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.

Mahaquizzer 2008

The 2008 edition of the Karnataka Quiz Association's annual individual written quiz Mahaquizzer will be held this weekend. This is an open quiz.

There are prizes for best overall quizzer, best woman participant, and best student participant. Please carry valid identification if you are competing as a school/college student.

Write to kqaquizzes [AT] gmail [DOT] com or mahaquizzer [AT] gmail [DOT] com to register, mentioning which city you would like to appear from in the subject line.

Date: 18 May, 2008 (Sunday)

Reporting Time: 0930 (Please be in your seats by this time. No one will be allowed in after 0945.)

Venue:
Innobox Systems Pvt Ltd
#G19, Ground Floor,
Swarnajayanthi Complex,
SR Nagar, Hyderabad - 73

Map:



Directions: From Punjagutta, take the road that goes towards Ameerpet. Cross the Fantoosh-greenlands road junction. Keep going on the road till you see HUDA Complex- Maitrivanam on the RIGHT. Swarnajayanti Complex is the complex immediately after the HUDA complex on the RIGHT.

Hyderabad Coordinator: Satyajit Chetri (91-99591-89943)

Help! Classroom Needed!!

The 4^th edition of the Karnataka Quiz Association's annual summer written individual Mahaquizzer quiz is scheduled to be held at 9:30 a.m., on Sunday, 18 May.

The powers that be (1, 2) are finding it hard to get a venue for the Hyderabad edition. Previous versions were held in college classrooms (St. Francis, Begumpet and this other college in Marredpally).

Help is needed.

A classroom (school, college) or other room (preferably with desks) that can seat 50-70 people and is available between 9:00 a.m. and 01:00 p.m. on May 18, 2008 is being sought. If you know someone who can arrange this, please email quizhyd [AT] gmail [DOT] com and mark a copy to choultry [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

Or if you know Ludwig, you can call Ludwig.

Please to help.

2 Ways Of Looking At A Cycle With A Basket

Which are random thoughts inspired by morning bike rides

Eos rhododactylos (this be new favourite expression) had barely shrugged off the stifling embrace of a very warm night and started to do her dance in the sky when we dittoed off the dittoed ditto of a very ditto ditto ourselves and careened about the silent (except for 3 million trucks and 17.74 million call center cabs) roads of Hyderabad.

We were on our way to a 5:30 a.m. at rendezvous for a run around/near KBR Park in Banjara Hills. It struck us that

(a) We hadn't showed people the cycle before
(b) We hadn't ever taken the bugger out this far before

Those who know will tell you that the road from Nagarjuna Circle to KBR Parks is a long and relentless climb, with a pause at the mosque near Q Mart where the load revels out a bit and lets you catch your breath. All the months of wondering why the thing had 15 gears came to an end when we hit this stretch. They are necessary, friends, necessary. Age doth wither and custom stales the dainty feet and legs and they need the help of mechanical advantage...

Parked at KBR, drank half of water supply (bad move), duly put one horrendously exhausting wheezifying perambulation of the thing, and then wheeeeee.... Slipped into top gear and screamed down the hill at a terrifying clip.

Now a salient feature of this hill is that while coming down, right near the bottom, there stands a superior eatery that rejoices in the name of Chutney's. Curiously, we'd somehow managed to slip in a Rs. 100 note into the shorts pocket, so we were able to stop off at said establishment and order a steamed dosa parcel thing. This we slipped into basket, and furiously pedaled home because eos rhododactylos had hurried away with alacrity, and was replaced by solaris iwillgiveyousunstrokus which wasn't very pleasant.

dosa was had, coffee was drunk, Sunday papers, etc. etc. A parallel thread of thought was running all this while, prompted partly by an incident a couple of weeks back where a bunch of young boys advised the Nitwit (who owns the same bike) to get rid of the basket, and the carrier and hey presto, "masth poriilu ostaaru anna, impress aitaaru!" (trans: "hot chicks will come and fall for you!").

So what's to be done about the basket? Thesis and antithesis:

I
A grown man cycles by,
Puffing and panting,
With basket attached.
Sissy.

II
Cycle with basket attached.
Steamed dosa. MLA pesarattu.
mmm

mmm...
The possibilities.

So far we're leaning towards letting the basket stay. Apart from this unexpected bonus of being able to carry tiffin home, it helps with groceries, Xeroxing and so on.

Vaahanam:


This was from a few days back, breakfast at chez Ludwig, mit pesarattu, dosa podi, allam pacchadi und filter coffee.

Note (12-May-2008): Certain person has been going around acting all snooty in the comments section that we don't make pesarattu from f'(x) = lim Δx -> 0 [f(x + Δx) - f(x)]/Δx type principles. Let all be notified by these presents that the pesarattu was indeed made via standard operating procedures (soaking overnight, grinding etc.) So was the podi (but by the maternal unit). The coffee is filter coffee (Mr. Bean brand from Tata) percolated by yours truly, with water fetched in earthen pots from the village well by yours truly (yes, it's quite a sight), and the milk was from our own pet bovine Kamu (short for Ms. Kamadhenu Gomaata) freshly extracted that very morning (by yours truly). The ginger pickle is out of a bottle. So there.



Bad pictures courtesy of phone. Camera ist kaput.

Dearest One

In which we write a letter

This was in the inbox today. Normally don't pay attention, but aaj mood aa gaya. From Mike:

Dearest One (WTF)

My name is Mike Dennis Keita from Cote D'Ivoire. I am 19 years old and a student. Please I would like you to assist me as urgent as you can,before they kill me.My father is a wealthy cocoa merchant.Trouble began early last two year when my father's associates began suspecting that my father is not givingn proper accounts of all the tonnes of cocoa being cultivated by local farmersn in some villages.

This mistrust deepens between Oct-Sept, 2005 when they discovered avery large some of money my father deposited with a Bank here in ABIDJAN-COTE D'IVOIRE (FORMALLY (WTF) IVORY COAST in West Africa. As a result of this discovery and the envy on the money he was poisioned by his associates.At his hospital bed ,he revealed to me the reasons of his sickness and directed me where to get the documents of the said deposit which he made on my name as the next of kin,being the only child.

He dvised me that in case he die, that I should not stay in this country Cote D'Ivoire because his associates will equally kill me hence (WTF) my mother had died five years ago of breast cancer.

He also instructed that if he dies, I should look for a foreign partner who will help me to transfer the money out of this place (Abidjan Cote d'Ivoire), to his account and the person will help me to invest the money in that country. Based on this, I had to contact you bearing in mind that you will be humane enough to protect my life. My father finally died on the 5th of june,2006 and since then, I was out of school and went into hiding because of my father's asociates. All the relevant documents of the ($8.2 Million United States Dollars) that was deposited in a Commercial Bank by my late father, are with me now.

I will give you 20% of the total money, if you can help me transferring it into your Account, for onward investment in your country. Please contact me immediately with the above E-mail address and include your telephone and Fax numbers to enable me send you all necessary documents asregards the money before they kill me. It is a risk free transaction.(WTF)

I'm waiting for your urgent reply.
Best regards.sincerely,
Mike Dennis Keita.

The following reply was composed extempore. Should we send it?

Respected Sir (or Madam, as the case may be)

I humbly beg to introduce myself Pulusu Cheepurupulla Vengayam Sambar Pappu, from Kankipadu, ye small villaize in East Godavari District., India. I am 31 years old and a loser. Please I would like you to assist me as urgent as you can, before they kill castrate me. One of my close relative, namely my uncle's brother on my mamaiah's daughter's chittappa's chachehre bhai's side is a coconut farmer. Trouble began late last year when my close relative's goolies began suspecting that he is not giving proper counts of all the shenanigans that their "master" was up to, including but not limited to the local livestock in some villaizes.

This hanky panky deepens between 3:37 and 3:43 p.m. of Oct 23, 2007 when they discovered a very large bum of honey he deposited with a Bank here in RAJAHMUNDHRY (FORMALLY RAJAMAHENDRAVARAM) next door to backside of VIJAYAWADA (FORMALLY BEZWADA) in South South East India. Then shtarted struggle! Why? As a result of this discovery and the envy on the honey he was poisioned castrated by his goolies. At his hospital, he revealed to me the reasons of his high pitchedness and directed me where to get the chastitty belt of the the deposit of the said goolies which he made on my name as the next of kin, being the only other dumbass he knew.

