Hip hop economics

Found this great video thanks to a friend on Facebook:



There is a wonderful Friedreich Hayek quote at the end: "The curious task of economists is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." And that task applies as well to super confident, suit-wearing economists and all people who take their knowledge of the world too seriously.

Random stuff

It’s late October already. The air outside is cold and crisp, and fallen leaves, the currency of the season, are everywhere; the woods are aflame with color. The strange thing about fall colors – the irresistibly rich shades of red and yellow – is that you want to experience them in some deep way, capture them forever, yet the awareness that they are transient and foreshadow the approaching gloom of winter tinges the season with melancholy.

The semester is busy as usual – I am writing publications and grants, claiming that I will solve the world’s most pressing healthcare delivery problems; serving on departmental committees, the most difficult part of which is dealing with the profusion of emails about when the committee should meet. In one committee, I have now counted twenty seven emails and there is still no agreement on a meeting time. That doesn't surprise me: professors live in their own autonomous worlds and only rarely do those worlds intersect.

I am teaching, for the third time, a class on linear optimization. Teaching is the most enjoyable part of academia and an intensely social activity (and hence the most tiring). I’ve got students from eleven countries this time. Asia, as usual, is well represented (Turkey, Iran, India, China), but there’s a also student from Chad and one from Nigeria.

I also attend the occasional conference where academics who feel supremely confident about themselves strut around fancy hotels in suits, their name tags weighed down by such pompous titles as “Cluster Chair” or “Section Chair”; conferences where academics talk in a cliquish, incomprehensible language, all the time forgetting (sometimes deliberately, for the sake of tenure and election to special academic societies) that the world outside is vastly more complex than their mathematical models or theories suggest. The biggest benefit of these gatherings, it would seem, is that they temporarily rejuvenate the economy of the downtowns they are held in. The hotels, the taxi-drivers who wait patiently to drop attendees to the airport, the waiters who serve drinks or politely take away dishes after a reception – and whom the conference attendees, so engrossed with their “networking”, are completely unaware of (because networking with regular people doesn’t get you anywhere) – benefit the most. There is a further irony: many plastic bottles of water will be wasted at these conferences and yet academics will present airy-fairy mathematical models on how the scarce resources of the world should be used more efficiently.

Academic talk (and rants) aside, I am aware I haven’t posted quite as regularly. That’s because I want my essays to evolve a little more. And yet, it’s hard to leave the blog blank for long – hence this rambling post. But let me assure you: there are travel pieces in the works. One is about a trip to my family’s ancestral temple in the district of Thanjavur in south India; another is about my travels in Peru and my conversations, while on the train to Machu Picchu, with fellow Latin American travelers.

I also want to mention the two books I am reading. The first is a 7th century work of fiction in Sanskrit, called Dasakumaracharita, by Dandin (translated by Isabelle Onians for the Clay Sanskrit Library; Onians’ interpretive notes at the end of the book are essential for a richer understanding of prose). The story is about the adventures of ten young men, who set out on separate and somewhat interlinked journeys in north India, which at the time consisted of a patchwork of kingdoms. Dasakumaracharita provides a glimpse of the sensibility and religious views of that period. I might write a longer essay on the book when I am done (and considering that I am terribly slow reader, you might have to wait a while).

The second book – in sharp contrast to Dasakumaracharita – is Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, my first real introduction to physics. When I was in the second grade, my father bought me a book called Children’s Knowledge Bank, a collection of easy-to-read articles, each a page long. There was one on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Of course, I was clueless then, and I don’t understand much now either.

But Brian Greene’s summary of general relativity has at least provided the wonder I wish I had experienced long ago. What aesthetic elegance theories of physics can have! I never knew that space and time are inseparable and how we experience them is really a consequence of gravity. I never knew that no matter how fast you travel, light still travels at the same speed; that is, if you chased after light at very, very high speed, it would still escape from you at the same speed. And the bizarre idea that time would actually slow down if you move very fast. In fact, if you traveled at the speed of light, you would not age at all. As Greene writes, “light does not get old: a photon that emerged from the Big Bang is the same age today as it was then. There is no passage of time at light speed.”

This has been an exceptionally good year for science books – from the biologist Edward Wilson’s Nature Revealed, to Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, and finally The Elegant Universe.

The food post -- Part 1

1.

