Lalit Bhanot's head

From http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100922/jsp/sports/story_12966666.jsp:
Asked why the rooms of the Village were not cleaned for the visiting athletes, the high profile OC official came up with an outlandish statement.

“These rooms are clean to both you and us. However, it may not appear so to some others. They want certain standards in hygiene and cleanliness which may differ from our perception,” commented the high profile sports administrator, who is also the secretary of the Athletics Association of India (AAI)."

Pictures of the rooms referred to above are at http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/commonwealth_games/delhi_2010/9025907.stm

I want Bhanot's head. We, citizens of India, deserve his head. Nothing less.

Right vs effective... contd

But then again, what is man? A function of his genes, upbringing, desires and circumstances? principles? pride? self-respect?

Right or effective?

Someone recently said we should concentrate on being effective, rather than being right. She pointed out that growing up, we are taught to be right - at home, in school, at university; but at work its more important to be effective.

Its a question which has been troubling me since then. She is right - to the extent that her philosophy seems to describe what most people seem to do - concentrate on being effective rather than being right. But really, what is being effective? Is it an euphemism for compromise? People compromise. They grow up and they compromise. They give up on their principles - maybe they never had any in the first place. These are all good people - they wont want to hurt anyone, they want to be right but they end up effective - which is a good thing. Or is it?

Why do we become effective? What makes us compromise? Maybe because we start having and wanting things; and we become afraid of losing or not having them and therefore we think "I want to be effective". As Buddha said, desire is the source of all suffering. Or maybe, all compromise.

If you have nothing to lose, you would never compromise; the more you have, the more you want, the weaker you are.

Gandhi is a case in point. He never compromised. India might have been free in 1922, but after Chauri Chaura, he called off the non-cooperation movement. He wanted non-violence and he would have it; even if it meant India wasn't to get freedom for 27 more years. Again, in 1947, he didn't want prime ministership; he never really seemed to want anything than to live by his principles and he never budged on them.

I dont know. Everybody is so afraid, so diplomatic, so "correct". Where are the people who care about being right and are not afraid of saying it? Humanity has grown stronger; unfortunately humans seem to have become weaker.

Strength, in the end, is everything.

Once

I could once smell the sky
I could once dream
I could once live
and I could once breathe

Argh@Neil Nitin Mukesh

Neil Nitin Mukesh. An Actor. Is he? I'm watching Jail and every scene with this guy makes me want to cry. Have they no standards at all for acting? Isn't it supposed to be a profession? If so, how does someone who so obviously has no clue about acting get to act in (and thus completely fuck up) so many films?
Right now I have this outpouring of frustration but I don't think it can be translated into words. It would be more appropriately translated into something much more physically violent (maybe like hitting the director on the head for inflicting such acting on us?)

P.S. Oh well. I shouldn't be that harsh. If John Abraham can make a living out of acting, so will Neil Nitin.

helpless

back to blogging. generally, its anger which brings me here; this time though, its surprise - genuine surprise which has quite shaken me out of my comfortable indifference. the mumbai attacks. and now i am tempted to launch into the obvious stuff about "worst attack ever", "shocking" etc but will cut it out.

so they are saying - is this the defining moment for mumbai? or even for india? i hope so. for india. for us to finally say a strong definite NO to terrorism. having lived with extremism (which i still contend is very different from terrorism) all our lives, many of us (speak for yourself i say - hence maybe i should say "i") have quite got used to killings, bombings etc. we ("i") shrug it off. i say it happens. it happens in india. thats life. right. wrong. wrong? well, not entirely. it is part of life. but it does not have to be. not at this scale. not to this point of lawlessness.

it does not have to be? how not? there must be a way. some way. maybe many ways.

education? yeah. but do we wait around for everybody (including everybody in our neighbouring countries) to get educated enough to understand that killing other people is not really a good thing. no please, we dont want to.

