly, now that there are not that many totalitarian political ideologies extant, the business of banning books rests more or less solely with the various defenders of the various faiths.

Death is a good thing not merely because, as Mr. Jobs put it, “It’s probably the single best invention of life,” or “it’s life’s change agent,” but also because men of hubris are at last brought down to Earth (and indeed below the Earth) by the phenomenon of death. It’s a fate that no hubristic billionaire can escape … yet. The ordinary person can look at a hubris-laden individual engaged in some megalomaniacal activity and take some satisfaction out of this knowledge that death will conquer this villain as well just as it has claimed many other villains through history. What other areas of human activity can you think of where there’s virtual equality between all? Some path breaking inventions of medical science qualify. When a vaccine is available for polio, EVERYONE is suddenly safe from this scourge — street dwellers and penthouse dwellers. But they are few and far between. Technology seems to be one arena where this occurs more frequently. Consumer devices are at once cutt...

So how does it 'FEEL' like? What is the typical experience of banking in India? I had an experience today that is considered par for the course in this country. It's instructive as well as funny. Some things change. Some things remain the same. That's the nature of India. Showrooms (think Suzuki ... or BMW) that have the look of permanence and solidity can disappear when you revisit some old location after a gap of a year or two. But a street vendor selling ice cream or sweets in front of a Pizza Hut is a permanent fixture over five years, perhaps a decade. People who are familiar with Janpath in New Delhi and know where the Hut and Sony are located will understand what I am talking about. I recall the guy who used to collect old newspapers from our house back in my childhood days. When we moved house once to a new place which was some 15 miles from the old place, I was astonished to see that the paper-collector got to know about our new location and came to o...

In any modern nation that has a taxation system, the poor don't pay taxes. In India, more than 90 percent do not pay taxes. But that makes sense. The poor in India do not use as much of the infrastructure. The poor in India do not use airports. The poor in America do not use private planes. One should be taxed at a rate commensurate with one's level of income. This is obvious and does not need debating. When the super rich have to pay taxes at a lower rate as Warren Buffett has reiterated so often, it's clearly unfair. Millionaires need to be taxed at a higher but fair rate. A 90 percent rate of income tax is clearly unfair. But a 30 percent or 35 percent rate of tax seems fair enough. Those in the 10 million to 50 million bracket can correspondingly be charged at a higher rate than the mere single-digit millionaires. Those in the 50 million to 100 million bracket need to pay even higher taxes. The tax rate can increase by 5 percentage points for every tax bracket. The ot...

What is it that draws us to a news such as the untimely death of a celebrity? Whether it's Diana or Michael Jackson or Elvis Presley and John Lennon and so many others? Now we have the untimely, tragic death of a teenage son of a cricket star. It must tell us something about ourselves above all. Are we attracted to these events by any chance because at some level, we somehow prove ourselves to be superior to the dead by having simply outlived them? After all, one of our most fundamental biological traits must be the desire to stay alive for as long as possible. Whatever else it's that you want to do, you have to be alive in the first place to be able to accomplish that. Celebrities are celebrities in the first place because we choose to idolize them. This idolization perhaps involves both admiration and envy. We must envy celebrities as they have surely achieved success in life in any of the myriad ways in which we may choose to define the term. Thus w...

All I propose to do in this post is collect in one place the book reviews published at various places. From The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8765444/Arguably-by-Christopher-Hitchens-review.html Excerpts: Every generation tends to look silly to the one after; those beehive hairdos, those chain smokers. Reacting to previous experience, we don’t make progress, necessarily. Vicars have randy daughters and randy daughters give birth to boys who in turn become vicars. Salman Rushdie told me once that Hitchens was one of the two funniest people he had known (the other was Bruce Chatwin). I was unconvinced until I read in Arguably the following passage: “Is there anything less funny than a woman relating a dream she’s just had? (‘And then Quentin was there somehow. And so were you, in a strange sort of way. And it was all so peaceful.’ Peaceful?).” Of all the beliefs from which he has yet to deviate is the conviction t...