My friends know well that I do not drink much. In fact, I know nothing of the nuances: which glass suits which wine, the subtle differences between beers, the myriad cocktails. I am even worse about hard liquor, which I haven’t tried beyond a few sips.

But with food it’s a different story. I have a hard time understanding those who want to “get done” with the chore of eating. To me, every meal has to be deliberated on, even if the options are limited and even if I am busy. When I am on the road and alone (and especially so), I search earnestly for a place to sit and enjoy a hearty, elaborate meal.

I am picky though. I prefer vegetarian because that is the way I was brought up. Meat turns me off with its texture and odor. I am willing to reconsider if I am at a Pakistani restaurant that is known to make exemplary chicken curries. I prefer foods that are “liquidy”: soups and moist dips. Dry sandwiches are okay but they have to be nothing short of spectacular, else they risk condemnation. That is why the bagel is my least favorite food: it turns my mouth (and throat) into an arid, oasis-less desert. No, it does not matter how much cream cheese I add -- sorry!

2.

Indian food was all I’d tasted when I first came to the US. I was unwilling for a few months to try anything outside what we graduate students cooked (and I was afraid of credit cards: I had never used one and it seemed like the most complicated process, what with signatures and all). Someone suggested a restaurant called Haji Baba. At the time, I had a subconscious anti-Muslim bias and the Arabic lettering outside the restaurant frightened me. The irony is that the same place later became a favorite, and a way to signal to my more “parochial” friends how “cool” and “multicultural” I was.

So it was a gradual and tentative opening out: the inauthentic yet ubiquitous Chinese restaurants with food soaked in sugar syrup to please the super sweet American tooth; the excitement and later exhaustion with the dull Indian buffets with mass produced northern fare; the repulsion upon first encountering pasta and raw broccoli (Newman, the postal officer in sitcom Seinfeld, rightly calls the latter a “vile weed”, though recently I’ve figured out how to use it well).

In time, I discovered my flavors. The farther north and west of India the cuisine's origins were (but not quite as far as Europe), the better I liked the food. In any American city, if I spot an Afghani or Iranian restaurant, I will not have the slightest hesitation. But it is not the famous kababs that I like, rather it is the simpler vegetable preparations. Eggplant dishes such as kashk e badejmaan and mirza ghassemi for example bring out the essence of the vegetable much better than the Indian version, the baingan bhartha.

And the rice! Rice made the Iranian way (polo, which may be the etymological root of the Indian pulao) is something else. My favorite is the adas polo – rice with lentils, raisins, dates, saffron – at Persian Room, a somewhat upscale restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona. At that high ceilinged place with blemish-less white napkins, it was easy to forget, because of the quality of food on offer, that I was a poor graduate student.

There are dozens of such Middle Eastern restaurants in the Phoenix metro area (Arizona). The Lebanese restaurant, Haji Baba, I’ve already mentioned. Dipping pita bread in garlicky mashes, hummus and babaghanouj, or having falafels with tahini sauce: these are the usual pleasures. But an under appreciated dish, and one I love, is fava beans, seasoned with sumac and served curry style, along with buttered long grain rice.

3.

Farther west and in a different continent is a cuisine that has captivated me for years now. To most, Ethiopia suggests only famine and poverty. But the tragedies stick in our minds longer of course, and we forget the day to day. I find an echo in Ethiopian cuisine of Indian styles – in the spices, the lentils and the vegetables – but I do not mean to lessen its distinctness or originality by making that comparison.

For starters, Ethiopia is the place where the nutritious yet largely unknown grain teff was domesticated (coffee too is first traced to Ethiopia). Teff is used to make injera, a sour, porous and spongy flatbread (like a dosa). It is a mystery why this African grain, so rich in ingredients, never leapt continents to become as popular as wheat, rice and maize.

Injera is served on a large circular plate. On top, are arrayed small sized vegetable and lentil preparations (I always order the veggie combo; meat is the farthest thing from my mind at an Ethiopian restaurant). The meal is supposed to be communal and eaten without silverware. The lentil preparations – misir watt, kik misir watt – are striking; I rate them much higher than the ubiquitous dals of India. Among the vegetables, my favorite is the the gomen watt, a collard greens dish.