information? maybe. the assam blasts last month (yes yes always assam which really makes parochial assamese me think/care etc) frustated me into thinking about information as a step. a terror helpline. a terror site. with information about all extremist/terrorist groups operating in india. something like a wiki. and with telephone numbers. so that it reaches every corner of india (as pointed out by yoga). terror does not come from a big bang. it starts somewhere. like a small group. then spreads out, recruits, extorts, spreads its ideas. people know about it. from the beginning. there is information. that information we need to share and put out. somebody hears something, sees something - give that somebody a channel to put that information out.

one federal anti-terrorism agency? yes, definitely. an obvious idea i finally heard on tv today. a professional agency. with one huge network. well funded, powerful and everywhere. why is RAW something we rarely hear about? why does it not inspire confidence? maybe it should even inspire fear. why is it not something i can join?

give the people tools. an agency they can join. a service they can report to. security weaknesses they can point out and which will be taken care of. in my head, its a solution which will go some way.

that helpless feeling. that same feeling which leads an honest man to compromise on his way to power, another honest man on his way to extremism, another on his way to terrorism. and the rest of us to cultivating a shield of indifference.

or maybe we are all hindus. we leave it to fate. and to the terrorists. (oh, hinduism is apparently a religion. i meant it as a way of life. a way of life for all of us from every religious denomination in india. that way of life which leads us to fault fate for our own flaws. or is that a strength? yes. but not now please.)

i'm digressing. i'm helpless.

The "do something significant" bug

Just wassuped a friend. Her response was to say she didnt do anything significant the last week. She meant significant at work, but whatever. I dont get this line of thinking, this need to do something significant. We live, we think, we feel - thats significant. Everything else - the doing thing, the traveling thing, the picnic thing, the party thing - they are just add-ons to life. Not to say add-ons are bad. They are definitely good to have (sometimes:p) but they are still not central to life.

And I can never forget that one line a colleague once said when going on vacation - "I going to ski and I love it; and of course I love work but ski-ing would be nice for a few days." Why I cant forget it is the context - he was really excited to go ski-ing and he mentioned the "love work" thing then very honestly it struck me he actually (ACTUALLY) meant it. Of course why I cant forget it is coz I like my work but I'd always prefer not working to working. Work to me is a loss of independence and time, which is one hell of a sacrifice (independence being the only true value and time being the only scarce resource)

Or maybe I'm just weird. (yeah i know grrrr)

Why Europeans have the travel bug

It struck me today that most of the time I am outside here in Amsterdam, its a constant struggle against the elements - the biting cold that makes u want to shrivel up within yourself or the chilly wind thats blowing your umbrella off or that painfully slow drizzle which never gets to be the downpour I love. And this is what people here live with, and have forever lived with. No wonder then they wanted out and they travelled out in their ships the first chance they got. No wonder also that they are so structured and disciplined like machines - humans couldn't possibly have survived in such conditions otherwise.

Cricket.. (if google will.. argh)

Last time I wanted to write something about cricket, google pained me with getting me to creating some stupid google account with my blogger account. Fortunately, they dont seem upto any new tricks today.

Just a thought - another way in which cricket differs from football - both are beautiful sports; and both showcase individual brilliance and teamwork too; football however requires a certain amount of teamwork to do the individual brilliance which can then make a telling difference to the result of the game; cricket on the other hand can have great individual play without teamwork but that has less of an effect on the result (A goal or two can decice a game more than a fifty or a century - particularly test cricket.)

The other differences like how test cricket is more of a man game's rather than football etc are of course obvious :)

All that shit...

Excerpt from FT's "Why the climate change wolf is so hard to kill off" (By Martin Wolf) (Published: December 4 2007 19:02)
(http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fc338d2a-a292-11dc-81c4-0000779fd2ac.html)

...we must confront the fact that the world is far from a single country. This creates three huge problems: collective (in)action; perceived injustice; and indifference.

First, not only does each country want to be a free rider on the efforts of others but none feels wholly responsible for the outcome.

Second, the contributions made by different countries to the problem have been (and remain) enormously different. Collectively, the rich countries account for seven out of every 10 tonnes of CO2 emitted since the start of the industrial era. While China is the biggest emitter in the world, its emissions are still only one-fifth of US levels per head. India’s are one-fifteenth.