He devised me that in case he reach G#, that I should not stay in this country India because Alka Yagnik is already there for those notes and the people will surely kill me hence my mother is a giraffe from Tristan da Cunha with a side of ulli chammandi.

He also instructed me that if he dies, I should look for a foreign partner who will help me to transfer the honey out of this place (Rajahmundhry), to his account the person will help me to invest the honey in that country. Based on this, I had to contact you bearing in mind that you will be humane enough to protect my life. He finally (finally!) died yesterday because his face happened to be under a pillow I was sitting on, I was out of the asylum and went into Chilakaluripeta because of his goolies. All the relevant documents of the (4.7 Million Konaseema Coconuts) that was deposited in a Commercial Bank by my late relative, are with me now.

I will give you 20% of the total honey, if you can help me transferring it into your Account, for onward plantation in your country. Please contact me immediately at choultry AT gmail DOT com and include your name, address, date of birth, mother's maiden name, social security number, first pet's name, first school's name, ATM card number, bank account number, ATM PIN code, credit card number, online bank transaction PIN, numbers of any hot chicks you happen to know, and your telephone and fax numbers to enable me send you all necessary coconuts one at a time before they kill me.

It is a risk free transaction.

I'm waiting for your urzent reply,

Best regards,

Sincerely,

Your obedient servant,

PCVS Pappu


Connoisseurs will recognize shades of Money (YouTube video).

PS1 No, we don't know what goolies are.
PS2 No, there are no giraffes in Tristan da Cunha.

Richard Stalkey

Which pun whoever deciphers will get a sandwich (see below)

Life has been somewhat hectic, to say the least. First however, lunch. We made lunch. Observe.


Ham, egg and cheese sandwich. Juice. Fruit. Pretty bloody fantastic, even if we say so ourselves. This was a workday lunch. Below, is the weekend game version of lunch.


Not very different at all, no? This "food tableaux" photo business has potential that needs exploring.

Also, we will make sandwiches for anyone who can guess which saliva inducing sandwich making movie scene inspired this bout of sandwich making.

Wall poster in Begumpet, today:


Subhash asks us to tell you that if he doesn't answer the phone, please leave a masaj after the peep.

A poem. No particular reason.

Stalker

Silouwettes.they.follow.me.
Wherever.I.go.
Watching.me.
Hunting.me.
Tormenting.my.soul.

Joy Davis

Which poem lets us segue nicely into the link fest.

Why Modern Poems Don't Rhyme, Etc.: Frequently asked questions about the business of verse, by Robert Pinsky.

Q9: Well, I like poetry that is amusing, that maybe makes me chuckle a little. I'd rather read something reassuring and light than something complicated or gloomy. Is that bad? Does that mean I am a jerk?

A9: Yes.

:)

Via Richard Dawkins, Evolution: 24 Myths and Misconceptions. Evolution cannot be disproved and is therefore not science seems most promising.

Horribly poignant story. Gen Peter van Uhm took command of Dutch forces in Afghanistan on Thursday. His son Lt Dennis van Uhm (23) was killed by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan on Friday. Friday's attack is not thought to have specifically targeted the new military commander. Is that good? Or bad?

On a related note, Andrew Olmsted, a US soldier in Iraq left a blog post that was to be published in the event of his death. It's up now.

If you haven't, Google up Randy Pausch and see "The Last Lecture".

Physics on women.


Points for identifying the equations.

In other education related news, the Supreme Court of India recently issued a judgment upholding reservations for OBCs in India. In general terms we're quite happy with this, no complaints. Now if only they'd do away with the death penalty, Section 377 of the IPC, and other such monstrosities.

In general, the desi blog world has been pretty solidly against reservations, and you can find as many posts as you feel like. Posts in favour on the other hand, have been far and few in between. As usual, a good starting point is Abi. Of particular interest may be a paper titled "Affirmative Action in Education: Evidence From Engineering College Admissions in India" by Marianne Bertrand (University of Chicago), Rema Hanna (New York University), and Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard University). Mullainathan has featured in these pages before for the paper Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? (PDF)

kuffir as usual is very powerful. His latest posts have been about the "creamy layer" (low fat, apparently). This link appears to be broken at the moment, but it leads you to kuffir's quest to find blogs about both sides of the issue.

Speaking of Abi, he has started The Hindu Death Spiral Watch along the lines of Brad DeLong's New York Times Death Spiral Watch. Currently featured in The Hindu watch is their fairly icky news (as opposed to their insane editorial) coverage of the protests in Tibet. Nandigram started it all off, and Ludwig humbly submits this one as another example of faff passing off as news.

A heartening (if old) piece about The Girls of Bihar. Read all of them ('I stole Rs 5 from my home to buy a pen and a note book' for example). Or

We began swimming in the village pond when we were very young and people began telling us we were good. We trained in our village against the wishes of many villagers and try to be our best with whatever resources we have.

We wake up at 3 am every day and go to the pond to swim. We run and swim to build our stamina and swim for two-and-a-half hours every day. Then we come home, eat vegetable and roti and walk to school. It takes us an hour to reach school.

I don't eat anything during lunch because I am not eligible for the mid day meal scheme (the free lunch given to children up to Class V), so I stay hungry till I get back for dinner.

The Delhi Walla follows Sadia Dehlvi around on her new three wheeler!

Apparently Yale has 40,000 and not 4,000 artifacts from Machhu Picchu as previously believed. What are they on? Ayahuasca?

Buy One, Get One Free

Which is about a jugalbandi

Just got back from Sunday evening concert at the Ravindra Bharati. "Bombay" Jayashri Ramnath in the South corner, and Shubha Mudgal (who even has what seems to be a very up to date blog) in the North.

Now pretty much everyone knows that we have issues with frequencies in general. Cannot tell some in the visual spectrum apart, ditto also with audio frequencies. We have a very eclectic music taste, dipping into this, that and the other. Another way of saying the same thing is that we're tone deaf.

Be that as it may, Ms. Jayashri has long been on the "want to attend live performance" list, and so also Ms. Mudgal (perhaps just a little less, not having heard much beyond ab ke saawan). Tonight was a chance to remedy this, and it really was worth it. Both the ladies seem to have a base octave (or whatever) that is nicely lower than many of their higher pitched contemporaries, which is definitely one reason why we like them.

The whole Jayashri thing started off (perhaps like for most people) with that vaseegara song. This was to Jayashri what ennavale was to Unnikrishnan, and random sampling of more of her stuff resulted in much joy. Then we read Baradwaj Rangan's interview with her. She makes a point which possibly sets her apart from the rest of them.

Because down the ages, we’ve had it drummed into our heads that the essence of Hindustani music is shringara, love, while Carnatic compositions are capsules of bhakti, or devotion. And here’s Jayashri, implying otherwise. Or is she, really? "This is bhakti, but to the music – not to Krishna," she says. "We're not in an era where we're into that kind of bhakti. Because if it's just bhakti, and if it's just about Krishna or Rama, why would I – someone who doesn't come from a very religious or ritualistic background – revel in it? I don't think I love God more than I love music. Why would a European sitting there, who doesn't know the difference between Krishna and Rama, listen to this music for two hours? Why are instrumental concerts so popular? Do we know if the performer is playing a kriti in Kannada or Telugu, or if that kriti is talking about this lord or that deity? Our music is not about religion."

More power to you, lady. Mudgal's blog seems to be very interesting, isn't it great when someone like her has a post called Eeks! Look what I found! with a bare midriff picture of Rakhi Sawant?

Back to the concert: It was 90% good (there was one Hindi song that didn't quite fit too well). Aneesh Pradhan on the tabla and Embar S. Kannan (whom we've heard so often on Worldspace) on the violin, the mridangist and the haromniumist were all very nicely in sync, and seemed to sincerely enjoy the evening, which really helps. The percussion (oxymoron alert) jugalbandi tanniavartanam was a big hit with the audience, these things usually are.

