Take that, grass-eaters!

'I, serving a meat' is an anagram of vegetarianism. Go figure.

What's pest-ering me

There's this huge hoo-hah about MNC demons Coke and Pepsi busily poisoning us with excessive levels of pesticide in their drinks. Some states have banned sales of their products, other have even banned their manufacture.

The companies themselves have issued the usual half-page advertisements protesting their innocence and adherence to worldwide standards.

What nobody's explained to me is where this alleged pesticide is coming from. Surely no one is suggesting that the Colas add in DDT to make up the volume and cut costs. And I doubt that they are that paranoid about pest control as to over-fumigate their factory premises so that pesticides get into the bottles. And I doubt that pesticide constitutes one of the famous secret ingredients.

That leaves only one place: the water.

Yep, the pesticides have probably leached from the over-dosed soil into the ground water and most of our wells and lakes are probably chock-full of the salubrious stuff.

So if the pesticides are in the water to start with, we are drinking the damn things anyway. How come nobody's bothered to test the tap water?

No convenient scapegoat around, is that it?

Who can I sue?

And why do mosquitoes continue to feed off me?

Tech wizards, forsooth!

Now I know our vaunted technological prowess is just a bunch of crumbly stale bread.

My blog is still blocked via one ISP (Tata - you listening, Ratan dikra?) but is accessible via another, Sify.

I'd suspected this because friends in other cities could access blogspot while I couldn't.

Today, in office I switched my router from one ISP to the other and voila!

This means:
- Tata is technically incompetent because they've blocked blogspot when they shouldn't
- Sify is technically incompetent because they haven't blocked blogspot when they should
- Neither gives a rodent's sexual congress for the customer
- All of the above

Premature ejaculation...

... is what my previous blog entry was.

We ain't back. Shortly after I posted that, blogspot dropped off my network again and the only way I can get to it now is via a proxy.

This sucks.

At least China has better roads even if they don't have an uncensored Net. What's our claim to fame?

We're back!

Yippee and zippee and doodle and all that. Blogspot is back. Democracy wins. Or whatever.

One more thing, Franz

Oh, I forgot - the reason I can continue to write my blog, is because the idiots have blocked blogspot.com which is where the blog resides, but not blogger.com which is where the authoring of the blog takes place.

I am tempted to break my own rule and display expletives on my blog.

Kafka, we need you...

This has to be the strangest blog entry I've ever done. Not that I've done many, but still.

It's strange because while I'm allowed to make this entry, I'm not allowed to read it myself.

In its infinite wisdom, the Government of India has decided to block certain blogs from public consumption in India. Fine, they want to do that, they probably have the right to.

But in their ham-handed fashion (I didn't say "typical" but you read it, right?) they've blocked the entire blogspot.com URL. So, all blogs hosted here are inaccessible in India.

Bloody daft!

I'm writing this in the hope that one day I'll be able to read it online without having to go through an anonymizer.

Oh yes, you CAN still access all these sites by going via an anonymizer site - and you can find one in about 0.28 seconds via a Google search. It works - I just saw my own blog though with the styles a bit off, but it's there. I have no doubt that there are other ways to get around this stupid block, but it irks me that I need to.

Forget about my individual rights. Whatever happened to plain commonsense?

The inevitable...

Well, this is the inevitable, nay, obligatory, entry post the latest round of Mumbai blasts. In this I'm probably joining thousands of bloggers who've undoubtedly all expressed their solidarity, horror, regret, pride, and so on.

It's strange how in times like this the usual platitudes and cliches are the only words that actually make sense. "Show must go on." "Pride in Mumbaikar's spirit." "Common man's courage." "Bloody but unbowed." "Business as usual." Even a cynical old sod such as yours truly is moved by the way this city bounces back and keeps on keeping on. Not that there really is such an entity as "this city" - it's you and me that does all the bouncing. And the being bounced, unfortunately.

It's close to two decades since I last regularly commuted by train, but it's an experience that is never forgotten. In fact, you don't even need to be a regular to savor that never-to-be-forgotten experience. Just one ride on Mumbai's trains and you have something to boast about. It's kind of like white-water rafting or bungee jumping: you need to do it just once during rush hour to understand the special skills and daring it requires. After that you can strut around with your chest thrown out with pride - and your spine probably mangled beyond repair, but that's another story.

In my callow youth I wooed in quick succession two Bandra girls and since I was (and still am) an avowed townie, I needed to commute on the suburban trains if I wanted to spend time with my beloved. I still have very fond memories of being crushed against the object of my desire on the journey to her house and then spending the return journey in a dreamy haze in the first class compartment actually sitting down. Ah, call me a roamantic.

Apart from the platitudes and cliches that such events (not the romantic journeys, the other events) throw up, there is also the phenomenon of the fatuous comment. This is usually delivered by a politician or bureaucrat, often with an axe to grind, but they don't have a monopoly on it. Some gems from 7/11:

Mumbai Commissioner: "This appears to be a planned event." You don't say! And here we were thinking what a horrible coincidence it was that seven trains blew up in quick succession, a few kilometers away from each other and a few minutes apart. By the way, the TV networks never made it clear which enlightened Commissioner this was.

Politician: "We need to learn from Gujarat. See how tough they are there and they don't suffer any terrorism while Mumbai is always a target." Ahem! Could that be because Mumbai is the financial capital, has over 17 million inhabitants, provides over 50% of the country's tax revenues, is a great symbol of Indian capitalism and the economy, has loads of public places with gazillions of people in them? Could you name even half a target in Gujarat that is even a quarter as attractive from a terrorist's point of view?

Misguided public advertisement (last page of today's Mumbai Mirror): "Appeal to all Terrorists! Please do not kill absolutely innocent people." Hello? It may be just me, but I always thought terrorism was all about killing innocent people. After all, if you only targeted "guilty" people such as (presumably) the armed forces and the police, where's the terror in that? And who are "absolutely" innocent people? Are there some who are not so innocent, and therefore acceptable targets? And, of course, terrorists are going to be swayed by advertising. Well, if we can be gulled by advertising into buying crap we don't need, hope could be said to spring eternal.

I guess crises do bring out the irrational side of humanity.

Random post-WC thoughts

And so the month of quadrennial football frenzy has drawn to a close. Perhaps now I can get back to sleeping nights. There were moments of brilliance, of tedium, of glory, of infamy, of skill, of ineptitude, of victory, of defeat. And that was just the Brazilian team. Multiply that by 32 and you get an inkling of why this is the most watched event on the planet.

My dear friend and prolific Chiffonesque blogger, Mugsy has heaped praise on my unworthy head. I think she meant to shame me into getting back to my blog. In which case, she has succeeded, at least for now. She has bemoaned her own inability to stick to the point while writing, but that's exactly what I love about her style: an ability to let her stream of consciousness take over while still remaining coherent and in complete command of the language. And her self-deprecatory, laconic humour, strangely reminiscent of Raymond Chandler, though minus the bourbon and blondes. (There's a reason why she continues at the top of my Other Blogger Friends list.)

The New York Times informs me that there is a gender divide in many US colleges today and that therefore, "Colleges eager to attract men to increasingly female campuses have found that football teams can be a lure." I always knew American males were blockheads but it's nice to have it confirmed. You have a campus which is "increasingly female" and you need football as a lure? C'mon guys, no wonder you have a falling birth rate. Get with the program and focus on using those other round objects.

Which reminds me of that classic Yes, Minister crack. Nigel, who considers a proposal that lands up on his table to be absolute bollocks, returns it with the notation, "Round objects!" To which Humphrey responds starchily, "Who is Round and to what does he object?"

Crossword clews

Provide sustenance, support and grub (11)

Mater mater (7)

Proof that some of the best clues are the briefest.

Oops, I skipped church...

I just discovered courtesy the Times Sunday Cryptic crossword that Britney Spears is an anagram of Presbyterians.

That has to be one of the supreme ironies of Christianity.

Rude? That's news?

My beloved city has just been voted the rudest city in the world. Worthy citizens have sprung to its defense claiming that Bombay/Mumbai has a heart of gold.

Well, that's as may be, but it certainly has a tongue of nettles and the patience of a viper.

Anyone who has experienced the cacophonous impatience of our roads, or the heedless viciousness of the train-boarding stampede, or the deliberate disdain for others manifested in the bhajan-singing or card-playing commuter groups, or the middle-finger-in-your-face attitude of the hawker who displaces the pedestrian and the pedestrian who encroaches on the motorist's road and the motorist who weaves into another's lane, or any of the million babus sitting in their Kafka-esque labyrinths awaiting the unsuspecting mortal who dares to enter their domain...

Heck, you know what I'm talking about. We are the rudest city in the world. And probably proud of it to boot.

That ain't news.

Colour complex

As I get older I find myself striving to simplify my life. The less mundane decisions one needs to take, the more one can focus on the things that matter. (Like food.)

I thought I had one such decision licked.

White shirts are a wonderful solution to the matutinal problem of what to wear to work. They go with anything, they suit any occasion, they can look smart or scruffy as the situation demands.

However, they are unequal to the task of coping with the rigours of the wash and iron cycle. On returning from a recent vacation I took an inventory of my white shirts and discovered that all save one of them have acquired the ugliest of spots in the unlikeliest of places. I could understand this if I made a habit of feeding my shirts while feeding myself. But the blemishes appear at the collar-tips, the cuffs, the back and other places normally inaccessible.

So, with great sadness, I have given up one simple solution in my life and have reverted to coloured shirts. And my mornings are sartorially confused.

Would-be poet, get thee hence!

I may trouble many with this post.
But that's small cause to yield the ghost.
A dead ear turned for months on end
To lots of those I would call a friend.

My ear is dead not deaf, I say,
It seeks to die again each day.
Maimed and killed, a hundred times,
Revived in hope of hearing rhymes.

