and still...

"In addition, adopting advertising techniques increasingly employed by private business, American politics became more packaged and American politicians more image conscious.
The ablest practioners of this public relations politics were Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Whatever their limitations as statesmen and political thinkers - neither had a vision of a just society or an appreciation of fundamental problems - both Harding and Coolidge were masterful politicians. Nor were they merely accidental presidents. Both men attained the presidency and commanded popular support by astutely using rhetoric to cultivate and project an image of sound, responsive leadership. Harding's speeches, as pompous and meaningless in content as they often were, were impressive policical performances. "

Still

"When autumn came sports excitement did not abate. College football teams took up the slack, as each Saturday they waged their wars on countless athletic fields. Between later September and Thanksgiving of 1927, some thirty million fans paid over $50 million to watch college football. To accommodate the crowds earger to see the performances of such collegiate celebrities as Red Grange of Illionois and Bronco Nagurski of Minnesota, American universities built stadiums, sometimes derided as “lunar craters”, that held between 70,000 and 100,000 spectators."

Some goats I like

I've been tagged by Silverine. For the past 4 years or thereabouts, I've been in the habit of taking notes from books I read in the hope of documenting the worthwhile because I usually forget everything. Such being the case it is naturally impossible to take on the task of listing a mere 5 quotations as per the rules of the tag. Today, I was going through some of the notes I've made over the years and picked out a handful of the choicest from what little I managed to go through. I am pleased with the final collection I have assembled here because it covers a fairly interesting range of subjects, and that is very satisfactory considering I'm only culling out from a tiniest collection of my notes. A note of caution: The content of the quotations aren't necessarily ideas I subscribe to. They are merely quotations that appeal to me.

• Friedrich Nietzsche’s beautiful description of Arthur Schopenhauer:
  He was absolutely alone, with not a single friend; and between one and none there lies an infinity.

• Arthur Schopenhauer:
  Most of our suffering lies in retrospect or anticipation; pain itself is brief. How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than death itself.

• Arthur Schopenhauer:
  Only a philosopher can be happy in marriage, and philosophers do not marry.

• Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels(Note: Read the book to know definition of ‘Yahoo’):
  A soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.

• Arthur Schopenhauer:
  We are unhappy married, and unmarried we are unhappy. We are unhappy when alone, and unhappy when in society: we are like hedge-hogs clustering for warmth, uncomfortable when too closely packed, and yet miserable when kept apart. It is all very funny.

• TAG ENDS HERE.
• 
  
• Sriram Sivaramakrishnan:
  Is quantum mechanics Ψ-Φ ?

• Anjali Philip:
  I learnt to cook at the tender age of 8 months, when I lifted a jar of salt and emptied it into a bowl of chicken curry.

• Socrates:
  Tragedy itself is proof of the fact that the Greeks were not pessimists .

• Bertrand Russell:
  We think of education as the transmission of a certain body of settled knowledge, when it should be rather the development of a scientific habit of mind.
• 
  
• George Santayana:
  Religion is human experience interpreted by human imagination.
  
• 
  
• William Somerset Maugham:
  The most important thing that money can buy is time.

The formating has been terrible because of my lack of familiarity with the blogger tools. Is there a way to directly insert a word formatted document in here?

I enjoyed going through my notes and must go through some more again some time. I tag:
Myself
Babe
Jk
Ramku
Kiran

I am not sure if even these 4 have RSS feeds to my blog. So if you are reading this and you have a blog ID, and you've left a comment, then you are tagged as well.

A joke warning

There was this North Indian in front of me in the line in Subway the other day. The lady across the counter asked, "So what kind of sub would you like sir?", to which he replied what sounded like, "I'd like a six inch tharki breast" :)

For those who are deficient in their Hindi knowledge(which is probably a majority of my few readers(or else i'd be under fire for this post)), 'tharki' in Hindi means a 'nymphomaniac' ;)

Inadvertent humour :)

Abortion, infanticide, female foeticide - A thought process and its implicaitons in theory and practice