Third, as the report spells out in compelling detail, the heaviest cost will be borne by the world’s poor...............But this, if we were honest, is why the rich are unlikely to make the huge reductions in emissions the report demands. The powerful will continue to act without much consideration for the poor. This, after all, is a world that spends 10 times as much on defence (much of it useless) as on aid to poor countries.

....

The truth, moreover, is that this will happen only if the US also takes the lead. No country will deliver radical cuts if the US does not do so, too. No leaps forward in science and technology will occur if the US is not prepared to commit its resources to those ends. The US can no longer wait for a lead from others. Either it takes the lead now or the cause, in all probability, will be lost.....

The internet and power to the people

Social lending (Prosper, Asheesh Advani and Virgin Money, Zopa) is one more dimension to power to the people - brought about by the internet. The more I think about it, the more it seems to be that it is finally the possession (exclusive, mostly) of knowledge that is the real power - or at least it is what gives the politicians, the financial markets (commercial bank, investment banks, hegde funds, private equity - everybody who makes more money than the sorry investor who puts his money in the bank and earns a paltry return) and the retail industry their power.

All the three above are essentially brokers; brokers of information. They are not really a part of the division of labour chain; they are facilitators. And while facilitating, they take your money (oh yeah make no mistake, the banks are more unthrustworthy than even your politican with his false promises and the retail guy who charges you that hefty premium). None of them are a skill industry; take their monopoly on knowledge away and you can take them away.

Which is what is happening. Ebay Amazon Yahoo etc took on the retail industry. Betfair took on the bookmakers. Then electronic trading took on the brokers from the financial industry. Now social lending on the commercial banks.

There will be more to come. We will take on the equity analysts - they are easy meat; an open online analysis and ranking platform of companies can obliterate those. Better electronic trading, with more tools to the users, (and maybe using the power of distributed computing) can take out the marketmakers, even the hedge funds. When social lending becomes commercial lending, the commercial banks will start fading. A consolidation of political views on the internet can take on the politicians.

It shall be a fairer world. Information, knowledge and thus power to the people.

Taxi 9211

The music of this movie has set me thinking. The music is super fuckingly amazing of course. But what got me thinking was not that - it was that the music is a super blend - has amazing guitar, beats, indian instruments, the melody so typical of hindi romantic songs, the drums/beats so to typical of modern (yes i'm prehistoric) trance/club etc. It has blended them all and come out very good. (Rock fans would appreciate the good guitar in places though they - and me - want more of that).

(Hardcore musicians will forgive my amateurish criticim. I played the guitar a wee lil bit long long ago but I really do not know much about music. My taste is music is all "acquired"; acquired from friends.)

And it strikes me that this "blend" thing is so typical of Indian culture - look at the ahoms and the mughals - they came in, they conquered, and became Indian. Indians can both accept and they can copy; they accepted the mughals and the ahoms, imbibed/copied part of their culture and made it their own. And they copy and make it better. Like they are doing with music now.

Would the US have attacked a white christian Iraq? (for the oil maybe?)

(Also, would they have attacked North Korea by now if North Korea was Muslim?)


Thank god (the Hindu gods of course:p) the Tamils are not Muslims. Or else, the world (the west predominantly, but the east is now following suit) would just have branded the LTTE as "islamist jihadists". Like they do with the ones in Chechnya. And with the ones who did the blasts in Karachi recently. And with the ones in Palestine. And probably now the ones in Kashmir too.

(If the Assamese had a Muslim majority, the ULFA would be branded as just another example of jihad too.)

(I will not insult the reader's intelligence by explaining why those movements are not any jihad).

I am tired, of all this Islamophobia (OK I am not sure if there is a term like that; if there isn't, there soon will be). I knew the Hindus were like that and I always rebelled against it; now here in the Netherlands, those Islamophobic Hindus from India look like angels. And I am amazed, at the jokes highly qualified and intelligent people here make about Muslims and jihad, at their reaction when someone says he is from Pakistan (I wonder how they would react if someone said he is from Afghanistan), at their general perception of Muslims.