They started off with saraswati namostute in saraswati raagam, did a kamaas/khamaaj thingy and so on. The bestest piece we thought was something called pAyum oLi nI enakku pArkkum/papiihara mat bol, very soulful and tragic. We can find the lyrics to the Tamizh song, but need the meaning. Can't find the Hindustani one anywhere. Help!!

A splendid time was had by all.

pAyum oLi nI enakku pArkkum vizhi nAn unakku tOyum madu nI enakku tumbiyaDi nAnunakku
vAyuraikka varugudillai vAzhi ninran mEnmaiyellAm tUya shuDar vAnoLiyE shUraiyamudE kaNNammA
2: vINaiyaDi nI enakku mEvum viral nAnunakku pUNum vaDam nI enakku pudu vayiram nAnunakku
kANumindOru ninran kaNNin oLi vIshudaDi mANuDaiya pErarashE vAzhvu nilaiyE kaNNammA
3: vAna mazhai nI enakku vaNNa mayil nAnunakku pAnamaDi nI enakku bhANDamaDi nAnunakku
jnAna oLI vIshudaDi nangai ninran jyOti mukham Unamaru nallazhagE Uru shuvaiyE kaNNammA
4: veNNIlavu nI enakku mEvu kaDal nAnunakku paNNU gati nI enakku pATTinimai nAnunakku
eNNi eNNI pArtiDilOr eNNamilai nin shuvaikkE kaNNin maNi pOnravaLE kaTTi amudE kaNNammA
5: vIshu kamazh nI enakku viriyu malar nAnunakku pEshu poruL nI enakku pENu mozhi nAnunakku
nEshamuLLa vAn shuDarE ninnazhagai EduraippEn Ashai madhuvE kaniyE aLLu shuvaiyE kaNNammA
6: kAdalaDi nI enakku kAntamaDi nAnunakku vEdamaDi nI enakku viddaiyaDi nAnunakku
bOdhamuTra pOdinilE pongi varum tIn-shuvaiyE nAda vaDivAnavaLE nalla uyirE kaNNammA
7: nalla uyir nI enakku nADiyaDi nAnunakku shelvamaDi nI enakku kSEma nidhi nAnunakku
ellaiyaTra pErazhagE engum nirai pork-kaDarE mullai nigar punnakaiyAi pOdum inbamE kaNNammA
8: tAraiyaDi nI enakku taNmatiyam nAnunakku vIramaDi nI enakku veTriyaDi nAnunakku
dAraNiyil vAnulagil shArndirukkum inbamellAm oruvarumAi samaindAi uLLamudE kaNNammA

On The Road - Funda, The Fifth

More RaamaayaNaa, geekiness, no science (haven't had time to trough at the feeds), and so on

One more trip to Madras. Phew. Time to move? Not much this time by way of audio-visual media. Almost duffilled again, this time in Kavali. Completely forgot that the Madras-Tenali line is a double line, was blissfully waiting for the crossing train to cross, and wham, off she went. Made it back on board in one piece, as you can see. Almost slept all the way through to Hyderabad, luckily the pandemonium at Sec'bad was pandemoniacal.

This picture, of a tired Coromandel Express gliding into Central should soothe you.



The RaamaayaNa is suddenly all over the place. We pointed to one source in funda IV. We come back to find (via this Passion for Cinema post) that there's an animated movie called Mahayoddha Rama that's in the making apparently. The trailer shows a glimpse of what RaavaNa is going to look like. Most disappointing.

There seems to be (i.e. some (mostly North Indian) friends and acquaintances have told us) that this whole RaavaNa-as-a-sympathetic character is a figment of the loony Dravidian chauvinist fringe imagination. How then, to explain, that at least some of mainstream pauraNic Telugu cinema is very sympathetic to the dude? See any of the YouTube clips of Bhookailas, for example. RaavaNa is played by NTR, no less!

Or Falstaff's interpretation, more power to him. And also Nina Paley's (via Samanth).

In 2002, Nina Paley got dumped by her husband, over email. But instead of reaching for the nearest bottle of Prozac, Paley began to sketch. The result: Sita Sings the Blues, an animated retelling of the Ramayana and of Paley’s own break-up, set to the 1920s jazz of Annette Hanshaw.
...
I didn’t understand why my husband had dumped me, or why I still loved him and wanted him back, but apparently Valmiki was writing about such things 3,000 years ago.

The Hackszine has a post on "Relational database using jQuery and HTML tables" i.e. a relational database implementation (joins and all!) that runs inside a web browser thanks to HTML and some voodoo called jQuery! Seems wayy too cool.

There is a somewhat intimidating discussion going on at Space Bar's. Positively terrifying, actually. Wovon mann nicht sprechen kann and all. There's something about writing poetry in a programming language or something that caught the eye, and we beg to drag everyone's attention to Perl Poetry.

Jacob Cass has 2 fantastic posts (1, 2) about "Awe Inspiring Must See Creative Photographs".

Sepia Mutiny has been most interesting, lately. Ennis points us to the "Kenya sings *" series. For example, Kenya sings India, i.e. Jana Gana Mana. Absolutely fantastic to see a bunch of Kenyans give it a go. National anthems don't do much for us, seeing as we're horribly afraid of nationalism and patriotism, but this is somehow different.

Abhi writes about the Washington Post's much talked about Pearls Before Breakfast experiment (wasn't this on NPR some time back?). The idea:

Writer Gene Weingarten helped orchestrate a brilliant “stunt” on commuters passing through L’Enfant Plaza last January in order to take a stab at settling the debate above. He took one of the most gifted violin players in the world, dressed him up as a humble busker in jeans, and asked him to play his 3.5 million dollar violin on the metro platform. Who would recognize brilliance? Who would even stop?

Go on, read the whole thing. All sorts of questions about art and taste will emerge.

Abhi also has a post provocatively titled Don't let your desi mom read this post.

Especially if you are a smart, attractive, single desi woman.
...
Slate.com recently published, The Eligible-Bachelor Paradox, which makes use of game theory to explain why the best women often end up single and alone if they wait "too long" to get married.

Don't shoot the messenger.

We've either lost or lent out our copy of "A Poem at the Right Moment: Remembered Verses from Premodern South India".

:(

On The Road - Funda, The Fourth

Which is a long and winding post

The Lord of the Links - The Return of the King: "I come back to you now, at the turn of the tide."

The Charminar Express pulled into Gudur Jn. around 9:00 p.m. Ludwig had polished off his egg biryani, apple, biscuit, and Perk and was lolling in the upper berth with his laptop, churning out code playing Tetris till the battery was doomed. Directly we heard the sounds of the railway platform and we detrained to see what was to be seen and to eat that which was to be eaten.

Those of you who ride the rails in this wonderful country will know that a new blight that answers to the names such as "standardization", "privatization" and so on now inflicts the expresses and mails.

What this means is that a host of private caterers under the umbrella of the IRCTC have theka le rakha hai the business of plying the hapless traveling public with grub, chow, and oota. Since these guys are all about margins and are allotted on a per train and per station basis, it isn't really in their interest to have your platform vendors selling all and sundry to their precious flock.

What this means is that the desi railway platform is fast turning into culinary Kalahari. Remember the days when you could exit the vestibule and swoon into the arms (and/or boiling pan of oil) of the poori bhaaji? Gone. The bun omelet fellow with the banshee wail is silent, the plaintive tones of the pazham pori plantain guy is hushed, and a sepulchral silence more or less pervades over the qaaynaat.

We are not even talking about the Tadepalligudems and the Nidadavolus of the world, this malaise has spread to the Vijayawadas and the Vizags of the network. The good vendors of the sublime dal vadaas at Dharmavaram Jn were the last bastion of station specific food specialization, the final line of defense, the Spartans of saapaad at the Thermopylae of sleeper class hunger.

We report that we were (thankfully) somewhat mistaken. On this particular trip, we had the good fortune to be plonked in S14, which as you all know, is the last sleeper class compartment on Charminar Express before the general compartments, brake van, engine, and everything in front of the engine.

It turns out that these private caterers don't have any interest in catering to the general bogies. Question of margins, we think. So instead the good 'ol poori man with his hellfire, the banshee and other such creatures now lurk at the ends of the trains and it's all a throwback to the old days.

