The Hangng of Saddam Hussain

So they've finally hanged Saddam. Saddam the great big evil dictator, who killed so many Iraqis. Saddam the terrible, who invaded Kuwait, supposedly had nuclear weapons and who promised to fight the mother of alll wars. Eventually, the shambling relic became, in his words, the sacrifice for Islam, and died at the end of a long rope at a secret location.

I'm not really sure the man didn't deserve it. He was a brutal man who headed a brutal repressive government, killed millions of fellow humans with poison gas, and tortured and executed political opponents. A man who lived by the sword, and who it was expected would die by one.

No, the question is simply this - did the Americans, or the puppet government who rules in their name, have the moral legitimacy to execute the man?

I can understand the need to hang Saddam - a deep desire to close a chapter, a feeling that as long as he was alive he would serve as a rallying point for insurgents, a fear that when the American armies left, the Baathists left could come back and return him to power. It's an age old tradition to execute the enemy after displaying him in a triumph - from Vercingetorix to Najibullah, via the Nazi top brass and the Romanovs. In fact it was good leadership, according to Macchiavelli.

Accept it, Admit it.

The neoconservative ruling class in the USA would not admit to such motives. Accepting such a motive would anger the voting public, sheltered from the harsh realities of real war.

OK, one can understand the need of the US to finish off the enemy commander before they finally cut their losses and run. One can understand the motive in handing over Saddam to the Iraqi government for the execution.

But what galls me is when Bush tries to be holier than thou when talking about the execution. After all, the US happily supported Iraq through the worst excesses of Saddam's regime and only turned against him when the Kuwaiti oil-wells were threatened. The US hasn't fought a moral holy war. It was realpolitik, plain and simple - and economics as well. The welfare of Iraqis was the last thing on the minds of US policymakers.

When the US will face the inevitable backlash of anger, its citizens will wring their hands in horror and wonder what they did to deserve that.

Merry Christmas

Worst PJ of the season: Bappi Lahiri on Radio Mirchi:

Yeh Merry Christmas hai to teri Christmas bhi to hai!

(For those who do not speak Hindi, translation impossible - thank God)

Anyway dear readers, the time approaches when ol' St. Nicholas squeezes himself down chimneys and radiator wires to bring gifts for little children. Poor man, it's lucky that he has so much to do while preparing for the season that he manages to slim down enough to be able to sqeeze down increasingly narrowing chimneys.
Mathematicians have calculated that Rudolf the red-nose successfully approaches the speed of light while ensuring delivery to milions of kids, taking advantage of time dilation and a rotating earth to get Santa's work done.

Poor Yesu, who it has now been revealed, was never the only child of a virgin but a younger sibling of a whole brood. No wonder he managed to feed the multitude with three loaves and some fish.
Being the runt of the litter must have given him enough training in eking out nourishment out of the scraps left over by the older siblings.

The poor kid, tested by birth by a triad of Zoroastrian priests, must have had a tough time getting looked at by shepherds in a cold December. I guess that toughened him enough to be able to take a bath under the guidance of St. John the Baptist - which couldn't have been a common thing at that time...

In the meantime I hear that this year the elves had struck work for a day demanding higher DA. Eventually it was settled by a 0.25% increase in the contributory retirement benefit, along with a promise not to outsource their work to Taiwan.

Meantime, please heed the warning by the WHO - chronic foot and mouth disease can be spread by Santa coming in contact with dirty stockings. A spokesperson for the organisation has advised parents to ensure that Santa gets to touch only freshly disinfected stockings. And Santa has been requested to keep his Form 37H (Exemption from Quarantine of Imported Animals) ready for easy transit of Rudolf.

Enough updates - there's a fat man trying to squeeze down the chimney - he's stuck and groaning about what seems to be the last piece of chocolate cake for which there was no space in the refrigerator. Poor man, I'd better give him a hand...

