Tony Who?

Tony Judt died. His name had registered very peripherally a few times, but I had never read anything by him. The flurry of obits and other pieces over the last few days made me root around for more information.

Among the highlights from the New York Times obituary:

Mr. Judt (pronounced Jutt)...began as a specialist in postwar French intellectual history, and for much of his life he embodied the idea of the French-style engaged intellectual.

An impassioned left-wing Zionist as a teenager, he shed his faith in agrarian socialism and Marxism early on and became, as he put it, a "universalist social democrat" with a deep suspicion of left-wing ideologues, identity politics and the emerging role of the United States as the world's sole superpower.
...
His views on Israel made Mr. Judt an increasingly polarizing figure. He placed himself in the midst of a bitter debate when, in 2003, he outlined a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem in The New York Review of Books, proposing that Israel accept a future as a secular, bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs enjoyed equal status.

Strangely (maybe not) there was no hyperlink to the essay in question, but it's easy enough to find.

What a punch in the stomach piece of writing this is! Went into my head like a lance etc. It is worthwhile to put aside whatever you are doing now and reading this one carefully.

...an American statesman is going to have to tell the truth to an Israeli prime minister and find a way to make him listen. Israeli liberals and moderate Palestinians have for two decades been thanklessly insisting that the only hope was for Israel to dismantle nearly all the settlements and return to the 1967 borders, in exchange for real Arab recognition of those frontiers and a stable, terrorist-free Palestinian state underwritten (and constrained) by Western and international agencies. This is still the conventional consensus, and it was once a just and possible solution.

But I suspect that we are already too late for that. There are too many settlements, too many Jewish settlers, and too many Palestinians, and they all live together, albeit separated by barbed wire and pass laws. Whatever the "road map" says, the real map is the one on the ground, and that, as Israelis say, reflects facts. It may be that over a quarter of a million heavily armed and subsidized Jewish settlers would leave Arab Palestine voluntarily; but no one I know believes it will happen. Many of those settlers will die—and kill—rather than move. The last Israeli politician to shoot Jews in pursuit of state policy was David Ben-Gurion, who forcibly disarmed Begin's illegal Irgun militia in 1948 and integrated it into the new Israel Defense Forces. Ariel Sharon is not Ben-Gurion.

The Palestinian-Israeli problem is just too depressing to think about, and this article doesn't make it any easier. Nevertheless, it does present future scenarios in stark relief, and a jolt of clarity is definitely in order.

[Aside: An eminently readable history of the conflict is to be found in Sowing the Wind.]

Sorry to have missed you when you were alive Mr. Judt, and more power to universalist social democrats.

On Bathrooms, And Trains

toilets; aesthetics of

Thanks to a winged friend who shall remain nameless, I have recently come into possession of one book by name of In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. It is fairly short, more a long essay than anything else. I first heard about it in the preface of What is Good? and the couple of paragraphs that Grayling quotes was enough to whet the appetite and shamelessly ask said winged personage to lug one copy across the Atlantic and the Eurasian landmass.

The essay consists of 16 sections that discuss traditional Japanese aesthetics in contrast with change. Comparisons of light with darkness are used to contrast Western and Asian cultures. The West, in its striving for progress, is presented as continuously searching for light and clarity, while the subtle and subdued forms of oriental art and literature are seen by Tanizaki to represent an appreciation of shadow and subtlety.

I have finished reading about half of it, and so far so good. Tanizaki does tend to get a little too hi-falutin' about the Japanese way of life, a mildly annoying undercurrent of "Oh it was all so nice in the good 'ol traditional days..." permeates the thing. And he is a little too critical of "Western progress", but beyond that no major cribs. Some parts are just lovely. And when he gets into the aesthetics of toilets I am, of course, spellbound.

The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe the sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Soseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, "a physiological delight", he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves.

As I have said there are certain prerequisites: a degree of dimness, absolute cleanliness, and quiet so complete one can hear the hum of a mosquito. I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet of the Kanto region, with its long, narrow windows at floor level; there one can listen with a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones.

And so on he goes, for a good 2-3 pages.

The whole thing immediately whisked me back to holidays at the grandparents' house in Marx's own country. Some of the toilets there were outside the house, you had to walk through the garden/grove/plantation (vaLappu for the Mallu unchallenged) to get to it. In June and in the winter, the ground is wet and squelchy all the time, and every nook and cranny is just crawling with life in every form imaginable on 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10++ legs (and sometimes slithering greenly over the undergrowth on its belly). A trip to the loo was a minor expedition, and once safely ensconced and enthroned inside, you could watch a patch of blue sky, framed by the tiles of the eaves and by coconut fronds and betel nut leaves. Or watch the rain come down in a din, sousing all of existence.

Of course, this is all a 20-20 hindsight thing. As kids I think we mostly hated this whole business of having to go outside the house, and having to put up with assorted insects and amphibians while abluting (yes, it's a new word). Why couldn't we just have vitrified tiles and a flush and all that city stuff, we wailed. Going to the loo at night was an endeavour that scared the bejesus out of us. It was bad enough that you had a decent probability of copping it from snakebite, but when assorted relatives had filled you with stories of the brahma rakshas (The Ghost Formerly Known As Strapping-Young-Namboothiri) in the temple peepal, you were, so to speak, emitting bricks, as opposed to what you wanted to in the first place.

Photos of ye olde countryside house are appended for your kind information.




toilets; cleaning of

There is only one secret to cleaning a toilet (or any bathroom, in general).

YOU HAVE TO WANT TO CLEAN IT

You must desire it deeply, uncompromisingly. With the sort of steadfastness that only an Ekalavya type can possess. When you have decided to clean a bathroom one morning, it must seep into every pore, and take over your being. A whole morning, nay a whole day is nothing. You are willing to give up the brunch with friends, the afternoon snooze, the curling up with the book, the checking email, the cup of filter coffee, the long run, or whatever it is that is floating your nautical vehicle at the present time.

You have it in you, or you don't.

I have it.

Note carefully that this is very different from a general desire to keep bathrooms clean on a regular basis, which boatloads of people have. Even I have it, in a very general and non-obsessive way. We are speaking here of a primeval urge to clean. Scrub. On hands and knees. The mildew. Off every fucking tile.

This doesn't happen often. In my case it approximately coincides with return trips of Halley's comet. Nevertheless, the point is to DO IT. And DO IT SUPREMELY WELL. No amount of chemical help is enough. It's a mind game, it's a marathon. And the wall is really a goddamn wall that is laughing in your face.

My autobiography will be called It's Not About The Bathroom Cleaning Chemical Thing.

Indian Railways; obsessions hereto and thereunder

It is impossible to praise IRFCA too much. Pure treasure trove of information. I recently hopped onto their hyper-active mailing list. And I thought I was train obsessed. These guys take it to the next level. For example, here is the story of one thread that I followed. A couple of days back, a new train from Vizag to Kurla (more properly VSKP-LTT) was started.