Revived in vain by fraudulent verse,
Murdered again with a devilish curse.
It seeks for rhyme, it seeks for metre,
A phrase that would inspire St. Peter.

It needs the salt of wisdom and wit
Sprinkled on words that rhyme, that fit.
It yearns for fruity turns of phrase
That sparkle like wine in college days.

But all it's fed is mangled prose
Snorted out through someone's nose,
Devoid of rhyme, bereft of grace,
Masquerading as beauty's face.

Missing commas, misplaced ends
Are uglier when lost by friends.
And every word is friend to me,
So treat them fair, or let them be.

If you'd arrange them to a plan,
Make sure they rhyme, ensure they scan.
The metre is a veil, not shroud,
It should sound right when read out loud.

If these tests fail, perhaps you should
Abandon thoughts of writing good
Poetry, and stay with words
That don't need coralling into herds.

You cannot rhyme? You have no wit.
You cannot scan? You are not fit.
The metre's lost? Ah, woe is me,
What passes these days for poetry!

New Love

If anyone has been wondering where I've been, the answer is: with my new love.

I have dumped Windows and embraced the Mac. 

When I purchased my new MacBook Pro recently, I met a long-time Mac user who proudly welcomed me to the fold and proclaimed, "You will feel liberated!"

In many ways, he's right. It's great fun to use and most of the software I've used on the Mac so far is so infinitely superior to anything I've used on Windows that I felt the need to share my love with the world.

I'm doing that via my new Mac topics only blog, Why Mac. Pop in and see what the fuss is all about.

Hark, hist...

The crisp crunch of sneakers on gravel. The chunky clunk of a steel spoon in a mug of hot chocolate. The sizzling scorch of bacon frying to a crisp. Sounds evoke memories.

I am transported back to my callow youth each time I drive my car nowadays. The reason? I've hooked up my iPod to an FM transmitter so I can listen to my music collection on my car's FM receiver. It works fabulously, but at times there's a crackle and a hiss around the edges of a song.

Instead of making me cringe and fret, it brings a nostalgic smile to my lips. Memories arise of LPs and 45s, spinning discs of sound. Sleeves that were an art form. Learned teenage discussions on the merits of magnetic cartridges versus ceramic ones. A diamond stylus that looked nothing like Cartier.

Crackles, pops, hisses, jumps. Tears of frustration when the needle slid across a vinyl disc and refused to play "Cold Turkey", or stuck obstinately in its groove like a middle-aged banker, repeating "Can't Buy Me Love" ad nauseum until you gave it a gentle nudge. The delicate precision with which you lifted the turntable arm with a finger and guided it across the disc, letting it down gingerly on the millimeter slim groove between two songs. Repeating it, again and again, until you deciphered all the lyrics. Holding the LP sleeve in your hands as the music washed over you, poring over the enigmatic sleeve notes and the photographs, looking for magical incantations and finding meaning and significance in the most obscure places.

Cutting math classes to trot across the Oval and pop in at Rhythm House and browse through the boxes of LPs. Selecting a handful and braving the glare of the attendants who well knew you couldn't afford to buy even one, but were circumscribed by market forces from kicking you out on your rear. Taking your booty to one of the listening booths that surrounded the main floor. Safely ensconced behind the closed door, the world shut out and a new world waiting in a paper sleeve.

Slipping the LP out and popping it on the turntable. Letting the arm down to draw magic from a diamond bouncing along invisible grooves. Flailing guitars, crashing drums, delirious voices, plaintive violins, whispering beasts, singing birds, joyful saxophones. Tunes that reached into your chest and pulled your heart out and hung it on the wall to dry. Words that raced through your ears, found the grooves on your brain and skated there wildly forever. They're still skating around.

We lost so much when we went digital.

But I love my iPod-FM marriage.

Did I lose the Muse?

It's been a long time, now I'm coming back home...

Well, I probably misplaced the blogging Muse, but not for nothing is this the Return of the Son of Blog with a url that reads blogusinterruptus.

I was away both physically and mentally and technologically and all of that was fun.

Mac Attack

And now, this erstwhile Windows user has joined the forces of the Appleheads and has moved to the MacBook Pro. Probably time for a MacWin blog on the virtues of the MacTel over the WinTel, learning curve notwithstanding...

Wanderings

It's been a dozen days since I visited Blogsville. In the interim I've been musing on words and their true meaning.

For example:
Dismayed adj. - the emotion experienced when the maid quits
Metrosexual n. - 1. a person who gets turned on by trains; 2. one who likes doing it on trains (see "mile-high club" for other such junkies)
Broad gauge n. - Preferred by metrosexuals

Socratic thinking, Aristotelian logic

Size matters. Size doesn't matter. Which is the phallusy?

Hands on

Started the new financial year by completing a 1000-piece jigsaw of "Drawing Hands" by M.C. Escher.

The sense of accomplishment derived from completing a large, intricate jigsaw of a great painting is the closest that an art lover with a complete absence of talent will ever get to being a painter. And the intimate relationship that one enters into with every minute detail of the painting while figuring out which piece goes where is incredibly rewarding.

This is the latest in a series that has already encompassed the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's masterpieces on the Sistine Chapel ceiling and altar wall and is scheduled to include three more Escher works and five Van Goghs.

Breaking news: Film star spouts sense!

I can't believe I'm actually blogging this, but here goes:

Read Aamir Khan's interview with Tehelka at:
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main17.asp?filename=hub040106Mainstream_CS.asp

(With these kind of links I'm never sure if the link will be valid a few weeks from now: I distrust stuff that ends in .asp)

Here's a celebrity who is giving a sensible interview and an intelligent one and is making a point that urgently needs to be made but which no one else seems to care about: the media in India is going to the dogs. Consumerist running dogs.

Okay, I like dogs, so let's rephrase that: the media in India is down in the garbage dump.

My pet fetish is, of course, the quality of writing, or rather the lack thereof; but even if one was to excuse the appalling grammar, spastic punctuation and ludicrous spelling mistakes, the actual content of 90% of today's newspapers and tv channels is pure drivel.

It's the sort of stuff no self-respecting cat would want to bring home. If fish-and-chips shops attempted to wrap their offerings in these newspapers, the fish would jump back in the water, batter and all, and the chips would re-assemble themselves into potatoes and roll away. I am sometimes tempted to apologise to my tv set for subjecting it to such vapid tripe.

Mr Khan has risen in my esteem considerably for speaking sense and speaking it well.

Living on a prayer. Or not.

The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin) informs me that a "Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer". It goes on to say:

"Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.

"And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.

"Because it is the most scientifically rigorous investigation of whether prayer can heal illness, the study, begun almost a decade ago and involving more than 1,800 patients, has for years been the subject of speculation."

And they've spent $2.3 million on this so far.

You just gotta love Americans, scientists and American scientists.

Something about this whole scenario intrigues me: using science to investigate whether religion works. That's like appointing a teetotaller as a wine-taster. Or putting a vegetarian in charge of Angus Steak House's kitchen. It can be done, but what would be the point?

If you have faith, no amount of scientific study is going to convince you otherwise. And if you don't, then you don't need the scientific study anyway. Not this particular one, that is.

Well, that was fun!

My previous blog on authors I have loved was an enjoyable romp through my memories. I started it intending to briefly comment on V.S. Naipaul's chutzpah and to list some authors that I found tedious.

But as I tried to remember the authors I found unmemorable - oxymoronic attempt, if ever there was one - the authors who have brought me so many hours of enjoyment just kept popping up in my train of thought, like prairie dogs or whack-a-moles.

What started out as a rant became a rave.

Ce'st la vie. (And I still can't do the accent on the 'e'.)

Nay, Paul, here are a few of my favourite pens

Or possibly, Nahi, pal.

Nobel Laureate Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul ("Surajprasad" sounds more like my corner paanwalla than a Nobel-man) has seen fit to tear into some icons of English literature including stalwarts such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen. Mark Twain and H.G. Wells are apparently treated with more deference. In the past he has also trashed E.M. Forster and his own acolyte, Paul Theroux.

Where Naipaul roams, I shall not fear to tread.

Authors whose books I have begun then flung from me in disgust, usually before getting through a third of the book: Arundhati Roy, James Joyce, Shobha De (and no I won't chuck in an extraa 'a' or an accent on the 'e' - I'm frugal that way), Umberto Eco (except for The Name of the Rose).

Authors whom I cordially detest, but at least I made it through their books: Sidney Sheldon, Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham, Jonathan Kellerman, and all the other airport authors. You buy 'em at the airport, you read 'em on the flight (thus inviting deep vein thrombosis) and you leave 'em in the seat pocket for the next unsuspecting traveller. The best you can say about them is that they're more palatable and less indigestible than the airline food.

Authors who I find either incredibly pretentious or tear-inducingly boring but I have (usually) manfully struggled through their opiate opaque opuses: Salman Rushdie, Ayn Rand, practically any Russian great you care to name. Collectively, they have probably knocked a decade off my life span.

Authors whom I devoured in my misspent youth, but now, on revisiting them in middle-age, I wonder what all the fuss was about: Leon Uris, James Clavell. This may have something to do with the size of their offerings and muscular atrophy brought on by my advancing years.

Authors whom I was force-fed in my youth, but whom I nevertheless enjoyed and returned to willingly in my adult life, though I would never have confessed that to my English teachers - that would be selling out: William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, Alan Paton, E.M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway.

Authors who are acknowledged "classic greats" whom I have enjoyed, often many times over: Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, Saki, Oscar Wilde, Voltaire, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Jack London.

