Cross-posted at ContentBlog
Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!, along with some other search engine companies, in collaboration with a few NGOs, are going to develop a code of conduct to promote freedom of expression and privacy right, according to a PC World blog post titled Google, Microsoft, and Others Agree to Code of Conduct. All these companies in the past (they continue to do so) have sold their souls to gain markets in repressive countries like China. Google hides all the search results the Chinese authorities don’t like.
I’ve been spending around half-an-hour everyday sitting under the sun. I’ve done this after years. Actually I used to sit outside a lot when we used to stay in Nauroji Nagar. There is not much sun in Sarita Vihar due to the way the flats are constructed — or at least our house there doesn’t get much sun in the winter. So when Vasudha was born, Alka and I decided that we should move to a house that gets plenty of sun, and we shifted to NOIDA.
We live on the second floor (it’s a building complex) and there are two balconies that get unhindered sunshine for at least 5 hours everyday. Last winter too we were here but sitting under then sun wasn’t on my mind at that time, due to many things happening at the same time. Even now too, the professional travails continue, but there is a subtle stability that allows me to sit outside on my revolving chair for some time with my eyes close. By the time I come inside and resume my work, I’m thoroughly warm.
I feel like sleeping when I sit in the sun. It’s not a sleep, sleepy, it’s a tranquil sleepy. All of a sudden the world becomes so peaceful that you don’t want to disturb it even with your breath. I had initially thought I would read a book whenever I sat in the balcony, but then I thought, why must I always do something? So I just close my eyes and see the dance of those red and green bubbles that you see when you sit facing the sun with your eyes closed. It’s so blissful. The winter sun is a manifestation of heaven.
Oh, yes, today a bee stung me on the neck, behind my ear, when I was sitting outside. There is a big beehive in the balcony of the fifth floor as I think no one lives there (no wonder!). The bee just came and started darting at me. Alka and I laughed because she said something to the tune of “all females dart towards you.” I wasn’t scared and I let it explore me. But then she approached my face and got so menacingly close that I could feel the wind of its wings. And it was quite big.
I had a handkerchief and I started shooing it away with it. Perhaps it got offended and attacked the back of my neck. By the time Alka could grab it with the handkerchief and extract it away, it had done its business with the sting. I felt bad for it because bees die after they sting.
Alka quickly brought a key from inside and rubbed it hard where the bee had stung. Within a few seconds the sting was between her fingers and it was quite big and nasty. The excruciating pain started after a few minutes, but Alka gave me a homeopathic medicine so it wasn’t that painful.
Do you read books multiple times? I don’t do it often, but I’ve done my share of re-readings. There are tons of Hindi comics I must have read two or three times. Then there was this pocket book for teens that had the two detective protagonists joining a team of explorers visiting a dark part of Africa. This is perhaps the book I have re-read the most because I simply fell in love with the way different relationships developed and how different group members who were hostile to each other in the beginning of the expeditions, faced death together again and again and saved each other. It was partly like that The Lost serial that comes on TV (is it still coming?).
Another 52 Books has a post about the joys of rereading and I got the idea of writing this quick post from this.
After growing up my re-reading has revolved around Garcia, Rushdie, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Dostoyevski, Kafka and Agatha Christie and in the same order, their books are:
- One Hundred Years of Solitude — 4 times
- Love In The Time Of Cholera — twice
- Midnight’s Children — twice
- The Moor’s Last Sigh — twice
- Great Expectations — thrice
- Jude the Obscure — twice
- Crime and Punishment — twice
- The Metamorphosis — more than 4 times
- The Nemesis — twice
I’m sure there are some other books too that I must have read more than once but I cannot recall the names of those books. I’ll write more about this topic some day soon.
I think I need an image revamp :-). In fact I think the problem has been there for many years, I’ve just about started noticing it. A long time ago an NRI family of relatives visited our house, mistook me as a moron (no one else was there at home at that time) and kept commenting on me (“he looks funny and stupid,” etc.) and our house in American accented (but broken) English. I had written about the incident but I don’t know where that post has gone. It was not, of course, completely their blunder, as I’d presented to them a disposition that didn’t exactly look decent, but still.
So of late, just for fun sake, I’ve started observing how people react to me, and if you’re not already aware, I’m cerebral palsied (and hence, physically constrained almost to an extent of 70%) and walk with elbow crutches. As soon as people see my hands, or my posture, they assume I’m not very smart, and in fact why blame people who see me occasionally?
Even my own family members (excluding my wife) keep giving me advises as if I no nothing of the world. But they don’t mean it negatively and I can understand. Since they think I’m always at home and don’t meet many people, I’m not worldly-wise. I wonder why they think like that though — I live on my own, I’m raising a family, I’m better off than many people around me, I convince people to give me work and then pay me for that work. How many people can do that? It’s very easy to go to an office and do work that has been assigned to you. I not only do the work, I get that work on my own. Alka often tells me even a few of her relatives think I’m stupid, and my parents send us the money so that we can rent an apartment.