I attribute my love of Ethiopian food to Blue Nile, a restaurant that opened very near my apartment in Tempe, Arizona. So taken was I from then on that during my travels, I made a conscious effort to look for Ethiopian meals. In DC, where the community is the strongest, I’ve tried Meskerem and Etete; in Minneapolis, Fasika; in Las Vegas, Merkato. Then there are two restaurants whose names I do not remember, but whose food I do. In Tucson, I ate the spiciest Ethiopian meal I’ve ever tasted; I remember enjoying immensely even as I sweated throughout. And in Sioux Falls, South Dakota (during this trip), a hole in the wall place unexpectedly turned out to be memorable.

I’ll stop here for now, but the journey isn’t quite complete. In the continuing piece, I’ll turn my eye, briefly, to cuisines to the east of India. And rather than talk of the history of Mexico, Peru and Bolivia – I’ve bored you enough with that – I’ll talk of my meals there.

On not being a morning person

They say you are either a morning or a night person. I am certainly the latter: it is a pity to miss the freshness of dawn, but it seems an even greater pity to miss a few extra hours of sleep. No matter how early I get to bed, my eyes just won’t open earlier than eight – so much for the old adage about rising early.

I wonder if I ended up this way because as a child I had to be in school only at 11:30 am. This was back in the eighties; my parents lived in Gujarat, in the Naranpura area of Ahmadabad. We were tenants in the small upper section of a house owned by a large family. The living room doubled as the bedroom; attached to it was a small kitchen. My mother would wake me up at eight, well after my father had left, and with eyes barely open, I would begin my journey to the toilet.

I call it a journey because the toilet was downstairs and was shared – we didn’t have our own. I made the descent lazily, leaning against the railing, contemplating a nap every step of the way; so slow was I that on some days it took me thirty minutes to get down. The stairs were out in the open and faced the backyard, most of which was under the canopy of a neem tree. To the left was a narrow pathway, a kind of neutral zone between houses that led to a nearby temple. The pathway was frequented by stray dogs, cats, and especially cows, which came to chew on discarded pieces of paper or rummage through trash. It was during those slow morning descents that I started observing domestic animals – to the point of being mesmerized. Even today, I can watch dogs play and interact for hours on end.

I got back around nine. Then, as I sipped Bournvita or Maltova (chocolate drinks) I felt the texture of my mother’s sari with my fingers. This meant she had to sit on the floor next to me for the entire time it took me to finish. It was a strange ritual, one I find hard to explain today. But I do remember distinctly that the drink tasted heavenly when her sari’s texture was somewhat rough.

Such laid back mornings – minus the chocolate drink and strange ritual – were still the norm during high school in Nagpur. At college in Trichy, though classes started at 8:30 am, I routinely bunked the first two, so I could have a leisurely breakfast of tea, eggs, bread and jam at the mess until 10:00. Early morning classes were harder to miss in grad school, where the quality of education was just too high to be ignored, but once course requirements were done, I reverted to the late start schedule. For a while, my breakfast consisted of enormous quantities of whole wheat bread, almond butter and soy milk.

And the pattern continues to this day. One of the pleasures of being an academic is that I don’t have to be in my office at 9; in fact, I don’t have to be there at all unless necessary. On the days that I don’t teach, I wake up, make my coffee (flavored hot milk really), and settle to read the the blogs listed on this page. It’s only around noon time that I really get going. The flip side, of course, is that I do most of my work at night, which thankfully is capacious enough to accommodate my worst procrastination excesses.

King Khan in Lima

My Name is Khan (MNIK) is one of the worst movies I’ve seen this year. The embarrassing sentimentality of its scenes, which promote a cheesy, highly simplistic race-and-religion-transcending solidarity, make it unwatchable in parts. Bollywood’s alpha males – the Khans and the Roshans – are no longer overtly alpha-male, but they still are superhuman in other ways: they deliver babies using vacuum cleaners (3 Idiots); they invent new devices and fix just about anything (3 Idiots and MNIK); and most importantly, they live the most ideal and moral lives, are tremendously compassionate, follow their own unique visions, and deliver telling truths.

What else is this if not poorly concealed narcissism?

But my post isn’t supposed to be a rant on the modern day Indian superhero. Rather, it’s a rambling account on how I came to know of the popularity of a certain Khan in an unlikely city: Lima, Peru. This shouldn’t surprise us, given how interconnected the world is today. In fact, most Africans and Central Asians I’ve spoken to are decently well versed with Bollywood.