At Gudur, we whipped out our cellphone and shot our first ever movie with it. A brief snippet titled "Life At One End Of Charminar Express In Gudur Junction In March 2008" is presented below.



We also recorded the sounds, this was a lot easier (try hanging out with a video camera At One End Of Charminar Express In Gudur Junction In March 2008 - quite nerve wracking, everyone will either be very suspicious, or start pretending like they're Dilip Kumar).

The clip (993K MP3) is here. (Hat tip to BM for suggesting location and helping us find the damn thing once it was uploaded). Warning: This may make you hungry. Quite mellifluous, the vendors of Gudur. Try to make a note of all the different comestibles being hawked.

Finally, as the train left, we shot a motion picture (of the leaving). A brief glimpse of Ludwig's sexy legs is to be seen right at the beginning. The blur on the other platform is the empty rake of 2709 Gudur-Hyderabad Simhapuri Express. A fine and upstanding member of the train community no doubt. Much to our horror however, it was being hauled by a WAG! A WAG, we tell you. What self respecting superfast allows itself to be hauled by a WAG. A WAM might be excusable, but a WAP would be the proper thing to do by it. Shameless train. Kali yugam.

Anyway, Video Deux: Departing Gudur.



So we bookmarked a whole bunch of interesting links from last week. Yensoy.

Missing Children

Spare a moment. Check out Missing Indian Kids. You might be able to help.

Sports

Via Smoke Signals, the Pedros and the Schillings of the world better watch out, cometh the hour, cometh the man, Rinku Singh is here.

They are not exactly sure what baseball is, or even javelin for that matter. However, in and around Rinku Singh’s village Holepur in Bhadohi, the news of his $100,000 throw — catapulting him to San Francisco — has reached fast.

While on the subject, On Point tells us that they're taking down Yankee Stadium. Good riddance. Please make sure that the team is in the clubhouse when the dynamite goes off.

Kidding.

Not.

Kidding.

Not.

No, really, kidding.





Not.

Science

Physics

Newsweek asks Nobel boy Steven Weinberg about how the Large Hadron Collider experiments might impact our ideas of the cosmos and our place in it.

At some point will it be possible to find proof that God or the Ultimate Designer does not exist?
I don't think that we can ever prove that God does not exist. But if he does exit it might be possible to prove it.

It might be?
Well, if God did exist and suddenly made himself known by sending thunderbolts to all the people who don't believe in him [Laughs], that would be pretty strong evidence that he exists.

Do you think he would send you one?
He hasn't so far.

Philosophy of Science

On a related note, the excellent Cosmic Variance has tried to address the issue of science and unobservable things.

...the case I tried to make was that attitudes along the lines of “that stuff you’re talking about can never be observed, so you’re not doing science, it’s just theology” are woefully simplistic, and simply don’t reflect the way that science works in the real world.

Marine Biology

Delightful. Apparently, "A bizarre geek-fight has erupted in the blogosphere over which types of invertebrates are coolest, Echinoderms or Molluscs.". How can you not love something like that?

Back on the 20th of March The Intersection blog mused on sea cucumbers and squid, concluding, “No contest! Cukes would eat squid for breakfast...”

This drew a scathing response from some quarters, with Craig McClain on Deep Sea News delivering this cutting put down to the sea cucumber fans:

It’s just hard to get excited about a sea cucumber that either feeds on sediment muck or filters muck out of the water column and not much else. Or an organism whose idea of fun is spewing its organs all over you or creating poop trails.

Hilarious.

Funny Geeky Stuff

Error Messages

30 error messages from hell.

A problem has been detected and CONTROLPANEL N9608P has been shut down to prevent further damage to your HELICOPTER.

Please shut down and restart your HELICOPTER and check all newly installed hardware or software...

#2 is a variation on a theme from Pulp Fiction, no less!

Funny Answers

This is a chestnut, but worth revisiting.

Time Travel Forum

Priceless. Read right through to the end.

11/15/2104
At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl's cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

Department of Remarkably Good Ideas, nuclear weapons edition

Netscape founder Marc Andreessen writes about a Dr. Strangeloveish headline he found.

Hackszine

A plug for the Hackszine where the most bizarre and cool hacks are perpetrated. For instance, you could build a little drummer bot

...Yellow Drum Machine is a tiny musical robot who's sole purpose in simulife is to motor around looking for suitable surfaces to drum a beat on.

Stick Figure Genius/Misogyny

Fuck grapefruit. Anyone who has read a Gartner Magic Quadrant thing will empathize. Mouse over for more gyaan.

Suggestive pickup lines for geeks. Mouse over for more gyaan.

And gender and math. Mouse over for more gyaan. A related math joke (molto funny if you get it, sorry non-calculus folks) is at Wild About Math.

April Fool

Virgle and singles sites for IITians is all very well, but the award goes to the BBC for the blow-you-off-your-feet hoax (see the YouTube video here).
Just Plain Weird

Science tattoos it seems!

Environment

Siva wonders how you could live in a big bad city and not be a total environmental jerk, with en passant references to diesel generator sets.

History, Literature, Religion

Everyone's surely on top of the RaamaayaNa controversy where a bunch of the usual suspects (i.e. khaaki chaddiwaala isotopes) beat up someone for something to do with the fact that many Indian traditions have many readings of the epic. It turns out that the "controversial" essay is available online. Fascinating, fascinating stories. Read.

On a related note, we told a couple of running buddies that in some versions Sita is depicted as Ravana's daughter for various reasons, and they were somewhat mortified. Since when do Valmiki and Tulsidas have exclusive rights on this tale?

Science, Religion

Child abuse video, via Parseval.

In other news, one issue that had the science blog world in a tizzy last week was PZ Myers - Richard Dawkins - Expelled incident.

Briefly: Ben Stein and a bunch of other eminent scientists have made a movie called Expelled. The basic premise of this movie is that "big science" is a monster that suppresses alternative, valid theories such as "intelligent design", "creationism" etc. The movie included interview excerpts with PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins, who were to speak for the non-believer position.

Myers and Dawkins showed up at a screening where the director recognized Myers and refused to allow him in, but inexplicably let Dawkins through. Controversies galore. Search for "Myers", "Dawkins" and "Expelled" and you'll be all set.

Economics

On Point had a great show, an interview with MIT professor Daniel Ariely about irrational human behaviour. Some very, very interesting experiments...

Now, a new work of behavioral economics looks at how dependably goofy we humans can be. How "predictably irrational," whether we're standing at the all-you-can-eat buffet, or fingering our credit card or getting naked at Mardi Gras.

This really deserves a post of its own, but listen to the podcast if you can. Fascinating.

On The Road, Funda The Third

19-March-2008: Painted sign near Secunderabad station, "Entrance shifted to backside."

3 new albums + sundry other songs find their place in the iPod.

Hazaaron Khwaishien Aisi - for baavra mann (the qawwali version, and the woman singing version)

Metro - for the non-remixed songs, all of them

Phir Teri Kahaani Yaad Aayi - for old times sake, and for tere dar pe sanam and aane waala pal

Sundry - Mehdi Hasan (ek bas tuu hii nahin, Farhat Shahzad), Steely Dan (Reelin' In The Years), Simon & Garfunkel (Dangling Conversations - we're told it's bad form to reveal that you like this song, but WTF), Kalyug (tujhe dekh dekh hasna)

Among the things deleted to make way for all this, Def Leppard (Vault - everything except 'Pour Some Sugar On Me' and 'Let's Get Rocked')

1. Higginbothams and Book Point on Mount Road, Madras do not have poetry sections.

2. 4 bookshops in Madras don't have what is more or less considered to be a landmark in modern Tamil literature, neither in the original, nor in translation.

It rained.

Ominous coffee mug in Landmark, seen just before a reasonably important meeting:

"If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it." ~ W. C. Fields

Fuck.

PS Links will be added once the safety of the broadband pavilion is regained.

Lynx Orgy

In which no animals were subjected to violence, cruelty, or other indignities in the making of the post

Since writing original content is so difficult (although a seminal work on the psychoanalysis of pigeons is lurking beneath the surface), we will make do with more links, in no particular order.