Several days before this historic event, people on the list had begun to conjecture on

(i) What will be the composition of the train?
(ii) How will it get to Kurla, i.e. which locos from which loco shed will haul it on which stretches?
(iii) Mother of God, is it possible that the thing will be pulled by a diesel engine all the way from VSKP to LTT?!!!!!!
(iv) Taking point # (iii) further, is it true, oh-please-Lord-Laupathgamineshwara-make-it-so, that the same VSKP shed WDM loco will be used all the way to Kurla? I mean, will we have a darshan of diesel in Dombivili? That too an ECoR, VSKP diesel?

et cetera

And sure enough, when the train was flagged off, railfans showed up at stations along the way to gaze lovingly upon this miracle (this is just an ordinary superfast train, mind you) whizzing over the permanent way, past the platform.

In BZA (Vijayawada to you rail challenged), Jayakar took a photograph. In BMT (Begumpet to you all !$#@!%), Vrij actually filmed the train.



And from Kurla came a breathless email, the VSKP diesel was used all the way to Bombay!!!!

Regular readers will be aware that I am the sort of person who will die of joy upon seeing a VSKP locomotive in far off places, but what a joy to find a kindred gang. I love these guys.

Ludwig Reads A Book

Trying to get an education...

O Screw It...

...if he's not going to do it, I will.

Loot from proceeds of Landmark Quiz, Chennai - 2009

Bad Science, Ben Goldacre
Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodernism, Science and Hindu Nationalism, Meera Nanda
The Music of the Primes, Marcus du Sautoy
Cardus on Cricket, Neville Cardus
The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, Granville Austin
What is Good?: The Search for the Best Way to Live, AC Grayling
Two Lives, Vikram Seth
Zoo in the Garden, EHA
The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib, Mirza Asadullah Khan 'Ghalib'
The Ode Less Travelled, Stephen Fry
Bollywood: A History, Mihir Bose

Potternama

Bleah.

Why Ludwig Ought To Feel Happier About The One

0. We've generally been known to be somewhat (uncharacteristically) cynical about The One. "What's the big deal?", "How would things be any different if Hillary had won, or for that matter any Democrat?" etc. type koschans have been used to needle people their warmfuzziness about Him. However someone (who will mysteriously be referred to as The Giggler, on account of apparently uncontrollable gigglings at the thought of the Kwisatz Haderach in the White House), used this highly effective angle of attack to illustrate her point (chat transcript follows):

G: lets put it this way
G: it is like how your friends and family would feel



G: if you were dating a bollywood bimbo and then decided to date nandita das
G: she might not change the world
but atleast it is nice
very nice, warm and fuzzy

G: for everyone

G: so now you see the source of all the giggles

G: we are still making bollywood movies
but with nandita das
and not amrita rao
or kareena kapoor

Highly effective, non? Kinda see the point now.

May He bring balance to the Force. With or without mitochondria. Or is it midi-chlorians? WTF was Georgie Porgie smoking?

1. Ironic newspaper headline of the year award (via CSM) goes to this one:

Name your children in Tamil: Stalin

2. Cosmic Variance, has a highly readable piece called The Sacred. Sean Carroll writes about the problem he sees with using words like "sacred" and "spiritual" to qualify things we say about the wonders of the cosmos.

...When you start talking about “spirituality,” people are going to take you to mean something that goes beyond the laws of nature, in the sense of being incompatible with them, not just “hard to understand in terms of them” — something supernatural...
...The puzzles of human life, and our mutual sense of wonder, and a feeling of awe when confronted with the cosmos, are all perfectly respectable topics for discussion. And there exists perfectly respectable vocabularies for discussing them, that don’t come laden with unfortunate supernatural overtones: literature, anthropology, psychology, the arts, and so on. There is a huge disadvantage to throwing around words like “sacred” and “spiritual,” in that you will very frequently be understood (misunderstood, one hopes) to be talking about the supernatural...
...But there is a deeper point, which is consistently missed by the gentle-minded/accommodationist/agnostic/liberal-religious/sophisticated-theology segment of the debate: It’s Not About You. Richard Dawkins was not addressing this kind of touchy-feely non-interventionist religion, for the excellent reason that it doesn’t match up with what the overwhelming majority of religious believers actually believe...

There are lots of comments that argue both sides of Carroll's point, and are quite engrossing. There's a link in the article to another earlier and longer piece called The God Conundrum which is also quite interesting.

This is all apropos of a couple of weeks old post and back and forth (in the comments) at chez SVyas that one hasn't found the time, internet connection, or lucid thought to post a comment on.

3. The Mumbai Half Marathon was duly attempted again this year. Kenny has the dope. We did better time than last year, but Lud. lost the mindgame, as was widely reported in Indian media. The whole 2:00:00 mark is turning into an obsession. So we did precisely nothing about it and have been sitting and increasing the size of butt for the last week. Passing it off as post-event depression. The sandbagging dolphin also ran, cold turkey, and is rumored to have finished.

Post run, much fun came, in the form of beer and bowling in the company of Kenny, monster, CSM, and various other juntae.

4. One side-effect of having to pick up the bib was that we lost our way and somehow ended up in Strand Book Stall in Fort. They happened to be having their annual sale. Strange coincidence. 3 books that must be mentioned, since we haven't done lists in so long

• Predictably Irrational - which came to us via NPR. Sounded fascinating on the radio, deals with such things as

  Do you know why we so often promise ourselves to diet and exercise, only to have the thought vanish when the dessert cart rolls by?
  
  Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need?
  
  Do you know why we still have a headache after taking a five-cent aspirin, but why that same headache vanishes when the aspirin costs 50 cents?
  
  Do you know why people who have been asked to recall the Ten Commandments tend to be more honest (at least immediately afterward) than those who haven’t? Or why honor codes actually do reduce dishonesty in the workplace?

• Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India
• Dreams of a Final Theory - The Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature by Stephen Weinberg. Fascinating book, even if somewhat difficult to read in parts on account of the physics. From the Amazon page:

  In his celebrated book The First Three Minutes (Basic, 1977; 1988, reprint) Nobel laureate Weinberg wrote the ominous and oft-quoted remark "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." This book can be seen as his response to that remark after 15 years of reflection and scientific progress. Weinberg writes with great hope and clarity about the possibility that science can find a universal theory uniting the laws of nature into a single statement that is mathematically, philosophically, and aesthetically complete. His writing is technical in places, and some of the first-person narratives come off as less than humble, but overall Weinberg offers excellent insights on how such a theory could be realized and what it would mean. Especially engaging are his chapters, "Beautiful Theories" and "What About God?" Other books have been written on this subject (e.g., Paul Davies's Superforce , LJ 11/15/84; John Barrow's Theories of Everything , Oxford Univ. Pr., 1991; and Barry Parker's Search for a Supertheory , Plenum, 1987), but Weinberg's is likely to have the highest demand. Highly recommended.