Authors who kept me awake at night when I was a boy in a hurry to finish the book so I could get to the next one, and who cares if there was school the next day or even an exam: Alistair Maclean, Oliver Strange, Louis L'Amour, Agatha Christie, whoever wrote the Biggles series (I can't imagine I've forgotten his name!), Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Wallace, Leslie Charteris, John Creasey, G.K. Chesterton, Jules Verne, John Wyndham, Enid Blyton.

Authors who made me guffaw when I was young and who still make me chuckle: Frank Richards (sadly unavailable nowadays - the Billy Bunter guy), Richmal Compton, Stephen Leacock, Goscinny and Uderzo, Herge (I'd love to do the accent on this 'e', but I can't).

Worthy successors to the chuckle-inducers: Ben Elton, Stephen Fry, Tom Holt, Douglas Adams, Scott Adams, Joseph Heller (but only that one book - with a debut that brilliant any follow-up is bound to be a crashing failure).

Authors who will one day be considered "classic greats" if there's justice in this world and if global warming doesn't kill off the human species first: John Fowles, John le Carre (another accent I'd like to do on the 'e', but sadly can't), Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, E.L. Doctorow, Robert Harris, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes.

Authors of "Indian fiction" - what a nauseating term - who are well worth a read: R.K. Narayan (the godfather and the one to beat), Vikas Swarup, Samit Basu (Indian science fiction and fantasy, no less!), Vikram Seth (but only his poetic epic), Shashi Tharoor.

Authors who provide me a cathartic outlet in glorious prose for my murderous instincts: Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Elizabeth George, Minnette Walters, John Dickson Carr, Rex Stout, Georges Simenon, Michael Dibdin, Ellery Queen (though he was really two guys).

Authors who provide me a cathartic outlet in hardboiled prose for my murderous instincts: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler, James Cain, James Hadley Chase, Dorothy B. Hughes, Mario Puzo.

Authors who make me wonder and want to live to be four hundred and three so I can live on their worlds: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Ben Bova, Robert Heinlein, Ursula le Guin, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, C.J. Cherryh.

Authors who make me wonder if they're on illegal substances but who can get me high without a needle: Lewis Carroll, J.R.R. Tolkien, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick (unfortunate name in Hinglish, that), Roald Dahl.

Authors who explain this incredible universe of ours and leave my head spinning: Bertrand Russell, John Gribbin, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, James Gleick, Roger Penrose.

But if I was left alone on this earth with only one author's works to keep me company for all of eternity, there is no author I would rather choose than P.G. Wodehouse.

Sandwich moment - NON

A sandwich moment in Hong Kong - New-Old-New.

A commentary on the city in a thousand words (and acres of glass).

Squirt Squiddles and Diddles

Time to welcome another blogger on board: say hello to Squirt aka Squiddly-Diddly. Squiddly-Diddly? That sounds vaguely obscene and definitely juvenile.

Well, Squirt, you're probably one and may even be the other. (I shall leave it to the reader's critical analysis to decide which is which.) Nevertheless (or maybe because thereof), you're one of my favourite people, so I shall point the world (or at least that small microcosm of intelligent and discerning readers who brave my blog) to your site, which has been featured for a couple of days in my Friends column.

It says a lot for the state of the world as I know it that I found it easier and quicker to pop in an HTML link to your site than I did to take time off and key these words.

However, there's something to be said for not being an early worm, so here's bytes in your blog!

Out in Bohemia

Bohemia, this one's for you!

I thought about linking to your blog and wondered if you'd be pleased or upset. Then I figured that if you're blogging, this comes with the territory. So expect to be linked.

And keep blogging!

As Mr Anderson says, May you find sweet inspiration, may your memory not be dull; may you rise to dizzy success, may your wit be quick and strong; may you constantly amaze us, may your answers not be wrong; May your head be on your shoulders, May your tongue be in your cheek; And most of all we pray that you may come back next week!

Watch the elegant sound of time

I have a watch.

While awaiting my connecting flight in Bangkok, it was purchased for me.

I have owned watches before, but this one is special. Not just for the sentiment behind its purchase, for that is not for this blog.

It does not have a battery.

It ticks. It absolutely ticks!

There is an entire generation that has grown up on quartz watches that require batteries to make them go. There are variations on this theme including solar powered watches and digital ones and ones with faces that light up and others that tell you the phases of the moon and where you are in the world and whether you will meet a mysterious stranger in black tomorrow. Most of these are silent and the only noise they make is if they have an alarm function: a subdued or raucous beep, depending on their family background and upbringing.

They are accurate enough to clock atoms decaying. Or racing cars completing laps. Or lap dancers setting hearts racing.

But none of these watches tick.

Mine does.

There is something wonderfully reassuring and healthy and heart-warming when I stretch my arms behind my head for a moment's exercise at the keyboard, and as my wrist lies near my ear, my watch chatters busily but respectfully in my ear. It is an unobtrusive ticking - my wrist needs to be right next to my ear for me to hear it - but it is unmistakable. It's as if it is mimicking my heart beat, a regular life-affirming metronome.

My watch has a plain austere face: nothing showy, nothing bold. No date indicator, no second hand. Thin unobtrusive Roman numerals and anorexic hands. It tells the time. That's all that it does. It doesn't even tell me the time to the nearest second or even the nearest minute, merely the nearest five minutes.

There is a philosophical approach behind this old-fashioned method of measuring time; an acknowledgment that in our headlong rush towards productivity and efficiency and time management we have lost sight of something deeper, something more subtle.

It has a black leather strap with a simple buckle and two loops. No Velcro or elastic or clasps.

It does not command attention from the observer, but it demands attention from the owner. It is an automatic, which means I need to wear it for it to continue to work. It derives its inspiration and momentum from the movement of my arm as I go through the day. As I go through my daily life, my watch draws its sustenance from me, not from the entropy of some battery.

And it ticks to thank me for continuing to give it life. The watch has me.

You can go back again

I'm visiting Hong Kong after 14 years.

The last time I was here the airport was a primitive shambles. My suitcase wouldn't fit into the x-ray machine so I was asked to open it while the thoola pawed through it in a bored fashion. Thoola is not a Hong Kong word. My suitcase hasn't gotten any smaller, but Hong Kong airport is now a self-described "world-class facility". World-class is somewhere above first-class but below heavenly. My suitcase no longer needs to fit into an x-ray machine: it stayed un-x-rayed as I walked out. That's the first time I've used two hyphens in one word. Hong Kong will do that to you.

When I go back to Mumbai in 5 days I will be greeted by Sahar airport that will still be a primitive shambles. Thank god for continuity.

My suitcase stayed virgo intacta but my temperature was taken as I headed for Immigration. It was done with great panache and non-intrusively. We were merely herded through a narrow corridor, three or four abreast, while infrared cameras kept a wary eye out for someone who registered Vesuvius on the red scale. I had encountered a similar camera at Shanghai airport. This seems to be a Chinese tradition since no other airport seems to care about your temperature. I feel loved and honored.

Immigration formalities at Hong Kong airport have to be the most boring in the world. The officer takes your passport and landing card, scans the first page, waits for his computer to beep, looks you in the eye searchingly, glances down at your passport photo, recognizes you, stamps your passport and hands it back to you. Some remarkable things about this exercise:
1. This is the first landing card I've seen that is in triplicate but with self-carbonized paper. Way cool.
2. No words are exchanged, not even a cursory good morning. Completely unlike, say, the US authorities who want to know if you're having a good day, how long you plan to stay around and where, why the devil you've landed up there anyway and whether you're wearing chartreuse underwear.
3. The Hong Kong Immigration officers are obviously chosen for their artistic eye and their ability to make intuitive leaps of accurate judgement. There is no other way that they could compare your face with your passport photograph and let you in to the country. It is an acknowledged fact that if people actually looked like their passport photographs, humanity would have celibated its way into extinction more than a few generations ago and we would never have needed to invent the camera. (Webster thought: Can celibate be a verb considering it refers to a lack of action?)
4. Indians do not need a visa to visit Hong Kong. This has to be the only place in the world where this is so. Let's hear it for Hong Kong! (Does this however mean that Hong Kong is not world-class, after all?)
5. The Immigration counter has a bowl of complimentary lemon mints. Never saw that at Newark.

A sign of a truly civilized airport greeted us as we sauntered nonchalantly out of Immigration: Starbucks. The force is with us. I am not one of those who turn their noses up at the concept of overpriced coffee in absurd cup sizes. I have drunk too many cups of terrible coffee in too many places to sniff at the Starbucks phenomenon.

It represents, along with MacDonald's, the triumph of standardized mediocrity over individual genius.

The Starbucks coffee may not be the best in the world - my maid at home has been trained by my wife to whip up a cup of coffee that leaves Starbucks in the dust of coffee grounds. Calling a small cup of coffee Tall is pretentious, while it may be accurate considering it holds about a liter; and calling a larger size Grande, with an "e", no less, smacks of the silliness of the local kirana shop re-christening itself "shoppe" (or worse, "shoppee").

Nonetheless, when you are 2763 miles from home as the 767 flies, it is reassuring to know what you are letting yourself in for when you part with a small fortune for a cup of java: a standard cup of coffee that tastes the same in New Jersey, Minnesota, London, Paris, Singapore and Hong Kong - no mean feat, that. And let's not forget the comfortable sofas, the stay-as-long-as-you-like ambience and the cheesecake.

I have just returned from a breakfast of a small cappucino and a medium apple turnout at the Starbucks that is next to my hotel, so that may explain some of my enthusiasm.

There has been much made of late of how Mumbai needs to transform itself into Shanghai. I think we should reset our sights and aim for Hong Kong instead. We have a lot more in common with Hong Kong, I think. For one, our shared (till recently) history of democracy. For another, narrow crowded streets. For a third, shabby rundown buildings cheek-by-jowl with tony malls and ugly residential skyscrapers that resemble concrete anthills. I could go on, but it seems that Hong Kong has all the problems that we have. Yet, they've managed to transform it into a world-class (that word again!) city without the ruthless upheaval and sweeping under the carpet that Shanghai has undergone. The city works and is clean, unlike Mumbai which today merely stutters along and is filthy.

