Miss Drucker, Now Go For The Kill

Times of India on October 26, 2007 reports: Revealing clothes a no-no in office.

“An IT company received complaints from employees who found the dressing style of some employees objectionable and distracting, and hence the need to formulate a policy. Women security personnel are being deployed to check women employees.

Mini-skirts, spaghetti-strap dresses, halter-tops are a strict no-no. Sleevless tops unless draped by a jacket are not acceptable. Irrespective of the choice of attire, clothes with very low necks and backs should not be worn. Skirts that end above the knees, transparent clothing, capris, pyjamas, trousers with cut-offs, low waist jeans are also not acceptable.”

It’s very obvious from above laundry list (!) that the code is largely meant to curb sex appeal of women employees to their young colleagues and not-so-young managers.

This is very simplistic.

In our society, men in power-at home, society and office- kept women, of all castes and colours, down for far too long, the way the Dalits were oppressed. Women like the Dalits now are fighting back. They won't follow men's rule-book for the fight!

Social reformer and sexologist R D Karve’s mission was not just happy family life, emancipation of women, control of population etc but more. R D Karve wanted Indian women to have as much sexual freedom as men did. He wanted them to have as much sensual pleasure as men did.

When one spends most of her waking life at a workplace, she cannot be faulted if she sought few pleasures there.

Daily Mail of UK reported in February 2007: Forget hard work - women would rather flirt their way to the top.

“Forget the sisterhood - the majority of working women would rather have a male boss and flirt their way to the top, according to a survey.

Despite the fact that women often complain of inequality in the workplace, new research reveals that women will don high heels and rely on their feminine charms to get what they want.

Rather than combining strength with fellow female workers, they in fact see other women as the main competition.

As a result three out of five women would rather work directly for a man than a woman while a further 86 per cent would happily flirt with a male colleague if it meant they got their own way.

The survey, commissioned by magazine Harper's Bazaar, questioned 500 professional women with top jobs in finance, newspapers and healthcare about their attitudes to their office environments.

It found that while women continue to reach high-powered positions in the workplace, they are still prone to indulging in what could be described as typically female behaviour.

Crying in the loos was a common confession with 85 per cent of women admitting that they had locked themselves in the office toilet for a quick weep.

Despite striving for equality at work a third of women admitted to pretending to be less intelligent than they actually are to flatter a male ego and get ahead.

Seven out of ten women said that simply by wearing a pair of high heels to work they automatically felt more powerful and confident in their ability to deal with the working day.

Although only 58 per cent of women thought there was gender equality in the office, one in 25 admitted to selling out a female colleague for their own career gains.
Nearly 70 per cent confessed that they would secretly revel in seeing another colleague fail while one in five have taken the credit for someone else's work.

According to the research there is conflict between mothers and childless women in the workplace.

More than half of women thought that women with children held more power in the office to the disadvantage of those without. “


Artist: Robert Weber The New Yorker April 6, 1963

Anju, Relax. Oceans May Be Rising But Don’t Start Packing Yet!

While talking to Newsweek (October 29, 2007), Rajendra Pachauri head of Nobel Prize winning the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says:

”… The 20th century sea level rise was about 17 centimeters. Our predictions for the end of this century are 18 to 59 centimeters. So even if we end up somewhere in the middle, we have a pretty serious crisis on our hands….

If you want to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases at the level that will limit temperature increases to 2 degrees to 2.4 degrees centigrade, the cost to the global economy in 2030 will be less than 3 percent….”

The Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg says (Prospect Magazine UK November 2007) :

”… the IPCC’s estimates show that oceans will rise between 18-59cm, and that the most likely scenario is around 30cm. That’s similar to what the planet experienced in the last 150 years and it (rather obviously) coped….

Rising temperatures will mean more heat waves, but the cold is a much bigger killer than the heat. By 2050, global warming will cause almost 400,000 more heat-related deaths each year. Yet at the same time, 1.8m fewer people will die from cold. In this respect, global warming will save lives...

If we eradicated malaria, we would not only do immediate good, but leave these nations more productive—estimates suggest they would be twice as rich by 2100—with more resilience and capacity to respond to climate change. Instead of saving one person from malaria through climate change policies, the same amount of money spent on malaria could save 36,000 people. This isn’t just an academic discussion—it's about helping real people now and in the future.”