I am generalizing, of course; forgive me. But it is there, that seed of Islamophobia, more than a seed really. Much more. (OK not quite a tree yet, but a plant maybe?:p)

And it frightens me, this intolerance that I see here (and which has manifested in US's attack on Iraq - oh yes, do you think the US would have attacked them if there were white and christian? ok maybe, for the oil). I don't see these people having to interact with a lot of Muslims; there just ain't as many Muslims here as say in India. And that definitely is the problem; and a problem the media and the governments are exacerbating by raving about jihad all the time.

I don't see an Islamic jihad. I rather see the beginnings of a anti-Islamic jihad, led mostly and fiercely by the west.

Update on Listening to the (Western) Twentieth Century

I had emailed the guy my view. His response gives hope that the title is indeed apt (while the summary apparently is not).

Response below:

Chandan,

The summary is a bit deceptive. In the final chapter of my book I talk
at length about Toru Takemitsu, Tan Dun, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Kayhan
Kalhor, and other non-Western composers. I suspect that in the current
century the story of classical music will be increasingly non-Western
in orientation.

All best,

Alex Ross

Listening to the (Western) Twentieth Century

The Economist ran a review (http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=10015908&fsrc=nwlptwfree) on this book called "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century". The author is Alex Ross who has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996.

I read the economist review. And I read the summary at the author's blog (http://www.therestisnoise.com/).The summary goes like "...The narrative goes from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties, from Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies...".

Get the picture? See the problem?

For those who didn't, Isn't there also something called Indian classical music (yes, they have actually played a bit of that in the twentieth-century too)? There's probably Chinese classical music and Japanese etc but I don't know about that. All I'm saying is, Mr Alex, please be correct and call you book "Listening to the Western Twentieth Century".

The world awaits...

8:10 pm, 14 Aug 2007, here in Amsterdam. 11:40 pm in India. 20 minutes to the biggest event of the year - the celebration of independence of that vibrant beautiful fractured powerful country - India.

60 years ago to this day, Nehru said "Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long supressed, finds utterance...."

It has been 60 years since India freed herself from the ravages of English domination; 60 years since the most civilized nation on earth got rid of that most malignant notion of "white man's burden"; 60 years since her soul "found utterance". And now she finds herself poised on the brink of taking over the world; taking over the world not by deceit or violence or "divide and conquer", as were done by lesser civilizations, but taking over the world with intelligence, tolerance and peace. The world herself awaits in joy, for it is only fitting that the most civilized nation should take her over.

It is time also for the young generation of Indians to stand up; that generation which grew up free, free not only of foreign domination but also of any near memories of foreign domination, the generation that had access to the best education, the best opportunities, the broadest, widest experiences of life. Time for them to stand up and take over the country; time for them to tell those old potilicians to retire and let go of the reins; time for them to demand a President we can respect; time for them to tell their Prime Minister not to accept a honorary Oxford degree and go all queasy about it; time for them to outmanouvre those English-inspired politicians who still exploit of beautiful nation with "divide and conquer".

The world waits, and India journeys, inexorably, towards a better tomorrow; a tomorrow she only can deliver...

Happy independence day, fellow Indians..

Jealous me (medicine and math)

Had this visitor for a few days - my uncle's friend - he had come down to attend a conference on head and neck cancer. Super guy, extremely straightforward; landed in Schipol and straightaway got pickpocketed at WTC - as Ashwin says, always happens to the best seedha-est people. Shit. Rings true. But I am diverting.

Anyway, his passion for his profession brought it all back - the envy I have for my father, my uncles, Z - the satisfaction they have daily is to be never mine. Looking back, it was probably my love for math which led me to ditch medicine; shit if only medicine had math, I would have my cake and eaten it too.

Which brings me to the troubling question - why isn't math emphasized in the medical profession; ok thats not fair I dont know enough about the profession itself to comment thus; but then, why isn't math emphasized in the entrance exams; why are(were?) math and biology optionals for us; why aren't both compulsory; shouldn't the people who are working on our bodies and researching the human physiology etc be very mathematically - and by inference, logically - minded? Why aren't doctors first trained in logic and AI and then the brain? Maybe they would then have a different perspective on the neural network? My ignorance of medicine prevents me from citing instances in medicine where a sound mathematical backgound would be useful; but somehow I find it unpalatable that good math is indispensible in medicine.