  Weinberg has some interesting cribs with philosophers and devotes the "Against Philosophy" chapter to it.

  The value today of philosophy to physics seems to me to be something like the value of early nation-states to their peoples. It is only a small exaggeration to say that, until the introduction of the post office, the chief service of nation-states was to protect their peoples from other nation-states. The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion—by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers...
  
  ...Wittgenstein remarked that "nothing seems to me less likely than that a scientist or mathematician who reads me should be seriously influenced in the way he works."...
  
  ...Even where philosophical doctrines have in the past been useful to scientists, they have generally lingered on too long, becoming of more harm than ever they were of use...

  He writes about the problems he has with metaphysics (causing people to hang on to ideas/ideologies long after they've ceased to be useful) and epistemology (specifically logical positivism and it's demand that all aspects of scientific theories must refer to quantities that are (in principle) observable). The biggest problem he has, though, is with what he calls relativism.

  Metaphysics and epistemology have at least been intended to play a constructive role in science. In recent years science has come under attack from unfriendly commentators joined under the banner of relativism. The philosophical relativists deny the claim of science to the discovery of objective truth; they see it as merely another social phenomenon, not fundamentally different from a fertility cult or a potlatch.
  Philosophical relativism stems in part from the discovery by philosophers and historians of science that there is a large subjective element in the process by which scientific ideas become accepted. We have seen here the role that aesthetic judgments play in the acceptance of new physical theories. This much is an old story to scientists (though philosophers and historians sometimes write as if we were utterly naive about this)...
  
  ...It is simply a logical fallacy to go from the observation that science is a social process to the conclusion that the final product, our scientific theories, is what it is because of the social and historical forces acting in this process. A party of mountain climbers may argue over the best path to the peak, and these arguments may be conditioned by the history and social structure of the expedition, but in the end either they find a good path to the peak or they do not, and when they get there they know it...
  
  ...I suspect that Gerald Holton is close to the truth in seeing the radical attack on science as one symptom of a broader hostility to Western civilization that has bedeviled Western intellectuals from Oswald Spengler on. Modern science is an obvious target for this hostility; great art and literature have sprung from many of the world's civilizations, but ever since Galileo scientific research has been overwhelmingly dominated by the West.
  This hostility seems to me to be tragically misdirected. Even the most frightening Western applications of science such as nuclear weapons represent just one more example of mankind's timeless efforts to destroy itself with whatever weapons it can devise. Balancing this against the benign applications of science and its role in liberating the human spirit, I think that modern science, along with democracy and contrapuntal music, is something that the West has given the world in which we should take special pride.
  In the end this issue will disappear. Modern scientific methods and knowledge have rapidly diffused to non-Western countries like Japan and India and indeed are spreading throughout the world. We can look forward to the day when science can no longer be identified with the West but is seen as the shared possession of humankind...

  If this sort of thing interests you, the entire chapter is available for download here. (PDF) Phew. Too much cutting and pasting only. Lots of videos of Weinberg are also available.

Books, Award, Railway Wagons, Optimal Kerchief Management, God, Pigeons, Outlook Traveller, Graphic Novels, Vinayaka Chaturthi, Disease (With Pics)

Where we regurgitate everything

0. Books

Lots and lots of people are borrowing our books nowadays. We've resorted to using reminders on the trusty E51.

So far we know that Emma has Sea of Poppies; the Nitwit has What I Talk About When I Talk About Running; Mango Indian has A Short History of Nearly Everything, The God Delusion, India: A History, and a couple of Eddie Izzard DVDs; the girl upstairs has Santorini, The Five Dollar Smile: And Other Stories (yes, a moment of weakness); and the neighbour uncle has The Unquiet Woods and Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600-1800. So all of you beware.

Someone, but someone has our copy of Norwegian Wood. If you're reading this, holler. The other Murakamis on the shelf are beginning to miss this one.

Speaking of which, the running book is unmissable, especially if you've had running and/or writing ambitions and lived in Cambridge, MA or Japan. One of the good things is that it de-mystifies Murakami quite a bit, and suddenly he is this ordinary runner guy (well, sort of, he runs one marathon every year) with ordinary running troubles. Lots of little things resonate for anyone who has engaged in long distance running. For example, that mysterious question that non-runners will pose, "What do you think about when you're running?" It's a bit of a baffling question for someone who's past the 10 mile mark. What are we thinking about? Nothing, really. To put it in a different way, who the fuck knows? It's a strange state, quasi-meditative, self-transcending and what have you. The book results in repeated mental revisits of Sharon Olds poem.

1. Awards

The good Imam has done the unthinkable and nominated us for some pink coloured award. Thank you, thank you. Curiously enough, Pragya (who through a complicated and unfathomable chain of links has been lurking here) also nominated us for said pinkie. Thank you, thank you. Now we needst pass it on. So here goes. Pretty much the only rule we're following in this is that the blog has to be a personal blog we read regularly and is not already on the blogroll.

1. Australopithecus - Sample: "Another thing that worries me about these Americans is the use of the word momentarily. I almost shat in my trousers when the pilot announced 'we shall take off momentarily'."

2. Barmy in Wonderland - For kaaryakshetra adhyayan and suchlike. Also for contributing some mufat ka gyaan.

3. Wisecandyman - Who will surely one day shuffle off the mortal coil during the video question at a quiz shortly after he has consumed industrial quantities of esoteric cuisine, thus neatly bundling all his passions into one compact event.

4. The River's Wing - Who really ought to write more often.

OK, that's it, have lost enthu. There's still a boatload of stuff to write in this post. Sue us. And we set all these worthies free of the obligation to continue the tag. So there. Muhaha.

Speaking of awards, we made a little bit of money at the Landmark Quiz on Aug 15 in Madras. This has duly been spent in Landmark on such things as The Watchmen; Common Sense and The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine; The Open Society and Its Enemies; I, Claudius etc. One of these days we'll write the definitive What Rs. x,000 Buys You At Landmark post, but till then what Rs. 3,000 can get you at Landmark is diddly squat.

3. Railway Wagons

A lot of time has lately been spent on trains, as readers will doubtless be aware. It's been very pretty too, what with all the rain and lushness. Behold, somewhere in northern Andhra Pradesh, dusk, Howrah-Madras Mail.




And there's the Godavari, all pregnant and ominous. Is there such a thing of joy as a bowstring girder in the middle distance?


But on these journeys, such of us who are wont to worry about such things, are plagued with unanswered questions of the following nature. Ever so often, you will pass a railway siding or a freight marshaling yard where there invariably are forlorn looking goods wagons lying about. This is a heartbreaking sight, especially at dusk, when there is a slight drizzle, especially. They look orphaned in a way that your average passenger coach never does.