Article first published as Delhi Bomb Blast on Technorati. Life is cheap in India. Deaths from myriad random and unnatural causes are all too commonplace. Nobody will really be able to give an accurate count of the number of terrorist attacks that have happened over the past few years. It's fashionable to compare any and all terrorist attacks to the gold standard christened as 9/11. There is no ambiguity about what event it refers to. But when attacks become all too commonplace, it's a bit tiring to come up with numerical shortcuts to refer to them. Should today's attack be called 7/9? The Mumbai attacks (not 26/11) on the suburban train system is already barely there in the faintest storehouse of our memory bank. The attacks on some crowded markets in Delhi around Diwali time is also but a mere part of the white noise background of my/our subconscious. At least in New York City, they are coming up with a permanent memorial that will have the names of the nea...

The attraction of the Anna movement apart from the topic of anti-corruption which is everyone's favorite whipping boy, was or is the fact that it is empowering. It is weird to compare this movement to the Arab Spring as that would be like aspiring to scale the economic heights that Bangladesh has climbed. Over and shrill nationalism is quite scary as it brooks no dissent. India's core problem is clearly not corruption. But people are easily swayed by symbolism rather than hard realities. This happens even in developed economies such as the United States where opportunistic politicians are harnessing superficial problems such as outsourcing, illegal/legal immigration, big government rather than focusing on fundamental shifts in the nature of the global economic structure. There will be disillusionment at some point. It remains to be seen what happens after that point is reached. It's as clear and true as the Earth moving around the Sun that India won't become a devel...

Clearly that brings together two important topics. Greta Cristina writes wonderfully about a report that has come out that shows how atheists have it better in matters of sex. Good to hear. But the survey is clearly confined to Western nations with their (already) rather liberal cultures and the three monotheistic religions. I want to bring a bit of a different perspective to it. Here in India, I have observed an entire generation grow up during the 30 odd years of my own life. It has been quite bewilderingly disappointing to see the way the younger generation deals with the existing cultural and religious value systems. To be sure, while growing up, kids in India are incessantly bombarded with the idea that it's important to respect the elderly, that they are great storehouses of knowledge and experience and wisdom. Clearly, the matter of respecting one's elders would have made sense in agrarian societies where the elderly would really have in fact mo...

For a civilization and a sub-continent, it's not quite clear what the specific import of 1947 is. I do not know where to place the specific importance in the long history of India of the acts of the British when they creepingly occupied India first and then suddenly left when things became a bit too hot to handle. Human lives however are measured on the scale of human lifespans. So it matters a lot to people whether the last 50 years have been productive or fruitless years in the story of India. And the India story over the past half century has been famously a mixed bag. India started its journey exactly like Nehru said: a great civilization awakened from long years of sleep. It has mostly been drifting since then. India can't make any singular claims of achievement that it can be proud of as a signature feat of all of humanity. People of India are mostly interested in trivialities -- such as religion and their petty family lives. What of the future? More of the ...

Here's the link: http://seagullbooks.org/blog/2011/08/01/ganesha-dances/ Here's the complete text: In the India in which I grew up, my father burned incense daily at the idol of Ganesha, the elephant-headed one who vanquishes evil, and my mother would keep the municipal water tap turned on at night, so that she would know when water would ‘arrive’ in our flat. Ganesha may or may not ward off evil, but the family needed water, and she would not leave anything to chance. The municipality ostensibly provided water 24 hours, but didn’t tell us that it meant 24 hours in a week, or sometimes, in a fortnight. If she kept the tap on, she would know the moment it would start to whisper and cough, and water would splutter, first as a trickle, then as a waterfall, and those sounds would wake her up, and she’d fill up the pots before others did, to make sure we’d have enough water. This was when India was the poster child for aid agencies. More Indians p...

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice." My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947. Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

Penis cutting and cutters are in the news again ... Take precautions men! Also, if you thought your nice dog will sooner starve than eat your dead body (if you happen to die in your home and no one is around except the dog), well, think again.

