It’s The Sacred Cow’s Pee Again. W H Auden and B S Mardhekar.

President George W. Bush:

“…In the final days of the San Francisco Conference, the delegates negotiating the U.N. Charter received a visit from President Harry Truman. He acknowledged the enormous challenges they faced, and said success was only possible because of what he called an “unshakable unity of determination.” Today the world is engaged in another period of great challenge. And by continuing to work together, that unshakable unity of determination will be ours. Together, we confront and defeat the evil of terrorism. Together, we can secure the Almighty’s gift of liberty and justice to millions who have not known it. And together, we can build a world that is freer, safer, and better for the generations who follow…”

(United Nations General Assembly, New York, September 22, 2008)

San Francisco Conference is formally known as United Nations Conference on International Organization (April 25–June 26, 1945). President Harry Truman visited the conference riding “The Sacred Cow”.

This blog had a take on that historic ride with the help of B S Mardhekar बा. सी. मर्ढेकर. Read it here: Our Globe- Not Guaranteed Against American Sacred Cows and their Pee.

After I wrote that post, I came across W H Auden’s 1938 sonnet about League of Nations that ends:

“Far off, no matter what good they intended,
The armies waited for a verbal error
With all the instruments for causing pain,
And on the issue of their charm depended
A land laid waste with all its young men slain,
The women weeping and the towns in terror.”

W H Auden was, as he described Freud, not a person but a climate of opinion. No doubt he was the greatest influence on B S Mardhekar बा. सी. मर्ढेकर.


Artist: Sam Cobean The New Yorker 22 September 1945

Have Signposts of the World Changed? Paul Theroux and Maurice Isserman Think So.

My favourite book “The Great Railway Bazaar” has been rewritten.

“…Thirty-three years and 40-odd books later, Theroux — ‘twice as old as the person who had ridden those trains’ — set off again, travelling in his own footsteps to see how much he and the world had changed…

Theroux’s idea, as before, is to cross eastern Europe, India and Asia, but he faces deviations from the original route. When he last passed through Iran, portraits of the Shah 15 times life-size dominated station walls; now he is refused a visa. Afghanistan is a no-go area. Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers create difficulties. Plane-hops and buses are unavoidable…

The world has boiled and resettled since that first journey. The Soviet Union has collapsed, China risen. India is IT- affluent and optimistic, but the population explosion defeats Theroux: just too many people. He flees. ”

(Spectator, Lee Langley, 10th September 2008)

Paul Theroux’s verdict: ‘Only the old can really see how badly the world is aging and all that we’ve lost.’

Maurice Isserman (NYT, August 10, 2008) informs how much we have lost. Reading it was devastating.

“WILCO VAN ROOIJEN, a Dutch mountain climber, managed to survive the debacle this week that took the lives of 11 others in Pakistan on K2, the world’s second-highest peak. Describing the chaotic events that ensued when a pinnacle of ice collapsed and swept away fixed ropes that climbers from several expeditions high on the mountain had counted on to aid their descent from the summit, Mr. van Rooijen lamented: “Everybody was fighting for himself, and I still do not understand why everybody were leaving each other.”

Himalayan mountaineering is an inherently dangerous pastime, and climbers are always at risk from the unexpected. But mountaineering has become more dangerous in recent decades as the traditional expeditionary culture of the early- and mid-20th century, which had emphasized mutual responsibility and common endeavor, gave way to an ethos stressing individualism and self-preservation.
The contrast between the two eras is vividly illustrated by the experience of an earlier expedition that ran into peril on K2…

“We entered the mountains as strangers, but we left as brothers.” Today in contrast, as was evident last week on K2, climbers enter the mountains as strangers and tend to leave the same way.”


Artist: Alan Dunn The New Yorker 15 June 1957

Prince Charles Talking About Dying Indian Farmers Once Again Turns His Back on Science.

PTI reported on October 7, 2008:

“Appalled by the increasing rate of suicides by debt trapped Indian farmers, Prince Charles of Britain has said that the tragedy is due to the use of "Genetically Modified (GM) farming techniques." Referring to the "failure of GM crop varieties in India" which have contributed to the plight of the farmers, the British Prince pushed for readopting the traditional farming methods…”

This is very simplistic and plain unscientific. Reasons for farmer suicides are very complex.

I think the prince has forgot about the open letter he received from Richard Dawkins.

“…But your hostility to science will not serve those aims; and your embracing of an ill-assorted jumble of mutually contradictory alternatives will lose you the respect that I think you deserve. I forget who it was who remarked: "Of course we must be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out."…

Next, Sir, I think you may have an exaggerated idea of the natural ness of "traditional" or "organic" agriculture. Agriculture has always been unnatural. Our species began to depart from our natural hunter-gatherer lifestyle as recently as 10,000 years ago - too short to measure on the evolutionary timescale.