The worst ones are from the far off railways. Nothing is more tragic than a rusting North East Frontier Railway wagon on an Erode siding, catching the last rays of the sun refracting through a light shower, silently watching the Salem and Coimbatore bound traffic thunder by with nary a care... Makes you cry. Oh, once in a while you'll find an engine that's as far removed from home as our wagon. A Tughlakabad WAG-5 in Thootukudi is nowadays not an unusual sight, but it's different for locomotives isn't it? The key word being locomotive. The thing could find its way to Delhi or Dehradun if it wanted to, innit?

Not so for the poor goods wagon. It's in our mind's eye, lying there silently in the gloaming, at the foothills of the Nilgiris. Meanwhile a clerk in Bongaigaon or Dibrugarh scratches out its serial number from a long list in a smudge-ridden, dog-eared, ledger in a dusty office in the Brahmaputra valley. Sigh. Think about it, the next time you see one of these.

4. Optimal Kerchief Management

Is this even possible? Are we to resign ourselves to the sad truth that there is a black hole or other such spacetime anomaly in the cupboard, into which kerchiefs disappear? We've bought 20 kerchiefs in the last year, and can barely find one when we need it. In pensive moments, we break into song. With Bong accent. "Bhere do you go, my lobhely? I bhant to no..." Where do they go? (That song, by the way, is one of those instantly evocative take-me-back-to-the-90s-when-STAR-TV-had-just-been-invented specimens.)

Is there some way of ensuring that all times 3-6 clean handkerchiefs are available for consumption in some easily accessible place? Please help.

5. God

See 6.

6. Pigeons

Assumption: There is no god. Therefore, species evolve according Darwinian principles of natural selection and genetic mutation.

(i) Pigeons exist.
(ii) They are unquestionably the dumbest creatures on the planet. Staring deeply into a pigeon's eyes for about 3 milliseconds will make this truth instantly self-evident. If you aren't convinced, send us an application in triplicate and we will put a post on such topics as "pigeons; IQ of", "pigeons; cranial cubic capacity of", "pigeons; taste of" and so on which will doubtless convince you.
(iii) And yet they flourish. By the gazillion. If natural selection and all those fairy tales were true, they would at least have to have gone the way of the Kakapo or the Jerdon's Courser. But, nahiin. They darken the skies with their pestilential coochiings and cooings, and dive-bomb terrified, helpless Grand Slam winners. Did they go off in some distant past and engage in some ghoulish coupling with Stuka (Junkers Ju 87)?

Anyway, they exist, and seem to thrive.
(iv) Assumption must be wrong. Ergo, god exists.

Corollary: Given this sort of blatant bias towards an unfit species, the only logical explanation is that the biased One is Itself one of the beneficiaries. Ergo god is a Pigeon.

Jai Guttur Dev.

6. Outlook Traveler

Hah. Thanks are due again to Lesley because the Konaseema piece is finally out in print. Outlook Traveller recently released their 45 Weekend Getaways from Hyderabad book. It's not in the stores yet, but we have an author copy ("author copy", "author copy", oh delicious sound) and find that we're rubbing shoulders with the likes of William Dalrymple and Sheetal and are very kicked. Please buy in industrial quantities.

7. Graphic Novels

Who would've thought that there's something new to discover once you're 30+? As Jamesh Bond put it, "Never Shay Never Again" or whatever. Lately we have been lapping up these ones. That Man Keynes With His Execrable Urdu started us off by gifting us Maus and Persepolis. Then along came El Spaniardo with Amruta Patil's Kari, and the alea was well and truly iacta est. Latest couple of bouts of bookbuying have resulted in Tezuka's Buddha and the aforementioned Watchmen joining the ranks. Are we done? Do we need to do more? Sin City and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen beckon, but not much else.

It is so important to have all the volumes just so in the shelf, don't you think?

Popper, Calvino, Moore, Window, Balcony, Laundry (A Juxtaposition)

8. Happy Pillayar Day

Today it is. We spent some quiet time in the evening on the terrace and thought we'll share some of the pictures with our hapless breathless readers.

The view from the balcony

Sunset - I

Sunset - II
Close observation will reveal a sliver of moon that has been causing hullaballoo in certain parts.

Sunset - III

Sunset - IV

Silhouette - Self Portrait

Jalebi vendor - Begumpet

puja pandal, apni galli mein

9. Disease

We have mumps.

10. Bonus

Does anybody remember this?

Zing Thing

Found in a 1980s copy of a magazine/Indrajal comic on the CFL premises. Brought back some memories. Was it good for you too?

Tag Tag

Orey kallile rendu maangaa

Tag, the First

Space Bar asks whoever wants to to take up Swar's tag.

Procedure:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Ergo

1. No Fuss Cooking - 100 recipes you can't go wrong with by Sheema & Jhampan Mookerjee.

This book seriously rocks. Sort of like a hard copy version of Cooking for Engineers. We've mastered the Ratnagiri fish curry, and the jhal sprouts thing. Very easy.

2. Right. Done. Thank god I picked a book that has a 123 pages. [Where have we heard this line before?]

3 & 4.

"Fry over high heat for 5-6 minutes till mutton turns brown. Add ginger and spice powders, and sauté for a minute. Stir in 2 tbsp curd."

In case you're wondering, this is from a rogan josh recipe.

5. Whoever wants to take this up. [Where have we heard this line before?]

Tag, the Second

Emma has got one and names us by name, so how to not respond?

Procedure:

The following is apparently a list of books, "most of them sitting unread in people's bookshelves to make them look smarter". The rules are: bold the ones that you have read, underline the ones you have read in school, italicize the ones you have started but didn't finish.

One doubt. School = high school and earlier, or in the American sense, college? We will assume former.

Our list is going to suck ass. But what the hell.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude (I think!)
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion
8. Life of Pi: a novel
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre
17. The Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs and Steel
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler's Wife
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assasin
26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
37. The Canterbury Tales
38. The Historian: A Novel
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera
41. Brave New World
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault's Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible
53. 1984
54. Angels and Demons
55. Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D'Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver's Travels
65. Les Miserables
66. The Correction
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
69. Dune
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
73. The God of Small Things
74. A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
75. Cryptonomicon
76. Neverwhere
77. A Confederacy of Dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
81. Beloved
82. Slaughter House- five
83. The Scarlett Letter
84. Eats, Shoots and Leaves
85. The Mists of Avalon
86. Oryx and Crake
87. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
88. Cloud Atlas
89. The Confusion
90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
96. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Enquiry into Values
98. The Aeneid
99. Watership Down
100. Gravity's Rainbow
101. The Hobbit
102. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
103. White Teeth
104. Treasure Island
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers

Also, abridged stuff read in school didn't count.

There's an obscene amount of Jane Austen in the list, also Thomas Hardy, Dumas, no Richard Dawkins/Daniel Dennett. It's a very odd list. Please don't judge me by it.

