Honey, I shrunk the Jurassic Park

Astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees warns: "What happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter."

Jurassic Park is a tale of an experiment which has gone horribly wrong.

What if we shrunk the giant dinos like Stegosaurus and Trex? Can we co-exist?

On a practical note, are roaches and mosquitoes basically dinos shrunk?

Artist : Al Ross Publication: The New Yorker 21 Mar 1994

Smell the flowers along the way

Walter Hagen:

"You're only here for a short visit. Don't hurry, don't worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way."


Artist : Bruce Eric Kaplan Publication: The New Yorker 20 Apr 1994

Being symbiotic with people

In Indian epic Mahabharata, dog is part of a very moving story.

After fighting bloodiest battle of the time, Pandavas, the victors, began their final journey towards heaven atop Himalayas, a dog accompanied them.

All except the eldest brother- Yudhishthira- died on their way. Only Yudhishthira and the dog reached the door of the heaven. Indra came on his chariot to get pious and truthful Yudhishthira to heaven. Yudhishthira paid his respect to Lord Indra and asked his companion dog to get into the chariot. Indra was shocked, “A dog to heaven?” When Yudhishthira refused to go to heaven without the dog, the God of Death, Dharmaraj Yama emerged out of the dog and blessed Yudhishthira. Yama was testing the steadfastness of Yudhishthira.

If there was any other animal instead of dog, it may not have understood when Yudhishthira motioned it to get into the chariot!

The Economist in Feb 2004 had a story "Sensitive souls" on dogs. Why did dog become man's best friend?

It says: "NO SPECIES has developed a closer relationship with humanity than the dog. But that relationship's basis—what it is about dogs that allows them to live at ease with people—is still little understood. After all, dogs are descended from wolves, which are big, scary carnivores that would certainly have competed with early man for prey, and might not have been averse to the occasional human as a light snack……

sensitivity to human social cues is a recent genetic adaptation that has evolved specifically to allow dogs to enter a new ecological niche—that of being symbiotic with people."

Therefore no amount of teaching or coercion will help a cat to wag its tail!


Artist : Tom Cheney Publication: The New Yorker Nov 11 1985

Free Tagore and Sane-guruji

Indian copyright laws were changed to enable Santiniketan to hold on to the rights of the literary works of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore longer- from 50 to 60 years after his death. Indian copyright law now deems that literary works of authors would come to thepublic domain 60 years after their death.

This change was outrageous and Tagore himself would have cried foul.

"Jawaharlal Nehru's literary works, turned over toprivate publishers last year (1994), have emerged bestsellers. And the books,re-born with a more stylish and contemporary look, are bringing rich returnsfor their two main royalty owners - his great grandchildren Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi. The copyrights of Nehru's writings, published for decades by OxfordUniversity Press and the National Book Trust and funded by Jawaharlal NehruMemorial Fund and Children's Book Trust, were handed over last year to Penguin India Ltd. So the Gandhi siblings will continue to get 10-15 percent royalty on the sales of these books till 2024. "

The Economist (Apr 15th 2004 ) : "Copyright was originally designed to restrict publishers from exerting too much control over information; today it constrains individuals from creating new works".

Lessig says: ".....we come from a tradition of “free culture”—not “free” as in “free beer” (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the freesoftware movement2), but “free” as in “free speech,” “free markets,” “free trade,” “free enterprise,” “free will,” and “free elections.” A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a “permission culture”—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past."

In his famous book "Free Culture" he says: ".......the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture
today. It is against that extremism that this book is written."

Therefore, let Bible be Bible first and then S&S publication!

Artist : Alan Dunn Publication: The New Yorker 31 Oct1936

All my genius is in my nostrils

Artist : George Price Publication: The New Yorker 7 Nov 1936

Friedrich Nietzsche: "All my genius is in my nostrils."

Mine too! Not for its Aryan straightness -far from it, it is quite Dravidian- but for its core function-SMELLING. For me, olfactory clues are more reliable than visual ones. When I walk into a gathering or a crowd, I am concerned about the smell. If it smells well, I settle down.

Lara Feigel has written a brilliant essay “Turning up our noses” for Pospect Magazine December 2006.