A Necklace of Flash

The fashionable flash sticks have spelt the death of the floppy disk. Apart from the new series of double entendres in which the new device has replaced its jurassic predecessor, they are smaller, more rugged and hold more data.

They also have the dubious distinction of being small enough to fall down from your pocket and go down the drain. So new flash drives come with a strap which could be worn around the neck.

If you go so far, why not go a bit further? Current flash drives hold up to 4 GB data. If you wish to have 40 GB data - roughly the information in a hard drive, you need 10 flash sticks. Instead of 10 straps, why not string them into a necklace, and get designers make you gold, silver and platinum sticks. Alternatively the sticks can be rhodium polished to make them attractive. In fact you could do more - hold them together in a key-chain or wear them like a bandolier. A new industry of stick designers will vie with each other to make custom made stick ornaments.

By which time a new memory device would have been invented to hold 1 petabyte in a chip small as a nail. And a new ornament form would have to be invented. If I'd have my rathers, I'd select Theva memory chips...

Good night gentle reader... enough verbal diarrhoea from me.

Driving Home - Part 2

Even a Humvee driven by a murderous maniac would have trouble getting through the mess of a traffic on Mehrauli Gurgaon Road. The traffic has increased to the point that at normal hours (i.e. not between midnight and 2 in the morning), the cars just crystallize into position and are unable to move. Crystallography talks of degrees of freedom, and Professor G Sundar tried to teach us how to calculate it. On MG Road, the value is easy to work out - Zero. You cannot move. If you move your elbow, you will poke it into the eye of a fellow motorist, who will turn around and fire a bullet through the head.

Creatures like me harbour the deep rooted desire to return home and go to sleep, so MG road is an absolute no-no. Even the T-72 tank that I had planned to obtain would find it difficult to pass through the crystal maze, so alternate methods of locomotion is a must.

So, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the god-foresaken road past Mandi-gaon. It's a narrow road, currently used by a few Qualis drivers and chauffeurs of the rich and famous (who own the farmhouses along that road). The road connects Andheria More on one side to the Gurgaon-Faridabad highway. If you take a turn on the way, you could pass the Chattarpur village and reach Anuvrat Marg, a kilometer from the Qutub Minar.

At a time when it takes two hours on the MG road route, the alternate route, 10 Km longer, takes an hour.

And, an hour's extra sleep is welcome any day!

Stranger in a Strange Land Part 2

I've got to admit, the New Jersey Transit trains are quite enjoyable if you travel in off peak hours, buy the ticket at vending machines (You save 5$ - which at the 43X factor is quite a bit)and don't try to use the waiting room. A gentleman of chinese origin left his luggage there, stepped outside to get some air and realised that he could not get back in. The door would not open till the next morning.

I reached New York Penn Station - stepped outside and got my first impression of New York. It was full of oversize buildings that were drab and gray, and reeked of big money. No wonder bin Laden and his ilk thought they had bulls-eyes painted on them.

During the week-end I managed to wear out my new jelly-filled insoled footwear at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) and at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). It was a dream experience - pictures I'd spent a lifetime admiring in print, seen in reality. It takes a long time to sink in that you are in a room where every itty bitty piece of work is worth millions of dollars. And then it hits you again - they are worth every bit of it. What impressed me even more is the way these paintings and exhibits are displayed. I wish the curators of the dusty galleries and museums of India could take a look at how beautifully these exhibits are displayed to maximise their effect.

I was most impressed by a special exhibit, called "An American In Paris", about how the most famous among the artists in America - Whistler, Homer, Copley, Sargent, among others - studied art in Paris, and exhibited their works at the salon there. The exhibit, garnished with quotes of extravagent quotes in praise of Paris (Sample: When a good American dies, he goes to Paris - Oscar Wilde), are a touching counterpoint to the sneering ill will the American media harbours for France today. I was also a bit amused to note the tremendous similarity between the style favoured by a majority of the American artists with the neo-realistic school of Russian art. Two nations, at opposite poles of the Cold War world, influenced culturally by the same nation! An irony, at least... in both countries, impressionism was held in genteel contempt.

