Not Just Graffiti but Reality?

Unless this is a prank, this picture would make most people numb.

Outlook March 24, 2008 “Saving Vidarbha”



Banner written in Marathi reads “With houses, cattle and entire fields, this village is for sale” at Dorli village in Wardha, Maharashtra

How Democracies Can Elect Hitler and Defeat Mahatma Phule महात्मा फुले

Indians are proud of their democracy. They feel it facilitates social mobility in a caste ridden society and is the least flawed of all forms of governance.

I agree with this assessment.

Ian Kershaw wrote on February 3, 2008:

“How democracy produced a monster: Could something like it happen again? That is invariably the first question that comes to mind when recalling that Hitler was given power in Germany 75 years ago last week.

With the world now facing such great instability, the question seems more obvious than ever.

Hitler came to power in a democracy with a highly liberal constitution, and in part by using democratic freedoms to undermine and then destroy democracy itself…

…These distant events still have echoes today. In Europe, in the wake of increased immigration, most countries have experienced some revival of neo-fascist movements. Not so long ago, Serbian nationalism, inflamed by President Slobodan Milosevic, set off war and ethnic cleansing within the Continent…”

Marathi daily Pudhari पुढारी reported on March 19, 2008:

“125 years ago on March 19, 1883, two of the greatest Indians ever, Mahatma Jyotiba Phule महात्मा ज्योतिबा फुले (1827-1890) and Gopal Hari Deshmukh aka Lokhitwadi गोपाळ हरी देशमुख लोकहितवादी (1823-1892)- were trounced by conservatives in local elections.

In Vetal Peth वेताळ पेठ, Phule got zero votes and in Bhavai Peth भवानी पेठ he got just two votes, including his own vote. Keeping him company, in Shukravar Peth शुक्रवार पेठ, Lokhitwadi got zero votes.”

Pudhari claimed that today Phule would surely get elected because his agenda of social reforms is now universally accepted etc. (Btw- No such claim was made on behalf of Lokhitwadi.)

In deeply divided on caste lines of today's Maharashtra, I am not sure about Phule's electoral prospects but Lokhitwadi would surely be defeated in year 2008!


Artist: Frank Modell The New Yorker 12 January 1957

Tragedy and Comedy are NOT two Different Planets but Windows

Inspired by Anton Chekhov, Israeli author Amos Oz told Newsweek March 3, 2008:

"...I no longer believe that tragedy and comedy are two different planets. They are just two different windows from which we can view the same landscape of our lives..."

Never to know one's mother must be the only tragedy greater than never to know one's father.

G A Kulkarni जी ए कुलकर्णी wrote in 1977:
"
तीर्थरूप आबांस,
डोळे उघडून उठून बसत मी तुम्हाला नीट
पाहण्यापूर्वीच तुमची पावले उंबऱ्याबाहेर
पडली होती."

(Respected Father,
Before I opened eyes while sitting up to have a good look at you, your feet had crossed the threshold)

This moved me but I what liked more was…

Mel Brooks:

“I can’t tell you what sadness, what pain it is to me never to have known my father…If only I could look at him, touch his face, see if he had eyebrows!”


Artist: Dana Fradon The New Yorker 1 May 1965

Earth’s Love Song of Kusumagraj कुसुमाग्रज Is Prophetic

On March 11, 2008, DENNIS OVERBYE wrote for NYT “Kissing the Earth Goodbye in About 7.59 Billion Years.”

“If nature is left to its own devices, about 7.59 billion years from now Earth will be dragged from its orbit by an engorged red Sun and spiral to a rapid vaporous death…

… Earth’s basic problem is that the Sun will gradually get larger and more luminous as it goes through life, according to widely held theories of stellar evolution. In its first 4.5 billion years, according to the models, the Sun has already grown about 40 percent brighter.

Over the coming eons, life on Earth will become muggier and more uncomfortable and finally impossible...

… About a billion years from now, the Sun will be 10 percent brighter. Oceans on Earth will boil away. The Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel in its core about 5.5 billion years from now and start burning hydrogen in the surrounding layers. As a result, the core will shrink and the outer layers will rapidly expand as the Sun transforms itself into a red giant…

… As a result, the red giant version of the Sun — at its maximum — will be 256 times as big across as the star is today and 2,730 times as luminous…”

This article brought to my mind a Marathi poem.