Wheat, be it ever so wholemeal and stoneground, is not a natural food for Homo sapiens. Nor is milk, except for children. Almost every morsel of our food is genetically modified - admittedly by artificial selection not artificial mutation, but the end result is the same. A wheat grain is a genetically modified grass seed, just as a pekinese is a genetically modified wolf. Playing God? We've been playing God for centuries!…

Incidentally, one worrying aspect of the hysterical opposition to the possible risks from GM crops is that it diverts attention from definite dangers which are already well understood but largely ignored. The evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria is something that a Darwinian might have foreseen from the day antibiotics were discovered. Unfortunately the warning voices have been rather quiet, and now they are drowned by the baying cacophony: "GM GM GM GM GM GM!"

Moreover if, as I expect, the dire prophecies of GM doom fail to materialise, the feeling of let-down may spill over into complacency about real risks. Has it occurred to you that our present GM brouhaha may be a terrible case of crying wolf? …”



Artist: David Borchart The New Yorker October 13 2008 Cartoon Caption Contest 165

Proposed Caption:

‘Prince, Are you leaving because you think they are bleating "GM GM GM GM GM GM!"? Actually they should be leaving because you are crying wolf!’

Ratan Tata’s Dinner Date with Mamta Banerjee

Ratan Tata:

“Two years ago, I said if somebody puts a gun to my head, you would either have to remove the gun or pull the trigger. I would not move my head. I think Ms Banerjee pulled the trigger.” (October 3, 2008)



Artist: P C Vey, The New Yorker October 06, 2008 Cartoon Caption Contest #164

Proposed Caption:

“Ms. Banerjee, We have frisked you. You are 'clean'. We have checked the toilets. There are no firearms taped to any flush tank. I wonder how you are going to get the gun to shoot Mr. Tata."

In US, Main Street Vs. Wall Street. In India, Street Vs. No Street

It’s interesting to watch US lawmakers fighting a street game called: “Main Street Vs. Wall Street”.

In India, we too play a street game. It’s called: “Street Vs. No Street.”

I am lucky and in minority. I have a street. Sort of. Most months of a year.

Majority of Indians are not that lucky. Ladies, like in the picture below, may think they are all bums.


Artist: I.Klein The New Yorker 14 December 1929

What is Deadliest? Traffic,Temple Queues and Terrorism. In that Order.

We are not driven around in a chauffeur driven car. We don't live in a gated community. Our family has to worry about bombs.

But I am more worried about Pune traffic.

Recently my wife and I met with an accident. Luckily for us we were not knocked down by a truck.

It had to happen. Stochastic Processes.

I go for a morning walk. My wife's cousin has warned me that the benefits that accrue to me by that walk are offset by the risk I take by walking on a busy Pune road for almost an hour.

Another "deadly place" in today's India is a queue of devotees.
Times of India said on October 1, 2008:

"NEW DELHI: Stampedes are bigger killers in India than bomb blasts that so dramatically capture our mindspace. In 2008 alone so far, over 360 people lost their life in major stampedes compared to 156 killed by bomb blasts.

This year is not an aberration. Data collated for the last nearly nine years shows that while 875 people have lost their lives in stampedes that were big enough to make the national press, 766 have been killed by terror bombs.

The actual number killed in stampedes may be even higher. What we have collated is based on press reports, since no centralized data base exists for such incidents, unlike with terror attacks. It is also clear that single bomb blasts rarely kill people in the kind of large numbers that are associated with stampedes..."

Luckily my family does not visit popular temples.

I wonder why people get so upset about terrorist bombs but not about deadlier traffic and temple queues. Is it because they think something can be done about terrorism but nothing about traffic and temple queues?


Artist: Sudhir Tailang Asian Age October 1, 2008

I’m all for Putting Newsweek in its Place

On July 16, 2001, Fareed Zakaria wrote in Newsweek:

“Last week I celebrated my first Fourth of July as an American…

A South African judge recently addressed a group of students at a major American university. She began by noting that the newspapers in the United States seemed full of trivia. Then she explained her deep and fervent hope that one day the newspapers in her country would also have nothing serious to report. For me, and I would guess most of the people in that Brooklyn auditorium, the big news about America is that there is no big news.”

I wrote to him saying there was plenty of “big news” in US even then.

I never received a reply but starting September 11 of that year then there has been no shortage of “big news” in US.

Later Mr. Zakaria went to justify Iraq war with the enthusiasm of a new convert. I stopped reading him after that but continued my subscription to Newsweek.

