Inflation

Inflation once again has become hot. It is on TV! TV screen does not like old and poor people but likes the reason which wories them most- Inflation!

In India, from ages, we have weighed our royalty- both borne and elected- using various things. (It is interesting to note that renowned Marathi-Farsi poet Madhav Julian माधव जूलियन् was weighed in footwears just after his birth because he would not stop crying - "Aamchi Akra Varshe" by Leelabai Patwardhan)

Inflation seems to have affected even that practice!


Artist : James Stevenson Publication: The New Yorker 7 Nov 1964

And how are we middle class people coping with it when even our neighbourhood shopkeeper is so scared……..

Artist: Barney Tobey Publication: The New Yorker 28-8-48

Nothing except facts

I am not perfect , I never was, I never will be in anything I do , have done or will do.

Let me please belong!

Artist :James Thurber Publication: The New Yorker 12 Dec 1936

To help corporations find their soul ?

Adman Bruce Barton in 1923 said that the role of advertising was to help corporations find their soul.

"I like to think of advertising as something big, something splendid, something which goes deep down into an institution and gets hold of the soul of it. . . . Institutions have souls, just as men and nations have souls,"

Artist : Frank Modell Publication: The New Yorker 5 Nov 1960

What is ‘meaning’?

What is the real meaning of life? What is my purpose?.........

Mario Pisani reveiwed the book "THE MEANING OF LIFE by Terry Eagleton" for FT on March 2, 2007।

It has these lines : " I decided to put the book’s analytical framework to the test। I identified three people with very different perspectives on life, and asked them what it meant to them।

A British friend, a member of the international policy-making elite, answered with a dry “it means nothing.” A German colleague said something along the lines of “to be happy.” My Turkish corner-shop-keeper answered “What is ‘meaning’?”

It looks like Eagleton got it right, after all."

Artist: Lee Lorenz Publication: The New Yorker 10 Dec 1960

Mother's Love

Sigmund Freud : "He who knows his mother's love and is secure in that knowledge will never know failure।"

Tom Wolfe: “The demise of Freudianism can be summed up in a single word: lithium”.


Artist :Alan Dunn Publication: The New Yorker 14 Nov 1936

is smoking evil?

I have always felt that so-called 'vices' bring people together.

When in college, I always envied smokers who could make friends so easily and had no trouble in passing time anywhere and on any occasion.

Even at work, especially in non-smoking offices, smokers gathered outside and networked.

Artist : William Hamilton Publication: The New Yorker 31 Jan 1994

if we didn't make it somebody would!

Money for the sake of money has become the objective of many (most?) of us. It has become a favourite habit and past time. If every excuse fails, this could work : if we didn't make it somebody would!

Masahiko Fujiwara - author of best selling Japanese book "The Dignity of a State"- says: "Japan used to despise money, just like English gentlemen. But after the war, under American influence, we concentrated on prosperity."

Similar thing has happened to educated Indians.

Does money make us more happy? There is overwhelming evidence against it.

Consider a paradox outlined by London School of Economics economist Richard Lay­ard in Happiness (Penguin, 2005), in which he shows that we are no happier even though average incomes have more than doubled since 1950 and "we have more food, more clothes, more cars, bigger houses, more central heating, more foreign holidays, a shorter working week, nicer work and, above all, better health."

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert goes deeper into our psyches in Stumbling on Happiness (Knopf, 2006), in which he claims, "The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future." Much of our happiness depends on projecting what will make us happy (instead of what actually does), and Gilbert shows that we are not very good at this forethought.

Michael Hecht- author of The Happiness Myth (Harper, 2007)- writes, "The basic modern assumptions about how to be happy are nonsense." Take sex. "A century ago, an average man who had not had sex in three years might have felt proud of his health and forbearance, and a woman might have praised herself for the health and happiness benefits of ten years of abstinence."

Artist : Richard Decker Publication: The New Yorker Jan 30 1960

Artist : Bruce Erik Kaplan Publication: The New Yorker 4 Apr 1994

What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing

I have just added a line to the subtitle of this blog: What’s So Funny? Well, Maybe Nothing.

As you may read some of the items here that could be your response. Even I have not found everything funny here!

JOHN TIERNEY NYT March 13 2007: "Laughter, a topic that stymied philosophers for 2,000 years, is finally yielding to science.....They’ve discovered something that eluded Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud and the many theorists who have tried to explain laughter based on the mistaken premise that they’re explaining humour.....Occasionally we’re surprised into laughing at something funny, but most laughter has little to do with humor. It’s an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit. It’s not about getting the joke. It’s about getting along.......most speakers, particularly women, did more laughing than their listeners, using the laughs as punctuation for their sentences. It’s a largely involuntary process. People can consciously suppress laughs, but few can make themselves laugh convincingly....The human ha-ha evolved from the rhythmic sound — pant-pant — made by primates like chimpanzees when they tickle and chase one other while playing."

We all came out of a hat.........

.....................and surely will go there.

Artist : Richard Decker Publication: The New Yorker 11 Jul 1936

Asian Flu or American Plague

Global financial markets are integrated। When one part of it catches virus, another part starts sneezing.

Also, it is not simply demand-supply economics at work.

For example, price of oil rises because it is favourite commodity of speculators and hedge funds and not because some great fundamental forces are at play.

Another prevailing thing among business media is the pervasive and insidious habit of anthropomorphic thought. "markets will go where they want to go"!

Edsger W. Dijkstra: "Is anthropomorphic thinking bad? Well, it is certainly no good in the sense that it does not help. Why did the stone fall in Greek antiquity? Quite simply because it wanted to go to the centre of the earth. And, several centuries later, we had the burning question: why do stones want to go to the centre of the earth? Well, that is simple too: because that's where they belong. Why are heavier stones heavier than lighter stones? Because they are more eager to be at the centre of the earth. But then Galileo made the troubling discovery that the heavier stone does not fall any faster than the lighter one. How come? Simple, dear Watson: the heavier stone has indeed a greater desire to be at the centre of the earth, but it is also more lazy. So much for a - be it somewhat simplified - history of the development of physics."


Artist : Richard Cline Publication: The New Yorker 25 Apr 1994