This post by Silverine made me think about the issue of abortion, particularly in terms of the 'right to live' or not of the foetus. Firstly, let us think about a 'right'. Only humans have rights granted to them. Notice also that they have to be 'granted'. So who grants these rights? Society. Ok, so which society? The aborigines of australia? The whites? The blacks? Each society has their own set of rules and rights that they guarantee. Fortunately, that does not complicate the present issue, because i'm only talking about the 'right to live', which every society guarantees, at any rate locally, to its own kind, if not to others too. Since this 'right to live' is then a part of every society, I shall broadly address the 'right to live' of human beings in general. As only human beings have rights, that means rights necessarily also have to do with conscious awareness of that right, because if i could give the chicken a right to pee on all people wearing white shirts, but it wouldn't, except by random chance, because it wouldn't understand the right, because animals don't 'understand', and understanding is a conscious process which only human beings are capable of. Ok, so let me repeat that key statement: for a right to be exercised, it has not only to be 'granted' by society, but also the creature to whom it is granted has to be 'aware' of it. I use the word 'aware' not in the sense of notified but in the sense of having a conscious understanding of what it means to the individual concerned. Now that we have a 'right' clearly defined, I shall alternately take the two stances of assigning a right to live for the foetus, and not, and see what rational consequences it has.

1) Statement: The foetus has the right to live.
Logical implications: The foetus has no conscious awareness of this right, just like the chicken doesn't, or the chicken's egg doesn't. Hence, if the foetus has the right to live, so does the chicken, and so does its egg, because there's no difference between the three from the point of view of the right to live which we humans may generously confer on them. They are none of them any more capable of exercising it. As a consequence, if the foetus has the right to live, all creatures have the right to live, including the ants in your food. This leads essentially to a jainist view. Note however that involuntary killing and killing for self-preservation are excluded because both of those are fall-outs of man as an animal.

2) The foetus does not have the right to live.
Logical implications: Thankfully, this does not have to trouble our conscience about killing chickens and eggs for breakfast. If the foetus can be killed, so can these. But, why stop at the foetus? Does a foetus get the right to live just because it changed its spacio-temporal location, i.e., it traveled through a canal, i.e., it is an infant? Logically, no. If a foetus has no right to live, then no more of a right does an infant have. The only difference between the two is spacio-temporal. Of course, this spatio-temporal shift results in a sensory dose to the granters. Meaning, you and I can see, touch, smell, and hear the infant. But a sensory dose is hardly a rational basis for deciding the right to live or not! An infant is no more aware of the right conferred upon it than a foetus. But what about children? What about adults? Where do we draw the line? In theory, I have already shown where the line is to be drawn. When an individual is 'aware' of the right to live, he has that right, by definition, provided it has been granted to him. Note that I use the word 'aware', because it is meaningless to expect, say the child, to 'state' its right to live. Language and its complications are immaterial here. So in theory that makes it simple. If there is a person who after 40 years of his life isn't aware of his right to live, he doesn't have that right, by definition. After all, the world we live in works just this way in the case of simpler rights. If someone isn't aware that he has a certain right, he is often denied it.


In practice, the theoretical logical implications of 1 are impossible to keep, because in practice, humans kill, and all too often for reasons other than self-preservation. But the goal is one that can be striven towards, even if not attained. It is possible for human beings to strive towards living with only that amount of killing of creatures as is necessary for self-preservation.

The problem with implementing the theoretical implications of 2 is that it is hard to define at what stage a child is 'aware' of his right to live. So the practical line has to be drawn somewhere. Probabilistically, one can be fairly certain that upto the age of 5 no child is aware of the right to live. While the foetus is like a chicken's egg, the child is like a trained parrot, and perhaps a little extra in other aspects. But for our purposes, they are the same. So, that makes infanticide quite permissible, and some extent of childicide too. Whether in practice people would start doing this extensively just because it is legally permitted is doubtful. So that got me thinking about to what extent people would do it if it were permitted. Because human beings have a notion of 'cruelty', which seems to them amplified if it is their own kind, the practice won't be very widespread. Of course, if there were to be a child grinding farm, it might be done a little more just as most of us would be reluctant to break the neck of a chicken and skin it ourselves, or stick a hot rod up a pig's arse till it screams and dies, but will gladly munch on chicken meat and pig meat. Anyways, in practice it seems like infanticide is practiced, more so in the developing countries. The problem is that its female foeticide. The problem is not that its a female, but that it upsets the sex ratio. So what? How does the sex ratio matter in a strictly logical sense? Is the human population going to go all the way to extinction from its present population of 6.6 billion because of female foeticide? No. So there's no long term worries of that kind. Hence, from the long term point of view, female foeticide is fine too. There are short-term worries though. A dwindled female population, leads to more frustrated males. That would directly have an effect on the crime rate. So, from the short-term point of view female foeticide is inadvisable. However, people seem to be doing it, in their blinkered look at self-preservation, because a man is a better work slave than a woman. They don't see the indirect consequences through crime, which works against that very self-preservation.

I've written this post because I'd like to encourage rational debate to see the flaws in these arguments.