Personally speaking cold bothers me a lot more than heat.

Last word in this debate is not spoken yet. Therefore, Anju relax,let us not start packing yet!


Artist: Robert J. Day The New Yorker 4 April 1959

Bhagat Singh Lives In Many Hearts, Lenin Just A Collectible

South Asia is celebrating Bhagat Singh’s 100th birth anniversary.

Supreme sacrifice of young Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev for a larger cause has motivated millions in the past and will continue to do so.

T S Shejwalkar has described in his essay of October 1930 what Motilal Nehru (more charismatic personality than his son) felt on meeting Bhagat Singh:”For the first time in my life, I met someone greater than me.”

Bhagat Singh was just 23 when hanged.

I have always been impressed with not just Bhagat Singh’s rugged good looks- wearing Western hat or prisoner’s chains- but his intellect. Man was an atheist and remained so till the end. He didn’t believe in rebirth. He must be one of the first famous people in India to talk about Charles Darwin’s work. Just for the appreciation of readers, he established a library of 175 books at Agra, where the Assembly bomb plan was finalised. As a revolutionary thinker, he encouraged the reading habit among his comrades and also debates on topical social and political issues.

His family was very eclectic and was open to diverse influences. It truly believed in a composite India and also practised it in the family.

He once said: “Up to that period (1925) I was a romantic revolutionary… That was a turning point in my revolutionary career;

“Study” was the cry that reverberated in the corridors of my mind. Study to enable yourself to face the arguments advanced by opposition. Study to arm yourself with arguments in favour of your cult. I began to study.

My previous faith and convictions underwent a remarkable modification. The romance of violent methods alone, which was so prominent amongst our predecessors, was replaced by serious ideas. No more mysticism, no more blind faith. Realism became our cult. Use of force justifiable when restored to as a matter of terrible necessity: non-violence as policy indispensable for all mass movements. So much about methods.

The most important thing was the clear conception of ideal for which we were to fight. As there were no important activities in the field of action, I got ample opportunity to study various ideals of world revolution. I studied Bakunin, the anarchist leader, something of Marx, the father of communism and much of Lenin, Trotsky and others – the men who had successfully carried out a revolution in their country.”

Bhagat Singh trusted Lenin and his revolution in Russia without realizing horrors of Russian revolution. George Orwell was to write “Animal Farm” only in 1945.

Brad DeLong:”Lenin was a really evil man. His followers and supporters slaughtered more than ten million of their fellow humans… for Communists, Lenin and Guevara are truly heroic. Standing as they did on the shoulders of the great Karl Marx, they saw deeply into the present and far into the future. They ran great personal risks and stood bravely against their adversaries as they struggled to bring about the revolutionary liberation of humanity.... we cannot view Lenin and Guevara as truly heroic, any more than we can view Hitler and Mussolini as truly heroic…”

In retrospect, I feel Bhagat Singh didn’t need Lenin. His native idealism, his ideas, his leadership qualities and his youthful good looks were more than enough to power his dreams.

Like in the picture below Lenin is being assigned to the dustbin of history while Bhagat Singh continues to rule many young hearts in India.


Artist: Eldon Dedini The New Yorker 27 Nov 1989

Dalits & Slaves as Stock Options in Our Celebrated and Mythologized History

Two of the sorriest chapters in human history are the practices of slavery and caste.

20th century Maharashtra produced some good books on the suffering of Dalits. But more needs to be researched and told. People need to know what it was to be a Dalit even in 19th century India.

Markus Rediker has written a book “The Slave Ship” reviewed by Adam Hochschild, author of “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves”.

.” Most spasms of cruelty in history we know about largely through the testimony of victims. It is thanks to acts of witness by survivors like Primo Levi and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for instance, that we can begin to picture what life was like in Auschwitz and the gulag. There is no great trove of memoirs by retired concentration camp guards.

By contrast, a much more prolonged bout of suffering, the notorious Middle Passage across the Atlantic, on which more than 12 million Africans were embarked for the Americas over more than three centuries, we know about almost entirely from the perpetrators. There are few accounts of this voyage by slaves…

Like executives today, British slave merchants pressed their government for deregulation, and finally it obliged, canceling the Royal African Company’s guaranteed monopoly.