I blog about Hong Kong but end up back in Mumbai. Maybe that's where my heart lies.

Ambition, Distraction, Uglification & Derision

This is the twentieth post in this blog: so that's Ambition fulfilled - one of them, anyway. Hey, I'm easily pleased.

Distraction was provided by a front-page article in the Economic Times on how English-medium schools are teaching multiplication tables the wrong way when compared with non-English-medium schools. Apart from the point that it seems to be a slow news day when non-events make the front page, let's see what point the author, a T.K. Arun, has to make.

His (I'm presuming a gender, here) contention appears to be, and I quote:
"Six ones are six, six twos are twelve... and so on. While each term is valid in itself, together, collectively [sic] they fail to convey the idea that the term five sixes means six added together five times." He acknowledges that 5X6 has the same value as 6X5 but he goes on, "But the expression five sixes means adding 6 together 5 times, which is conceptually different from six fives, or adding five together six times."

There seems to a difference in T.K. Arun's English and mine. When I say five stones, I mean (no, not Jagger, Richards, et al) stone, stone, stone, stone and stone. 5 of 'em. When I say five beetles, I mean (no, not John, Paul etc.) beetle, beetle, beetle, beetle and beetle. 5 of 'em. So when I say five sixes, I mean (no, not Dhoni in action) six, six, six, six and six. 5 of 'em.

So I AM adding 6 together five time. What else would I be doing? Together or collectively? So much for his theory that "(the methods) fail to convey the idea that the term five sixes means six added together five times."

And of course, adding 6 together 5 times IS conceptually different from six fives, or adding five together six times, which would be - bear with me, here - five, five, five, five, five and (you guessed it) five. 6 of 'em. Compare with six, six, six, six and six. In seven words or less.

So, what the devil is his grouse? Uglification of the Indian mathematical soul, probably. His dander has been got and his umbrage has been taken by how the mighty land of the inventors of the zero (which incidentally, doesn't lend itself to multiplication) and the inheritors of Ramanujam are being sullied by the dumb white man and his language. Our patrimony is at stake and we are in imminent danger of losing our cutting edge.

No wonder this made the front page.

I assure you, Derision is the last thing on my mind.

For the literary-minded among my few readers, I trust you spotted the literary reference in the title.

Holi thoughts

I've just got off the keyboard after sending an email to a young squirt of whom I am inordinately fond and I had food for thought. So I climbed back on the keyboard again.

What is it about the cell phone generation that leads them to prefer SMS and chatting to sending emails? Is it instant gratification, is it laziness, is it sloppiness, is it impetuosity, is it convenience, is it plain orneriness? A bit of all, I guess. I conducted a straw poll with others of Squirt's generation (well, a few years younger actually) and it was universal - SMS and chatting scores over email.

I guess it's a generational thing. much as I prefer emails to putting pen to paper, they prefer putting thumb to keypad.

To quote what I wrote to Squirt:
How can writing mail be a pain? In the first place you get a human-sized keyboard to bash the thing out on instead of a gnat-sized bunch of numbers masquerading as letters. Then you have a screen large enough to watch movies on and on which letters and characters assume their normal size instead of being scrunched into a space that a self-respecting flea would scoff at. Finally, a mail by its very existence speaks of thought and care and premeditation unlike an SMS that is a thing of whimsy and flightiness.

The other thing that bothers me about SMSes and chats is the way that they promote crappy spelling and absent grammar. It's all very well to say that a language is a living thing and it evolves exactly by such maltreatment. I still think it's cruel to abjure punctuation and to maul words into phonetic spellings. Phoney-tic, more like it. There's a reason that the English language does not have a phonetic script - so we can have spelling bees.

For instance, in Hindi, it would be fairly impossible to misspell a word - you pronounce it like so, you spell it like so. Boring. English is so much more exciting and unpredictable.

Apropos of languages, I also mooted an addition to the Latin vocabulary in my mail to Squirt. I'm reproducing it here as a copyright measure. Squirt was protesting my use of "Coolio" when I meant "Cool". I had to clarify:

Coolio is actually Latin. First conjugation from the infinitive cooliare, meaning to be cool; first person coolio, meaning I am cool. The other declensions are coolias, cooliat, cooliamus, cooliatis, cooliant . Meaning respectively, you are cool, he/she/it is cool, we are cool, you (plural) are cool and they are cool. Now you can impress your friends. Coolias.

Getting Bloggy

And now there's an addition to the Friends column. Sunshine is sharing with us her musings of an eternally restless mind. Welcome aboard!

Maybe Mugsy and Sunshine together will shame me into being more regular with this bloggety-blog thing. But they have the advantage of youth. So, maybe they won't.

3 Movies and a Review

A tale of three movies: one hyped, one under the radar and one surprise package. Let's review them in the order in which I saw them.

Under the radar: Crash, an L.A. tale of intersecting destinies, racial tensions, bad guys who aren't all bad and good guys with human failings. I saw this many months ago and while I no longer recall the details, I remember walking out of the theater with a spring in my step and my head churning with thoughts and emotions - exactly what a good movie should evoke. I remember outstanding performances from Matt Dillon and Don Cheadle and a surprisingly minuscule role for Sandra Bullock, whose talents and unconventional beauty seemed wasted in an otherwise strong movie.

5 stars, 2 thumbs up and a pending DVD purchase.

Surprise package: Munich, Steven Spielberg's tale of revenge and futility. I saw this about 3 weeks ago (around the time of my last blog). Apart from Spielberg, the only other names to reckon with in the movie are Eric Bana and Daniel Craig, neither of whom are yet A-list box office stars, and the always remarkable Geoffrey Rush (fabulous in The Tailor of Panama with Pierce Brosnan). The movie narrates the efforts of a secret Israeli hit squad to assassinate 11 Palestinian terrorists or supporters in revenge for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Surprise package because this movie doesn't seem to have taken over the box office and the media the way Spielberg movies usually do. It deserves to, however.

At 3 hours this is not your edge-of-the-seat swift-paced thriller, but it has no shortage of exciting moments and nail-biting moments of tension. What it also has is a narrative that is intelligent, passionate and clear-sighted: there are no solutions here, no black and white heroes and villains; the Israelis aren't exactly super-efficient, cold-blooded killers flawlessly executing a master plan and the Palestinians aren't stupid blood-thirsty ogres. The movie neatly sidesteps all the cliches that might have littered the path of a lesser director.

There is a gently despondent air to the film, a miasma of regret at the ultimate futility of eye-for-an-eye politics and what, in the end, are immature responses to huge problems, usually of our own making. But the movie also acknowledges that this is who we are, this is what we do and even if it makes no sense, we often cannot help that we do it.

Ironies abound: a grandmotherly Golda Meir approving the revenge project and making tea for her chosen project leader while she sends him off on a quest that will destroy his soul; a mission that officially will never exist, yet that seeks to create a legend; Geoffrey Rush's self-effacing bureaucratic George Smiley persona calmly discussing the parameters of the mission while munching through a box of the Turkish sweet, baklava; the Israeli intelligence's insistence that the team produce bills if they want reimbursement of funds; the bumbling bomb-maker in the squad whose expertise is actually bomb disposal not bombing; the perfect family portrait of one of the intended victims, but that doesn't prevent him from being blown to bits; the amateur intelligence-gathering from the mercenary French underworld that lays the team open to being double-crossed and betrayed; the success of the mission that carries with it the seeds of its own failure.

A solid movie that stays with you a long, long time. 5 stars, a thumbs up and a potential DVD purchase.

Hyped: Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee's tale of gay love in the mountains. In a word, B-o-ring. This movie has been hyped beyond belief and certainly beyond its slim capabilities. The buzz about this movie is the gay romance between two cowboys who discover deep love during a night of passion high in the mountains; a deep love that allegedly spans the next two decades while both of them get married, have children and lead otherwise heterosexual lives. I have a number of objections to this.

In the first place, they are not cowboys, they are sheep herders whose remit is to guard over a flock of sheep during the summer grazing months. The only cow who shows up in the movie has a 2-second cameo while hay is being dumped in her paddock. You can't be a cowboy without cows. Sheep somehow just don't cut it.

Secondly, the movie abounds in cars, pickup trucks and similar wheeled menaces. In the cowboy movies that I grew up watching, the only wheeled contrivances were the wagons that were circled at night to protect against marauding Indians (sorry, native Americans) and the stagecoaches that were robbed by bandits with bandanas around their faces. Something wrong, therefore, with the period of the movie.

Next, and this is critical: there is absolutely no chemistry between the leading pair. There is nothing in the story that explains why these two fall in love with each other so desperately. You might argue that love is blind and in the real world there is no reason why people fall in love with each other, but that is flimflammery. There are always reasons for love: they may not be logical reasons, but they are reasons none the less. And we're not talking about real life anyway, we're talking about the movies, which have a responsibility to tell a story and to involve the audience in that story. Watch African Queen and see the inexplicable attraction between Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. Watch Casablanca and catch the smouldering sparks between Humphrey Bogart (again!) and Ingrid Bergman. Watch any Meg Ryan movie. Heck, even catch the normally wooden Tom Cruise with his delectable spouse (at the time, in real life too), Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut and you will see what I'm talking about when I say chemistry. Sorry, Jack and Ennis ain't got it.

Since I will now be accused of being homophobic, let me point to another gay themed movie that I consider a genuine classic: Midnight Cowboy. Enough said.