(While on it, computers science students can fairly easily look at a human brain as some sort of computer, with a trained neural network and a scheduler which goes awry in intoxicated states! - btw, are humans multi-cpu-ed? do the sharper guys have faster cpus? is there a separate process for committing short term memory for long term memory which is why intoxicated people dont remember later what they did?! etc etc:) )

(I now need a doctor's perspective on a computer!)

How smart softwares and Google fail (and irritates and bugs and drives me fucking crazy)

The world cup just got over. And in spite of Australia's continued dominance and India's pathetic performance, some cricket scenes with a nice song in the background on tv set me in a romantic cricket mood and I thought I wanna write something on how this beautiful game trumps all other games.

So I type www.blogger.com

First thing, the blogger page is in Dutch! Fuck fuck fuck. Just coz I am located in Amsterdam does not mean I know to read (even if I could speak, which I also cannot) the local language; please at least give me an option to change my language setting but no I cannot find any such thing. Wow. Who project managed this whole smart language thing? Which stupid smart-ass too-good fucking engineer/project manager/team forgot about the people who live in places where they do not know the local language? How can Google - which does have the smartest guys and makes the smartest softwares - fuck up on this?

Second, Google's taken over Blogger. And I have to create a google account now (or use my old account and link it to my Blogger one). But why? I want to blog. Thats all I fucking want to do. Why is Blogger/Google troubling me with things like linking up accounts/creating gmail accounts etc? When I signed up on Blogger, I probably checked on some Blogger "Terms and Conditions". But shouldn't there also be terms and conditions that these sites - which offer you free acounts and good services and hence very nicely make sure you use them a lot and get used to them - that these sites would not without sufficient warning suddenly change themselves so much? I signed up for a particular thing; that thing itself can evolve fine - they could give me better blogging tools etc - but linking up to email? thats something I DID NOT SIGN UP ON BLOGGER FOR.

So Google, FUCK THE HELL OFF. And thanks for spoiling my mood. I loved Google. Now, I am starting to be wary of it. It is going where Microsoft went. And is fucking us all.

300 and hypocrisy

just saw 300. very entertaining movie. pure thrill. came out feelin i hadnt wasted my money n my time.

but it irritates me too. when xerxes invades greece, he's portrayed as a tyrant and a debauch and a crazed maniac who thinks of himself as god. (n oh yes he's also so foolish as to send soldiers with just swords and no shields. come on!) well ok. invaders r tyrants. but when alexander set out to invade everybody else, he is "alexander the great". baah. such hypocrisy.

or maybe xerxes is a tyrant because he lost. so we have the classical syndrome of history eulogizing the winners and villifying the losers. hence we have the "great" roman and later the english empires. or rather, the roman and english tyrants and plunderers.

On "happiness" and hypertension (in response to RISK)

RISK: http://blog.risk.net/2007/03/towards_a_theory_of_cardiovasc_1.html
FT: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f035d56e-c92b-11db-9f7b-000b5df10621.html
Research paper: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/oswald/hypertensionfeb07.pdf
ALEA: http://www.aleablog.com/2007/03/03/happiness-economics/
First, I must confess I have not read the research paper itself.

Second, I must point out. Risk says "blood pressure... is linked fairly closely to national happiness". Alea says "nations that regarded themselves as happy reported lower levels of hypertension. " The phrase "regarded themselves" is very important - in fact, it is the crux.

Happiness is not well-defined and it is probably not very wide off the mark to say that the perception of happiness is linked to a particular culture. The research is fine - it just should not extrapolate the findings to other cultures; and it does seem to do that since it time and again uses phrases like "national happiness", "mental health" etc.

FT says "It is now well established that people in richer countries tend to be happier than those in poorer ones." My personal experience however does not support that at all - in fact it is quite the contrary. My question to FT is - "Please, who established it and how?". I have a deep suspicion the establishment is based on research papers such as this again.

Also, I think it strange there is no mention of smiles (the real ones not the volatility ones!). Isn't it obvious that happpiness would be linked to the number of smiles in a day?