V V Shirwadkar वि वा शिरवाडकर aka Kusumagraj कुसुमाग्रज wrote पृथ्वीचे प्रेमगीत “Earth’s Love Song” in the first half of 20th century ( विशाखा Vishakha 1942).

I had this poem to study in school (9th standard?). I liked it on the first reading.

I remember a little embarrassment of our Marathi teacher (Mr. Ligade?) reading out to the whole class carnal desires of mother earth!

One of its stanza reads as follows:

गमे की तुझ्या रुद्र रूपात जावे
मिळोनी गळा घालुनीया गळा
तुझ्या लाल ओठांतली आग प्यावी.
मिठीने तुझ्या तीव्र व्हाव्या कळा.

(“Feel like in your fierce beauty
I should merge by necking
Drink fire of your red lips.
Should feel acute pain by your embrace. “)

This is no more poet's fantasy. We think this all will happen!

The robots or cockroaches or whoever that is running the Earth in a billion years will know.


Artist: Charles Addams The New Yorker 25 July 1983

All You Hear is Hema Malini. It’s as though Manorama Never Lived.

Hindi film actor Manorama died: reported The Times of India February 17, 2008.

In sad circumstances. Alone. Apparently she had no house to stay before it was arranged. No one knows her only daughter’s whereabouts.

This is almost a pattern when it comes to Hindi film personalities, particularly character actors, of yesteryears.

She gave us so much of pleasure.

Other day I watched tearjerker Dus Lakh (1966) for a while. It has a scene when Manorama walks over to the table where Pran and Om Prakash are sitting. Moving her arched thumb towards Om Prakash, she asks Pran: “Who is this joker?”

I couldn’t stop laughing for a while.

1972 was a golden year for her.

Block buster, “Seeta Aur Geeta” is the most popular movie in our household largely because of Manorama. And “Bombay To Goa” where Manorama stood her ground admirably is arguably the greatest gathering of comic actors in Hindi film history.

Sorry Manorama, we were not grateful enough and life –not you- is a bitch anyway. Make lots of faces at us.



Artist: Alain The New Yorker 20 January 1934

Pune Bikers, Get Life Expectancy Dial Installed!

The Times of India front page headline on March 7, 2008:

“Death lurks on city roads. 418 killed in 2007. Fatalities high on highway stretches.”

Pune for sure is still not as bad as Kolkata of yesteryears or Bangaluru (Bangalore) of today. But it may get there.

These days I get most scared by 'wrong-side' traffic. Those who are driving on wrong side, drive at their usual speed and honk vigorously! When I give them semi-amused look, they look quizzed.

Meanwhile, here is a suggestion captured well in following picture...(I wonder how we calibrate those dials for Pune.)


Artist: Robert Thompson, The Spectator

Dreams of India Must Remain Open-Defecation-Free and Hunger-Free

Marathi daily Sakal सकाळ reported on March 8, 2008:
“…60% Indians earn less than Rs. 20 or less per day and more than 660 million Indians live below poverty line…In Maharashtra 26% urban population and 70.4% rural population live below poverty line…”

Times of India reported on March 9, 2008:

“…Satara is on its way to becoming one of the first “open defecation free” (ODF) districts in the country…”

(see a related post here: Shitting In Public, Not a Cell Phone- Image of India .)

Times of India reported on March 9, 2008:

“…Indians are stingy…people who spend several thousand rupees on eating out but do not help impoverished…most of the time people donate money only if it is connected to aid religious purposes…”

(currently the most visible effort to collect donations at Pune is for a temple.)

Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar admitted in Times of India March 9, 2008
“…India has enjoyed 8-9% GDP growth for four years but the boom has bypassed many rural areas…”

NYT Editorial on March 3, 2008:
“The world’s food situation is bleak, and shortsighted policies in the United States and other wealthy countries — which are diverting crops to environmentally dubious biofuels — bear much of the blame… Prices have gone so high that the World Food Program, which aims to feed 73 million people this year, said it might have to reduce rations or the number of people it will help… “

And finally Moisés Naím- editor in chief of Foreign Policy- wondered:

"Can the World Afford a Middle Class? Yes, but it will be awfully expensive" Foreign Policy, 28 February 2008.