Recently there was another small incident that got stuck to my subconscious. One of Alka’s friends regularly visits us these days. It so happened that one day we were talking about these guys she’s working with who publish a magazine. Both, the niche of the magazine and a name she took, sounded very familiar and I told her that I might have met this person. Her immediate reaction was, “No, no, there is no chance you could have ever met him.” She hasn’t known me for a long time, and she hasn’t even known that person for a long time, but still she was so convinced that I could have never met him. I actually might have not met this person but the way she said was really funny and it originated from an impression that I have not interacted with many people.
I have never taken such things seriously, but I think now I should. I’ve observed it’s not about how much you know, it’s all about how you portray yourself, and this is where I have paid scant regard. People are always telling me things and delivering unsought advises just because I don’t flaunt names and facts, and one can easily make out they’ve assumed there is no way I could be aware of those things.
Interestingly, I don’t know how this happened, relatives from my father’s side always give due credit to my intelligence (at least whatever intelligence I possess). They might think that physically I’m vulnerable and behave accordingly, I’ve never found them behaving condescendingly. They take my word seriously and there have been instances when they have insisted upon sending their children to live with me for some time so that I could teach them something or at least teach them some ways of the world. Some of them are real smart asses, but at least they are aware that I know their games. And most of them are semi-literate.
You know, I actually left my chair, got up, walked to the bed room (where we have our TV) to catch a cataclysmic glimpse of Shilpa Shetty sobbing after being criticized for cooking a horrible chicken, or for being called a dog (the contestant that called her a dog perhaps doesn’t know that dogs are males and bitches are females, but here, considering the general IQ level of the participants, it hardly matters). I’m not bothered about the racial slur that was (if at all it was) heaped upon her, I’m bothered about her reaction. Why did she have to cry?
Dog, bitch, swine, ass, I mean, how does it matter? If someone calls you a dog, call that person by some other zoological name, for instance, anaconda, or rhinoceros, or porcupine. Ask around for more animal names if you run out of them, or if you have access to the Internet then search for some exotic animal names such as marsupial rat or olive ridley turtle and if that doesn’t knock off the fight then move on to the Latin counterparts such as procyon lotor (raccoon) or ursus arctos (grizzly bear). With so many animal names going around you’ll become a PETA mascot soon, quarrel or no quarrel.
If you are not privy to what I’m gabbing about, there is this UK show called Big Brother where a few people are kept in a house and how they spend their time, is broadcast, I think so, 24×7. What a gross way of spending your precious TV time — I’d rather watch porn.
So in this show there is our very own Shilpa Shetty. What I could make out of the 2 minutes of news coverage I saw was that the other contestants couldn’t simply digest the fact how ravishing she looks on the show (actually with all those nose jobs and cheek jobs and what not, she’s actually turned out a stunner), so they started racially abusing her. She stood her ground for as long as she could (5 seconds, or may be 6, or, astoundingly, even 7!) and then she broke down.
Now the entire Indian community, or at least the pre-teens, are flooding the offices of the organizers with their SMS protests and the scandal has even rattled the House of Commons. I think in India too candle-light protest marches will be organized and people like Arundhati Roy will term this event post-colonial Anglo-Saxon cultural terrorism. She’ll stop the traffic and upon being arrested she’ll render an apology.
We recently switched from The Asian Age to The Pioneer and suddenly I recalled why I stopped getting The Pioneer in the first place many years ago. It is always blowing BJP’s horn. The Asian Age is far better but it is too biased against anything “Hindu”. In fact The Asian Age guys are cunning: their own journalists write trash, but their syndicated columns, for instance by Robert Friedman, are of high quality.
Since I don’t want to get back to The Asian Age we might start getting The Times of India. In the Indian blogsphere this newspaper is better known as “The Slimes of India” but it is actually not that bad a newspaper, considering the kind of journalism I’ve read or viewed. Actually I take the views of most Indian bloggers with a pinch of salt because they’re mostly “follow the herd” types so if one “reputed” blogger says he or she doesn’t like a particular newspaper, the feeling quickly becomes fashionable. Anyway, that’s irrelevant. Given a choice between trashy stupidity and intellectual stupidity I’d prefer trashy stupidity.
And anyway, there are some columnists in the TOI that I like, for instance Dilip Padgaonkar (he used to be the editor, not sure about now), Gurcharan Das and even Swaminathan A Aiyar of the Swaminomics fame. But the thing is, in the past, since I was the only one who decided what newspaper we should get because I was the only one who most of the times read newspaper in the morning (my mom got a Hindi newspaper for herself, my sister was never a newspaper reading types and my father worked abroad). Now, since I’m married, I cannot change the newspaper just because I want to. And the TOI is not liked in my household not because of the blogsphere, but because of the ideology and culture it promotes. My view is, these days every newspaper has the page 3 type sections; even The Asian Age has it.
The sadhus have been protesting against the overwhelming pollution in Ganga because they cannot take the holy dip during the Kumbh. It’s sad that they only think about this ancient river when they cannot carry out their religious performances, and such performances happen just a few times every year. Do they ever think of the river otherwise? And what about the citizens of this country?
