Duuuuuuuude.

Wtf?

The BBC said the deal would enable it to develop a "huge amount" of digital and online opportunities with the brand, particularly in relation to existing BBC content such as Planet Earth and Michael Palin's New Europe.

This acquisitions thing. BBC has done it before.

The McMansions of Our Minds - Prelude.

It was sheer serendipity that made me notice the quetzal CD lying on my computer table.

Actually, it isn't the quetzal CD; it is, in fact, the _Quipukamak_ CD. Quipukamak Vol 4, to be precise. From Ecuador, the CD politely, but firmly, announces in English, before cheerfully adding, that it is, in fact, Latin music. I was just lazy to reach for the CD when I wrote the earlier sentence, so I abbreviated its full pronto-Spanish name to 'quetzal'. You may mispronounce 'nuclear', but you can't choke on this one.

Now, you have to understand: even on the best of days, my computer table is merely overflowing with stuff. It's mostly very helpful stuff, mind you, (computer) mice, keyboards, an opened CPU, my work IC, wallet, my lucky Parker pen that dad gave me and other useful stuff too numerous to list. Today morning, though, there were also a few books; a friend had left his dog-eared National Geographic collection with me while moving to the US, and I had taken to carefully analyzing them on my daily morning commutes. The National Geographics have now taken to stretching themselves on that computer table; I suppose the room is as good a place as any for them to get a yellow tan.

That is to say, I'm fairly certain Quetzal simply willed itself into positioning itself on top of that opened CPU.

Not the first time this has happened, mind you; as recently as two weeks back, it mysteriously, but suggestively, apparated itself in my sling-on bag in a Banjara Hills mall. A friend and I were visiting one of those new-fangled all-you-can-gawk-at malls in Hyderabad on my holiday there. Lumbini, like 911, had changed everything; my friend and I opened our bags for inspection as soon as we saw that lone security guard sitting blankly, next to a beeping metal detector. The guard was as bewildered as anyone else was, I suppose, with all these new security arrangements; he was eyeing us in askance when he saw us open our bags.

He was, however, professional; putting on the best serious face he could muster, he proceeded to examine whatever we were stretching out for him. What is this, he asked, picking up a USB bluetooth adapter that fell out of my bag. I decided to be open with him; I began to explain its utility at length. Say you have your mobile, I said, picking his mobile up. Say you have your friend's mobile number on this. Now say you want to enter the number on a computer. A computer sir, he asked. Yes, a computer, I said, you want to enter the number in a computer, perhaps to save his phone number on Orkut or something. How would you do that?, I asked rhetorically, pausing for a second for some drama. Why, using this of course!, I said, holding the adapter victoriously.

I don't think he believed me. He continued to stare at me vaccously, before picking up the Quetzal CD.

What is this?, he asked. I'm sure he knew what it was. Uhhh, a CD?, I said, unsure of why he was asking this. Yes, what CD is this?, he asked.

I stared at the Quetzal CD deeply. There was, in addition to the PowerPoint-ed font salad on its front cover, a slightly disturbing charcoal drawing of a balding, almost skeletal, guitar player holding a banjo, and showing his bone-thin phalanges off. That is, it _was_ a charcoal drawing, before it was scanned, photoshopped, and greyscaled to a dark olive-green texture. It was disturbing, because one of the hands playing the guitar-like-banjo-ed rugby ball seemingly came from nowhere. Almost like a hungry Chinese ghost would touch you for some favours in the seventh month, you could say. QUIPUKAMAK, it finally summarized, in two colours, neither matching each other, nor with the dark-olive-green background.

I, uh, don't know how it came here, I said finally, deciding to stick to the truth.

An uncomfortable silence was threatening to ensue. My friend quickly interjected, however; : eedho music CD saar, he tried to sardufy, asking us let us go inside. The guard finally relented, insisting that I pass under the metal detector with the CD in tow. Just in case, I'm sure he thought.

Just what was it, then, my friend later asked, just as he was tucking into a plate of Thai yellow curry. I held it for him. He stared at the diseased guitar player, read the double appellation. Unsatisfied, he turned it over, and read the track list. Pop?, he asked, reading the track list. No, Spanish I'm sure, I replied, Latin in fact, Latin music from Ecuador. Then why is track three called "In the Middle of the Road"?, he asked, trying to challenge me for the scene earlier at the metal detector. I snatched the CD, and read the title of the sixth track there. Mountain of Happiness, it announced, followed by Por Una Gota De Tu Voz and Pituco after that.

I had specifically asked for this, of course. Many many moons ago.

(To be continued)

||News|| Whoa.