The MoMA was of course far more bewildering. A room with lights switching on and off (that was the exhibit!), a video of a young woman smashing the windows of cars while people look on admiringly, a room where the roof appear to have fallen in, the insane paint splashes of Pollock, a wallpaper of a pharmacy (made to look like the visual identification page from Physician's Desk Reference, except that the text are the names of chapters from the Bible). In comparison the Picassos and Henry Moores are quite accessible and sensible. The section on modern design was fascinating - you'd seldom think of a table lamp, or an airport flight announce ment board to be highly artistic design, but then they are! The fan blades of a GE turboprop engine, carefully whittles out by a 5-axes CNC lathe, also hardly appears like art. I guess, beyond a point, art, science and engineering all tend to overlap.

Tucked away in one corner of MoMA is Andrew Wyeth's famous Christina's World. This famous painting certainly deserves greater prominence - the careful detail of the painting, never captured in the most accurate reproduction, certainly heightens the pathos. It deserved a room to itself, not a corner of a 5th floor.

Of course I loved a special exhibition of Manet's The Execution of Emperor Maximilian. While trying to figure out the origin of the name of Delhi's Benito Juares Marg, I'd come across the history of Mexico's freedom struggle, and how Maximilian, the puppet king set up by the French, had offered Juarez a post in his cabinet. Juarez had refused, and having overthrown Maximilian and his rather inept generals, had them executed, to great outrage in Europe. I'd seen reproductions of the painting, but never knew that Manet had painted three versions. With studies of the painting and lithographic reproductions of other illustrators of the execution, it was quite a study into the influence of a well known painting.

I returned to Parsippany late on Sunday. At the Morris Plains station, I saw a note on the door of the waiting room:

The gentleman who left his luggage in the waiting room last night is requested
to collect his belongings from the office.

Poor man, I wonder if he did get his luggage back!

Stranger in a Strange Land

Now that I have officially got over the jetlag (Ha ha, I have woken up at midnight feeling as fresh as I would at sunrise!) I am finally getting down to putting in my promised two bits on my travel beyond kaalapani.

British Airways dropped me off in Philadelphia exactly 24 hours behind schedule. I thought it was an auspicious start - I missed meeting the global head of our company - John Clarke is an aggressive New Zealander with a taste in things like rugby - so maybe it's not a bad thing.

The delay was made up by a very polite official of the CBP - quite different from the stereotype dragons at JFK. I got my visa stamped without a fuss, with a cheery "Good day to you!" Pretty decent weather, polite taxi drivers and a good hotel. Later heard from Dad that the Rittenhouse was once the best hotel in Philadelphia.

First impression? Well the Americans use a lot of concrete. The roads seemed to be a maze of express-ways and flyovers. Once I'd got over the fear of being driven on the wrong side of the road, I got to take a good look at the scenery. With all the concrete, I had one wish - if only they's paint them a bit brighter...

At the hotel got my first shock:

We would please request you not to venture out of the hotel alone in the early morning and late evening. There have been incidents just outside the hotel, so we would advise you to be careful for your safety, and always travel in groups.

There goes the planet - the only time these geezers will allow me to wander around is exactly when I have to be locked up listening to offical waffle. Made a note to myself - must get them to sponsor another trip here to see the Liberty bell. Ha!

But they made up for it with an excellent dinner at a steakhouse in the King of Prussia Mall. With the malls infiltrating our middle class existance in India, malls have become a bit of a so what for us. Plus the 43X factor, which pervades our soul - I confess that I didn't quite adore the experience.

(To be continued...)

An Idea for Icecream

Lately, sheer laziness and a good cook has conspired to make my attempts at culinary innovations a fairly rare occasion. It's unusual at this time of the year - usually the brightly coloured vegetable barrows in winter are a sheer temptation to try my hand at something new.