Finally, what was the story line of this unfortunate movie? Boy meets boy; they share a night of passion on a mountain top (passion, incidentally, that looks more like a bar-room brawl than gentle love - I somehow can't quite see Elton John and his beau behaving like that); they share some more days of bonding; they go their separate ways; they meet babes (Michelle Williams, by the way, is cute as a button!); they have babies; they keep meeting up over the years to rekindle their passion; one dies, the other doesn't. That's a story? Give me Hans Christan Andersen anyday.

My faith in the Oscars has been renewed after the resounding rejection of this movie at the awards. I do wonder though why Ang Lee got Best Director for this.

2 stars (for the wonderful locales), both thumbs down and I wouldn't keep this DVD if you paid me.

Danish? I think not.

Story so far: An editor in Denmark decides to push the envelope on self-censorship and free speech. He invites contributions from a bunch of cartoonists. The topic: The face of Muhammed. Background (in case you've been vacationing on another planet): Muhammed is the Prophet who founded the religion of Islam, which proscribes visual depictions of Muhammed himself, Allah (God), and, according to some severe interpretations, any person, in fact (effectively putting the kibosh on Michelangelo and his ilk).

Forty cartoonists respond, twelve of whom depict Muhammed (in defiance of Islamic proscription), some of which are in questionable taste. All are published in September 2005 (congruence with the World Trade Towers destruction month a coincidence?). Protests start from October 2005, varying from petitions from Danish Muslim groups to a request to meet the Danish Prime Minister by eleven Arab ambassadors. An apology is published by the newspaper. The meeting with the ambassadors is refused, apparently because the Danish government thought they were demanding criminal prosecution against the newspaper.

Protests escalate worldwide as publicity grows. Embassies in Arab nations are stoned and burnt. Riots break out. People die.

Arguments in favour of the cartoons range from freedom of speech and freedom of expression to, "Hey, we make fun of Christianity and our God and our politicians, so what's the big deal?"

As a reasonable member of humanity (I'm in a minority, I know, but bear with me) I find the whole imbroglio fantastic beyond belief. If I was to attempt to explain it to a visiting alien I'm not sure I'd be able to show humanity in a favourable light.

Let's start with the starting point, the cartoons and the request that prompted them. Does the Danish press have any doubts about its own freedom? Why did it feel the need to get up on a table and thump its collective chest about how free it was by publishing cartoons that it knew were offensive to a significant section of humanity? What's so offensive about self-censorship anyway? Maybe self-censorship in certain contexts can be viewed as a terrified response to threats and domination, but surely that wasn't happening here? Isn't self-censorship also an indication of maturity and a humane approach to tricky situations?

For example, an intelligent parent chastising a child is unlikely to use abusive language no matter what the provocation, and instead will try and get the point across in a reasonable way. That's self-censorship.

Or, a calm driver will not succumb to road rage and will refrain from giving the public finger to someone who cuts into his lane. He may well yell abuses safely within the confines of his own car, but will usually not roll down the window and inform the other driver of his questionable parentage. That's self-censorship. (Now you know my driving response tactics.)

Or, your best friend falls in love with a dork who gives you the creeps and you refrain from hurting his feelings by professing to admire her knowledge of the best way to cook sweet potatoes. That's self-censorship.

Self-censorship can't be all bad. So, why did the Danish newspaper feel this urge to do something about it.

The argument that we do it to ourselves and our religious figures, so we can do it to yours is asinine. It's on the lines of, "I beat up my wife, so it's ok for me to pop over on the weekend and beat up your wife too." Two wrongs don't make it right.

The West (and particularly Europe) prides itself on its mature approach to religion and its ability to separate Church and State. There is a lot of undisguised dismay, cynicism and ridicule aimed at the US for its unabashed espousal of the Religious Right point of view in these post-Clinton years. Much of this is because Europe has tried to pretend that it thinks of all religions as equal and equally worthy of scorn, a point of view that agnostics and atheists alike gleefully espouse. However we seem to have lost sight of the fact that religions continue to matter to those who practise them and if we are to live together, we have to agree that people are entitled to that opinion. Freedom of opinion, right?

Okay, let's move on to the reactions and responses to what was admittedly a decidedly stupid action. (Well, I'm not sure anyone else has admitted to it being a stupid action, but I sure think it was.)

If anything, the reaction has been even more stupid than the cartoons themselves.

How does burning an embassy and killing one's own people in riots constitute a sensible response? Boycotting Danish goods made some sense and would probably have hurt the West where it counted most - in their pockets. Rioting in Indonesia and Jordan and Syria merely proves the West's point, namely, that all Muslims are fanatical apes. Which is so not.

But the supreme irony of this entire episode is this:

"Danish" is an adjective meaning "of or from Denmark" and it's pronounced "Dane-ish". But there's another meaning and pronunciation. Pronounced "Done-ish" but with a soft "d" as in "there" (which oddly, doesn't have a "d" but does have a "d" sound) it means, guess what?

It means "intelligent" and is a common Muslim name. Yep, Muslim name.

Danish, Danish.

The world is weird.

Tarmac and Ice

Back online after an eight-day hiatus caused by some travel to very cold climes indeed. I'm now sitting in New Jersey in the relative warmth of 19 F, which on a more sensible scale is -7 Celsius. I have just escaped from Minnesota, where for my pains I was privileged to witness the coldest day of this year's winter at -8 F with a wind chill factor that brought it down to -17 F. Now, that translates to -27 Celsius. Let's spell that out: Minus twenty-seven degrees Celsius.

Back in Bombay I would have been basking in Plus twenty-seven degrees Celsius, a difference of 54 degrees.

My respect for Arctic and Antarctic explorers and mountaineers knows no bounds. My estimation of them as some of the daftest bravehearts to walk this planet is also confirmed.

Over the last week I've spent an unseemly number of hours in planes, airports and taxis. Also in taxi-ing planes at airports. And stationary non-taxi-ing planes, too.

My flight from Bombay boarded on time, pushed off from the gate then sat on the tarmac with an unspecified "technical fault" for 90 minutes. Not a very reassuring start to some serious globe trotting. However, we did take off uneventfully once the fault, whatever it was, had been fixed. I suspect it had something to do with the kitchen, judging from the inflight food, if one can dignify it with such a term.

On landing at Heathrow, we spent 45 minutes on the tarmac waiting for a gate. Since this was 50% less than the time spent at Bombay waiting outside a gate, it should be considered an improvement in service standards.

This was Saturday. Across the Atlantic the worst storm in living memory to hit the US eastern seaboard dumped 26 inches of snow in a few hours in New York. Naturally, since that was where I was headed next. (As a digression, what is it with this 26 inches figure? That was the amount of rain that Bombay received in July of 2005 in one night. And now New York does the 26 inch snowfall show.)

Saturday flights to New York were cancelled by the dozen, but since my flight was scheduled for Sunday, I feared not. More fool, I. We took off from London on Sunday on the dot, flapped across the Atlantic uneventfully, reached Newark airport on the dot, were granted a landing slot with no ado and touched down gracefully on the tarmac on the dot. Okay, I've given you enough dots for you to join them and figure out the magic word. Yes, tarmac!

We spent the next 3 hours (also reckoned as 180 minutes or 10800 seconds) sitting on the tarmac at Newark. Of course, this was in instalments of "a few minutes more", "just about five or six minutes to go", "momentarily" and similar reassurance-oriented lies. Apparently the plane ahead of us at the gate, an El Al airliner, had got stuck in the ice and couldn't be moved away from the gate. One would think that Newark airport with over a hundred gates around would have found us an alternative gate to spare, but it took them 2 hours (120 minutes or 7200 seconds) to do so. Some bright spark finally did get the idea after the 120th minute (or maybe union regulations prevented them from doing so any earlier) and they taxied us over to another gate. Alas, the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, as Robert Burns was wont to say. (Dunno why he couldn't speak the Queen's, but that could be because of those unnatural Scottish garments, kilts.)

At the new gate, we waited for another 1 hour (60 minutes or 3600 seconds) because the aerobridge was stuck in the ice and couldn't be extended out to meet our plane.

By this time, of course, the habitual restrained demeanour of four hundred odd passengers had melted (unlike the ice) and the air was thick with comments and suggestions being passed around. These ranged from exhortations to pop the chutes open and have us slide down to our old friend the tarmac (pretty daft considering it was minus umpteen Celsius outside and our butts would probably have frozen to the slide) to calls to pop open some of the bottles in the bar so we could all wet our whistles.

The crew on board being stoutly British passed the time by making announcements over the loudspeakers about how this kind of thing would never have happened in ol' Blighty. Strangely, all announcements were preceded by "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls" - they seemed to take their junior passengers very seriously.

My Monday trip to upstate New York was cancelled because flights refused to take off, but my Tuesday trip to Minnesota was on schedule. Of course, in their infinite wisdom when the airline cancelled my Monday flight they also cancelled my Tuesday reservation to Minnesota. I guess their reasoning went, "Since we cancelled Monday's flight and he couldn't travel on Monday, he wouldn't want to travel on Tuesday either, so though we'll have the flight take off, there's no point having him on it, so let's cancel his reservations all around. Tea, anyone?"

Modern American airports specialize in having fewer check-in staff around and in providing the passenger with the exciting activity of checking himself (or herself) in at a funky kiosk. So when the nearest kiosk cordially informed me that there was no way in hell it was going to check me in, I had to run around the airport to find something resembling a human being in authority that I could talk to. This turned out to be a short plump lady in spectacles and a beard who resembled a minor hobbit. The beard was a mere starter's edition, but impressive nonetheless for adorning the face of one of the fairer, less hirsute sex. However, Mama Hobbit turned out to be a godsend and far more impressive than appearances would portend. She tapped out some cryptic commands on a stone-age computer quicker than Neo dodging Agent Smith's virtual bullets and hey, presto! my reservations were reinstated.

