Of worms and chaff

Its true. Sad isn't it? Yesterday being Independence day and all. I mean, what exactly are we celebrating? 100 years of struggle to overthrow the British Raj, only to be bogged down by 67 years of self-directed oppression? The common human being in India is oppressed in many many ways. Sometimes I wonder if my fellow citizens actually invent ways of oppression - desi ishtyle, forming special oppression sub-committees and all. But you know the form of oppression that really really ticks me off? The prejudice against each and every melanocyte of dark-colored skin. Its like there is this hidden graph somewhere, that shows there must be a positive linear (almost exponential) correlation between the color of someone's skin and their worth. The lighter your skin color, the more popular, sexy, hot or generally awesome you are. And don't even get me started with how this mostly applies to women. Just thinking about this is making me punch a hole in my keyboard, which ...

Dear Mr.Swamy I recently heard that Harvard dropped your summer courses covering economics in Asia. I also heard that your article in a local Mumbai newspaper titled "How to wipe out Islamic terror" (no more available on the newspaper's website) was the cause of this exclusion from Harvard's summer course catalog. While I am sad that you, as an Indian were excluded from one of the finest institutions of higher learning in the world, I uphold their decision to remove you, sir, from their faculty. I believe anyone with a conscience would deem your article as supremacist snobbery at best and plain ol' bigotry at worst. And this underlying attitude of yours which showed its ugly face in the above-mentioned article of yours was perhaps simultaneously your worst professional move (Harvard and all..) and your best political one. Who knows? Why I consider this to be your best political move is the fact that you've roused a number of hindu nationalists in the ...

What is this thing called hope? Where does it come from? What is it made of? Having confronted an answer to these questions many times before, I presumed it would seem petty and trivial to revisit the theme. Little did I know that a singular experience would make my most colossal version of this entity that I knew well, seem almost facetious. Sometime back, I had the privilege to visit, with my friends, a home called S.H.E.L.T.E.R. (Don't mind the acronym; it stands for something I couldn't remember past the first time I heard it). There are three reasons for which I would grant a visit to be a privilege: 1. If it involves Eric Kandel 2. If it involves Eric Kandel and 3. If in retrospect, my mind seems to be reduced to a state of utter humility and "smallness" - for lack of a better word. And as you would have rightly pointed out, this particular visit fell in the third category. For this was one of the most beautiful homes I've ever been to; One filled with all t...

If "sunk in" is a feeling of being exactly what it literally means.. then I haven't been the object of anything sinking in yet. The only place i sank in was when the pilot of Air France flight AF201 made such a beautiful or gross (take your pick) dip when he took off from Chennai International airport. Air France - doesnt it remind you of the french air, french babes and french wine? No. It makes you realise that you're in cramped seats with no leg space whatsoever...took me back to the good ol' days during ayudha poojai when all the buses would be full, but no matter what, you could always depend on the Rs.105/- bus at 1130 hrs IST(Indian Stretchable Time)... Ah.. Air France..the state transport bus which could even fly overseas....what joy! Its a pity.. the air hostesses didnt look all that great.. bu they had zees francais accent zat seemz so delctable zhyou could zhus eas ees aap! one air hostess looked ok though..reminded me of greta garbo. Food was nice...if...

Who could ever forget those golden words of Tyler Durden , “You are not a unique snowflake; we are the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world.” The brilliant soap manufacturing modern revolutionary of Fight Club fame got it right in many ways… I wish I could leave it at that. OK, let me play genie and just leave it at that (for now). C.S. Lewis, in his essay Lilies that fester speaks with unabashed repugnance (quite rightly so) about culture -mongers who are so caught up in being “cultured” that there is no real acknowledgement of a Don Giovanni or the Orestaia but just some feigned rubbish worth less than nothing. Culture, in CSL’s England was the collective term for a whole set of “certain very valuable activities” like appreciating (or feigning to appreciate) literature or the arts. It was something, in a sense, attainable. But travel half way around the world and one realizes the multiplicity of the English language. “Culture” means something seemingly completely unrelated...