We pass this on to "Whoever wants to take this up." [Where have we heard this line before?]

This Just In: This is turning out to be one superbly popular pair of tags for some reason. So far, the following unfortunates have succumbed to the charm:

Srinivasan Balasubramaniam Thirugnanasambandamoorthi
Nisha
Kenny has promises to keep, and miles to go before she sleeps
Imam Waspsoro has finished with the saga of Subtle Subramanian and spread the tag

Watch zis ispace.

eiθ = cos θ + i sin θ? Ha ha ha...

In which Ludwig tries to find jokes rooted in serious mathematics

It's been a while since we did a post on mathematics. A young hedonist in New York posted a delightful piece about mathematical encounters on Broadway and 102^nd, and this has inspired us to dust off a few items.

Serious things first. Most Indians have heard of G. H. Hardy of course, as Srinivasa Ramanujan's correspondent, mentor, teacher, student, and friend. Robert Kanigel's biography of Ramanujan necessarily contains pages and pages of engrossing information about Hardy. The great man was an atheist, his politics was left of centre and he was a sort of maniacal cricket buff. One year his New Year resolutions were

1. Prove the Riemann hypothesis
2. Make 211 not out in the fourth innings of the last test match at the Oval [which was something like hitting a grand slam home run while behind by three runs in the ninth inning of the World Series' final game]
3. Find an argument for the nonexistence of God that will convince the general public
4. Be the first man at the top of Mt. Everest
5. Be proclaimed the first president of the U.S.S.R, of Great Britain, and Germany.
6. Murder Mussolini

Kanigel's book has another anecdote which is equally entertaining.

Another story neatly combined his love of cricket, his pleasure in the sun, his warfare with God, and his madcap bent. One of his collaborators, Marcel Reisz, was staying at the place Hardy shared with his sister in London. Hardy ordered him to step outside, open umbrella clearly in view, and yell up to God, "I am Hardy, and I am going to the British Museum." This, of course, would draw a lovely day from God, who had nothing better to do than thwart Hardy. Hardy would then scurry off for an afternoon's cricket, fine weather presumably assured.

What can you say about a man whose cricket teams include "God(F), God(S), God(HG)" (F = Father, S = Son, HG = Holy Ghost!)? His mantelpiece sported photographs of Einstein, Jack Hobbs and Lenin. Later in life, when he found his mathematical powers on the decline, he wrote A Mathematician's Apology. This "book of haunting sadness" [C. P. Snow] is actually a long essay about the uses of mathematics, the motivations of mathematicians (and indeed anyone engaged in creative work), the aesthetics of mathematics, and a reflection of his own decades long engagement with the field.

(i)

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. ... The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

(ii)

The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful--'important' if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and 'serious' expresses what I mean much better.

(iii)

I still say to myself when I am depressed, and find myself forced to listen to pompus and tiresome people, "Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms."

The entire essay is available here for free download. Makes for a very thought provoking afternoon's reading.

Anyway, this was supposed to be a post about jokes rooted in serious mathematics. Here's one that we posted once already, but doesn't lose anything in a retelling. It is paraphrased from Simon Singh's Fermat's Last Enigma.

Grafitti on New York City subway wall:

xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ

There is no value of n>2 for which the above is true. I have found a truly remarkable proof of this, but my train is coming and I have to go...

Zeno of Elea came up with variations of his paradox, and these have given rise to possibly multiple funnies. We present a couple.

The dichotomy paradox leads to the following mathematical joke. A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer were asked to answer the following question. A group of boys are lined up on one wall of a dance hall, and an equal number of girls are lined up on the opposite wall. Both groups are then instructed to advance toward each other by one quarter the distance separating them every ten seconds (i.e., if they are distance d apart at time 0, they are d/2 at t = 10, d/4 at t = 20, d/8 at t = 30, and so on.) When do they meet at the center of the dance hall? The mathematician said they would never actually meet because the series is infinite. The physicist said they would meet when time equals infinity. The engineer said that within one minute they would be close enough for all practical purposes.

Another one is actually a cartoon, which we've been unable to unearth. So we'll just tell the joke.

[Scene: City street, ancient Greece. Two philosophers (bearded), run into each other.]
Phil I: Hey, it seems Zeno didn't come to work today...
Phil II [chuckles]: Yeah, wait till you hear his excuse!

That one is truly brilliant, we thought.

Any others?

Histaree Lecher Undhi

At the choultry, we haven't looked at a proper list in what seems to be aeons. So, without much further ado, a list. On history books. The discerning Gult choultry reader (2 nos.?) will have undoubtedly noticed that we have borrowed from that classic song Botany paatham undi from that classic movie Shiva. Be that as it may, the list beckons...

First, a few words of caution:

(a) We will break our own rules very often, and instead of talking about history books, we will talk about historians themselves
(b) There is some overlap between this post and the book tag post
(c) We tend to be somewhat biased towards military affairs, unfortunately. Forgive us.
(d) We are talking strictly of narrative (mostly non-academic) history books. We do not have the grey matter or attention span necessary for venturing into and partaking of proper textbooks.

And the nominees are:

• John Keay - You must've seen this coming, no? He is the flavour of the era. We like his stuff (a lot), and have written copiously about him here and here and here. Enough said.


• The Second Creation (Robert P. Crease, Charles C. Mann) - "Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics". Amma had this lying at home and we read it by and by. We still haven't quite understood a decent chunk of it (on account of it being particle physics and muons and so on), but if you're interested in the history of science, this one is worth the money.


• Battle Cry Of Freedom (James McPherson) - This single volume history of the American Civil War is quite possibly the best single volume history book on any broad historical subject. An amazing book, learned yet accesible. Don't take it from the choultry, read a review. If you're a history buff, and are even moderately interested in US history, please go and buy this book. Why don't all historians get together and draw chits on which various topics are written, and go off and quietly write a book like this one?


• Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman - They aren't historians, and between them, they've written mostly books on Dravidian literature and poetry, but more than their analysis of the art, we've come to like their prefaces and afterwords, where they talk about the evolution of their pet subjects. A Poem At The Right Moment: Remembered Verses From Premodern South India and (with Sanjay Subrahmanyam) Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600-1800 (this is a more proper historiographical book) are particularly noteworthy.


• The War Against Hannibal (Titus Livius) - Surely an unexpected entry in the list! Livy wrote some 142 books during his lifetime, of which 35 have survived. Books XXI-XXX (you can read them all, in Latin, here) deal with the Punic wars. The first part has to do with that peerless Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca, and his European excursion, starting in modern-day Spain, into Transalpine and Cisalpine Gaul, and finally into the Italian peninsula proper. The second part has to do with the Roman riposite, in the form of Publius Cornelius Scipio and his expedition to North Africa, culminating in the landmark Battle of Zama.
  