News

Our politicians are all getting their knickers in a twist about Sarabjit Singh's impending execution. In particular, it is disgusting that this lot want Sarabjit let off. This is more or less the same lot that has been baying for Mohammad Afzal's blood, even if that case is like a colander. Indeed, no less than the worthies of our venerable Supreme Court think that "The collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if the capital punishment is awarded to the offender."

Shame, shame, puppy shame. The death penalty is wrong.

Economics

The S.J.Dubner and S.D.Levitt, authors of Freaknomics have a blog at the New York Times. In their latest post, they point you to a video on The "Colbear" Report where the main man himself speaks with Sudhir Venkatesh about his (Sudhir's) experiences as a Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. Venkatesh spent time living with Chicago gangs to understand among other things what makes someone risk their lives and limbs for a minimum wage job. Fascinating stuff.

Teaching

Via Chaotic Utopia, we are led to the Questionaut, an educational game.

The game begins with two friends lazily lounging on a tiny pastoral planet. As you click around and explore, you’ll set off little chain reactions. One of these will lead to one of the friend’s hat being blown away. The other friend promptly chases after it in his hot air balloon. Now, this is where you come in. The little aeronaut needs enough hot air to keep the balloon lifting. As he reaches new levels, he’ll find himself stuck in different environments. The only way to move on is to catch the attention of the local residents. Once they notice the little guy, they’ll start asking a series of questions in areas we ought to all know: geometry, physics, English, biology, and much more. If you answer correctly, they’ll give the balloon a lift.

Utterly delightful and very cute. The audio effects rock! Stage 3 has desi elevator music and all! A must if you were ever a child, or have one of those things yourself.

Books

Forgotten Books, forgotten no more.

Welcome to ForgottenBooks.org! From here you can read thousands of books FREE online (100% viewable) and purchase the books you like as high-quality paperbacks at wholesale prices.

We specialize in historical writings, this includes works such as: classical fiction, philosophy, science, religion, folklore, mythology and sacred texts, in addition to secret and esoteric subjects, such as: occult, freemasonry, alchemy, hermetic and ancient knowledge. Fiction and non-fiction books.

Early days, but promising. Random browsing unearthed "A Christmas Carol" (Dickens), "A Textbook of Theosophy" (Leadbeater), "The Nicomachean Ethics" (Aristotle), "Beowulf", "The Code of Hammurabi" and so on.

Software

The sometimes controversial but always readable Joel Spolsky predicts war.

You’re about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. It’ll make the Battle of Stalingrad look like that time your sister-in-law stormed out of afternoon tea at your grandmother’s and wrapped the Mustang around a tree.

Strictly for geeks, this is about browsers and standards (or lack thereof).

Music

Some people write fugues. This fellow, for example wrote some passable ones, and made a name for himself. Art of Fugue is very nice we've always thought, especially after Vikram used it so lovelily in An Equal Music.

There is no forced gravitas in her playing. It is a beauty beyond imagining - clear, lovely, inexorable, phrase across phrase, phrase echoing phrase, the incomplete, the unending "Art of Fugue". It is an equal music.
...
I push through the crowded lobby into the rain. I walk a long while, through the streets, the darkness of the park. Once more I stand by the Serpentine. The rain has washed my earlier tears away.

Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music - not too much, or the soul could not sustain it - from time to time.

Fugues feature prominently in Gödel, Escher, Bach, and lately we find that this worthy has also begun fugifying.

So, off we went on the Wikipedia-Youtube circuit, in the manner of Esmeralda after truffles and here is what we've uncovered.

Glenn Gould talks about "Art of Fugue". He even plays several of them (this one for example). But the most entertaining introduction to fugue, after you've done your Wikipedia and other due diligence, is to be found in this video. It is splendid! How to write a fugue using Britney Spears' "Oops I Did It Again". Fundastic. So you want to write a fugue? along similar lines is also immensely entertaining.

En passant, we alight on hot woman violinist play "Toccata and Fugue in D minor". What's to not like?

Theology

The Official God FAQ is now available, and pretty much bang on target.

On The Road - Funda, The Second

Which is a random roundup of the peregrinations including weddings, campuses, fundamental problems, poultry farms, Satyajit Ray, and how we were almost duffilled

It is a very bad thing to have 200+ blogs in your feed reader, and to go away for 10 days. Had to wade through industrial quantities of posts to clear up the queue somewhat, and the whole "science" category is still waiting...

While we're at it, random facts about the trip. Circuit was Hyderabad-Vizag-Madras-Bangalore-Hyderabad.

In Vizag, went to one wedding and one wedding reception. The wedding was huge. Groom was a hostel mate, and bride happened to be daughter of a Member of Parliament. The entire playground of a Zilla Parishad high school had been commandeered, partitioned in two, and what looked like the whole constituency was invited to the party.

There was a live band ("the Young Stars from downtown Amadalavalasa, Srikakulam Dt."), CCTV cameras monitoring the hordes, fireworks (some exploding dangerously close to the car park), and screens showing videos of the engagement ceremony. Somehow made way through the throng, blessed happy couple, gorged, and scooted out.

The reception was altogether more low key, walking distance from home, and relatively more peaceful and quieter. Alas, had to scoot out early thanks to being self-assigned driver to 2 of the spunkiest little girls in existence. The bride claims that she has no memory of our blessings! Cheating...

5k run on the bestestestest stretch of runnable road in the world (i.e. the esplanade at Vizag), 2 cricket matches, and we were off to Madras on the Guwahati-Bangalore Exp. The train was crawling with people from the northeast. Almost felt apologetic about having to disturb the community atmosphere on board. Nevertheless, bravely soldiered onto upper berth, and got some work done (i.e. played Tetris until the battery ran out on the laptop).

Rajahmundhry happened in the evening, and we stood at the open compartment door, ogling at the splendiferous Godavari, feeling very superior to the northeasties, seeing as it is the longest rail bridge in India and all. Then remembered that where these folks come from, they have a river that is so wide that it's probably impossible to build a bridge across it. At this point, Ludwig saw the approach of Kovvuru and discreetly fell silent.

Madras was a blur of meetings and greetings, including some quality time in ye olde campus. Hung out at the swank Coffee Day that has sprung up next to the old library, and was scandalized by a couple of students coochie-cooing in the middle of the afternoon. Since when? My God, this is the campus where our class of 360 had 20 girls (and that was a record high), where the general algorithm was "boy treats, boy treats, boy treats, boy retreats". What's with the PDA?!! Bah.

The Bangalore train trip was supremely interesting, because we were set upon by one gentleman, who happens to be the head priest at the Andal temple in Srivilliputhur. Said gentleman cornered us as we stood near the door per usual, and launched into a long diatribe against various ills in the world. Much of it was in Kameswaran (of Michael Madana Kama Rajan fame) lingo, and somewhat unparseable.

From Bangalore, scooted by bus to Puvidham where Gaseous Beyondus teaches nowadays. Fundastic place, photos follow. Did some walking, birding, astronomy 101, eating, and lazing about. Some fundamental problems were discussed, including:

* How to teach a child about why negative multiplied by negative is a positive? A related question was why the hell do we need negative numbers? No satisfactory answers.

* What is the fundamental difference between conventional (allopathic) medicine and complementary and alternative medicine (homeo, siddha etc.)? Does it matter?

* Will olives grow in Dharmapuri?

* What are the key differences between amphibians and reptiles?

And so on... As you can see, we were very jobless.

Drove back to Bangalore, met the pink person for an altogether too brief coffee and discussion on chicken and egg problems, and municipal porcine management, borrowed and watched "Snatch" and "Farewell, My Concubine", celebrated the sibling's 30th b'day by having a suitable sombre wake, watched "Aranyer Din Ratri" the next day, and caught the Kacheguda Express back home.

The side upper berth effectively prevented all sleep, so in the middle of the night when the train stopped in some forsaken town, we got off and were stretching our legs. Thanks to iPod booming in ear canal, didn't hear the train whistle, didn't hear the rattle of couplings being jolted out of stasis, and the next thing we knew, the bloody thing was on its way. A very small sprint and nimble, gazelle-ish leap later, we were thankfully back in the confines of S1. Reminded very forcefully of Paul Theroux's "The Great Railway Bazaar" where a certain sad old individual named Duffill is stranded on some obscure Italian railway platform as the Orient Express buggers off, thereby leading to the word duffilled entering the vocabulary.