Several friends, at the receiving end of new experiments, often ask me, where do you get ideas for all this? They usually have a look of martyred resignation, steeling themselves for bouts of nausea, food poisoning, diarrhoea or worse. Only when they find themselves to have miraculously survived another sunrise do they trickle back to ask for the recipe.

At such occasions i am strictly truthful, even to the point of admitting a modification to a published recipe. Over the years I have admitted:
(1) Recipes that have come in dreams (Honestly!!!),
(2) Reverse engineering from food at restaurants,
(3) Sneak peek at someones kitchen,
(4) Sheer random exuberance

But this time I have taken professional help. During a development of a fairly bitter concoction I briefed all the well known flavour houses - IFF, Firmenich, Givaurdan Roure and Symrise. And they have come out with brilliant combinations that will persuade the sweet little kiddies not to spit out what mamma spoons into their mouth.

One of the flavours that failed has, however held me spellbound. Forget Lily the Pink's Medicinal Compound. This flavour - a combination of alfonso mango, peach and vanilla is a shoo-in for the next icecream to be made during the week end.

The flavour house, which I shall not name, has thoughtfully provided the individual flavours - none of them are as good as the three of them put together. Even a small deviation in the percentage of the flavours takes away the entire charm.

So what is the combination? Sorry, that's the secret that stays in-house. After all, I did take the trouble to brief the flavour house. To the victor goes the spoils, doesn't it?

Never mind! Friends are always welcome to visit during the week-end! Advance warning (in the form of a telephone call) is a must...

Packing

I shall be travelling again at the end of the week. Its a thing I usually look at with dread. Travelling means packing.

I am bad at packing. Every time I travel, I end up postponing the packing part of the journey till the very last minute - and then hastily dumping the things I need to take into a suitcase. I end up leaving quite a few things I needed to pack, toothbrush, shaving tackle, socks, slippers...

I've never left my ticket behind. I check a million times before I reach the station or airport.

My wife loves packing. Not only for herself, but for me. She takes time and effort to select what she is going to take, intuitively works out the most optimum way of filling the suitcase, with due care to ensure that everything comes out more-or-less intact. The suitcase is carefully shut (without a pair of socks sticking out from the side), locked and carefully arranged near the front door in anticipation of our departure.

Naturally I have passed on the responsibility of packing to her capable hands. Once, in a burst of guilt, I did try to pack my bag myself, but the resultant chaos, lost temper and delayed journey swiftly convinced me to leave something to the experts.

There's something about packing that creates a mental block. Theoretically, I should be pretty good at it. I managed an A-grade in Optimisation in college, breezing through the section on Cargo Loading Problem. Even practically, my wife defers to my expertise in stuffing the last bowl of left-over into a fridge bursting to the seams.

But when it comes to packing I have waved the white flag long ago. I have done many hectic first-flight-in, last-flight-out type tours so that I didn't have to pack. I've sent colleagues out on tours instead of going myself for the same reason.

Unfortunately in the end you end up with tickets in your hand and an empty bag on the floor and a cupboard from which you've got to select which combinations of shirts, trousers, undergarments, nightwear and accessories need and should be coaxed into the suitcase.

"It's easy," says Nilanjana, "all you have to do is to first put the trousers in this way..." I don't listen any more. My wife's home, and the packing is finally in safe hands.

Just to be contrary... (Part 1)

The UPA government will be viewed in history as a group of visionaries who brought true equality to India or as a group of idiots who destroyed the chances of India ever making it big in the world economy.

With our relatively elite background, our instinct tells us that doom is near; the government is pulling us to destruction. The forcible lowering of drug prices will kill the competitiveness of the Indian pharmaceutical Industry and ruin the possibilities of innovations happening out of India, the reservation of SC/ST/OBC/Muslims in elite institutes and in the private sector will utterly ruin the effectiveness of the industry, the wastage of the taxpayers money in ruinous and futile projects like Sarva Siksha Udyog and Rural Employment Guarantee bill will bankrupt the exchequer and the Prevention of Domestic Violence Against Women will only help a small number of scheming women with an agenda against their husbands and in laws.