  Polybius also wrote about the Punic wars, but Livy is particularly enchanting because he identifies so closely with the "good guys", and only has grudging respect for the adversaries. Livy's history is unabashedly partisan, you find him cheering his team on here, defending Roman atrocities there, bad-mouthing Carthage and in general behaving like a Tom Clancy of yore.

Well, that's that. Now we move on to the honourable mentions category:

• A Short History of World War I (James L. Stokesbury) - A long time back, when our M.S. was dragging on ad infinitum, and we had momentarily tired of civil and uncivil engineering, we signed up for a World War I course and this was the prescribed textbook. Short, yet catholic (inasmuch as WWI is concerned); witty, yet poignant; abominable snowman, yet i. (Heh! Gotcha!!) We have tried to lay our paws on other books by the same author and failed.


• The Conquest of the Incas (John Hemming) - This was (is?) the "standard" book on the antics of the conquistadores in Peru, and perhaps still is. Good reference value...


• America: A Narrative History (George Tindall, David E. Shi) - The single volume version of this (even if it is 1000+ pages) could quite possibly compete with "Battle Cry of Freedom" for the top spot in the single volume stakes. Lucidly written, covers a lot of ground, with excellent and timely digressions into the American zeitgeist of whichever period they happen to be dealing with.


• Alberuni's India (Al-Biruni) - Haven't read the whole thing (it is a bit boring and nitpicky), but Al-Biruni's foreword or preface to the book is memorable. This guy must have been quite something. Nearly a millenium back, he expresses his concern at how biased the book he is about to write might turn out to be, on account of his being an outsider to his subject (India). Several remarks on the pitfalls of writing history, on the notion of the disinterested observer, and on the notion of cultural prisms refracting history (not in so many words, but close 'nuff :)


• Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire (Jason Goodwin) - A most charming tome written in a fairly unique style; part whimsical brooding - part historical narrative. A fortunate and serendipitous "MacIntyre and Moore" discovery.


• Assorted - Some random interesting ones: Stillwell and the American Experience in China (Barbara W. Tuchman) is a good read about the China-Burma-India theater of WWII; Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (Lawrence James) was interesting, but might also controversial; The Proudest Day: India's Long Road To Independence (Anthony Read, David Fisher) is also interesting and controversial.

As usual, we are open to interesting suggestions vis a vis narrative history books.

Ich bin Tagged

Oooooooooo!!! We've been tagged, we've been tagged, we've been tagged!!! [Skips up and down] This is very flattering, we are positively shouting from the rooftops, I say. We have also been accused of making lists, we haven't made lists in ages! Time has lists, but do you see anyone tagging Time? No, sirree.

Be that as it may (and it is), this tag is an 'n' interesting. If you're wondering what 'n' means, we'll have to do '3-dimensional surrender', 'general Olympics' and deesh.

Total number of books owned

We make a distinction between 'owned', and 'bought'. Rough estimates on the latter are 300-350 in Hyderabad, maybe 2 dozen in Vizag, and about a dozen that have been 'borrowed'. If, however, we speak of 'owned', there is a whole wall of crumbly books that is sitting in Vizag that we will inherit. That is, shortly after we have gagged and bound the sibling and dropped her into one of her precious croc pits, and laced amma's tea with some suitably humane toxin.

Last book(s) we bought

This was on Saturday. At Walden, we bought John Keay's When Men and Mountains Meet : The Explorers of the Western Himalayas 1820-1875 and Confronting Love, edited by Jerry Pinto and Arundhati Subramaniam. We then proceeded to waddle over to Odyssey (mainly for the cafe), and mysteriously ended up buying India Discovered by a certain John Keay (Yes, we've decided to own all John Keays. Our recommendation to donors is that when that "Got to give Ludwig a book!!!" impulse seizes you, check with us, and give us a Keay we do not own yet. We will grovel at your Lotus feet in abject humility and gratitude.)

Last books(s) we read

The broken record continues. We read Sowing The Wind. We also re-read a bunch of books we'd already read, but what's the fun in that?

Books we are currently reading

Apart from dipping into the ones we bought this weekend, we are engaged in concurrently reading Pillars of Hercules by Paul Theroux and another book. We really like Theroux because he is observatory (yes, his pet name is Jantar Mantar) and sarcastic, and sympathetic when necessary. If we could, we would make a living out of doing what Theroux did. We also like Theroux because he grew up in Meffid, and he keeps referring to Meffid, and Summahville and Cambridge, and Baws'hn in his writings. We may have done some long runs near his house when we were circumambulating the Mystic Lakes in the summer of '03.

We are also re-dipping into The Riemann Hypothesis. One of these days, we'll understand the whole damn thing, prove (or disprove) it, pocket a cool million, and retire.

Five books that we have really enjoyed or influenced me

Five? Five??? This seems to be the response that all self respecting reader types seem to be giving to this koschan. Nevertheless, we will shamelessly plagiarize an idea floated by the jester and and idea floated by the individual under the influence of infusions made from an Amazonian giant vine, and implement here.

Fiction

Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage
Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird
J.R.R.Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings, Silmarillon (when you're a certain age and are at certain institutes, this can't be helped, sorry)
Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet
R.K.Narayan - Swami and Friends

Also Jack Kerouac - On The Road, Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment, Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient, Kazuo Ishiguro - Remains of the Day, Haruki Murakami - Wild Sheep Chase, Kiran Nagarkar - Seven Sixes are Forty Three and so on. This is really pointless.

History

John Keay - The Honourable Company (well, this was the first, but needed to be read)
James McPherson - Battle Cry of Freedom
Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel
V. Narayana Rao, David Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam - Textures of Time: Writing History in South India
Crease & Mann - The Second Creation

Poetry

Stephen Dobyns - Pallbearers Envy The One Who Rides
Coleman Barks's Rumi book
Various - Making Love To Marilyn Monroe
V. Narayana Rao, David Shulman - A Poem at the Right Moment: Remembered Verses from Pre-modern South India. This is a must have. [Nudges violently :)]
Constantine Cavafy - The Complete Poems of Constantine Cavafy

This is getting tiresome, we stop here. There are several other 'influential' books (Alistair Maclean who set off the whole Navy obsession, Commando comics which set off the whole Rommel obsession, Rani Mukherjee who set off the whole Jibanananda Das obsession, Ruskin Bond who set off the Himalaya obsession, Kenneth Anderson who set off the whole South Indian wildlife obsession and so on).

Books we plan to buy next

Bit of a mystery. Only definite ones in mind are the Keay books, and Kolatkar's Kala Ghoda poems. This one we've been looking for high and low and not been able to find in Hyderabad.

Books that caught our attention but we have never read

Oh God, so many.

James Joyce - Pretty much everything, but Ulysses mostly
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Again, everything
Milan Kundera - Ditto
J.M.Coetzee - Ditto

And so on.