Back in Hyderabad at a ghoulish 5:30 a.m., and promptly fell back into our cheapskate ways by taking the MMTS from Kacheguda to Begumpet and walking home, instead of taking an auto. What to do, public transport ki jai!

Rebooted home. Defrosted fridge. Got the whole dosai batter thing going. And here we are...

“A beginning is a time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct”
- Bene Gesserit coda, "Dune", Frank Herber

On The Road - Funda, The First

Which was sparked by a reverie on Falaknuma Express

Long time, no sunset from sleeper class. Friday, between Secunderabad and Guntur, was unspeakably gorgeous. Sun, gold, rocks, water, egrets, fields, stone, blues.

Don't just do something. Sit there.

The God Particle And Why It Might Be OK For Languages To Die

Physics rocks, and other stuff

National Geographic has a very nice piece on the Large Hadron Collider and the quest for the God particle. Links to one page summaries of the Higgs boson are here.

Quote from the National Geographic piece:

And anyone who thinks these big machines are soulless contraptions should listen to Richard Jacobsson. The LHC is replacing a particle detector he worked with for a decade. He came to know every inch of that instrument. He understood its moods and idiosyncrasies. The day the engineers came to rip it out, Jacobsson was overcome with emotion. "I had tears in my eyes," he said. "When they cut the cables, I thought blood would flow out." Now entire lives are wrapped up in the new machine, which physicists have been dreaming about since the 1980s.

Thank goodness we still live in a world where a physicist wells up when his particle accelerator is dismembered. Some hope remains.

In other news, the excellent Language Log has Geoffrey Pullum's review of a review. A Professor Ronald Butters reviews Language in the USA (ed. by Edward Finegan and John Rickford, CUP, 2004) and "...he seems to be fed up with being pushed around by language-loving sentimentalists." Pullum:

Ever want to see some liberal diversity-loving multi-culti-lefty linguists get slapped about a bit, just so they could taste some of their own medicine? This review is for you!
...
In short, widespread faith in the ideal of linguistic and cultural assimilation should — especially in a democracy — be treated with respect and considered thoughtfully, not snapped at as if it were ignorant bigotry.

Lately, there have been many reports in many places (including NPR) about languages that have been dying out, mostly Native American/indigenous dialects.

An odd coincidence is that in the week that this issue of Language reached me, the obituary of the week in The Economist (February 9th) was about Marie Smith, the last speaker of the now extinct language Eyak. But far from echoing anything like the tough-minded what-economic-benefit thinking that Butters alludes to, the Economist obituarist's discussion of the Eyak language, though well-written and interesting, is entirely devoted to sentimental musing about its many words for trees and roots and spruce needles and resin and abalone and nets and mixing bowls, and the way the word for "leaf" was the same as the word for "feather", as if that were the crucial thing we needed linguistic diversity for.

There's a meta-review of the meta-review here.

Death By RSS

Where we're actually referring to Really Simple Syndication, not that the other RSS is much better

We came to feed reading quite late, we will blame Space Bar for telling us about it and convincing us that it wasn't too hard. So now we have 200 (200!) subscriptions classified into

Business (26)
Design (3)
Movies (12)
Personal (61)
Policy-type-stuff (23)
Quizzing (7)
Science (28)
Software-dev (39)
Stuff (10)
Technology (13)
Writing (10)

Please don't add the numbers and say the sum is > 200, some feeds count in more than one category. Also, the above is the most ridiculous possible classification, need to get more fine-grained ("Sports", "Politics", "Literature", "Arts", "Science", "History" etc.)

By far the most prolific feed is from the GWT Google Group. Don't ask why. Basically every message that gets posted there shows up, >200 per day.

Second, and definitely a candidate for favourite is ScienceBlogs Select feed. Possibly Brad DeLong's is third, although more often than not we don't understand/don't have the time for the stuff there.

So a random sample of interesting things that the feed reader has delivered over the last couple of days:

Conservative physicist and climate change skeptic Luboš Motl on How to Disprove Spoon Bending. Valuable in itself for a description of what it means to be scientific, it leads us to two other very readable articles, one on telekinesis and the other on What I Believe But Cannot Prove at Cosmic Variance, the group blog of a bunch of physicists and astrophysicists. The second post is really very, very useful and worth reading end-to-end and quoting from. The temptation to quote wholesale is overwhelming, but we will cease and desist. But do read the post. In passing, it will lead you to the Edge Question Center which every year asks an interesting question (What have you changed your mind about? Why? in 2007) to a bunch of interesting people (scientists, philosophers, mathematicians etc.) Hours and hours of browsing beckon...

Anand Giridhardas has a post (via Sepia Mutiny?) with a little documentary about how technology is making some professions disappear.

On the lighter side, here's a page whose sole commodity is photos of people proving mathematical theorems in sarongs (though many of the provers simply have the sarong wrapped around their shoulders, which is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention). Side splitting. On similar lines, 41 Hilarious Science Fair Experiments and they're really hilarious ("Crystal Meth. Friend or foe?", "Eww", "Fat man to Mars")!

Kufr should really be on your bookmarks list. He/she has a way of putting things across that cuts through the bovine ordure, smacks you in the face, and grabs your attention wholeheartedly. Fluidity of the Cesspool is one such ("once upon a time, not so long ago, educated hindus found a handy teddy bear in the theory of sanskritization. if a jati can move up the hierarchy by shedding its old, ugly customs and beliefs and adopting sanskritic mores, the caste system can't be so bad, right?...") There are many more.

Via the Delhiwalla, we hear about a Pakistani blogger who shares a name with a very famous poet.

Abel Pharmboy liveblogs his vasectomy, we kid you not. "doc started asking about workplace. told him about [controversial proprietary work] not being popular - he was not amused and asks why anyone is opposed to such a thing. man has now exposed my vas deferens and is cutting it. I will not argue."

What would "Stairway to Heaven" sound/look like, if "The Beatles" did it? Pretty catchily awesome, actually!

And Richard Dawkins tells us that one of evolutions missing links has been found in the Sydney Harbour.

5 Best Post 1990 "Mainstream" Hindi Movies

Where we return to the fine art of list making

A few hours back, we (= The Enlightened One Formerly Known As Prince Nitwit, Teen Shark, Jamadagni, Ludwig) had dinner. The food took forever to arrive, and if it wasn't for the engrossing subject we picked, we would've happily strangled the wait staff. A sincere attempt was made to list down the top 5 post 1990 "mainstream" Hindi movies. The rules were simple.

1. Everyone had to have seen the flick.
2. Simple majority needed at a minimum to make the cut.

And the winners (in chronological order) are [fanfare...]

Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (1992)
Andaz Apna Apna (1994)
Dil Chahta Hai (2001)
Company (2002)
Munnabhai MBBS (2003) - A bit of a con here: We all liked both movies, and picked one, it's like The Return of the King getting Oscars for all the trilogy.

We were unanimous on these, as in all of us agreed that we couldn't think of anything better. Three of us were really keen on Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2003), but it was torpedoed by the Teen Shark because he didn't like it, and because it isn't really all that "mainstream".

Other mainstream contenders that were considered briefly but didn't rise into the top 5 - Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (1993), Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995), Rangeela (1995), Gupt (1997), Dil Se... (1998), Satya (1998), Lagaan (2001), Main Hoon Na (2004), Lakshya (2004), Chak De! India (2007). Mainly because that the Chosen 5 are all individually arguably better (for various reasons which we could elaborate on, if someone is interested) than all of these ones. Unfortunately for him, this means that SRK narrowly misses getting into the top 5.

Darr (1995) and Kaho Naaa... Pyaar Hai (2001) were also considered, but all of us had not seen it.

Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006), Iqbal (2005), Johnny Gaddaar (2007), and the good Nagesh Kukkonoor movies weren't mainstream enough. Hera Pheri (2000), Raincoat (2004) and Dor (2006) were remakes/derivative (although Shakesepare and older was allowed) and missed out.