As an addendum to the discussion on reservations, and because I know this will get drowned in rest of the spin, thought I'd highlight what the Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court is actually saying:

"The last caste census was done in 1931" and "all census since 1951 have break-up of population based on religion only" not caste. [...]  The petition refers to the Kaka Kalekar Committee which in the 1950s had "enumerated approximately 1,200 OBC castes" and the Mandal Commission which listed some 2,200 castes as OBCs "based on social and economic criteria". [...] the OBC list has been increased further with some 3,200 castes being included.

"Mandal Commission had fixed OBC population in India at 52% based on fictitious data. (from article)

 
That's right, ladies and gentlemen, the definitive political struggle for an entire generation of Indian students, one that had put the country on hold for weeks in 1990, and threatens to do so again now in 2006, is based on a twenty-five-year-old statistical lie.

Today's A.Word.A.Day--manque

manque (mang-KAY) adjective

   Unfulfilled in realization of one's potential or ambition.

[From French manqué, past participle of manquer (to lack), from Italian mancare, from manco (lacking, defective), from Latin mancus (maimed, having a crippled hand). Ultimately from Indo-European root man- (hand) that's also the source of manage, maintain, maneuver, manufacture, manuscript, and command.]

What I want.

Some sort of a plugin for iTunes that randomly places my podcast
subscriptions into my party shuffle playlist. That'd be like creating
your own radio channel. Think of it as My Yahoo for audio.

So Stark, the Con of Dan.

Just watched Hollywood's finest self-flaggellation attempt since, ah well, Mel Gibson, and.... it's okay, not as bad as the critics panned it, has its moments. Audrey Tatou, though, needs to work on her Hollywood emotions, even as her English delivery is fine. I suppose she's not really used to taking herself seriously.

Which, if you think about it, is my real criticism of the book and movie; my issue with the book isn't really that it presents distorted half-truths as fiction (hated the narrative, cringed at the characters, loved the quick trivia-fix and found those cryptograms quaintly evocative, just as a certain British judge did), but that it's so bloddy self-righteous in its message. Sheesh people, it's just another trashy airport novel, not the Second Revelation.

Releasing today on chat messengers worldwide, the phrase, "So Dark, the Con of Man", will be on display on my Google and MSN nicks for the next few days.

The Minars of Nazareth.

Alright. Finally finished reading up From The Holy Mountain after three-odd months of reading while commutting.  For those of you who haven't been paying attention to hints I've been dropping all along, it's a rivetting contemporary travelogue through the last remnants of the ancient Byzantine empire. The Byzantine empire, the book asserts, is an era when Christianity had just supplanted the earlier Pagan beliefs, to become the sole choice of the religiously inclined, in the Middle East.

Indeed, the most startling of the messages of the book was that Islam, in its nascent stages during the inter-regnum between the decaying Byzantine empire and the still pre-pubescent Islamic civilizational centers, was once considered as one of the many theological branches in Christianity no different from Gnostics, the Suriani, the Maronites, Coptics and other assorted sects that dot the Holy Land. It's a long-forgotten tale of how the Christian practice of kneeling down before a cross became the Muslim namaz, of how fasting during the month of Lent became Ramadan, of Jerusalem-facing square church-towers becoming round Mecca-facing minarets. The setting is evocative, three religions co-operating in their religious imagery for a thousand-odd years, before tragically replacing each others in the past one hundred years, with genocides in Turkey and Lebanon, occupation in Palestine and Israel, and fundamentalist terrorism in Egypt.

In many ways, this ties in with the larger politico-ideological commentary of the book. There's this strong undercurrent in the book on how Christian communities in the Middle East seem to have been forgotten by their co-religionists in the West, at a time when their very existence is in question. Why do the US and UK support Israel uncritically when the regime there seems to be extremely eager in destroying any non-Jewish community, Muslim, Palestinian Christian or Armenian, in Jerusalem and West Bank? Clearly, if this was a clash of civilizations, shouldn't the Christian-majority West be concerned about Israeli settlements in Bethelhem or Nazareth, for example?

The answer, I believe, lies not just in the apparent power of the Jewish lobby in the US (personally I don't quite think it exists, but that's besides the point) as many would suggest, but more importantly in the hagiographies involved of the modern Israeli nation. Consider, for example, the official narrative for a West Bank settlement mentioned in the book, Ariel:

Aliyah & Absorption
Thousands of new immigrants, from the four corners of the world, have chosen to build their homes in Ariel and have been successfully integrated into the community. Today, over 45 % of Ariel's population are immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Many special programs and projects, from Hebrew Ulpan classes to rent controlled housing for senior citizens, have been established to let the newcomers know they are wanted and welcome in Ariel. [emphasis mine]

Consider the values the City would like to espouse. This, unlike similar gated communities in the US for example, doesn't mind people who might be different in a few respects, and in fact, offers abundant housing options and efforts at e-governance. The operative word here is that bad L word; this is a liberal town, the website seems to say, a forward-looking, technologically-oriented, open-minded muncipality established in an exotic, Biblical land.