Books we own but have never got around to reading

Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace (Hello, Veena)
Douglas Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach (started, but haven't finished, yet)
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
Voltaire - Candide
Lawrence Durrell - The Avignon Quintet

People we are passing this on to

The loblolly, who never ceases to remind us how well-read she is; Srin, who with the addition of movie star hair has become a bona fide celebrity (even if she questions the existence of sepia); Deski, who has cooked a number of bun-omlettes and is waiting for public to consume; young Thos., maybe this will get him to post something finally; and Anand, because he will definitely have something interesting to say.

Sowing The Wind

Our favourite historian has delivered again. From the manner in which he delivers, one begins to imagine he is trained in the innards of Pizza Hut, or Dominos or somesuch. Or not. Practically the very first post at the choultry involved this man, and two years and many biryanis down the line, we find ourselves gushing over him again.

On New Year's eve, we bought 1 pair Sandak chappals, 1 pair Hawaii chappals, 1 chicken biryani and 1 copy of Sowing The Wind in the vicinity of Paradise(1) and wended our way home to Begumpet, through the reveling throng. It is debatable as to which purchase resulted in maximum pleasure, but the book is rapidly rising to the top.

"Sowing The Wind" (about Rs. 500 in paperback in India) is about the mismanagement of the Middle East between 1900-1960, mostly by the British, the French, and the Americans, but with generous dollops of aid from the Turks and the peoples of Egypt, the Levant, Palestine, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Persia, Arabia and so on. Having blitzed through the first third of the book, it appears that Keay has once again come up with a wonderfully readable account of the origins of many of the conflicts in the Middle East (including Israel-Palestine, Kurd-Iraqi, Shia-Sunni, Iraq-Iran). Some of the reasons why the Western powers felt the need to meddle in these parts

• The British wanting to control both sides of the isthmus of Suez, so as to keep their short cut to India and the Far East bits of the 'empah'. Ergo, they mess around in Egyptian politics, and are desperate to see some form of 'friendly' government in control of the Sinai peninsula
• The combined concern of the Western powers for the Holy Oily Places [thanks, Sir Hmphrey]
• The British wanting some form of control over Iraq and Iran (oil!)
• And consequently wanting some control over a sea port (Haifa) in the eastern Med from where they could lay a railway line over Palestine, Transjordania and on to the Tigris-Euphrates doab
• General guilt in Christendom over their treatment of Jews for oh 1500 years or so
• The French being...well...French [thanks, Eddie]

We haven't yet started talking about American interference in these parts, mostly because we haven't read about it yet.

Keay brings his trademark dry, dark humour into this work, as he does in all his writings. For example

...anticipating a much later solution to the Kurdish problem, Churchill even proposed the use of chemical weapons as he wondered whether 'some kind of asphyxiating bombs to cause disablement of some kind' might not be the answer...

There's a lot more, in this vein, absolutely delightful stuff. The way he treats Lawrence (of Anakapalli, in case you were wondering which one) and other larger-than-life characters of the World War I etc. periods is chuckle-inducing. You also learn that the Middle East was full of the most unlikely personalities (Gertrude Bell, A.T.Wilson, King Faysal of Syria/Iraq), and some incredible incidents (remind us to tell you about the mile long railway train that took 5 days to cover 60 km)

The book is a keeper, rock on John Keay.

1. Paradise, contrary to popular perception, is not some ethereal version of Brindavan Gardens, replete with gurgling brooks and coy, lute-armed seraphim and cherubim, and nubile damsels/utes who keep you satiated through a system of underarm bowling [thanks, Larry] involving the bunging of the occasional grape (or grapeshot depending on your misdeeds and their mood) in the general direction of your mouth, as you recline on an Ottoman type thing <2 minutes silence in memory of the poor Ottoman yokel> with your remote control.

No sirree. Paradise, is an establishment in Secunderabad which serves as an old age home for destitute chickens. Destitute c. arrive here and are rehabilitated and moulded into finer things (biryanis) and sent on their merry way. That this merry way is usually down someone's GI tract is something that the d. chickens don't seem to be too concerned about, if you believe the latest surveys conducted among adult destitute c. populations in South India.

Two movies, a book, and a quizzer's place

Come, come. Surely, even you can't come up with such a beautifully contrived title for a post. Cinema Paradiso is definitely one of the better things to happen to movie lovers in these parts. One is circumambulating Nagarjuna circle (clockwise) a la Ganymede around Jove, as one often does, and then one catches a glimpse of a store that calls itself "Cinema Paradiso". With heavy heart, and virtual certainty that this will be a gigantic letdown, one detaches oneself from Nagarjuna's beguiling centripetal charms and propagates rectilinearly into said establishment. " 'pon my word, what do we have here?" [This is the little rational choice idiot having fun. See here.] Shelves thickly stacked with all kinds of movies - there's your Kurosawa, your Ray, your Truffaut, your Godard, your Hitchcock, your Tarantino, my Emmanuelle Beart, your Schwarzn., your Wong Kar-Wai, my Meryl Streep, your Woody Allen and so on. Started by Santhosh, a cinematographer, "Cinema Paradiso" can now be found in Madras, Bangalore, Calcutta and Hyderabad.

Veena (methinks) had a post at Yossarian Lives about the Tamil movie Autograph that had been in the pending list for a while. So, this becomes movie #1. And truly, it is as they say, thoda hatke hai. The director takes you on a romp through an autobiographical and autographical (as in everyone he knows signs his autograph book) journey through his past, mostly about the girls and women he fell for. #1 is a classmate from high school, this part was done rather nicely, one thought. #2 is a classmate from college. Turns out the bloke studied in Kerala, so this part of the movie is all backwaters and elephants and kai kotti kaLi, mohini attam, kathakaLi. The story though, isn't as credible. What with our 'hero' from Tamil Nadu de-boating a gang of slimy, oil-slick Mallus because they taunted him; the girl's pop being some kind of modern Capulet or Montague pater familias; and so on. #3 is not really a 'love interest'. This one is a colleague who inspires the hero/diro to pick himself up, 'become something in life' (aambleah aNaa vaazhkayilu vaazhapazham yada yada (The last bit is from Seinfeld, but its very confusing with the italics, isn't it? Tee hee...)). This tries to deal with the "we're just friends" aspect of man-woman relationships. Hmm. On the whole, the movie is decent. "A welcome change from the standard fare", as they quoth. But nothing spectacular, at all. The Tam chauvinism bit was played up a little bit too garishly (the interior Mallu speaketh). Hopefully, better stuff will emanate from the same crew soon.