Here’s the substance and sequence of events as I see it. • Rebecca Watson had an elevator encounter that she felt uncomfortable with. She talked about it on her blog. She has every right to do so. • PZ Myers picked it up on his blog. Thus far, this is like a conversation about dating techniques. • Dawkins decides to get into this debate. He equates Watson’s experience with the great amount of suffering that women face in various countries including threats to their lives. Dawkins trivializes Watson’s experience as ‘zero-bad.’ • On the face of it, it seems like these are two distinct and unrelated issues and there’s no reason for anyone to compare these two experiences. Or is it? • One is aware of problems such as date rape and various forms of sexual crimes which take place on campuses. Problems that are unique to the so-called advanced nations. Backward nations meanwhile are faced with the age-old issues: everything from killing female fetuses to killing female infants...

When household robots are around in the future, I wonder how they will be designed. Suppose, you want to have water. You can get it on your own. Suppose you are busy and want someone else to bring it for you. You would request someone in your family to bring it -- Johnny, can you get me a glass of water, please? You will not say -- hey, fucker, why don't you move your ass and get me some freaking water? I would imagine Johnny won't be so pleased (and worse if it was your wife that you were addressing and not Johnny) if you adopted the second tone. Now imagine you have that household robot. Would the robot be designed to respond the same way no matter how politely or impolitely you asked it for water? Or, may be, Hitachi or Honda will program it in such a manner that if you ask it for water in an impolite manner, it will coolly bring the water (hot) and splash it on your face.

Have one billion babies. Travel 5 billion light years in every direction starting from Earth. But if you have seen one galaxy, you've seen 'em all. Become a cheetah, an elephant, and a snake in my reincarnations ... oops, that will require me to die first. But anyway. Touch the sun and burn my fingers ... oops, it's HOT! Launch the space shuttle to the Moon with my bare hands ... remember how you launched those paper airplanes as a kid? Dip my finger gingerly into a black hole ... oops, my finger tip just vanished! Live to be one billion years old.

I think Mayawati is in many ways the likeliest person to become India's next Prime Minister. I see a fractious mandate being provided by the electorate in the next general election. I expect the regional leaders such as Jayalalitha and Mamta (not to mention Nitish Kumar, Naveen Patnaik, and Omar Farooq) to do well. I am sure the ladies would love to support a female from the grassroots for the post of Prime Minster. It will be up to the big parties such as Congress and BJP to recognize people's mandate for what it is and perhaps choose to support a coalition of smaller parties at the center from outside. This will of course reflect the reality of India's diversity where each state will have an individual voice in the running of the entire nation: a truly federal structure. Mayawati has successfully Uttar Pradesh, one of the most complex Indian states. With this experience, she has shown that she is capable of engaging in the kind of deal-making that is essential to...

Heaven uses an open-source, Linux based email server. Since Oprah is now over, let me confess on my blog. I've fathered three babies unbeknown to my imaginary wife. My co-conspirators were sequentially: my office intern, a member of my household staff, and inevitably, the proverbial (but quite literal) maid. The inspirations for these acts (and therefore the owners of authorial credit) are messers Clinton, Arnold, and DSK. So, I'm giving them due acknowledgement. Also, thanking them for not copyrighting or trademarking these techniques. Instead, these are available to all those who seek to enjoy the benefits of democracy combined with atheism under the Creative Commons License. Anyone can therefore use these techniques and modify them to suit their specific needs and then share the results with the world at large. There. I've done it! Or is there more? Well, I just remembered a fourth baby that I had with the hot, young TV journo lady. That was inspired by Mr. ...

This is so intriguing, ever fascinating and touching: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/magazine/could-conjoined-twins-share-a-mind.html/ I remember Laleh and Ladan Bijani and their surgery in Singapore and how that happened to go wrong.