Note: If you are simply disturbed and think what i've written is non-sense, there's no need to comment. I've taken that as the default anyways. If you wish, just put your name in for a head count, and go :p

WTF headline of the day

Most people are familiar with this headline. But check this new one out! And if that isn't enough to have your eyes popping out, read the caption to the first picture.

Repentant

Note: This post is very personal and one close to my heart, so if you aren’t interested in reading anything emotional, please skip this post.

This tag reminded me of my first kiss, but more importantly, of a time when I was happy. Truly happy. I’ve never regained that happiness since I lost her. It all happened so quickly that it almost seems unreal now. Yet, every second, every moment we spent together is etched in my memory like an engraving. The first time I saw her was on the streets of my campus. The moment I saw her calm, serene face, poised on an exquisitely slender body, I fell in love. I was so enchanted by her beauty that it was a while before I noticed she was actually sticking close to another man. With burning jealousy I looked to see who the lucky man was. I was heartbroken to see it was a friend I knew very well. He was much elder to me. She, on the other hand, looked younger to me. So he appeared old enough to be her father and I thought it a strange relationship. I knew he had a mature head, and I greatly respected him for that. I knew his love for her would be true, so I cursed my luck that the one time I truly fell in love, things had to turn out this way. I decided to be mature about it and took reign of my jealousy. I’d see her often after that, whenever I met my friend. I thought that strange because when I asked him about her, he said they had been together for a while now. Why was she suddenly showing up whenever I met him? Did it mean she was interested in me too? I stopped myself from continuing that train of thought. I knew that the most painful love is the unreciprocated kind, so I convinced myself that she had merely started spending more time with him, which increased the likelihood of my seeing her. I tried to grow detached, and every time I’d see her come with him, I would give her a pleasant smile, and then start conversation with him as if she wasn’t there, or she really didn’t matter. She seemed to be just fine with that, and she’d stick close to him, but stare at me incessantly during the conversation, and it would have my heart thumping, in spite of my efforts. It was frustrating, this strange behaviour of hers. It also affected the flow of conversation with my friend, so I decided I’d avoid meeting him for a bit, which meant I’d avoid her too. I hoped that would help me forget her, and these feelings for her. After all, it isn’t like she’s the only one of her kind out there I said to myself. I knew many who were more beautiful. Some of them were so beautiful, with their skin so soft, you’d think they’d melt if you touched them. At first, I simply tried to think of them, and distract myself. But her image kept coming back. Then I started spending more time with them, in the hope that at least when I’m physically with them, my mind wouldn’t get carried away. Somehow, that calm and composed face of hers kept nagging me, and it only estranged my relationship with the others. So I became very reclusive and kept to myself mostly. Nothing helped, and I knew I was incurably in love, but I used the pain as a drug, and when I wasn’t doing research, I’d spend the time thinking about her, and the lovely time we’d have together if she were mine.

Then, one fine morning, as I walked into my lab, I found her there. All alone. I was speechless. From her look I could tell it meant only one thing. I lost all restraint at that moment, ran upto her and smothered her with kisses. She didn’t reciprocate, but she didn’t refuse, and that’s all I cared for the moment, because I knew her reserved ways. That night, she came home with me, and it is the most unforgettable night of my life. From that day on, she became mine, and life was heaven. Every morning, I’d wake up with her head resting affectionately on my heart. We’d spend all day together, and her presence, rather than being a distraction, only helped me in my work. I managed to write-up a pending project report, that would otherwise have taken me two weeks, in just two days. Such were the miracles she brought into my life. I was overjoyed and I worked long hours in her comforting presence. Every now and then, I’d be reminded of my friend and I’d wonder what she told him, if she told him anything at all. A pang of guilt would flit through me, and then I’d be happy again.

I was having a perfect life, and I should’ve known that it cannot last. She began to lose weight. At first slowly. But when she started staying up with me when I worked long hours it became more severe. I was stupidly oblivious to all this in my state of bliss. Until, one day, suddenly, she choked, and fell terribly ill. One look at her emaciated body and I knew what was wrong. But I was afraid to tell her. That evening I went to the store and bought the medication that was needed to rejuvenate her. She took the medication and looked cheerful again. I knew, however, that her illness was terminal, and I shed a silent tear. I guess Mother Nature envied this girl’s sublime perfection. I was prepared to live with this. I felt it was all worth it, and to see her innocently rejuvenated by the medication every time she fell ill, brought a sad smile to my face. I didn’t want things to change. But, perhaps, I shouldn’t have wished that, knowing what luck I have when I wish for things.