And yet Lima? The Latin American capital is halfway across the world from India; besides Peruvians have as little clue about Indians as Indians about Peruvians. Still, Shahrukh has succeeded in establishing himself there, to the same extent that Machu Pichu – that most iconic and magical of archaeological sites – has succeeded in becoming a much sought after destination for Indians with money (when I landed in Lima, prominent among the names displayed on cutouts by the receiving parties at the airport, were “Mukherjee” and “Patel”).

___

Once, during a bus ride in Lima, I was seated across from the driver. He was a cheerful man. When he learned where I was from, he looked at me with a sort of awe that can only come from having discovered something immeasurably exotic. He announced my nationality a few times to the ticket collector, who wasn’t impressed. After we’d got past discussing Taj Mahal, he settled on Shahrukh Khan, with whom he was clearly besotted. Unfortunately, I was reduced to speaking in gestures and nodding sagely though I understood very little of what he was saying.
___

At a Peruvian-owned DVD shop a few blocks away from downtown Lima, near the Rimac river, I found an entire section dedicated to Bollywood. There was a massive poster of Jodhaa Akbar, with Hrithik and Aishwarya prominent. But if you look closely, a Khan poster lurks behind to the right, sidelined and only partly visible.

But Khan shouldn't feel slighted, for the most artistic of tributes to him in Lima comes from this illustrator, whom I found busy at work in a street not far from the DVD shop.

___


Just when Shahrukh seemed undisputed king in Lima, I learned that the immensely popular Thalaivar, who drives Tamil fans wild, has actually graced the land of the Incas for a song shoot at Machu Pichu in the Andean highlands (picture credits here). As can be seen, we have a feathered Aishwarya hopping with a bearded and macho looking Rajnikant. If the extras were local, then it follows that the Indians of India must have danced with the Indians of Peru.

I am sure the spirits of the dead Incas must have doubled in laughter upon watching this: “So these are the people we were mistaken for?”
___

Update: There is even a fan page on Facebook, called Bollywood Peru.

Dil to Bachcha Hai Ji

For me, the most delightful moment in the new movie Ishqiya is the scene that goes with the melodious Dil To Bachcha Hai Ji – crudely “The heart is a child after all”. That translation doesn’t do the song justice but it does convey something elemental: we may age but we can be occasionally possessed of a carefree happiness that makes us young again.



Khalujan, the character that Naseruddin Shah plays, is in his late forties, or early fifties – it’s a testament to the actor’s versatility that in Firaaq he plays, and looks, a much older man. He is old in Ishqiya too; his beard is mostly gray. But as soon as he meets Krishna (Vidya Balan), the beautiful, alluring widow some twenty years his junior, he colors his beard black. And with the knowledge that he is falling in love, a kind of babyish joy suffuses his face.

Dil To Bachcha Hai Ji plays when Khalujan is standing in a crowded bus. A woman seated by the window looks at him adoringly; the man next to her notices this and offers Khalujan his seat. Khalujan, flattered by the woman’s glances – and she too, like Krishna, is young – refuses politely, but the woman continues look at him. He finally relents and takes the seat. Later, asleep, he leans his head unknowingly against the woman’s shoulder, and dreams of Krishna with contentment, the lilting melody of the song in the background. He is woken suddenly by the laughter of the other women in the bus and smiles sheepishly -- they are laughing at him. “Is umar mein ab khaogey dhoke” – the song goes at one point (“disappointments await you at this age” in my unsubtle translation).

It’s a brilliant scene in which Khalujan’s charm, joy and vulnerability all come together.

The song is Vishal Bharadwaj’s composition, and is sung by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan; the sublime lyrics are Gulzar’s. The tune plays in the style of old Hindi songs, but to accompaniment of Latin beats and strumming; there's an Arabic interlude as well. It’s an exquisite blend – take a listen.

An earlier post about a song in a very different kind of movie, Om Shanti Om.

Moscow's metro dogs: Strays that use public transport

From FT:

Every so often, you would see one waiting on a metro platform. When the train pulled up, the dog would step in, scramble up to lie on a seat or sit on the floor if the carriage was crowded, and then exit a few stops later. There is even a website dedicated to the metro stray (www.metrodog.ru) on which passengers post photos and video clips taken with their mobile phones, documenting the ­savviest of the pack using the public transport system like any other Muscovite.

[...]

“The metro dog appeared for the simple reason that it was permitted to enter,” says Andrei Neuronov, an author and specialist in animal behaviour and psychology, who has worked with Vladimir Putin’s black female Labrador retriever, Connie (“a very nice pup”). “This began in the late 1980s during perestroika,” he says. “When more food appeared, people began to live better and feed strays.” The dogs started by riding on overground trams and buses, where supervisors were becoming increasingly thin on the ground.