Apparently, all self-respecting intellectual cinematic types are supposed to have seen many Truffaut works. Self had not seen even one. This was remedied, thanks to Cinema P. Les Quatre Cents Coups became flick #2 to be borrowed. Truffaut was a rather opinionated and vocal film critic, the "...enfant terrible of the Cahiers du Cinema and Arts..." Rather uncharacteristically (for a critic) and bravely, he decided to put his money where his mouth was, and with money borrowed from his father-in-law ("Eef zee feelm failz, Eye weel ave atleast ruined Papa..."), he plunged into the murky (how can it not be with the French) world of cinema. The result was The Four Hundred Blows. The story is autobiographical (do all first films have to be?), and deals with the growing up of young Antoine Doimel (Truffaut went on to make 4 other movies with the same chief character). The film is a landmark in the French New Wave cinema, and so on. Suspect that the modern day viewer will be left a little bit cold at the approach this movie takes, but apparently some features of modern cinema that we're accustomed to originate from this seminal work (the last shot 'freeze frame' for example). All said and done, a watchable movie for the acting, the photography, and the historical and conversation value. Doimel as an adult holds promise. At some point in a grown-up French movie, someone is bound to take off their clothes. Mmm...

Concurrently, one has been flipping through the latest collection of Satyajit Ray's writings/speeches (some in Bengali) on cinema. Can't quite remember the name of the damn book now, but definitely worth a gander. Or goose. If that's how you're inclined. Not sure all of what he says is clear, but you can't miss his almost 'measured passion' for cinema, in the way he talks about film makers and movies that inspired his work. There is even a chapter where he analyzes shot-by-shot the scene from Pather Panchali where Harihar is told about his daughter Durga's death. Thought seems to have gone into every facet of the shot (scene composition, lighting, camera angles, weather), and it does show, in the movie as a whole, even if you don't notice individual items. Read it.

TAILPIECE: Now we have to write about quizzing too? Two movies and a book weren't enough? Ostrogoths. Vandals. Visigoths. Anyway, the IIT Madras Open Quiz happened on Sunday last (October 2, 2005). 300 odd teams (of four people each). Usual IIT quiz, some really good questions, a decent amount of highly obscure stuff. The usual suspects won. The usual suspects came second. We came fourth.

Smorgasboard

0. Happy Onam.

1. Finished yet another John Keay book, The Spice Route: A History. This man is rapidly turning into one's favourite historian about these matters. His India: A History was also very good, a judicious mix of history sprinkled with Keay's own pointed remarks about everything ("...the Near East in the Middle Ages was almost as troubled and strife-torn as the Middle East in nearer ages..."). Of course, it all started off over a year and a half back when we wrote about Tall Ships and en passant touched upon The Honourable Company, which was a history of the British East India Company. "The Spice Route" and "The Honourable Company" have much in common, intertwined as the history of colonialism and spices is.
The chronology of "The Spice Route" however starts in the dimly seen past, when Phoenicians, Egyptians and other sundry Levantine types started sailing. A history of spices follows - Greece-Rome-Dark Ages-Middle Ages and so on, before arriving at the point where the Iberians, the Italians, the Low Countries, and of course the English took to serious blue water sailing in search of "The Origin Of Spices". The pioneering work of Hippalos; the mysteries of Periplus Maris Erythraei (which is available in its entirety here); the peregrinations of Marco Polo, Ibn Batuta and Xuan Zhuang; of Admiral Cheng-ho's argosy (thanks to Zoo Station) and so on.

This history is full of the most surprising characters: shady Italian industrial espionage types who converted to Islam so as to be able to hang out with Arabs and learn their secrets; a Greek cabin boy who joins a British ship, finds his way to Siam, becomes a favourite at the King's court and is virtually Prime Minister of Thailand for a few years; Siam and Golconda going to war over the harassment of Indian porters (at British instigation) who carried cargos from the eastern end of the Malay peninsula to the western end over the isthmus of Kra, and so on.

UPDATE: This should've been posted yesterday (thanks to Anonymous for the reminder), but John Keay is indeed touring the country. More information is available. If you get a chance to hear the man speak, please intimidate us at Choultry also.

2. There are many blogs devoted to economics. Zoo Station, Indian Economy, Deesha, Secular Right, India Uncut are some blogs that frequently feature very readable posts on economics, government, the role of government in economics, and so on.

While they present different and interesting facets of and takes on various economic systems, it wouldn't be unfair to say that by and large the bloggers agree on (for want of a better phrase) "laissez faire free market capitalism" as their preferred economic system, for various reasons. Further, in general, these blogs are critical about socialism, communism and all other related -isms (complete the list yourself).

As someone who's knowledge of conventional economics and economic history is abysmal, and further more someone whose ability to gather the facts and analyze them is also pathetic, it becomes hard to frame any decent questions, or come up with any decent arguments about these issues. But but but...as someone who writes a blog read by 6 people, who's to stop us from asking some stupid questions anyway? Huh?!

• What are the ethical/moral underpinnings of any economic systems? What is "good", "bad"? What does "equitable" mean? Is "equal access to resources and opportunities" "good"? Is it necessary? Is it sufficient? Have people who advocate any one system over the other answered these questions to their satisfaction? Is that necessary?
  
  
• Generally, the laissez faire folk seem to be "meritocrats". This means, you have minimal regulatory interference, let individuals/firms compete in the open against each other, may the best man win, and to the winner go the spoils. This is "fair", and this is "good" for everyone. This seems to work nicely when all concerned start on the same level playing field, in terms of access to resources and opportunities, and the only variables are the capabilities of the entities concerned.
  Unfortunately, these entities include people. What happens after the first generation?
  
  Mr. A did well in life, so his children go to the best schools and so on. Ms. B didn't do so well, so her children weren't able to get an education and so on. Now what? Is anyone studying the effect of inequalities and how they are propagated across generations? What is the "good" solution to this problem? What is the "fair" solution? Wouldn't it be "fair" and "meritorious" to separate all children away from their parents as soon as possible, put them in some kind of residential school system where everyone is equal and turn them loose in the real world, without their parents' accomplishments backing them up? How do we draw these lines?
  
  
• Doesn't it seem as though for about 5000 years, we lived in a free-for-all smash-and-grab world, where the bhains resided with the owner of the lathi, and the more you managed to hoodwink others, the better off you were? Then, suddenly, in the last 100 years or so, we've discovered "ethics" and "fairness" and now we changed the rules. "Oh no, you can't use violence to become rich any more." Seems like a bit of a children's game.
  
  
• Macro economically speaking, what is the "end" of economics? If economic performance is measured in terms of "growth", and rewarded based on that performance, does this mean that this "prosperity" thing is inextricably linked with "growth"? Does "economic growth" always mean that, ultimately, we are using up more and more of some non-renewable resource? Per conventional wisdom: "economic growth" is a "good" thing, population growth is a bad thing, does this mean that the same number of (or fewer) people have to consume more and more things forever? Aren't war/calamities and the subsequent rebuilding, or even economic activity for the sake of economic activity, then a viable solution to our economic problems? Does this ever end? Where does this end? Where do economists want this to end, and where do they see this whole shebang going?
  

And so on and so forth... Very vexing these questions are, no answers in sight, and no one making a halfway decent attempt to explain this to the hoi polloi like us.

And a bloody long post.

Finis.