After reading Newsweek issue dated September 29, 2008, I think time has come to say goodbye to the magazine.

Instead of focusing on all aspects of one of the biggest financial scams in human history that is causing much pain around the world, they have ended up glorifying one of its culprits- Henry Paulson.

BEN STEIN:

“IMAGINE, if you will, that a man who had much to do with creating the present credit crisis now says he is the man to fix this giant problem, and that his work is so important that he will need a trillion dollars or so of your money. Then add that this man thinks he is so indispensable that he wants Congress to forbid any judicial or administrative questioning of anything he does with your dollars.

You might think of a latter-day Lenin or Fidel Castro, but you would be far afield. Instead, you should be thinking of Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and the rapidly disintegrating United States of America, right here and now…

Why didn’t Mr. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, see it? He was once the head of Goldman Sachs, an immense player in the swaps world. Didn’t people at Treasury have a clue? If they didn’t, what was going on in their heads? If they did, why didn’t they do something about it a year ago, when saving the world would have been a lot cheaper?

If Mr. Paulson and Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, didn’t see this train coming, what else have they missed? What other freight train is barreling down the track at us?

(September 28, 2008 . “In Financial Food Chains, Little Guys Can’t Win” )


Artist: Leonard Dove The New Yorker 2 November 1929

How can Our Democracy Afford to Provide Third-rate Services to the Poor?

Arundhati Roy recently wrote

“…all Indians who are not nanga or bhookha are—and have been—complicit in complex and historical ways with the cruel cultural and economic systems that make Indian society so cruel, so vulgarly unequal…”

Financial Times, that beacon of modern America-led capitalism, agrees with "rabid Roy".

David Pilling (FT September 24, 2008) said:

“…the neglect of basic education and healthcare which, as well as being scandalous in its own right, deprives India of the fit and literate workforce any competitive industry requires. Mao Zedong, for all the reckless horror he unleashed, did bring schools and rudimentary healthcare to the peasants. “The train of China’s industrialisation runs on the secure foundation of Maoist rails,” says Prof Sen. If India is to become a car-owning democracy, it will have to solve some basic problems first. “

Now many Indians want to hold only their “government” responsible for this so that they can continue to party.

They should read Suhas Palshikar's brilliant Marathi essay in Samaj Prabodhan Patrika April-June 2008:

“…When patients die in government hospitals because of adulterated medicines, government and civil society look at them coldly because of the contempt for human life. When homeless poor die in summer and winter, children die only because of lack of access to clean water, they don’t become scandals for our civil society. Therefore, we assign the question of homeless, support-less, old, physically challenged to either a joint family or an invisible system called ‘government’…”

(“गरिबांना भुक्कड सुविधा पुरवणं आपल्या लोकशाहीला कसं परवडतं?”)


Peasant. 'Ah! I'd like to be cared vor half as well as thee be!'

Artist: John Tenniel,'The Pig and the Peasant' Punch 9 September 1863

What is the Breed of Your Tethered Dog? Financial-Watchdog?

"The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a longtime proponent of deregulation, acknowledged on Friday that failures in a voluntary supervision program for Wall Street’s largest investment banks had contributed to the global financial crisis, and he abruptly shut the program down..." (NYT, September 27, 2008)



Artist: Robert Mankoff The New Yorker Sept 29 2008 cartoon caption contest 162

proposed captions:

“He turned out to be a financial watchdog. True to his breed, he bolted when they came to rob me.”

or

“Your bitch wears coloured contact lenses. And my Dev Anand didn’t want to kiss her eyes.” (read more here)

Practical Problems with Hell and Heaven

Since my mother died in January 2006, I have been really hoping to meet her one-day. In flesh and blood. Although I saw her going up in smoke. (See previous hopes here and here)

However, I have always wondered about practical problems with hell and heaven.

Paul Johnson has put them across really well.

“…Death is inextricably linked to time, because if time continues after death, and the disembodied spirit lives in time, then insoluble problems arise. Heaven (or Hell for that matter) becomes a bedlam, in which husbands are confronted with wives married at different times, each with claims, and many with multiple husbands too, hovering moodily in the background. And the children! At what stage in their lives are they fixed, as it was, for all eternity? And what is eternity if it is time-governed? How could anyone conceivably bear it, however blissful? On the other hand, if when we die time loses its grip and we step into an existence where time and change, permanence and impermanence, past, present and future all cease to have any meaning, and we exist in an infinite instant without location or material dimension of any kind, leaving all to the imagination, then there is comfort in the prospect of leaving this world.”

(The Spectator, Wednesday, 27th August 2008)


The New Yorker