Neuronov says there are some 500 strays that live in the metro stations, especially during the colder months, but only about 20 have learned how to ride the trains. This happened gradually, first as a way to broaden their territory. Later, it became a way of life. “Why should they go by foot if they can move around by public transport?” he asks.

“They orient themselves in a number of ways,” Neuronov adds. “They figure out where they are by smell, by recognising the name of the station from the recorded announcer’s voice and by time intervals. If, for example, you come every Monday and feed a dog, that dog will know when it’s Monday and the hour to expect you, based on their sense of time intervals from their ­biological clocks.”

The story of our food

I've always wondered what Indian cuisine was like before the 16th century. A slew of now indispensable grains, nuts, vegetables, fruits, intoxicants -- corn, groundnuts, cashews, guavas, cheekus (sapotas), papaya, pineapple, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco -- from Mexico, Central and South America reached the Indian subcontinent via the Europeans in the late 1500s, but these delights had been missing until then. And in the list above, I've deliberately not mentioned that one ingredient absolutely essential to many Indian dishes now. Instead, let me quote KT Acharya, author of the short but informative book, The Story of Our Food:

We had a glimpse in the last chapter that chillis are not really Indian. These wonderful materials were brought to India from Mexico, perhaps in the late 16th century. They took a little while to catch on, but in about a hundred years, the use of chillis spread to every part of India. Before that it was [black] pepper that as used to give the pungency that is so characteristic of Indian food. In one of the sections of Ain-i-Akbari, written in 1590, there is a list of 50 dishes cooked in Akbar's court: all of them use only [black] pepper to impart spiciness. In most Indian languages, the name for chilli is simply a variation of the earlier name for [black] pepper in the same language. For example, in Hindi we say kalimirch for black pepper and harimirch for chili. In Tamil, the word for pepper is milagu and that for chili is milagai (=milagu-kai (pepper+fruit)). In Kannada, the words are karimenasu and menasinkayi. Try this exercise in your own language.

It is not difficult to understand why the chilli quickly replaced black pepper in our cooking. While the black pepper vine grows almost only in Kerala, chillis can be grown in almost every backyard, or cultivated in the fields, all over the country. Thus, they were easily available everywhere at a low price. All the many varieties that we know come to us from Mexico and none of them was developed afterwards in India. These include the green chili, red chili, long red chilli, very small and very hot green bird chilli, and the large mild capsicum. To make chilli-powder, the long bright-red variety with think skins can be dried in the sun, and ground either with its seeds to give more pungency, or without it to give a milder chilli-powder. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say the humble chilli from Mexico really revolutionized the food of India.

Indeed, we are thankful to Mexico for that. The story of food reveals a complex history of interconnections; it is really a history of globalization -- a globalization much older than the modern, accelerated version that is much talked about. What seems native now was once foreign. Think of it: Italian food before the 16th century was without tomatoes! No one in Africa, Europe, and Asia had tasted potatoes -- a staple now, worldwide-- before the Spanish conquest connected us with the Andes where it was originally cultivated, thousands of years ago, by the Indians there.

To, finish, here's another excerpt from the same book -- hat tip, Nitin Pai. All parts in italics are Acharya's quotes from original sources.

Many animal foods are described with great relish in the early Tamil literature.

Even Brahmins did not lack relish for the meat and toddy served to them at feasts held by the chieftains and princes of the land.

The meat dishes cooked with (black) pepper were called kari in Tamil, a word now used in English as curry. Fried spiced meat was called tallita-kari, fried meat was pori-kari, and meat with a source sauce made of tamarind was termed pulingari…

Beef was freely eaten: there are four names for this meat in the early Tamil language, showing that it was a common and well-liked food. In the north, as we have seen, the domestic fowl was not eaten, but there was no such taboo in the south. Other delicacies were the cooked aral fish served piping hot, and the meat of the tortoise, rabbit and hare. Wild boar was hunted using nets; it was then kept in a pit and fattened by feeding it with rice flour to yield pork of exceptional taste.

Here is a description from the Tamil literature of a feast given about 150 AD by a Chola ruler:

Goblets of gold with intoxicating liquor, soft-boiled legs of sheep fed on sweet grass, and hot meat, in large chops, cooked on the points of spits … fine cooked rice which, erect like fingers and with unbroken edges, resemble the buds of the mullai (jasmine) flower, together with curries sweetened with milk.