A movie about fly fishing that somehow manages to make one ponder about what it means to be alive. A kid who wants to grow up to be a fly fisherman. Another kid who wants to be a boxer. A preacher who's devoted to his calling of inspiring and soothing his people through the power of words as revealed by his God. The kids grow up. The elder one turns into the responsible one while the younger is more adventurous. Love and a stable career are the ambitions for one. The other aspires to and enjoys taking life on. But risk taking can exact grim reapings. One can get killed. This is almost inevitable. But perhaps that's precisely part of the allure of this kind of life. In time, the kid grows old. And reflects on the meaning of it all. The river meanwhile is the one constant. What a wonderful metaphor for life a river is! Always flowing, never stopping. With hidden dangers lurking beneath the surface. We are responsible for the decisions we make in our lives. The cons...

Can a movie make us think about life? Can a movie have anything to teach us about living life? One can pose these questions in relation to this movie. That already shows how much this movie has accomplished. The movie stars Jack Nicholson as a retired bachelor much attracted to and interested in the opposite sex. It so happens that the character is that of a retired astronaut. Is that so far fetched? I don't know. In terms of physical appearance, there's nothing unusual about Jack that would somehow disqualify him from playing the part of an astronaut. In fact, Jack takes quite a resemblance to one of the crew members of STS-134, the mission that is currently in space, the boyish looking Michael Fincke. Apart from this, I also think that there's some resemblance between Jack and the legendary Bob Crippen of STS-01. Then there's Shirley MacLaine. An aging woman who's over-protective of her daughter and suspicious of the world at large, grown somewhat bitter ...

When a director manages to combine the mythic heritage of the Mahabharata with the cauldron that is contemporary Indian politics, you inevitably get a searing saga. Unlike the usual Bollywood movie, Rajneeti is painted on a broad canvas and events happen at a fast clip and the movie does not grow stale at any point. From the start itself when it tells of a romance between an ageing idealist and a young protege, the movie somehow manages to acquire a mythic ambiance. The movie moves on to scheming politicians and feuding family members, a romance that is one-sided, one brother who's only too trigger happy and the younger brother, who's a cool schemer, and Nana Patkar cool as always. As we witness one planned murder after another, one is reminded of gangster country. But this is really the reality of life in politics in India and indeed, perhaps, the reality of life itself, in India. I don't know why the movie did not garner greater accolades. May be, people ar...

I am thinking of a scheme of how immortality might come to be real in the coming decades. Perhaps, there will be storage tanks which will house millions upon millions of brains that will be alive and will be connected to a global network of news and everything. When we are old, our brains will be put there and we will continue to live in a virtual sort of world or a mental world perhaps forever essentially being an observer. Or, may be, we will have something like fish tanks in our homes where we will have the brains of our ancestors. Perhaps they will continue to live in our drawing rooms observing their progeny lead their daily lives. How would that be like to have our grannies and granddaddies around? Or, at least, their brains.

I think of a future ... may be a few decades from now ... when we'll discover somewhere in the vastness of our own galaxy a planet eerily like our own. A planet in the Goldilocks zone with the same kind of temperatures as the Earth and with oceans and land. I think that would be the most tantalizing prospect of all ... what would happen on such a planet given billions of years? Will life spontaneously evolve inevitably? Or, can a planet remain barren of life for billions of years altogether? Imagine that life does evolve. Simple unicellular organisms. Then, tiny multicellular organisms. Then, it will be fascinating. What routes does life take? Will amphibians evolve? Birds? Fish? Trees? Reptiles? Dinosaurs? Mammals? Just think of the diversity of the history of life on Earth and ponder how much is going to remain the same and how much is going to be different on such a planet. How fascinating would it be when we detect such an inviting world and send across our robotic ...

As I observe people living their daily, humdrum existence, I wonder about these prophecies and what the future holds for humanity. There's clearly no hesitation on my part in sticking my neck out if it means that and saying that I wish the projection said instead that the world's population would reach 2 billion by the end of this century. What will happen if the planet becomes a planet of plenty like some middle eastern Asian nation with a lot of oil. Will people become lazy and uninnovative? That's of course unlikely in any case. What is instead likely to happen is a continuation of the present trend. Think of the competitive nature of life today. Really, there's so much competition happening where everyone is trying to show himself to be smart or make money. So many smart people working in alternative energy and physics and other sciences like automobiles to space. There's this extraordinary race which exists where so many have to fail for a few...