Just as corporate officers now get stock options, slave-ship officers received the extra compensation of a few “privilege” slaves they were permitted to buy, transport and sell for their own profit. Sometimes there were executive bonuses tied directly to performance, based on the number of slaves delivered.

And finally, those who succeeded in the business could seamlessly make the transition to politics, the way tycoons still do: former slave-ship captains sat in both the British House of Commons and the United States Senate (James D’Wolf of Rhode Island).

This complex tissue of normality makes one wonder what aspects of our own everyday business-as-usual people will, a century or two from now, be considered as horrendous as we think the slave trade was…

Humanly, the slave ship was the locus of unbelievable cruelty. To punish rebels, captains resorted to thumbscrews, red-hot pokers, strangling, the severing of limbs and more. Like the post of concentration-camp commandant, the job bred violence…

Violence cascaded downward from captain and officers to sailors to the enslaved. The slaves got the worst of it…”

In his own books, Adam Hochschild says:

"So rapidly were slaves worked to death, above all on the brutal sugar plantations of the Caribbean, that between 1660 and 1807, ships brought well over three times as many Africans across the ocean to British colonies as they did Europeans. And, of course, it was not just to British territories that slaves were sent. From Senegal to Virginia, Sierra Leone to Charleston, the Niger delta to Cuba, Angola to Brazil, and on dozens upon dozens of crisscrossing paths taken by thousands of vessels, the Atlantic was a vast conveyor belt to early death in the fields of an immense swath of plantations that stretched from Baltimore to Rio de Janeiro and beyond…

The world we live in -- its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence -- is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.”

John Hawkyns has said:”…slavery did change the world. Millions of people were deracinated. Whole economies and empires were birthed and borne on the backs of kidnapped Africans. The development of the African continent itself was irreparably arrested as a result of the stolen legacies of its strongest people. So we are still dealing with the dreadful aftermath even today.”

If you look at our celebrated and mythologized history from the eyes of slaves and Dalits, the Pharaoh was nice only if he built small Pyramid because it meant little less flogging and torture!


Artist: James Stevenson The New Yorker 29 June 1963

Can’t Write, Act, Draw, Play, Sing? You Haven’t Suffered Enough!

Times of India reported on October 23, 2007:
“Veteran film director Francis Ford Coppola has launched a blistering attack on three of the great actors he has directed.

The five-time Oscar winner took a surprise hit at Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson, saying he has become disappointed with them as they have grown older and richer.”

Coppola doesn’t feel that this has to do with their age: “You know, even in those days, after The Godfather, I didn't feel that those actors were ready to say, 'Let's do something else really ambitious.”

I am on the side of Coppola. Great art is often created out of hunger, suffering and insecurity.

Actor Dr. Shreeram Lagoo डाँ. श्रीराम लागू often defends his own crappy work in Hindi cinema saying he did it for money. I am not sure how much money he needed and for how long but in the process Marathi stage lost a promising artist who could have done some great and not just good work. Also, because of hamming he did in cinema, he surely lost a lot of his sensitivity as an actor.

Artist: Sam Cobean The New Yorker 17 Jan 1948

Mona Lisa Once Had Eyebrows But No Smile!

On October 23, 2007, newspapers world over printed Mona Lisa story very prominently.

Times of India: “Ultra-deatiled scans show Mona Lisa has eyebrows”.

Asian Age: “Scan shows Mona Lisa has lashes, eyebrows”.

Sure, but did she have a smile to begin with?


Artist: Charles Addams The New Yorker 12 April 1952

Pean to Potato

Business Line October 22, 2007 has published an AFP story on potato “Diplomatic tool, humbler of leaders, unifier of nations”

To begin with,personal disclaimer:
Potato not just sustains lives of my son and I but gives us ultimate gastronomic pleasure. My wife though could get by without it.

I often think a writer like Dnyaneshwar (along with Tukaram, the best Marathi produced) was handicapped not because of absence of 21st century toys and gadgets in his 13th century but he didn’t know potato (introduced in India in late 16th / early 17th century), chilli (introduced in India in late 15th century) and dinosaurs (discovered in 19th century).