It is interesting to note the reference to wine and to roast kababs, and the beautiful comparison of shining white rice grains to jasmine buds. Tamil literature also describes the brisk trade with both the east and the west from the ports of south India; one commodity brought in was Italian wine for use by the royalty.

Leveraging positive ethnic stereotypes

The first story of Ten Little Indians –a collection of Sherman Alexie’s stories – is about Corliss, a spunky, independent college-going Spokane Indian teenager. Unlike other sophomores Corliss lives alone. She does not want to share her place with another Indian because “she’d soon be taking in the roommate’s cousin, little brother, half uncle, and long-lost dog, and none of them would contribute anything toward the rent other than wispy apologies. Indians were used to sharing and called it tribalism, but Corliss suspected it was yet another failed form of communism.”

Corliss also does not want a white roommate. Why? Because Corliss is well aware of her native identity and the effect it has on mainstream society. She wants to retain the allure of her identity so she can benefit from it. Here’s a long -- and funny -- excerpt where Alexie takes us through Corliss' rationale:

White people, no matter how smart, were too romantic about Indians. White people looked at Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the full moon, newborn babies, and Indians with the same goofy sentimentalism. Being a smart Indian, Corliss had always taken advantage of this romanticism, but that didn’t mean she wanted to share the refrigerator with it. If white folks assumed she was serene and spiritual and wise simply because she was an Indian, and thought she was special based on those mistaken assumptions, then Corliss saw no reason to contradict them. The world is a competitive place, and a poor Indian girl needs all the advantages she can get. So if George Bush, a man possessed of no remarkable distinctions other than being the son of a former U.S. president, could also become president, then Corliss figured she could certainly benefit from positive ethnic stereotypes and not feel any guilt about it. For five centuries, Indians were slaughtered because they were Indians, so if Corliss received a free coffee now and again from the local free-range lesbian Indiophile, who could possibly find the wrong in that? In the twenty-first century, any Indian with a decent vocabulary wielded enormous social power, but only if she was a stoic who rarely spoke. If she lived with a white person, Corliss knew she’d quickly be seen as ordinary, because she was ordinary. It’s tough to share a bathroom with an Indian and continue to romanticize her. If word got around that Corliss was ordinary, even boring, she feared she’d lose her power and magic. She knew there would come a day when white folks finally understood that Indians are every bit as relentlessly boring, selfish, and smelly as they are, and that would be a wonderful day for human rights but a terrible day for Corliss.

Alexie is brilliant here: through Corliss’s character, he’s brought to fore a host of issues: identity, what it means at the individual level, the sense of entitlement it may bring; the stereotyping of minorities but also the reverse stereotyping of the majority (which is essentially what Corliss is doing); and -- though this is more subtle -- the touchy question of reparations.

Fall in Massachusetts

New England, as many of you may know, is famous for fall colors. When I moved to Amherst, Massachusetts in August last year, I hadn't given much thought to what was in store. But two Octobers later (October is when the leaves change) I consider myself very fortunate. All four pictures are of places in my immediate neighborhood -- they are all a minute's walk away.

The first picture is of Puffers Pond. The pond is where the Mill River drains before making its way to the more voluminous Connecticut River. The second picture is the road adjacent to the pond. The cars are parked close to hiking trails.

The third picture is of a stand of trees on my drive to the university -- this is where you typically see the best juxtaposition of colors. A half-decent photographer would have done a much better job. And the last picture is of the street I live in (the silver-gray car is mine). With leaves strewn all over, fall is indeed the perfect word to describe the season. The rustling of dry leaves is the dominant sound; the leaves conspire even to enter your home, traveling unobtrusively with your footwear.