It was a Saturday morning. The weather was just the way I like it, with the sun hidden behind the clouds, the diffused light giving a pleasant brightness to everything, and a gentle breeze blowing. I wished to take her out and so we set off on my bike. At the first traffic junction, as I made a turn, a hasty car took a sharp swerving left turn. I tried to dodge him and in the process lost balance. We both crashed on to the road. I had my helmet on so I recovered quickly. She had only her pretty cap. I’d told myself several times that I should buy her a helmet, but I didn’t, partly intentionally. She looked beautiful as she was. But in that cap, she looked like an angel. It was almost as if the cap completed her, and it gave me a strange thrill to see her with the cap on. I can’t forgive myself ever for this folly. She was a little hurt, and still lying on the road. Before I could turn around and help her, a bus sped past, and ran over her, mutilating her body. The cap was still on her head. I turn around in agony, and cried. I cried like there would be no tomorrow. I wished that bus had run over me instead, and I sobbed and sobbed relentlessly. The people around thought I must've gone mad. But I didn’t care. I cried till my eyes hurt.

Its two years since that day, and I still haven’t forgotten her, or forgiven myself.

After all, I can always find another one like her, but nothing can give the happiness of having stolen your best friend’s Mont Blanc

P.S: Now please re-read the article with a pen in mind :D

A conundrum?

Most women say, "I want to choose a partner who will be his true self with me."

I'm not quite sure what my true self is. That is one of the biggest puzzles. What's more I have a feeling, if I were to know my true self, and still be alive, then I'd be too content anyways to then wish to be with a woman. Interesting.

To put it (in) differently!

An article I'd written back in undergrad that never went to print:

The Vedas and Upanishads introduced the concept of ‘atman’ or the ‘self’ which, in essence, declares that ‘only the self exists’. Whatever might have been their intention at that time, we have, very conveniently, interpreted it to suit ourselves, so that, the ideology now subsists as a pernicious indifference to everything and everyone around us.

I shall give you the simple example of our hostels. Some of us keep the very rooms in which we stay (or not) so dirty. This is only a small cluster and most of us, I’m glad, care to keep the room spic and span. But the room is cleaned by elegantly pushing the dust out on to the corridor (read dust bin), and this, in spite of there being a refuse bin every four rooms. The bathrooms are used to dispose of tufts of public (the ‘l’ is only to avoid crude language and out of concern for the prude) hair. If those aren’t enough to clog the drain holes then there are always the soap packets and shampoo sachets. On the one hand, we use showers without scruples and, on the other, we choose to conserve water by rendering the flush redundant! The stairs are, fortunately, cleaner with just the odd cigarette butt and a couple of juice tetra paks.The ground floor serves as a repository of SAC litter. There is a ‘tide’ of sachets all around the washing machine making for a bad ‘aerial’ view. When in the mess, in blatant disregard to the adage that ‘one man’s food may be another man’s poison’, we use the ‘same’ hand (or just ‘hand’ in the case of those who use both hands!)to eat food and serve ourselves or pass the food around. The boon of having a freezer for soft drinks is a bane to the mess workers as people callously leave the bottles outside the mess, on the floor, or more precariously, on the window ledges and the monkeys give a helping hand by deftly pushing them off the ledge.

This indifference doesn’t stop with the hostel, and how can it, for it seems to be in our blood, not our heads. There are always a few cycles parked so as to block the shed entrance and those who sincerely park well inside the shed are, with equal sincerity, prevented from removing their cycles by those who park later. I shan’t venture to elaborate on the little game of dominoes that we play in these stands everyday. We cycle or walk in groups at a snail’s pace and often in large groups thus occupying most of the road. Even ambulance drivers would be astonished by the privileges we fellow assume for ourselves on the road. We enter the class only to find that the professor who taught in the previous hour has been generous enough to leave his intellectual work for us to admire. And we do just that until our professor comes and decides to show his contempt for that work and erases it mercilessly. When the class ends, we leave behind signs of our ‘brilliance’. Only, it is seen in the tubes and bulbs, not to mention the fans. In fact, as we walk the department corridors our hostel rooms also give notice of our ‘power’ful presence with fans remaining switched on. When we are walking to the next class, or when we are just free, it is important for us to carry out our communications in a manner which suggests we are eternally anticipating an aero plane over our heads or practicing for helicopter conversations for we will all eventually be multimillionaires with the said conveyance in our possession. Indeed, it is therefore only too appropriate for the nearby classes going on that they should halt and watch us future luminaries rehearse.