Thankfully, that, so far, has been the last of the excitement as far as my air travel goes. Since then I've uneventfully negotiated a day trip to Chicago and a return to Newark.

Tomorrow it's London again and a few days later, Bombay. Let's see what the future brings.

BTW, tarmac is actually short for tarmacadam, a paving material of tar and broken stone, mixed in a factory and shaped during paving. Tarmacadam, in turn, is short for tar-penetration macadam, a type of highway pavement no longer commonly used. Tarmac was invented when E. Purnell Hooley was passing a tarworks in 1901. (A Eureka moment, presumably.) Or so I am credibly informed by Wikipedia. It is ironic that I have spent so much of my recent life on something that is no longer commonly used. Perhaps tarmac is really concrete. Not abstract.

The cold is addling my brain.

Grammys and kids - Lennon and McCartney

Was awoken yesterday at the crack of dawn by sounds emanating from the TV room. My kids had tuned in to the live presentation of the Grammys. Time was when I could recognise most of the names in the show. Now that's restricted to the Lifetime Achievement Awards.

I missed U2 but I did catch Mariah Carey - no, not literally, more's the pity, she's quite a delicious armful - and an assortment of rap and hip-hop moguls who made me wish I'd stayed in bed. Paul McCartney was average at best, which is such a sad thing to have to say of as pivotal a genius as him. Bruce Springsteen was at his spare best: I do think he does "Nebraska" kind of music so much better than "Born To Run" kind.

The strangest show was a toss-up between a tribute to Sly and the Family Stone (Stoned, more like it) complete with Joss Stone (no relation, I think) who is unreasonably cute and Steve Tyler who is wonderfully wacked out, and a duet with Linkin Park (Lincoln, get it? duh!) and Jay-Z, who being American is Zee not Zed. (Zed's dead, baby.)

Jay-Z was rapping for all he was worth and I was mentally tuned out until I noticed that he was wearing a John Lennon t-shirt. Where did that come from? I wasn't aware that Lennon was an icon for rappers. Then, surprise, surprise! LP and JZ broke out into "Yesterday" only to be joined on stage by the man himself. So there they were, Paul McCartney, LP's main dude (whoever he be) and Jay-Z resplendent in a Lennon t-shirt. That must have been the first time in almost four decades that Lennon and McCartney shared a stage. Even if one was in the flesh and the other was on the flesh. Weird.

Support needed

A day ago I had a stiff neck, probably caused by sleeping at an awkward angle. It felt like a vertebra in my neck had swollen. Well, it did.

That prompted the thought that if women had their breasts in a vertical line from chin to navel, they would probably need a verti-bra.

Highway Blues

I seem to be doing a lot of morning drives lately. Early morning drives. Really early morning drives. Not all of them pleasant.

Thursday 6 a.m. saw me heading to a spot 300 kilometers outside Mumbai. The drive for the first 287 kilometers was uneventful, if refreshingly swift.

13 kilometers from our destination we encountered an accident. We didn't have one, but we came to close quarters with one. Accidents on India's highways are nothing new, but I've never encountered them as anything more firsthand than a mangled truck lying with its wheels in the air and its nose in a ditch. Usually about a week old. Those I've seen plenty of. There was a two-day drive that we once took from Mumbai to Delhi where we kept score of the accidents and we counted 104 of them. All but two involved trucks.

However, this accident had obviously just happened, perhaps a few minutes before we came around a bend in the road and spotted it. Well, it was hard to miss. An Esteem car was parked on the shoulder and its right headlight and fender was completely smashed; the rest of the car seemed untouched. A motorcycle lay in the middle of the road. Just beyond it were two bodies. Both were men and each was lying on his side in a crumpled heap. One had on a leather jacket, the other had a bandana tied around his head. Neither was wearing a helmet. A group of men and women stood around the two bodies; these seemed to be the car passengers. They looked like the small town, semi-well-to-do sort - far from your average below-the-poverty-line villager, but not quite city slickers.

We gingerly inched our car around the scene and goggled at it in typical rubberneck fashion. Two things struck me immediately: one is that, surprisingly, there was no blood to be seen on the road. The second was the attitude of the people standing around. Their chief emotion seemed to be bafflement. This was weird.

In the city when there's an accident, there is an immediate rush of onlookers to gawp at the scene. But the onlookers also contain a fair percentage of action-oriented doers who attempt to assist, call out instructions, hustle the injured into a taxi, or beat up the hapless driver. Here, in the rural hinterland, there was nothing of the kind - just a baffled, helpless look on the faces of all the hangers-on. There weren't that many of them either, just the car passengers, maybe four or five, and a few villagers who had been passing by. None of them seemed to have a clue what to do.

Everybody was simply standing around gazing down at the two bodies as if willing them to get up and get on with it. As if on cue, the man in the leather jacket groaned and tried to raise his head.

We had parked our car on the verge and were wondering what to do: drive on in a it's-none-of-my-business style or hop out and join the baffled lot in their bafflement. My chauffeur turned to me and said, "Help karega?" meaning "Shall we help them?"

Well, I was all for it, but I confess to sharing some of the bafflement of the party. What does one do in a situation like this? My knowledge of medicine is restricted to knowing when to pop two aspirins and that MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Once I've exhausted those two, I'm a spent force when it comes to healing.

What the two accident victims obviously needed was an ambulance: the lack of blood could have been a good sign, but somehow I doubted it. Internal injuries seemed likely. Both were hulking specimens and there was no way they would have fitted into any car, even if we could have picked them up and maneuvered them in. Not that that would have been a wise thing to do, given the possibility of internal damage.

All these thoughts flashed through my mind in the few seconds between parking the car and getting out. As soon as the baffled lot spotted a city slicker emerging from his car they shook themselves out of their torpor and meandered over to where I stood. Just then a State Transport bus appeared around the bend. They promptly asked me to stop it and request the driver to take the two injured men to the nearby town.

I have no clue why they didn't try to stop the bus themselves or why they thought I would be more successful at it.

In any event, their faith was ill-founded. The bus driver cast a dispassionate eye over the scene, shook his head forbiddingly at all of us, moved up a gear and took off down the road. In the next four minutes or so this scene was re-enacted with a jeep, an SUV, a small truck and another State bus.

This sudden burst of traffic seemed to enliven the crowd, whose numbers had been swelled by a couple of motor cyclists who had stopped, perhaps out of solidarity with two of their kin who had been mowed down. They decided that the two were safer on the shoulder of the road rather than the center and some of the burlier specimens managed to half-carry, half-drag the bandana-clad man, who was most at risk from being run over, to the side of the road.

While I had been watching these proceedings, I had not been idle. Technology to the rescue. I whipped out my cell phone and dialed 100 for the police. As soon as my phone was spotted in my hands, a set of the group detached themselves from the main lot and clustered around me to gawp at my phone; obviously a more interesting spectacle than the accident victims. It struck me, even at the time, as quite ghoulish.

The first time I dialed 100, I was cordially informed by a recorded message that all lines on the route were busy. I disconnected, waited a few seconds and tried again. This time the phone rang. After about five rings someone answered. I explained that I was calling from a few kilometers outside the nearest town, on so-and-so road and that there had been an accident with two people badly injured and that an ambulance was needed. I was asked by the voice at the other end where I was calling from. I went through the explanation again. Ah, but I needed to call another number which the cop would be happy to give me if I would take it down.

By this time, hearing my conversation, most of the crowd had transferred their attention to me, so I was able to collar one of the gentlemen closest to me and get him to write down the number that was being dictated to me in Marathi. (For some reason, even in the urgency of the situation I remember remarking mentally that his shirt was a crisp white khadi one. And that his hand shook while writing.) Numbers in anything other than English are not my strong suit, but surprisingly I could figure out what the numbers were and could dictate them in turn to the gent. There was obviously no point in continuing the conversation with 100, so I disconnected and tried the number I'd been given.

No luck. I just got the exasperated tone of an invalid number being dialed. White shirt helpfully volunteered the area code of the locality we were in, so I tacked that on and redialed the number. I got a different exasperated tone. Over the next three minutes I tried various permutations of area code and phone number and got precisely nowhere. White shirt belatedly discovered that he had a cell phone too and started dialing the various permutations frantically. I have no clue why he hadn't thought of it earlier. Shock, probably. I also have absolutely no clue why cell phone networks are so bloody opaque!!!!

In the meantime, my chauffeur had been trying to wave down various passing vehicles with absolutely no luck. Leather jacket was still moaning feebly, bandana was unconscious, crowd had returned to their baffled stupor.

Enough was enough. We were getting nowhere and time was running out. I told the crowd that we would drive on ourselves and attempt to contact an ambulance or the police at the next town, which was about ten minutes away, but could well have been in China for all the good it did us at this spot.

We got back into the car and sped down the road. In about five minutes we reached a toll booth. While we were paying the toll, I asked the teller if he had a phone on which he could call the police as there had been an accident a few kilometers away. As soon as he heard the word accident, he sat up alertly, then hopped out of his booth and yelled at a colleague to fetch the boss. His yell was taken up by other colleagues who appeared from nowhere. This was obviously more interesting than making change for tolls. But this display of interest and alacrity heartened me, until the said boss emerged hastily from a hut a little way behind the toll booth.