Points to note in the main list

1. No Shah Rukh
2. No Madhuri (My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense...)
3. No Amitabh
4. No Mani Ratnam
5. No Govinda (My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense...)
6. Salman gets a back door entry
7. Aamir is all over the place
8. 1994-2000 was very dreary

What say, vox populi? Fair? What did we miss out?

The Road to Wigan Pier

Which contains a prescient quote about our lives and times, and more videos

George Orwell is a rather smashing bloke, and he proves it again and again. For many people, he is simply the author of one satire and one dark novel that rail against the Great Satan, communism. 1984 and Animal Farm have been milked for all they are worth whenever a handy anti-left quote is needed. But Georgie Porgie was a lot more complicated than that, he was not the supremely anti-leftist literary genius that left-bashers with no imagination of their own could periodically dip into for a fresh nugget.

His Down and out in Paris and London talks about time spent as a menial in a Paris hotel, and as a London vagabond, and is possibly more valuable as a book than the other two. A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant hit you like a punch in the solar plexus. "A Hanging" makes capital punishment personal, and that perhaps is the most effective argument against it (for the record, the Choultry is against it). "Shooting an Elephant" is merely touching, and about a horrible dilemma faced by a young and sensitive anti-imperial functionary of Empire.

Apart from Douglas Adams, Orwell appears to be the only other person to have written an essay on making tea, both versions (Adams' can be found in The Salmon of Doubt) are delicious. And finally, Reflections of Ghandi(sic) is one of the most well-balanced evaluations of the Mahatma, taking a nice line somewhere between vilification and hagiography.

Anyway, the point of all this is That Man Keynes and His Homosexual Intrigues (TMKAHHI) (who is well known to some of you) points us to the following from The Road to Wigan Pier (1937):

It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment we are in a very serious mess, so serious that even the dullest-witted people find it difficult to remain unaware of it. We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive. For enormous blocks of the working class the conditions of life are such as I have described in the opening chapters of this book, and there is no chance of those conditions showing any fundamental improvement. The very best the English-working class can hope for is an occasional temporary decrease in unemployment when this or that industry is artificially stimulated by, for instance, rearmament. Even the middle classes, for the first time in their history, are feeling the pinch. They have not known actual hunger yet, but more and more of them find themselves floundering in a sort of deadly net of frustration in which it is harder and harder to persuade yourself that you are either happy, active, or useful. Even the lucky ones at the top, the real bourgeoisie, are haunted periodically by a consciousness of the miseries below, and still more by fears of the menacing future. And this is merely a preliminary stage, in a country still rich with the loot of a hundred years. Presently there may be coining God knows what horrors— horrors of which, in this sheltered island, we have not even a traditional knowledge.

Splendid, no?

That's that about Georgie Porgie. Peruse this post at Presentation Zen. It has a bunch of videos from the TED talks.

Al Gore's talk is a hoot, especially the first 4-5 minutes that he spends laughing at himself. The man has changed so much. You would think he would be a shoo in for President in 2009, wouldn't you?

Majora Carter's talk is depressing and inspiring at the same time. If you can watch only one of the videos (each is just shy of 20 minutes long), this is the one. It will hopefully show the links between discrimination, race, crime, poverty, urban stagnation etc. in new ways. Definitely, definitely, check this one out.

Hans Rosling's talk should result in jaws dropping. If there be such a thing as an ideal way to present statistics, it is this, it is this, it is this.

PPP

And no, it's about that party across the border. But first, let us get the random stuff out of the way.

(O)

It rained in Hyderabad this morning. Apres le deluge, hornbills.


(Note besplattered and bedraggled beeeater (?) in the bottom right of the frame.)



These twits are obviously very far away, but rather endearingly bumbling through the wet foliage.

(I)

Mathematical jokes have appeared here before. A variation on the theme is to be found at the "Wild About Math" blog. The "Deferential Equations" one is side splitting.

(II)

The search for the Democratic presidential nominee has now resulted in the creation of two new electoral constituencies whose behaviour psephologists must be falling over each other to understand and predict. With a black man and a white woman as the front runners, black women and white men in the electorate find themselves in the unique position of having been sliced and diced into a "vote bank". How will they vote? Will race pip gender, or what?

The NPR type commentators are positively tickling themselves silly into paroxyms of pleasure trying to figure out what these two demographics will do? A Hillary-Obama (Hilbama?) ticket might just turn out to be solid gold, but it's such a pity it will be wasted because this (of all elections) should be a wrap for the Dems. A scarecrow endorsed by Ted Kennedy should do the trick (although, against that notorious outlier McCain, one must be cautious about making predictions freely).

We live in interesting times, the radio need not be turned off.

(III)

In a seminal discovery made about 3 minutes ago, we realize that mashing up dates (i.e. khajoor) with those Amul cheese cubes (or chiplets or whatever) results in the most delicious and pasty confection ever. Mmm. Try it. Remember, you heard it here first.

Yes, we skipped breakfast, and these two things were all we could find in the fridge that were consumable at short notice. This is how Alexander Fleming discovered pencillin.

(IV)

Long post. Ram wrote us an email pointing to an article (PDF) in the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). The author is Prof. Krishna Kumar, director of NCERT. The article is titled "Partners in Education" and is apparently about:

Public-Private Partnership in school education is projected as a strategy to distribute the ownership of institutions, rather than tasks within institutions, between private entrepreneurs and NGOS on the one hand, and the government or state on the other. While the rationale for PPP is inefficiency of the government, the means offered to overcome it actually promise no relief or improvement. PPP is not an idea, but rather an ideology which promotes privatisation as a means of reducing the government’s responsibility to increase the number of schools.

Ram wanted some of us (including Melli and Rajni) to comment on how we thought Asha (with which we have all been associated one way or the other) fitted into the NGO scheme suggested by Prof. Kumar. This resulted in Ludwig actually spending a boatload of time reading the article and trying to parse it, and a very, very long email comment, which basically follows, in lieu of the usual insane blog post.

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So much for where I think Asha lies in the spectrum of NGOs (i.e. this is my answer to your question!). That being said, I think the article has some problems, mostly to do with the way the argument is presented, which I will try and describe. My basic point is that the article is somewhat confusing and this clouds the argument.

The line of reasoning in the article appears to be as follows:

1. There are valid sounding arguments for why the state should be dislodged from the business of education. Data on teacher absenteeism, dropout rates, achievement etc. proves that state investment in schools is wasteful. On a less quantitative and more rhetorical level, there is the argument that "quality" in state schools is abysmal. The state has failed, therefore a privatized system is needed.

2. One flaw in this argument is that votaries of privatization are seemingly unable to point to a successful model where the state does not serve as the primary education provider. There are no answers to this query, and in any case this question is increasingly never asked.

3. One way to confer increased legitimacy on any argument is to claim that it is a new idea. So the name "public private partnership" (PPP) is invented and touted as the silver bullet.

4. However, the idea of private intervention in education is quite old, and what is being called PPP has been around for many years now, since colonial times at least, in the form of the aided-school model. There are structural weaknesses in this model which have been visible for the last 100 years, but effectively, it continues to be promoted under the new name (PPP).

5. [So far, so good. Here is where, in my opinion, the confusion (textual, logical) starts.] Kumar says:

"Offering solid evidence of the meagreness of structural change in education since colonial days, the state-aided private-initiative model of institutional expansion has earned a renewed and vigorous favour today. And the state continues to feel persistently reluctant to own up to its primary responsibility for educating all its children in ways that would necessitate reforms in the system. This aspect of the meaning of PPP is quite apparent."

This, I confess, is somewhat incomprehensible to me. I'm afraid I cannot fathom what the "aspect of the meaning of PPP" is. Likely, my training (such as it is) is insufficient for me to parse this paragraph. If you can decipher and explain, I will be obliged. Further:

"The meaning which lurks in the zone of opacity has to do with the culture of outsourcing, especially in the context of non-government organisations (NGOs)."

A segue into the NGO section ("NGO Outsourcing") of the article follows (we briefly bid goodbye to the PPP angle). An important point (to my mind) is that no distinction is made between not-for-profit NGOs and for-profit NGOs (businesses).