Digital Confession to an Ayatollah

In The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, the author Hooman Majd visits Qom, the religious center for Shia learning. He tries to talk to the Grand Ayatollah Hajj Sheikh Mohammad Fazel Lankarani but is dismissed rather brusquely. Instead, Majd is taken to the “library and nerve center of his Web operation”. This is what he finds:

At a nicely air-conditioned building, a pleasant and self-taught computer-literate young man gave me a tour of the library and explained how Lankarani’s website [Google says visiting it is "dangerous" for software reasons, so proceed at own risk] operated in seventeen languages, including Swahili and Burmese, for all of his followers. It was updated daily with the Ayatollah’s proclamations, fatwas, or religious commands, if he’d issued any recently, and general information, but, most important, it was a place to ask questions: e-mails poured in every day in all seventeen languages and were carefully printed out, one by one, and arranged according to language in mailboxes for Lankarani’s Iranian and foreign talibs (Arabic for “students”, and where the word “Taliban” comes from) to translate, so that they could be answered by one of his senior staff, such as his son, but always reviewed by the Ayatollah himself. I was shown e-mails in English, translated into Farsi, where the Ayatollah had crossed out an answer and written his own, to be retranslated and transmitted back electronically. Most of the questions in the emails I saw related to sex; for example, a sixteen-year-old boy from England had written about his friend who had had oral sex with a fourteen-year-old boy and was worried that his prayers would be nullified and that he might be punished by God. The Ayatollah’s answer was refreshingly short and simple: repent and don’t do it again. No mention of homosexuality, no judgments -- who said the conservative Ayatollahs weren’t compassionate? I read the same thing, “repent”, page after page, for almost without exception the questioner had committed some kind of sin, or at least thought he had, or claimed to have a “friend” who had. I looked around at the banks of computers and the dark, highly polished wooden mail slots filled with printed emails: Digital confession, I thought. The Vatican should get into this.

The genius of Norman Rockwell

Painting is not my thing. But yesterday, at the museum dedicated to the famous American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), I was stunned. Stunned by Rockwell's eye for detail; his ability to deliver an incredible array of expressions, many of them comic; and the stories that Rockwell conveys in his illustrations. Two examples -- my favorites -- are below. Both appeared as covers for the Saturday Evening Post. The theme of the first (March 16th 1948 issue) is gossip . Look closely at it and you’ll know what I mean by "incredible array of expressions". Not to mention the details – hairstyles, hats, skin tones, gloves – and the funny story that unfolds.




The second (August 30th 1947 issue) is about a family going to and returning from a picnic (click to see a much better version). Look how expectant and eager everyone is while leaving. And how everyone fatigued everyone is while returning late in the evening. What a contrast!

But then there's Granny in the backseat, with a stoic, humorless expression that does not change one bit.

Arqueologia and Cibersexo in Mexico City

(Picture of roadside book stall in Mexico City, taken during my trip last December.)

Among magazines for the lascivious eye -- with pictures of almost-nude women, including a cover that says something about cybersex -- are six issues of Mexico's most prominent archaeology magazine. Indeed, one could cheekily conclude that this image demonstrates the power of Mexico's past. When your archaeology magazines are adjacent to titillating best-sellers, it must mean you value archaelogy as much as you value matters of the sexual kind, no?

Or, if you prefer the cynical view, you need archaelogy -- universally considered a dreary and boring field -- to be juxtaposed with sexual imagery, else it will never sell.

Michael Jackson and Balasaheb Thackeray

From Suketu Mehta's Maximum City:Bombay Lost and Found:

Shiv Sena's notions of what is culturally acceptable in India show a distinct bias towards kitsch: Michael Jackson, for example. In November 1996, Thackeray announced that the first performance of the pop star in India would proceed with his blessings. This may or may not have had to do with the fact that the singer had promised to donate the profits from his concert -- which eventually ran to more than a million dollars -- to a Shiv Sena-run youth employment project. The planned concert offended a number of people in the city, including Thackeray's own brother, who saw something alien in the values singer represented. "Who is Michael Jackson and how on earth is he linked to Hindu culture, which the Shiv Sena and its boss Thackeray talk about so proudly?"

The Shiv Sena Supremo responded, "Jackson is a great artist, and we must accept him as an artist. His movements are terrific. Not many people can that way. You will end up breaking your bones." Then the Saheb got to the heart of the matter. "And, well what is culture? He represents certain values in America, which India should not have any qualms in accepting. We would like to accept that part of America that is represented by Jackson." The pop star acknowledged Thackeray's praise by stopping off at the leader's residence on his way from the airport to his hotel and pissing in his toilet. Thackeray led photographers with pride to the sanctified bowl.

Mr.President, let me teach you batting

For those who may not know, this is batting maestro Brian Lara teaching the President how to hit a good front-foot cover drive. But from the awkward footwork and squatting that is on display, it looks as if the President may splay his feet and rip his pants. Ah, cricket doesn't come easy to the uninitiated. Let's hope this isn't a metaphor for the President's political skills. But at least, you could say, he's trying to learn.