He was a youngster who looked like he had bunked college that day to hang out on the highway. He also looked quite clueless, but I was shamefully wronging him. He proved to be the most resourceful guy yet. He heard what I had to say and then whipped out his cell phone and punched out a number. He repeated what I had said, and was evidently given another number. He repeated it to confirm it, disconnected and dialed the second number. This is a trick that I just can't do. I need to write down a number so that I can look at it while I dial. My respect for toll boss grew. Whoever answered the second number wanted more details than toll boss could give him, so he handed me the phone. I got into my routine once again, starting as usual with the location of the accident. Amazingly, the voice on the other end immediately grasped what I was saying and even before I could complete my sentence, he asked me to hold on. I could hear him barking orders to someone to grab the jeep, take 3 or 4 men with him and go down to the accident spot. Once that had been done, he returned to me and then asked me more details about which vehicles seemed to have been in the accident. He then reassured me that he would handle the matter and rang off.

I thanked toll boss and returned his phone to him. He explained that he had called the local cops - that was who I'd been speaking to. I was feeling good about the sense of urgency that the guys at the toll station had about the whole incident and about the way the cop on the phone had reacted quickly and sensibly.

We drove on. About three minutes later the penny dropped. We had been passed at the accident scene by about 10 vehicles heading in the same direction that we were. All of them would have had to pass the toll booth before we did - there was no turn off in the road before the toll booth. All of them had seen the accident. Yet, when we spoke of it to the toll attendants it had clearly come as a complete surprise to them! Obviously, not one of the other passers-by had thought the accident and two dying victims either important or worthwhile or even interesting enough to be mentioned to the first authority that they had encountered.

Reluctance to stop at an accident and get involved is perhaps understandable, given the way that authorities and red tape can sometimes create unforeseen and unpleasant repercussions for innocent passers-by. But this was more than a reluctance to get involved. This seemed to be just plain disinterest.

The value of human life is evidently very little indeed.

About an hour later, my appointment done, we drove past the spot again, headed back home. The Esteem was still parked at the side of the road, with the motorcycle next to it. There were no victims lying around, there was no crowd. I could only hope that help had reached them in time.

For the rest of the drive, my chauffeur took extra care when overtaking or encountering two-wheelers.

Aqualung, my friend

"Think of the people who blog - it's people who like the sound of their own voice and the internet has provided them the opportunity to sound off in public. They are reminiscent of the fuddy-duddy squadron leaders living in villages outside London who'd be writing to the Times, whining about this and that."

Not my words. That's Mr Ian Anderson, founder, flautist, singer and songwriter of the delightfully idiosyncratic rock group Jethro Tull. He has more to say in an interview to the Economic Times (published on 31 January 2006).

Another bon mot: "I've absolutely no intention of listening to the tittle-tattle and nonsense that gets spouted in chatrooms by so-called fans. They know, as well as I, that they are the train-spotters, the stamp collectors. People who have this obsesson with points of detail, who had their security blankets taken away when they were too small, abandoned babies in a dust heap somewhere. Musicians should never be adversely affected by the criticism of anything less than a first-rate professional journalist who is an expert in the field."

Now, I hold no brief for or against Mr Anderson. In fact, truth be told, I quite admire his musicianship and I've been privileged to attend two of his concerts, albeit when he was not quite in his prime, but by no means past his sell-by date. Certainly not too old to rock 'n' roll. (Unfortunately, I shall be missing his third concert in Mumbai, but for reasons that have nothing to do with this interview.)

There is much truth in what he says, and some exaggeration, and perhaps a touch of unwise pique. Firstly, now that I have recently returned to Blogsville, to be told by someone whose talents I respect that I am - how did he put it? - ah, yes, a narcissistic squadron leader living in a village outside London, is a trifle discouraging.

Do I really like the sound of my own voice? Well, in a manner of speaking, certainly. Not, I hasten to add, at a karaoke night, for I cannot hold anything more than the most basic of tunes. But certainly, I enjoy my own writing, even if I am in something of a minority at the moment. And I do live outside London in what is very much a village in many ways. And, absolutely, one of the selling features of the internet is this facility it offers to all and sundry to "sound off in public".

Am I blogging to satisfy my inner muse? Absolutely. Am I blogging to make the world a better place and to save the trees? Certainly. Would I like a fervent female fan following? Duh, sure. So, score one to Mr Anderson for accuracy.

Score two to Mr Anderson for his eloquence, lucidity and ability to turn a phrase. I like that bit about "abandoned babies in a dust heap". So much more graphic and memorable than a bland comment. Only a British musician would be able to conjure up an image like that and use scathing wit to such effect. Honestly, can you imagine someone from Boyzone or Destiny's Child or any rap singer you care to name being sufficiently fluent to spin off a sentence that has over twenty words in it? (I forbear from giving the exact word count for fear of an accusation of being obsessed with detail.) Well, if they did, nineteen of those words would probably be "Like dude, I mean, fugg it dawg" and so on. About the only other contemporary musician I can think of who is as eloquent is Bono, and he's Irish.

Now Mr Anderson surely does exaggerate when he lumps all us poor bloggers into one sack and then proceeds to metaphorically kick that sack into the Bosphorus. Some of us bloggers, especially novice four-day old ones like yours truly, are really nice human beings after all. Kind to children, dogs and our favourite shoes. But I would excuse his exaggeration as hyperbole, used to make his point and intending nothing personal against me. Especially since I own a fair percentage of his albums, all legally purchased in eco-unfriendly vinyl and later in even more eco-unfriendly plastic, though now converted (legally, I hasten to add) to "green" digital copies.

I would however wonder at his comment about what criticism musicians should and should not listen to. I agree that a musician (or any other creative artist) should and must follow his muse and not allow himself to be held ransom to fickle fandom and cretinous cows who have no taste and appreciation. Having said that, however, an artist must also have a realisation that he does not live by muse alone, and that in a commercial world, he must be aware of what sells and what doesn't and what is liked enough for money to be spent on it and what isn't. And I submit that, in many cases the "professional who is expert in his field" may simply be living in too high a tower, breathing air that is too rarefied to be able to adequately feel the pulse of the populace.

After all, no one would claim that Dan Brown is an artist with words (and Mr Anderson doesn't spare him in the interview either), but it would be equally foolish to deny that his books sell. Mr Brown is probably laughing all the way to the bank, while his critics fret and fume at his incompetence. He has successfully ignored the professionals who are expert in their fields and has harnessed the purchasing power of the train-spotters, the stamp collectors. Sad, but true.

(Entirely by the way, I applaud Mr Anderson's taste in literature, for he names John Le Carre as one of his favourite authors - he's one of mine too.)

So, what I think it boils down to is, can you be creative and successful without compromising your artistic scruples and integrity? I think Mr Anderson has shown that you can; but I also think that there are many more who can't. Kudos to Mr Anderson. Long may he rock and roll.

[I just bethunk me that a blogger who genuinely enjoys the sound of his voice would now be a podcaster.]

Matutinal Mumbai Musings (Second Movement)

First Movement was obviously adagio, dealing as it did with the cabbie bottlenecks. I've by no means exhausted that topic, but perhaps I should move on to allegro.

Zipping through the city in the pre-dawn hours you get a taste of what travel on these roads could really be like. But usually isn't.

One peculiarity of Indian city roads has always struck visitors as strange. Every visitor I've driven around in the city has commented upon it, usually in bemusement or bewilderment. I don't mean the "cows on the road" comment. That is so old hat. And to give the city its due, one rarely does see cows on the road any more, at least in South Mumbai.

No, what drives them to a full stop (terrible pun intended) is what we do to our traffic lights after 10 p.m. We switch them off. Traffic lights in other cities around the world work 24/7 and they are largely respected accordingly. However, that would be too bland for us, so we switch them off.

However, that is too bald a statement. We have numerous ways of switching them off. Strange but true. Here are some that I've encountered in all my nocturnal ramblings.

The most popular is the Amber Admonition. This is when all the lights at a crossing blink amber, admonishing you to navigate the crossing at your own peril. A variant of this is the Rhythmic Red, where the light facing the junior or less-travelled road blinks red, while its counterpart on the main road blinks amber. A kind of caste system at work here.

The blandest one is the Blankly Black, a "Look Ma, No Lights" version where all the traffic lights are simply switched off, presenting a boring dead aspect to the crossing.

Then there is the Deadpan Deadlight. This is a favourite not just at night, but often encountered during the day too. All the traffic lights in every direction are red. Simply Red. That's it: no fancy blinking or synchronization or variations. I think it is a philosophical statement on the part of the authorities, in keeping with the karmic approach to life, happiness and George Bush. Whatever is to happen, will happen; therefore, there is no use in going anywhere in any direction. So stop.

Of course, it doesn't work that way. At first, everyone comes to a respectful halt at the red light. Then after all have been waiting for a minute or so, two drivers realize that something's wrong and that Deadpan Delight is in operation. It's always two drivers who come to this simultaneous realization, and the two drivers are always at right angles to each other. Both of them take off with great enthusiasm only to encounter the other at the focal point of the intersection. If they are young and have good reflexes, there is a screeching of brakes and the refreshing tinkle of broken glass. If not, there is a delightful pile-up.

Occasionally, the two drivers who recognize the Deadpan Delight are about four cars behind the lights. In such cases, there is a fanfare of horns and a curse of oaths until the leading cars are goaded into action. Whereupon Deadpan Delight proceeds as outlined in the previous paragraph. Never fails.

However, the greatest of them all, the mother of all traffic signal configurations is the Funky Chicken. It is a variant of the Deadpan Delight mixed in with the Rhythmic Red and Amber Admonition. It's probably taken them years of computerized simulations to get it right, but they've succeeded. It works like so.

It starts off with Rhythmic Red on the main road while Amber Admonition is on the side road. Just as the cars tentatively venture forward, it slams into Deadpan Delight and everyone grinds to a halt. Now, here comes the touch of genius. Before anybody can recognize Deadpan Delight, the signals change to green. All of them in all directions. Everybody lurches forward simultaneously. Instant gridlock. The lights go back to Rhythmic Red. This is poetry in stop-motion.