Perhaps the thinking is if Indians and Chinese don't breed any further, no need to feed extra mouths and arranging closed places to defecate!

Problem of the Night Before i-pill

Watching TV in India with kids is getting trickier by the day.

You may avoid programming having steamy sex scenes of human beings (can’t avoid those of animals though thanks to NG and Animal Planet) but what about ad spots during even live coverage of cricket matches?

For a while now, we have been watching an advertisement of i-pill, a single-pill emergency contraceptive.

I think availability of such a pill as an over the counter drug would have made R D Karve र धों कर्वे very happy.

Now even Karve would have no solution for a problem below!


Artist: Marisa Acocella Marchetto The New Yorker 26 July 1999

Not with a Whimper but a Bang

T S Eliot wrote “The Hollow Men” in 1925.

The poem ends with following much quoted and copied words:

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

This blog has already visited starless sky on October 2, 2007. Read it here
I Should Learn to Look at an Empty Sky unless……..

(Please note I took some liberties with that post because “What will the scientists of the future see as they peer into the skies 100 billion years from now? Without telescopes, they will see pretty much what we see today: the stars of our galaxy. The largest and brightest stars will have burned up their nuclear fuel, but plenty of smaller stars will still light up the night sky. The big difference will occur when these future scientists build telescopes capable of detecting galaxies outside our own. They won’t see any!”)

Scientific American India March 2008 has cover story: “The End of Cosmology”.

Authors Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer claim:
“…Thus, observers of the future are likely to predict that the universe ultimately ends with a localized big crunch, rather than the eternal expansion that the cosmological constant produces. Instead of a whimper, their limited universe will end with a bang…”

Ironically, according to Wikipedia, when asked if he would write these lines again, Eliot said ‘no’:

“One reason is that while the association of the H-bomb is irrelevant to it, it would today come to everyone's mind. Another is that he is not sure the world will end with either…”



100 billion years in the future |
Successor to the Milky Way is a ball-like supergalaxy. Earth floats forlornly through its distant outskirts. Other galaxies, moving away from us faster than light, have disappeared from view.

Picture courtesy: Scientific American

IPL is Not Rape of Cricket but a Promise of Million Mutinies

Vinod Mehta has called IPL and/or its auction of cricketers “the rape of cricket”. (Outlook March 10, 2008).

“…The BCCI is a destructive body determined to kill cricket. If anyone is planning a coup d’etat against it, count me in. The present lot must be removed before they inflict further damage. Meanwhile, all cricket lovers must hope the IPL is a complete and total flop. And the people who conjured up this dreadful scheme are badly burned.”

National leaders of all hue from Gurudas Dasgupta to Bal Thackeray via Sharad Yadav have already lambasted IPL, some of them calling for its ban.

I disagree with all of them as far as IPL is concerned.

While growing up, I played and watched gulli sports from kabaddi to cricket and I strongly feel that people should get an opportunity to play/participate in a sport locally. And those who do should make reasonable living out of the same.

Fan like me should get an opportunity to see a sporting action on a local ground and not just on TV. I have always enjoyed watching a gulli game far more than the one on TV.

IPL and ICL are those opportunities.

Many people have called auction of the players vulgar.

If it’s so, most other things should also be called vulgar: Highly educated people changing three jobs in two days for more money, film stars charging obscene money to inaugurate shops, TV serials propagating pseudosciences, citizens changing nationality like soiled clothes, goons lynching poor labourers because they don’t speak a particular language, society at large that holds the poor criminally responsible for their position, news media that will catastrophize anything they can, people that worry about their own children but don’t feel hurt or pained when they see others’ children exploited or treated badly…

I feel IPL is likely to give huge opportunity to young people from weaker sections of Indian society to make it big. It is a promising tool to promote social mobility in India. Today BCCI may be controlling this localization of Indian cricket but tomorrow may throw a lot of surprises at it.

If a boy enjoys his cricket, is prepared to work hard for it, cannot afford expensive higher education, with a bit of luck, he needn’t study his textbooks.

Therefore, following picture is no exaggeration.


Artist : R K Laxman Times of India February 25, 2008