She says: “Humankind, even in its most primitive form, had a brain very similar to ours now, yet we have a much weaker sense of smell than our cave-dwelling ancestors. Indeed, congenital anosmia is on the increase, so the whole human race may be heading for an anosmic future. Characteristically, Freud suggests that ancient psychosexual anxieties are behind this decline in our nasal capabilities. For him, it all began when man raised himself from the ground to walk on two feet, flashing his genitals to all and sundry. The shame of this sudden exposure, the theory goes, triggered a species-wide repression of the sense of smell. Humans found genitals less embarrassing when they were seen but not smelt. This meant that men were no longer able to smell menstruation or ovulation. Smell became less important in creating sexual excitement, and humans began to be turned on more by the look of each other's bodies than the odour. As evidence for this view of smell as a forbidden, repressed sensation, Freud cites the fact that his hysterical patients often had extremely sensitive noses…

The 17th-century poet Robert Herrick found Julia's sweat as much of a turn-on as Napoleon did Josephine's 200 years later. (He famously sent word from the thick of battle that she should abstain from washing now that his return was nigh.) ”


I don’t want to be part of such an anosmic future when I have to say : “I can’t smell a thing”. I would rather be Freud’s hysterical patient!

Anti incumbency

We Indians are very proud of our democracy. Even author Pankaj Mishra who otherwise is so scathing about the country finds elections a somewhat redeeming feature.

"For decades now, India's underprivileged have used elections to register their protests against joblessness, inequality and corruption. In the 2004 general elections, they voted out a central government that claimed that India was "shining," bewildering not only most foreign journalists but also those in India who had predicted an easy victory for the ruling coalition."

For first few decades of our republic's existence, Congress party ran away with all the electoral success.

Not any more. Now the party in government, except places like West Bengal, gets trounced because our voter behaves like...



Artist : Helen E Hokinson Publication: The New Yorker 31 Oct 1936

Oh, hell

In Marathi literature, poet the late B S Mardhekar बा. सी. मर्ढेकर is next to only the giants - saint-poets - Dnyaneshwar, Eknath, Tukaram and Ramdas. He was deeply entrenched in native traditions and also influenced by Western poetry of T S Eliot, W H Auden among few others.

Literary critic Shri M V Dhond म वा धोंड has written perceptively on Mardhekar’s poetry. Dhond has discovered meanings there, which may pleasantly surprise even Mardhekar!

But the poem above is straightforward and meant as a caption for Peter Arno's picture from The New Yorker of 25 July 1936.

The Guide

I thought R K Narayan's book "The Guide" is sublime. Raju the guide is a very ordinary person but his story shows us how extra-ordinary one's life can become. Indeed it is one. One has to just discover it.

Raju towards the end is forced to fast to bring rains. Food is on his mind all the time. But then..."If by avoiding food I should help the trees bloom, and the grass grow, why not do it thoroughly? For the first time in his life he was making an earnest effort, for the first time he was learning the thrill of full application, outside money and love; for the first time he was doing something in which he was not personally interested. He felt suddenly so enthusiastic that it gave him a new strength to go through the ordeal....."

And then it rains.................Next, can Raju prevent wars? Sure, if we learn to breath properly!

Artist: Helen E Hokinson Publication : The New Yorker 25 Jul 1936

Thomas Malthus, eat my shorts

Artist : Peter Arno Publication: The New Yorker 17 Oct 1936

World 6,569,534,871 @ 13:41 GMT (EST+5) on Jan 13, 2007 and counting!

courtesy: http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html

What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?

Artist : Richard Decker Publication : The New Yorker 26 Dec 1936

On December 17, 2006 for NYT, Peter Singer has written thought provoking "What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?"

He says: “The Nobel Prize-winning economist and social scientist Herbert Simon estimated that “social capital” is responsible for at least 90 percent of what people earn in wealthy societies like those of the United States or northwestern Europe. By social capital Simon meant not only natural resources but, more important, the technology and organizational skills in the community, and the presence of good government. These are the foundation on which the rich can begin their work. “On moral grounds,” Simon added, “we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent.” Simon was not, of course, advocating so steep a rate of tax, for he was well aware of disincentive effects. But his estimate does undermine the argument that the rich are entitled to keep their wealth because it is all a result of their hard work. If Simon is right, that is true of at most 10 percent of it.”

Singer's Answer:

In India and other similar countries, people like me who enjoyed huge public subsidies in higher education should remember this all the time.