The untold part, of course, is what has been white-washed; Ariel, despite being in the middle of a thick coat of orange in the map, is actually war-zone central:

Ariel is the first reported case of colonizing efforts in the Salfit district, which at the present time has a 1:1 ratio of Israeli settlers to Palestinian residents. The Salfit district has become an extremely important location for Israeli settlement policy, and now Israeli settlements (24) outnumber Palestinian villages (22) and cover almost 10% of the land area of Salfit. Ariel settlement is the most well known and largest of the Salfit settlements, and with its own college, municipal court, and police station, has long been thought of within Israeli society as just another "town", rather than a settlement in the West Bank. Some of the factors that help to explain Ariel's significance within Israeli settlement policy include the abundance of water and agricultural resources in the Salfit district (known as the breadbasket of the West Bank). Additionally, a major "Israeli population center" in the geographical heart of the West Bank ultimately acts as a "fact on the ground", cementing Israel's control of the area and acting as an impediment to Palestinian territorial contiguity.

Smart City it might be, but all said and done, Ariel a strategic land-grab, not unlike basti-dwellers squatting over at the National park in Borivili, Mumbai, only more tragic in its human cost. However, and this is where the conflict is at its most interesting, narratives in Israel seem to emphasise a liberal basis for the nation; this is an open nation with a functioning multi-party democracy, they seem to say, but one that has had to take some unfortunate decisions that's best not discussed in public.

In other words, a clash of civilization exists, but at two levels; at the ground level, there are religions, Muslims, Jews, Christians (and Christian sects, Armenians and Palestinians), competing for land and other resources. At a higher level, there are political systems, in terms of  competing for influence and power. Israel, being a Jewish democracy, fights for the Jews on the ground, but as a liberal democracy. That is to say, while it operates at this ground-level clash as a representation of the Jewish civilization, at the higher-level clash, it operates as being the only representative-democracy out there. When it comes to supporting regimes, whom would you support; an elected, multi-party democractically-elected government, or a known fundamentalist, dare I say terrorist, organization? We in a center-of-right, liberal-democractic world, would like to support the former.

But clearly, it isn't easy to do so, perhaps even troubling to uncritically take sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Armenian sector in East Jerusalem, the book suggests, has been systematically neglected in preference to the Jewish quarter. Ancient monasteries and churches remain buried under newly built highways, while recently excavated sites of Jewish interest get a touristy makeover. They all want us out, says an Armenian Father, in 20-30 years, there'd be no Armenian presence in Jerusalem for the first time in a thousand years. I'll freely admit to not following the Israel-Palestine conflict as closely as I probably should have, so my thoughts here might come out as being näive, but it'd be very interesting indeed to read Israeli responses to the book; I, for one, had to stop ask: why? Why is it so difficult for an apparent liberal democracy to simply give full citizenship to everyone within your stated borders, and be done with it? Why did a (Palestinian) village find it necessary to organize itself to kill a corrupt, authoritarian, Israel-supported Palestinian mayor, and not vote him out, as we'd do even in the most violence-prone parts of India, in Kashmir or Manipur?

This lack of democracy, quite clearly, is the story in the rest of the Middle East too. With the exception of Turkey (and even there, it'll be possible to argue that the Kurd homelands are under military rule), none of the other countries in the book have free and fair elections; there are guards, governmental minders, refugees, nuns, warlords, mysterious spies, but troublingly for me, no competing political ideologies. Which is a pity, really, given that none of the countries involved are actually Islamic nations in the Wahaabist notion of the term; they might be authoritarian and dictatorial, but at heart, they've been founded on secular principles. It is possible to be Arab and not be Muslim, it seems, so much so that calling the Middle East as the "Muslim World" is perhaps as erroneous as calling Western Europe as "Christendom"; sad, really, that there's so little civic society participation in what goes on there.

Which brings us to my final thought-worthy point from the book, that on defending artistic freedom. We've had a heated debate here a few months back on art depicting religious motifs, and indeed, one of the finer points was that Islam seems to different from other religions in its frowning over sacred art. Given the earlier discussion on how Islam and Christianity had so much in common, it now seems strange to note this difference in sentiment. Why do Islam, and apparently Judaism, abhor sacred art, while Christianity seems to revel in it? Interestingly enough, iconoclasm, the destruction of religious icons, did exist in (Christian) Byzantine spheres as well, and indeed, is something that I see as a stark contrast to later Ottoman era miniatures which excelled in depicting Islamic motifs. Much of the theological support for iconophily was, however, Dalrymple suggests, opposed by the writings of a Byzantine monk, a certain St John Damascene, who was perhaps the first to oppose iconoclasm on theological grounds:

If I have no books I go to church, pricked as by spines by my thoughts; the flower of painting makes me look, charms my eyes as does a flowering meadow and softly distils the glory of God in my soul. (from the book, p. 300 - 301)

Art, we're asked to ponder, has the soul of God, and therefore needs to be protected. This is a sentiment that I find myself whole-heartedly applauding; religious art is what drives this otherwise, non-religiously-inclined Advaitist to Hindu temples, Buddhist shrines, Islamic mosques and Christian churches. Where would we be, hadn't it been for the Angkor Wats, the Hagia Sofias, and the Mecca Masjids of our imaginations?