Photo via Amitava.

What it means to be Christian

A Spanish evangelist, Fray Domingo de Santo Tomas, traveling in Peru circa 1560 finds out what being Christian means to the Indians of Peru:

It is of note that the Indians of Peru, before we Christians had come to them, had certain and particular modes of swearing, distinct from ours. They had no assertive oaths, such as 'by God' or 'by heaven' but only execration or curses...e.g. 'if I am not telling the truth, may the sun kill me' they said...Once when I asked a chieftain in a certain province if he was Christian, he said, 'I am not yet quite one, but I am making a beginning.' I asked him what he knew of being Christian, and he said: 'I know how to swear to God, and play cards a bit, and I am beginning to steal.'

This is an excerpt from one of Fray Domingo's books - which interestingly happens to be a book on Quechua grammar. Quechua is a Native American language of South America, still spoken by indigenous people in Peru, Bolivia and also in other countries - there are an estimated 10 million speakers. I found the above excerpt in Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (the link takes you to one of my earliest posts -- way back in 2005, when the earth was cooling).

Mr. W

"Indian": Perhaps the most abused term in history

VS Naipaul explains why in his brilliant essay East Indian*:

…this word Indian has been abused as no other word in the language; almost every time it is used it has to be qualified. There was a time in Europe when everything Oriental or everything a little unusual was judged to come from Turkey or India. So Indian ink is really Chinese ink and India paper first came from China. When in 1492, Columbus landed on the island of Guanahani he thought he had got to Cathay. He ought therefore to have called the people Chinese. But East was East. He called them Indians, and Indians they remained, walking Indian file through Indian corn. And so, too, that American bird which to English-speaking people is the turkey is to the French, le dindon, the bird of India.

So long as Indians remained on the other side of the world, there was little confusion. But when in 1845 these Indians began coming over [as indentured laborers] to some of the islands Columbus had called the Indies, confusion became total...

But what were these immigrants to be called? Their name had been appropriated three hundred and fifty years before. “Hindu” was a useful word, but it had religious connotations and would have offended the many Muslims among the immigrants. In the British territories the immigrants were called East Indians. In this way, they were distinguished from the two other types of Indians on the islands: the American Indians and the West Indians. After a generation or two, the East Indians were regarded as settled inhabitants of the West Indies and were thought of as West Indian East Indians. Then a national feeling grew up. There was a cry of national integration, and the West Indian East Indians became East Indian West Indians.

This didn’t suit the Dutch. They had a colony called Surinam, or Dutch Guiana, on the north coast of South America. They also owned a good deal of the East Indies [Indonesia], and to them an East Indian was someone who came from the East Indies and was of Malay stock. (When you go to an Indian restaurant in Holland, you don’t go to an Indian restaurant; you go to an East Indian or Javanese restaurant.) In Surinam there were many genuine East Indians from the East Indies. So another name had to be found for the Indians from India who came to Surinam. The Dutch called them the British Indians. Then, with the Indian nationalist agitation in India, the British Indians began to resent being called British Indians. The Dutch compromised by calling them Hindustanis.

Hilarious, isn’t it?

*East Indian is an essay in the collection Literary Occasions, by VS Naipaul

Ganesha in Mayan country

Generally, India has never been very distant, no matter where I've traveled. It isn't hard to find Indians and, besides, there is always the ubiquitous Indian restaurant, however pathetic. Even in the town of St. Etienne, which is in a provincial part of France and where I never expected to eat any curry, I found at least four Indian restaurants.

But in remote Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state, the only Indians are Mayan Indians. In the highland city of San Cristobal de las Casas, there was, for a long time, no indication that there would be anything from the home country - and I expected it to stay that way. So you can imagine my surprise when, on one of my walks through town, I found the following sign.


I still haven’t figured out what it means – I believe it is a sign for a hotel or hostel. But how nice it was to see my favorite deity, the pot-bellied Ganesha, the Elephant God, rendered so well so far away from home.

Hurling size 10 shoes: What people do in a free society

By now, most of you would have seen this. As Falstaff says, reality can sometimes outdo fiction. What was President Bush's response? This:

“All I can report is it is a size 10,” he said, continuing to take questions and noting the apologies. He also called the incident a sign of democracy, saying, “That’s what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves,” as the man’s screaming could be heard outside.