Rumi Nations

I put in a rather long comment on this article in Livemint. So, obviously I have to paste that comment on my blog and make a blog post out of it! 1) Who's that Duncan Fletcher guy pictured with Dhoni? Anyway, neither do I know nor do  I wish to know. I just wish people of India would stop making Gods out of silly young men that cricketers are. Even compared to the cricket that I grew up with, the days of Srikanth, Amarnath, Vengsarkar, Azhar, Sachin, Ganguly, Laxman, and Dravid, now the game is all too commercialized. Too much cricket, too much money, too many crores (and girls) dangling in front of talent-less young men. 2) What a fall when you consider that we started with "Yug-purush" such as Nehru to today's "half-purush" such as Rahul Gandhi and Manmohan Singh. Why did the people of India elect these jokers in 2004? And re-elect in 2009? But then again, what is the alternative before the billion poor of this country? No, Modi is certainly not who...

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. ...

What could be the motivation? Well, good stories sell. Novelists and storytellers have all the freedom in the world. Screenwriters even in biopics do not mind using a bit of artistic license to imagine a scene. If you can use reality as the base and add some embellishment and fine tuning and a dose of heroism and sacrifice to make the story appear more heroic and more emotional, what's wrong with that? The world is a bit too crowded with heroes and tales of heroism. So, it's a bit tough to stand out if one sticks strictly to the truth and nothing but the truth. So, who are the heroes? Well, creating an appropriate image is incredibly important. Bill Clinton is living proof of that. Mother Teresa and Diana are dead proofs. No matter how convincingly Christopher Hitchens is able to demolish myths of heroism and saintly qualities around these personalities, the public perception is so strongly rooted in the manufactured image that it's very difficult and nearly...

My debt of gratitude to Mr. Hitchens continues to grow. Not on a daily basis but every time I see an interview with him, I come out wiser after watching it. As a polemicist, Christopher has chosen to take on many individuals who have become larger than life. Mr. Hitchens has been a scathing critic of the false piousness of Mother Teresa. He has also been critical of the people's princess business with respect to Diana. Above all, Bill Clinton has been portrayed as a consummate and perhaps congenital smooth liar. That is where I came out with a lesson after watching Mr. Hitchens' interview yesterday. Mr. Clinton, it must be axiomatic, has to be narcissistic. So, why am I rooting for him? Why are so many? Indeed. Quite a point. It is perhaps yet another instance of how dangerously flawed we can be in our perceptions. We are perhaps giving a lot of leeway to Mr. Clinton because of his good looks. We may be doing this subconsciously without even realizing it. Perhaps, i...

The way Tiger Woods is being hounded, it would appear as if he were an elected official who had been caught with his hand in the till. But this is not the case. So, why all this fuss? Why do people want to foist greatness on someone? Tiger's genius lies in how he can hit the golf ball. Nothing has changed on that front. His golf skills enabled him to earn millions. His skills are exceptional. So, is his wealth. Why do people expect him to live an ordinary life like the rest of us ... the no-skills folks? What is the purpose of slogging so hard and having all that money if you can't go out and spend it the way you like? Why do people expect that everyone will accept the moribund rules of our society? Let's face it: the rules and regulations that govern our society are pretty old-fashioned and not really suited to our times and realities. If people are not brave enough to dump those rules in their entirety, that's people's problems. Through all of human history, peopl...

Give me a break! Probably that's how Indians would react if they knew about this phenomenon that's described as the post-World War II Baby Boom. It's the generation of Bill Clinton and others who belong to his age group. For those interested in arcane Americana, this Baby Boom refers to the eggregious increase in the number of babies that people were having ... this increase took place in the boom years following the end of the Second World War. Those years, late 40s and all of the 50s saw Americans having more than 4 million babies a year. Of course, that's a laughable boom by Indian standards. Indians would defeat Americans in this game any day: Indians today give birth to anywhere between 20 million to 30 million babies in a year. So, what boom are Americans talking about??? It's positively a baby drought rather than a baby boom. Americans would need to do a lot more to compete with Indians in this regard. And frankly, Americnas can't even hope or dream of ma...

The Japanese have a legendary appetite for seafood — much to the misfortune of sea life. Tuna fish happen to be one of the victims of this food fancy. Of course, just as the Japanese have pretty much hunted whales almost to the point of extinction, the seas near Japan have similarly lost much of their population of tuna fish. The Japanese have such a legendary appetite for such stuff that they even import seafood (specifically, prawns) from Orissa in India which happens to be my home state. It seems somewhat astonishing or bewildering that we humans who occupy less than one-third of the planet’s surface which is land should be able to deplete resources from the oceans which occupy more than two-thirds of the planet’s surface. On a completely different note — global warming deniers claim that humans are too insignificant a presence on the planet to be able to affect something as vast as the planet’s climate as the planet is too big. As the state of marine life shows, we humans certainly...

The saga of the new-age Krishna/Balaram pair is truly curious. In the age of mythologies, Balaram used to be the elder of the brothers, but now it’s Krishna who is playing elder brother to Balaram, a.k.a. Shashi. The Full-bright Krishna is normally used to all the ‘amenities’ and creature comforts of his heavenly abode, so naturally he found his ‘respective’ State Bhavan not quite up to the mark — quite understandably. Also, in his new role as India’s official globetrotter, he must be used to diverse locales and cuisines and peoples, etc. So, may be he was just choosing to stay in a place that has been home to many a world leaders including Bill Clinton and myriad others. Surely, that is part of his job-brief. This way, he could continue to sample a lot of ‘global’ offerings without burdening the meager taxpayer-funded resources of the Government of India with endless jaunts abroad. But, alas politics is a strange profession and though sometimes it might seem that the game is bereft of...

Sometimes knowledgeable people have the tendency to show off their knowledge too much by intentionally complicating their message. Then there are others who make it their business to communicate complicated ideas to the general public using language that everyone can understand. In the sphere of science, no one comes close to Carl Sagan when it comes to explaining science to everyone using spectacularly passionate language. Paul Krugman 's columns are similar — bereft of economic technobabble and illuminating. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/opinion/01krugman.html His latest column in the New York Times makes interesting reading — if nothing else, it was good to see someone criticizing Reagan. I've been watching with some skepticism all the praise that has been praised on President Reagan — particularly since his death(?). Apart from all the logical historical analysis, it seems somewhat implausible that a minor Hollywood actor would necessarily have the qualities required t...