Along with Gladwell, Amartya Sen, Ram Guha and others, Dalrymple is one of the more contemporary thinkers I seem to be tuning into for quite some time. In fact, the manner in which he's been exerting his intellectual ideas on yours truly is rather fiend-ish, given his apparent penchant for mystical tales involving demons and djinns. Should be interesting to read his narrative of what appears to be one of the greatest jihads the world has ever seen.

(Update - 2006.5.21 & 2006.5.22: Significant re-editting.)

Persian Spring In Hollywood.

So I just came back from watching MI3. Not too bad for an all-out Tom
Cruise-meets-globalized-baddies-helping-evil-middle-easterners-in-exotic-China-fest,
but as far as I'm concerned, the movie was a tragedy.

You see, personally, brown has always been the new black, and it was a
shame that the most stunning actress in tinsel town, errr, well, sod
it, I'll spoil it for you guys, DIES in the end.

What is even more a shame is that I apparently cant get a better
picture of hers on the web at this late hour, but Bahar Soomekh, if
you're reading this, you've swooned yet another twenty-something-er
over. And oh, get that make-up off, will ya; brown, like I said, is the
new black.

(For the Persian-challenged among you folks, 'Bahar' in Persian means 'spring')

Nice Aftertaste.

Despite the overreaching taste of Paracetamol in my mouth, what with
my relapsed fever, must say that today's lunch went off well. There
was *some* sexual tension, perhaps four on a scale of 1 to 10,
although I certainly hope it was not one-way.

Just a confidence boost, that's all. No long term prospects though.

My Chair Broke.

And I fell. Therein lies a story of commoditized globalization.

It was a nice chair, actually, a bwig, black executive chair that swings, pitches, tilts and yaws. You'd be forgiven for thinking it had a leather cushioning, but the reality, as it were, is much more nuanced; it had pseudo leather with pinches of cushioning that exist only to remind us that all good chairs must have some cushioning, even if it isn't exactly useful.

Over the four months I've had it, I've made exactly utilitarian enhancement; I somehow entwined my speaker system's volume control onto one of the arms. It's a minor change, and indeed, perhaps not entirely aesthetically pleasing, the cleaning lady who comes once a month to clean my house always makes it a point to disconnect the volume control and the wire from the sub-woofer source. The overall effect, though, is that of sheer, unbridled power; with my A/C remote and telephone to my left, music to my right, my wireless keyboard, mouse, office laptop and home comp in front, I knew it was only a matter of time before I get on with that taking-over-the-world process in earnest in a way neither Captain Kirk, nor trivia(l) masterminds could.

Until that is, it all came tumbling down tonight.

I was watching X-Men 2 on the comp while it happened. Actually, I think a lot of things happened simultaneously; those security folks attack the school, some mutant kid screams the hell out of my speaker system, another dissaparates through wooden floors, I received some astrological spam assuring me that my next week would be even more mundane than this one... and I'm on the ground, with my right arm hurting from all that sudden weight thrust upon it.

While I am shaken by the experience, I can't help feel stirred by the larger macro-picture from the above. You see, it was a bargain deal, or at least was supposed to be; between the sleazy furniture dealer around the corner, and those overpriced, unpronounceable swivel chairs from IKEA, I had opted to buy a cheap one from a local French hypermart chain, Carrefour. Unfortunately, those French marketers, with their double entendres and convoluted phrases, didn't quite mean "least expensive in town" when they said "cheapest in town". They had, instead, meant to say, well, low-cost, shoddily made, unfinished... cheapest.

The overall result, therefore, is something very familiar to Americans; I got a low-cost product sourced directly from some Shenzhen warehouse without, it now appears, passing through QC or other upper-class niceties.

My feet may be firmer on the ground now, but alas, I'm left with only two options and neither of them entirely desireable. Either I could show some Asian street-smarted-ness, eat crow and haggle with that neighbourhood furniture guy once more, orI could show some Indian ingenuity, eat crow and fix this with super-glue or duct-tape. In which case, alwas, there's only one place to get my hardware supplies in this region, Carrefour.

My world domination plan may be temporarily in pieces, and to steal an idiom from a longtime favourite comic (points for getting the reference), I seem to now throw my weight around more often, but oh, the choices we have to make just to stand on our feet.

Today's A.Word.A.Day Quote

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes. -Joseph Roux, priest and writer
(1834-1886)