So in every step one takes, starting from within one’s room, and moving in any direction, all the way till the end of this campus, one witnesses this appalling apathy. If I cover the entire institute in all its glory I am afraid I shall never have enough space to write it all and besides, it is my sincere wish that I get this article printed without censorship. That one is indifferent to dirt is no excuse to be indifferent to one’s surroundings. This is a cry to one and all, not to take responsibility to keep one’s surroundings clean, not even to show concern for the surroundings, but, only, to overcome this horrifying indifference and do what elementary common sense would dictate. Please! Let’s be different, or at least, less indifferent.

The amusing and the absurd - Part VII

There is a similarity between love and exams. In both, one is judged too quickly. Its funny that in the former we approve of it, in the latter, we don't :)

^:)^@My bro's status msg

Sriram

Is Quantum Mechanics ΨΦ?

Copyright: Sriram Sivaramakrishnan

I found the perfect reply :D

Sriram: stealing you status msg :)

me: :))

my pleasure

that's the idea in fact ;)

the propagate

4:05 PM *to propagate

oh,

did i show you my picasa pics?

4:06 PM Sriram: ur prev status msg?

me: yeah

Sriram: saw them

me: the langkawi island one

oh, good

Sriram: who did you go with?

4:07 PM me: with my soul mate

punctuate appropriately ;)

Sriram: hehe

4:08 PM me: :)

The amusing and the absurd - Part V

I remember thinking one afternoon while travelling in Hyderabad that ironically as the traffic continues its exponential increase in both numbers and chaos, I foresee the number of deaths by accidents only decreasing. The densities are so high that vehicles move at a crawl all the time, and I've found that even at one's maximum speed in such traffic, its easy to come to a grinding halt to avoid, say, the ubiquitous auto that juts its nose into traffic from the side after picking up a customer.

The little birthday surprise :-)

I'm past the stage when I have any wish to celebrate my birthday, or even let anyone know its my birthday. Its quite insignificant really. Nevertheless I had a special birthday surprise this year. It was so special, not because it was all arranged grandly, but because no one arranged it. I slept late at night and so awoke only at around 10:30 am on a lazy Saturday morning. I had to go to lab to finish some work that needed urgent attention. In a dazed and inertial way I moved about the house getting myself ready. At the perfectly insignificant hour of 11:16 am I left my house for the campus. Just as I stepped out my house and faced the road, a couple of students on bicycles passed by, one of them carrying an inflated balloon which said 'Happy Birthday!' :-) It obviously wasn't intended for me, and they just passed along by. But the incident was special because of its absurd impossibility!

The amusing and the absurd - Part IV

How ironic that the common principal problem of the Indian and American masses is the same - ignorance :-)

It is very interesting that two very different factors have led to the same problem. In India, the lack of education is directly responsible. In America on the other hand, the problem is a little more twisted. It comes from such an excess of freedom and protection, that all things external to the nation would make little dent in the conscious mind, unless one deliberately chooses to bother oneself with seemingly remote affairs.

The amusing and the absurd - Part III

I distinctly remember being amused when during an India-Australia one day match, Robin Singh plodded, and very literally too, to a 50 and then ended up puking on the ground from exhaustion! It was the probably the only time I'd ever seen him make an even slightly significant contribution to the team's score, and very probably too the only time that he scored a 50 in one-day internationals, and to celebrate that by spreading his joy(if the pun may be excused) made me sneer at his fitness level. Today, I just learnt to my utter disbelief that Robin Singh is India's fitness trainer.
:-)

The amusing and the absurd - Part II

The phenomenon of honking in India is amusing in its absurdity. In a country like ours, which reeks of short-sighted selfishness, it is obvious even to the most obtuse mind that a vehicle won't slow down or give way to another vehicle even if a knife were stuck to his throat. Such being the case, if a vehicle is seen to slow down in traffic, it must be obvious that the only reason it must be happening is that it is absolutely impossible, even theoretically, for the vehicle to move ahead. Thus, honking is least required in a country like India. In fact, it would be more comprehendable if people honked in the United States, where people are so generous in giving way, that it could easily drive an impatient man like me insane. Ironically, people rarely honk there and people rarely stop honking here.

The amusing and the absurd - Part I

It tickles me in its faint irony that most indian women make such fuss and fury about their virginity to ultimately be deflowered by a stranger.

Sagespeak for today.

Genius is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration - Thomas Alva Edison.

My sagespeak: He for got to mention that the 1 percent inspiration is a pre-requisite to the 99 percent perspiration.