Imagine how more powerful metaphors and imagery Dnyaneshwar would have created if he knew potato, chilli and T-rex!

AFP story says: “Few vegetables can claim to have shaped nations, sent the economy of a country tumbling, or played a starring role in diplomatic spats. But the humble potato can….

The impact of the humble tuber stretches back centuries. The population of Ireland was cut in half in the mid 1800s after the potato crop failed and a four-year famine ensued. The then agriculture-based Irish economy crumbled and the population plummeted from eight million to four million, through deaths from hunger and emigration.
It only surpassed the four million mark in the 1990s, when Ireland entered an economic boom.The massive wave of emigration from Ireland, sparked by the potato famine, shaped politics and history not only locally but also in the United States, the destination for the vast majority of those who left…”

In 1997, Tony Blair, British Prime Minister, apologized to Ireland for the famine which caused 1 million deaths. Many Irish people believe that Britain, which controlled the land, was more than negligent -- that it in fact worsened the problem by allowing the profitable export of grain and cattle from Ireland even as the poor starved.

(Btw- I wonder if Britain ever apologized to India for the Bengal famine of 1943 that occurred in British administered Bengal. It is estimated that 1.5-3 million people died from starvation and malnutrition during the period.)

And finally, what does potato on the plate have to do with the one on couch?

“British potato farmers have marched on the houses of parliament in London to demand that the term "couch potato" be removed from the dictionary. They argued the expression - which is derived from the slang word for a television, "tube", which gave rise to "tubers" for those who spent hours hunkered down on the sofa gazing at it - gave the impression that potatoes are bad for the health and, therefore, bad for their business.”


‘You want us to go up the hill to fetch a pail of water? Not now we’re watching TV.’

The Spectator September 8, 2007

Harold Robbins, Henry Miller-All They Talk is Sex, Sex, Sex

Andrew Wilson has written a book on Harold Robbins “The Man Who Invented Sex” reviewed by TOM CARSON for NYT October 21, 2007.

“…If you’ve ever wondered just when quality literature and commercial fiction parted ways for good with a shudder, call him Harold Rubicon… The real pity is that, stamina aside, Robbins was talentless, and he made his preferred subject matter radioactive for more gifted novelists for a number of years…”

I have read just one book of Robbins-“ A Stone for Danny Fisher” but I have read a lot more of Henry Miller, whose writing became a cult.

Khushwant Singh pretends that he is obsessed with sex and may like the title-"Man Who Invented Sex"-for his future obit, in his favourite Outlook magazine. But it’s just a put-on. His writing is always sensuous but never pornographic.

In the end, for me Miller and Robbins will be remembered only for titillation.

Graham Greene: “…All the same pornography has no place in a serious book…It’s not the posture of people in bed which reveals their characters. You don’t advance the story by giving details of their favourite positions. You merely attract the reader’s attention towards very trivial points.

People who read Henry Miller, for example, expect to come upon this or that pornographic scene. It is not the characters that interest them but their own arousal. So they read on even more quickly, hoping to come across the next pornographic passage…I’ve nothing against pornographic books as such, but don’t let us call them literature.” (“The Other Man- Conversations with Graham Greene” by Marie-Francoise Allain, 1981)


Artist: Alan Dunn The New Yorker 12 June 1948

After Getting Shot Through Eye, Buddha Still Smiles

MICHAEL KIMMELMAN (NYT October 13, 2007) commenting on attempts to destroy famous art says:

“…Thanks to its historic authority, the aura of Picasso’s “Guernica” has become like a bubble or halo that psychologically separates it from the gazing mobs, never mind that there’s no longer a glass wall. Standing before it, you can almost imagine that it has, historically speaking, passed beyond harm — that to attack it now would only make the picture a martyr, that it’s indestructible…”

Destruction of art always brings to my mind felling of the Bamyan Buddhas.

I have never been to Afghanistan but have often imagined what the sight must have been in Bamyan valley on a glorious winter morning few centuries ago. Perhaps a lot like Gomateshwara of Shravanabelgola, Karnataka who seems to be staring at us all the time, as you drive towards or away from him or even much later. He is here, there and every where.