Ganga, or the Ganges, is one of the ancient rivers of the world carrying mythological as well as civilizational significance. Thousands of generations have prospered around it.
Recently they were showing on TV that this great river has been reduced to a dirty nalla (a sewage) with all sorts of factories and industries continuously releasing pollutants into it and various government agencies drawing water from it. It’s far from sad; it’s tragic, it’s an ecological disaster.
The Pryag is a place where three holy rivers converge and become one. These three rivers are: Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati. Saraswati is a mythological river, it does not exist geographically, or if it ever existed, it is not there now. The similar fate is perhaps in store for the remaining two rivers, because there is no water in Yamuna too. I haven’t seen Ganga, but I regularly see Yamuna, and you can just see a strange, deadly froth floating on it, or there is this endless mass of weed that chokes the life of the river. To put salt on the wound, you can always see plush cars parked on the bridge and some losers throwing polythene bags full of offerings to the holy river. I wonder what sort of sins they are taking care of by suffocating their “beloved” river.
Coming back to Ganga, is it just there to wash off your sins? What about the gross sin against the river itself? Not much effort is seen, neither from the government nor from the citizens to save Ganga. It’s dying, or perhaps it’s already dead and now people simply submerge themselves in a dead body, indulging in a necrophilic celebration. You can get a skin disease if you take a dip.
I love the times I live in, lifestyle-wise. Living is a lot easier now. But I wish I lived in the times when the rivers were clean and the forests were dense and the sky was clear. This is certainly not the price our next generations have to pay for the comfort of our lousy generation.
My 17-month-old daughter loves throwing things on the floor, and given a chance, she also throws stuff down the balcony. Many a time she’s been intercepted while approaching the toilet seat holding her toys or other household tools and appliances. In fact recently she cracked our surveillance and threw my mobile phone into the flush.
Talking about the phone, she loves flinging the phones with great force. She does that with a calm face — it’s like, one moment she is engrossed in some deep conversation with the phone tightly held against the ear and the head tilted slightly towards the phone and both the shoulders slightly elevated, and the next moment she smashes the phone against the floor and moves on to some other object that catches her fancy. We’re quite amazed at the sturdiness of our phones. By now they should have disintegrated multiple times due to the impacts they incur everyday.
She launches a volley of vociferous protests when someone dares to interrupt her. When she wants to throw something, she means business, and you gotta be out of your mind if you want to stop her. No amount of verbal warnings can deter her and in fact the more vehemently you say “no”, the greater are the grin and the force when she throws the thing. She construes our cautionary expressions as a part of the game. So you can only hope that she gets distracted just in the nick of time if you were careless enough to leave your precious thing within her reach.
It’s not that we are dead against her sending things flying after every fifteen minutes but she doesn’t discriminate between expensive and inexpensive, heavy and light, and breakable and unbreakable objects. For instance, that day she pushed the dining chair and it fell on the floor with a great slam, rattling the entire neighborhood in the process. Then, she brings heavy utensils from the kitchen and bangs them against the floor, totally freaking out the people living on the first floor (we’re on the second floor). It often becomes a juggling act for Alka who constantly tries to catch the objects before they hit the floor.
Sometimes she doesn’t throw, as in, she doesn’t hurl the object as an act of throwing, she just let’s it fall from the point she’s holding it, without giving a second (or even a first) glance, as if it doesn’t exist, orchestrating an expression like an angel singing a melody of innocence, and you just want to give up the world for her there and then.
Fortunately she hasn’t broken anything very expensive yet and we hope her constant banging of utensils against the floor won’t get us thrown out of the building.
The Naipaul book — Literary Occasions — that I was reading mysteriously disappeared from my table just when I had set a rhythm. It was the first time I had read VS Naipaul and I really liked the way he writes, or at least the way he has written Literary Occasions. I think my 17-month-old daughter threw the book from our balcony and from there someone took it.
Anyway, consequently I’ve started reading William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal. I read his previous book too — The White Mughals — and I think he does a brilliant job chronicling the history of India in the middle ages. It’s just that, he focuses more on melancholic romanticism of the Mughals and sidesteps the unparalleled brutality the Mughals unleashed upon the Indian sub-continent. This could be because both the books deal with the times when the influence of the Mughals was whittling away under the strong winds of the European imperialism, mainly the British.
I think they are if deforestation over there has global impact. But as they rightly say, the rest of the world, having destroyed much of the green cover and progressed consequently (I doubt that) now wants to dictate how the countries having the Amazon rain forests should use them. The Washington Post has covered this topic in a latest blog post:
The dilemma for a Brazilian is how to enlist international help to protect this threatened natural heritage without forfeiting national sovereignty over an expanse of land that represents almost half of its territory? How should Brazil protect such a vast area of land with scarce financial resources?
Forest, any forest I mean, is generally, either cut for smuggling wood or to obtain land for farming or construction. Even if various international organizations gives lots of money to these Latin countries the smuggling won’t stop. What’s the best way of saving the rain forests?
OK, I know it’s going to sound outrageous, but I think the rest of the countries of this world should help these people relocate, and the offer should be so good that they cannot resist it.
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