6. Broad descriptions of the 3 types of NGOs (discussed above, in the context of the Asha position).

7. The NGOs, regardless of what type they are, have contributed to making the PPP argument sound more plausible i.e. NGOs (especially the corporate ones) assert that the state is redundant, run their own school systems, and in some sense "prove" the claim that PPP (in the sense of setting up a parallel system of schooling) works. This is in contrast with the notion of PPP where the private party (HSTP, MVF, for example) aids/supplements existing state school systems.

8. "In the history of private education, philanthropic efforts leading to high-quality education have played a very limited role, while profit-seeking has been an inappropriate (and illegal) goal to acknowledge. Private providers and their supporters therefore continue to succeed in shielding the normal, entrepreneurial aspect of educational ventures." Only the judiciary has so far called a spade a spade and said that these private entities are nothing more than profit seeking enterprises (by saying that setting up schools is part of their "right to occupation").

9. The state's response to pro-privatization claims is increasingly muted, thanks partly to the "speedy spread of the ideological discourse associated with neoliberalisation and globalisation among government officials." From this rises the instrumentalist view of the state where it is just another player in the market, one that merely performs a set of tasks without regard to the long term health of the system. An advantage of this view is that it makes the state look different from a corrupt regime of bureaucracy and less prone to political indoctrination.

10. The state doesn't view existing or past successful PPPs (for that is what they are/were) such as Ekalavya or the MV Foundation programme as a partnership, which is a pity.

11. There are other glaring gaps in the education scenario such as teacher training etc. which need to be addressed in a serious way. We need IIT-IIM style institutions to deal with this. Why don't PPP votaries advocate these things?

Phew. OK, my email is in danger of turning out to be longer than the original article, but it is helping me make more sense of the original. Would it be fair to say that in summary, what Krishna Kumar is saying is the following:

People are advocating PPP in education.
They are doing so claiming that the current state system of schooling has failed, and that PPP will improve the efficiency of the system i.e. improvements in quality and efficiency is the _main_ reason why PPP ('bad' profit seeking PPP) in education should be encouraged.
What they are hiding is that the real reason for PPP is that it might be very profitable. It is somehow politically incorrect to say that PPP is about making a profit and not about philanthropy/improving the system etc. and so they have to resort to the "state has failed, PPP will make things better" argument, to look good.
The activity and attitude of some NGOs (the 'corporate' ones especially) give credence to the PPP argument by repeating it.
An important argument against PPP (i.e the 'bad' privatization and corporatization of education by setting up a parallel schooling system rather than improving the existing system (HSTP, MVF) PPP) is that it hasn't been shown to work anywhere before. Most (all?) nations with advanced levels of education involved considerable state contribution.
So PPP may not work.

OK, so in my view, Krishna Kumar's main gripe is that "(i) PPP votaries claim that PPP is about improving efficiency and not about profit (ii) PPPs (the 'bad' ones) haven't worked historically anywhere".

This really doesn't constitute a solid argument against PPPs (the 'bad' ones) itself, no? At best it is an accusation of hypocrisy/bad faith/whatever against PPP supporters, "You're claiming that you support PPP for one reason, but the actual reason is something else."

If this is the main thrust of the article, I find it a somewhat complicated way to state the case (resulting in even more complicated emails!). On the other hand, if the article is about arguing against PPPs themselves...

Someone of the libertarian ilk will happily concede that "Yes, PPPs are about making money for the NGOs involved we don't deny that, the improvements in education/increased efficiency are side effects of this activity. The fact that there are no instances of a majority PPP driven effort successfully improving the lot of education in a country is neither here nor there, it hasn't been tried so you can't claim it will fail."

In my opinion, a coherent argument against PPPs has not been presented in this article. At the very least, some instances of PPP (the 'bad' ones) based programmes in other comparable parts of the world that have failed totally would have helped. Questions/arguments involving some reasonably basic economics, common sense and straightforward reasoning would have also been great. Some points might be:

How many successful private schools exist in the remote rural areas? (see this)
How can they be profitable and high quality at the same time?
Is it really possible to set up a perfect 'market' like system, where parents can switch kids from a bad school to a good one at will?
If government schools don't work, how do you explain Kendriya Vidyalayas and other such schools? Why do they work?

Of course, these are all very lowbrow for an EPW piece :-) but I am sure it is possible to spin the necessary verbiage around this foundation.

Note that one of the confusions in the original article is that I feel the need to keep distinguishing between the 'good' PPPs (MVF, HSTP) and the 'bad' PPPs (profit seeking), it would've been nice to use different terminology for both, no?

OK, this is long enough. I hope I've made my point clear.

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In response, Melli (among other things) said that:

(1) Interesting that you felt that the article does not make the case against PPP strongly. I felt it made the case, but after reading your note I realized it is my bias which influences my thinking - I agree with most of what KK says anyway, so I was not looking for a strong case so to speak. In my mind, education is a state responsibility, simply because "for all, equally" is not something the market can ensure. The market is inherently unequal in my opinion functions on the basis that there are multiple levels. That is OK when it comes to say the transportation system, where one can say "I cannot afford to go in a luxury bus which will go on time, so I will go in this cheaper, standing room only bus". Education, IMHO, has to be "for all" and "equal".

To which we said:

Note that I carefully did not say anywhere that I didn't agree with KK :-) I'm sure I haven't given it anywhere near the kind of thought you all have, but in general even I don't see how PPPs ('bad' PPPs!) will change anything fundamentally. My role in the reply was to try and show that _if_ the purpose of the article was to critique PPPs, that wasn't done too well, and to play a limited devil's advocate role and show what points someone who is a "neoliberal" or "libertarian" or whatever could potentially raise to critique the critique. In general I mostly concur with your #1, with the caveat that I'm open to arguments which will convince me fully one way or the other.

A further point that Melli made was:

Oh, and one more point - I think it is well-worth answering the question of why KVs work and state run govt. schools do not. In past discussions we have come to realize some points: (a) KV has Rs. 6000 per child, whereas a govt. school has Rs. 2000 per child. (b) the quality of hired teachers - maybe because KVs are smaller in number and central govt. jobs are more 'prestigious' they do attract good people - some headmasters/mistresses and teachers are simply excellent at KVs (as a side point we do not have enough excellent teachers to staff all govt. schools in the country, there are some funny stats on that). Additionally, the KV headmaster/mistress seems to have some autonomy, which might make a critical difference (c) KV children are typically _not_ first generation learners, and as Ram says for first generation learners the teacher-student ratio should be 1:5. But this begs the question of why the Navodaya Vidyalayas (KVs in rural areas, introduced in Rajiv Gandhi's time) are doing well. Apparently they are doing quite well. Ram had some thoughts on figuring out these differences, but now he is happily at Puvidham, so we have to wait for him to come back before we can analyze this further :) Seriously, I think we should explore why this is so. KVs and Navodaya Vidyalayas show that govt. institutions can be well run (a Navodaya Vidyalaya near Mandya is apparently extraordinarily good, so says my old school (a KV type school) headmistress). What is their hiring mechanism? Are the students really first generation learners? How much autonomy do they have? (Autonomy clearly plays a role - as we can see from the success of IITs, another state institution, but run autonomously by a board with I suppose appropriate checks and balances).

To which we said:

I think we've had these discussions ourselves before, and pretty much all the points you make are possibly factors. I have a slightly more high falutin' thought behind why KVs work, which is a kind of class based analysis. The children in KVs come from the same socio-economic background (largely) as their teachers, indeed quite often the children of the teachers are _in_ the KVs that their parents teach at. This is possibly a factor in KV teachers/administrators having strong motivation to care of their own. The sense of accountability towards other parents etc. is a lot stronger. We like to take care of our own, and each class watches out for itself implicitly. I really haven't studied the Navodaya Vidyalaya system at all, but what you say sounds interesting.

Basically what we're saying is that a KV teacher/staff member has a degree of empathy with a KV parent (due their congruent socio-economic backgrounds) that results in more accountable behaviour from the teacher/staff member. Your average village or basti schoolteacher or headmistress with a B. Ed. or whatever doesn't have any stake in the lives of the villagers or construction workers whose kids (s)he teaches. Each 'class' looks out for its own.

Anyway, the discussion continues...