Times of India wrote a great editorial on March 5, 2001 on the Taliban act.

“The Buddha would have been amused at the headlines describing the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statue by the Taliban. The Buddha cannot be blasted nor can he be bombarded. To mistake the likeness of the Buddha made by human hands and not to take part in a communion with the essence of the Buddha is to miss the message of impermanence, non-spirit and suffering of the Mighty Intellect.

The artist who visualised the Bamiyan Buddha would have first invoked, as per tradition, the moods of friendliness, compassion, sympathy and impartiality. He would not be driven by considerations of self-expression nor ideas of connoisseurship and aestheticism. The state of mind and the importance of the idea itself was all important.

All these virtues are sadly amiss in the hearts and minds of those who are breaking ancient monuments in Afghanistan as well as those who seem to be protesting about such vandalism.

In the Divyavadana, Upagupta asks Mara, who has the power of assuming shapes at will, to take the likeness of the Buddha. Upagupta bows in reverence to this figure, which shocks Mara. Upagupta says that he is not worshipping Mara but the person represented by Mara:"Just as people venerating earthen images of the undying angels do not revere the clay as such, but the immortals represented therein."

The least that can be said about the events in Afghanistan is that these are the triumph of the slave mentality, the main characteristic of which is the spirit of revenge. The ideal typical slave is incapable of forgetting, unable to love, admire or respect. Such individuals constantly impute wrong to others and perpetually blame the whole world for real and imagined wrongs. They cannot give or create.

In other words, there are Taliban-like organisations, individuals and symptoms within India which are as intolerant and brutal as their counterparts in Afghanistan. The sangh parivar for long has represented and actively promoted this negative strand in Indian society. Acharya Giriraj Kishore's reaction to the happenings in Afghanistan is indicative of the cult of hatred and mindless recriminations that the sangh parivar has promoted. Where were these self-righteous guardians of Indian heritage when the Babri Masjid was destroyed? If the statues in Bamiyan are `our' heritage, then so is the Babri Masjid. Instead, the Taliban and the sangh parivar have sought to divide the world into `us' and `them', between `friend' and `foe'. What is common to both is a very literal interpretation of Islam and Hinduism, without remotely understanding the essence of either faith.

Also, the sad state of our museums and monuments suggests that our concern for heritage is extremely superficial. What the Taliban has done in a couple of days is being systematically done slowly and steadily for the past fifty years…”


A fresco of Buddha defaced by a bullet at a temple in central Tibet

Some Times It’s Good to Hush Up During Fall

Fall season started in US on September 23.

Falls there are very beautiful. I particularly found the one of Washington DC, on the banks of Potomac, very haunting.

Celebrated spy Kim Philby says in his autobiography “My Silent War” (1968): “…The sumac was still in flower and gave me a foretaste of the famous fall, one of the few glories of America which Americans have never exaggerated because exaggeration is impossible”

In India Shishir Ritu will start on December 22 this year.

In introduction to B S Mardhekar’s first poetry book “शिशिरागम” ("Shishir's Arrival", first published by the poet at his own cost! Now part of collection -Mardhekar's Poems), S B Ranade says:

“झाङाने टाकले, हिमतुषारांनी गोंजारले, गारांनी झोङपले अणि उत्तरवार्यानें गिरक्या खात उन्हातान्हांत सोडले. आता पुन्हा तोच उत्तरवारा त्या पानांचे शुष्क सांगाडे एकत्र करीत करीत तेथे आला अणि म्हणाला- “

Mardhekar(बा. सी. मर्ढेकर) himself says in opening poem:

सूरकशाचे वातावरणी?
सळसळ पानांची? वा झरणी
खळखळ, ओहोटीचे पाणी?
किलबिल शिशिरी केविलवाणी?

कुणास ठाउक! डोळ्या पाणी
व्यर्थ आणतां; नच गार्हाणी
अर्थ; हासुनी वाचा सजणी.
भास! -- जरी हो खुपल्यावाणी.

and little later

शिशिरर्तुच्या पुनरागमे,
एकेक पान गळावया
कां लागतां मज येतसे
न कळे उगाच रडावया.



(click on the picture above to get its larger view)