On my morning drive I encountered a number of Deadpan Delights. However, being older and wiser, my foot ventured nowhere near the brake. At that hour in the morning, waiting at a red light on a Mumbai road is like George Michael wandering into a public toilet. Just begging to be rear-ended.

Backed up

Back at work after a delicious four-day weekend that saw the return of the son of Blog, and now back home after being back at work. I now need to be on my back, so I'll be back.

Matutinal Mumbai Musings (First Movement)

Well, that's better! I'm back online after a 90 minute nap and a cup of coffee. The only civilized way to spend a Sunday morning.

The round trip from my home to the airport and back is 50 kilometers. This morning it took me about 50 minutes, driving quite sedately: at no point did I cross 80 kmph. Of course, this was at 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday. On a weekday, once the sun is up, I would have taken at least 40 minutes longer for just one leg of the trip.

So, that's 50 kilometers in 50 minutes versus 25 kilometers in 90 minutes. An average of 60 kmph versus 16.67 kmph. A staggering 260% improvement in speed! (It's amazing what a cup of coffee can do. No, not the speed gain, but the facility with statistics.)

So, based on these observations and statistical analysis I can identify what ails Mumbai. Or, to put it another way, how to make Mumbai a civilized city.

Firstly, about 6 million fewer people. Face it, 12 million (official count) is a ludicrous number for a city. There are countries with fewer inhabitants than my municipal ward. Greece and New Zealand to name just two. But that ain't about to happen.

Secondly, about a million fewer cars. That's a no-brainer. And that's not happening either.

Thirdly, and most crucially, about 30,000 fewer cabs. Now, that's a workable number.

I kid you not, the number of traffic problems in Mumbai caused by obstreperous cabbies and their even more asinine country cousins, the autorickshaws, are out of all proportion to their headcount.

Even at 6:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, a scattering of cabs had contrived to double park and triple park at various points along my route. And the route I took is one of the least crowded parts of the city at 6:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. There was no reason for them to park down the middle of the road at Worli, or 20 feet from the curb at the expressway exit, but there they were, blocking traffic.

And then there are those cabbies with delusions about their horsepower, living on remembered glory when they were the fastest things on four wheels in the city. Ah, but that was in the days before liberalization and compressed natural gas. The former has brought a bevy of modern cars that can leave a cabbie in their wake before they've even got to third gear. The latter has reduced the air pollution, which is good, but has also throttled down the pulling power of the cabbies' engines, which is probably better, if only they'd realise it.

But most of them don't. So you find them in the fast lane going up the flyover at a breakneck 30 kmph blocking traffic behind them for miles at a time. Or jockeying for position at a traffic light, and then stalling just as the lights turn green.

That train of thought opens up more entries for this blog, which is in danger of becoming a Mumbai blog rant. Blame it on Sunday morning, 5:30 a.m.

Matutinal Mumbai Musings (Overture)

I think that is the right word, but I'm in no mood to go look it up, even if the trip is only to the next browser window and dictionary.com.

That's what comes of going to bed on a malapropism of "frying bhelpuri" and being awoken at 3:30 a.m. to the sound of a leaking geyser. Not the Ol' Faithful kind, but the modern plumbing kind. Come to think of it, though, this geyser is a bit like Ol' Faithful given the way that it regularly breaks down. Breaks down, hence the leaks. My wit makes me cry. (You too?)

At 3:32 a.m. I tried to dismiss said leaking geyser from my thoughts and valiantly summoned sheep to be enumerated. By 4:40 a.m. the sheep had been counted, herded and shorn, the wool had been carded and knitted into cardigans that were on sale in WalMart at a ridiculous price, but Sleep, that fickle mistress, stayed stubbornly away. The geyser still leaked.

I stumbled to the kitchen and carted a footstool back into the bathroom, clambered up, groped the geyser with all the expertise and none of the enthusiasm of a dance bar patron attending to his favourite lap dancer, and finally managed to turn the tap off. The geyser still leaked.

At 5:00 a.m. when the geyser had reconciled itself to the pressures of modern life and ancient plumbing, it stopped leaking. Too little too late. I had volunteered to escort my wife to the airport where she was scheduled to catch a 6:30 a.m. flight to Bangalore. On a Sunday. Yes, I know, but these are the troubled times we live in.

Up until this time, the day had promised to be one of those where the sun pokes a bleary eye over the horizon and wonders if it could take the day off. Not that the sun had got around to any bleary-eyed poking just yet; it had better sense than that. (It is Sunday, after all.)

For want of anything more sensible to do I noted the time we left and the odometer reading. On the lonely return leg of the airport chukker, I decided it was too early to listen to Pink Floyd (I know, I know: blame it on my advancing years) and spent the time in deciding what to blog today.

Smells like "Indian fiction"

The latest issue of The Economist has a generous review of a new book set in Mumbai: The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar.

I have not read the book, but I have read the review which describes it as "a powerful social commentary on the glorious and frustrating jigsaw puzzle that is India." Quite. I have no argument with that.

A paragraph in the review refers to descriptions of the city that include "the smell of frying bhelpuri." Now, I'm not clear whether this is Ms Umrigar's phrase or that of the anonymous reviewer.

Either way, as any Mumbaikar will vouch, bhelpuri is not fried and does not emanate any odour strong enough to be discernible against the myriad other scents of this odoriferous city. The ingredients of bhelpuri, notably the puri itself, may well be fried and may indeed be fried well. In fact, the puri is crisp and crackly and quite friable.

Bhelpuri, like vengeance, is best served cold. It is assembled with dexterity and panache and seasoned with chutneys and sauces of vigorous potency, some of which have been known to fry an unwary consumer's brain.

[Though it can be consumed all week, a popular bhelpuri day is Fryday. This is so that one can recover from its effects on one's belly over the weekend.]

Inaccuracies of this kind fryghten me.

All You Need is Caritas

I remember an interesting e-conversation I had with a friend on the sanctity and infallibility of the Bible. She had remarked that since the Bible is God's word, it necessarily must be right.

Of course, I'm not one to take that lying down so I had pointed out as gently as I could that her King James Bible was God's word originally spoken in Hebrew (or some local dialect thereof), then translated into Greek, many score years after the events, then translated from Greek into Latin, many hundred years later, then from Latin into English a millennium or so after that. Surely, something must have been lost in all these transmutations.

Today I read an article on Saint Jerome's homework assignment from Pope Damasus in the 4th century. He was asked to translate the Bible from Greek into "vulgar" Latin, that is, the Latin commonly spoken by the people. (This translation came to be known as the Vulgate.)

Apparently he got stuck when he encountered the Greek word agape which is love. But we all know that there are many kinds of love, from the erotic (from another Greek love word eros) to the familial, from the love of one's country to the love of one's pet dog, from the love of one's hobby to the love of one's work, and so on.

Latin, being an exceedingly practical and cut-and-dried kind of language, had only amor to represent any and all kinds of love. So, Jerome chose to use another Latin word, caritas, which meant "expensive", and, by extension, "esteem"; which, if you stretched a point, could mean, "affection" and thereby a chaste kind of "love".

From caritas came "charity", hence the triumvirate of "faith, hope and charity". So what did God really mean?

The Muslims have a more orthodox approach: the Koran was handed down to Muhammed in Arabic, therefore there is no other authentic version. All translations, by the very fact of their being translations, are suspect.

None of this has curbed humanity's penchant for a Humpty Dumpty approach to God's word:

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

On a laterally related note, there is a rather tatty art-deco cinema house in downtown Mumbai that calls itself Eros. Considering the open-mouthed, passive dull-wittedness which is invoked, nay, required, by most of the movies it screens, it should perhaps have chosen the alternative Greek word for love: Agape.

Reply All

You would think that the perils of the "Reply All" button would be ingrained into every email user's psyche by now, but evidently there are still some poor hasty souls out there who don't seem to get the message.

Or rather, they ensure that everyone does get the message, including those who obviously shouldn't have.

This happened yesterday on a recent mail exchange between a colleague of mine and a bunch of one customer's reps. One of the reps passed a rather snotty comment to his colleague on a report we had sent out. Unfortunately for him, yep, he hit "Reply All". So we all got to see his snotty comment which showed him up in quite a poor light.

I did like the way his colleague scrambled to send us an apology on his behalf, though. It was an impressive bit of semantic legerdemain to convert a snotty comment into an expression of profound gratitude for our work.

Keen as Mustard

Lunchtime musings: when you gotta go, you gotta go. So when you really gotta go, is it a case of Must-turd?

Who said this blog had to be mature?

Chiffon Plug

After contemplating my return to Blogsville, I discovered I also needed to template my return. I had unwittingly acquired some shameless plugs by Goggle (the ruling Spider of the Web) in my right navigation column. These needed to be quickly replaced with some shamelessly self-centred advertising.

While doing so, I remembered me a forgotten blog by my young friend and erstwhile colleague, who I affectionately refer to as Mugsy, not that the nickname has anything to do with her predilections, appearance or past.

I delved through my old mails and unearthed the link to Mugsy's forgotten blog.

Well, I say "forgotten" blog, but it is obviously only me who had forgotten it, for I see from the comments on her blog, that Mugsy has a coterie of devoted Mugsyholics who obviously are hooked on her daily musings.

And no wonder, because Mugsy, you write well! As a tribute to your literary virtuosity and prolificacy I award the first (and only, so far) link in my Friends column to your Chiffonesque blog.

Promise of the Son of Blog

I'm back! Not that anbody missed me while I was away, but still... I'm back! This is yet another stab at blogging. My motives? Not fame and fortune, for sure. More like discipline and dedication to the Muses (see http://www.eliki.com/portals/fantasy/circle/define.html).

I promise to attempt to be more diligent and faithful in recording my abstractions and distractions on a daily diary-like basis.