It's easy to agree, and predict Armageddon.

But what if we're wrong? What if we, in the words of Naipaul, the nattering nabobs of negativity, have as usual caught the wrong end of the stick? Way back in the early 90's when the economy was opening up, it was fashionable for us to look at the east Asian economies with envy and curse the government for a non convertible currency, a socialist mai-baap sarkar and for too much protection for the domestic industry. And lo and behold! The entire East-Asian economy collapsed, causing untold misery to millions and only poor left-behind India, due to its non-convertible currency emerged unscathed from the mess.

Today, we can see the ruinous short-term effect of the reservation in the private sector. But even without reservation, there is a severe shortage of employable people. The labour pool has to be seriously increased, and unless the vast numbers of backward classes are brought into the pool of educated people, India will not be able to have the necessary workforce it needs.

Of course the government is not going about it in the optimum way. Neither the 5-year term of a government, nor the necessity of reaping short term electoral benefits guides politicians to take the sensible, optimum, decades-long path to social upliftment. It has to be done now, by force if necessary, so that we have our names in the history books and our constituency votes for us.

Of course we will not get excellent English speakers with proper table manners in the first few generations. The straight-out-of-the-boondocks hillbillies will be gross misfits in the steel, glass and concrete corporate offices in Gurgaon, Andheri or Whitefield. But slowly, over a period of time the elitist culture of corporate offices would change, and the hillbillies will get smarter with the exposure.

It's not as if corporate houses are the epitome of civilized behaviour that we need to worry about the barbarians at the gates. In my experience, the veneer of civilization is very thin indeed. If SCs and STs enter the office, the infighting may become more open, but cannot be more vicious than it is now. If the new employees favour nepotism as a policy, so do the current people, under a garb of civilised behavior for sure. If we object to people who will be so sure of their immunity from dismissal that they do no work, so do many people in any office today.

We will face many hiccups initially while we adjust to the presence of each other. We may lose many American and European customers who will fear that our productivity will decrease with our reduced ability to speak fluent English, will take their business elsewhere. But once the SCs/STs/OBCs pick up, they will return, out of a greed for cheap trained labour.

After all, to a WASP executive in London or San Francisco, it doesn't matter if you are a upper caste Brahmin with a degree from Harvard or Oxford, or a poor Harijan educated at NIIT from Raigarh or Bhopal, if you can be voice trained to speak with an American or British accent. You are a FTE (so much more civilised to refer to you as an impersonal FTE rather than a Brownie, Paki or a Nigger!), who does the work for one-tenth the cost of an American employee.

(Cont...)

Driving Home

If you've ever driven down the Mehrauli Gurgaon road at a reasonable hour, it's likely that you've sometime or the other lost your temper and wanted to punch another driver on the nose. At any given time of the day it seems that most of Delhi and Gurgaon are travelling to Gurgaon or Delhi respectively. The road, originally designed for bullock carts ambling from Indraprastha to Gurudakshinagram (seriously, after one shower, the top layer washes off, showing archeological remains c 1500 b.c.) is used by literally lakhs of cars every day. It doesn't help that this road is probably the only route to much of Gurgaon, given that the NH8 super expressway is still in the distant future.

I wonder, if Guru Dronacharya had been around today, he would have probably shot off arrows to murder all the stupid drivers on the road. Naah, most likely he would have sold off his land for a few gadzillion rupees and would now be lying on the beaches in Bahamas with a nice cool drink in his hand...

I'm working on a long standing ambition - I shall buy a nice used T-72 tank from the army and use it to drive down the MG road. And if the damn Qualis from the call centre dares to cut into my path I shall roll over it with the panache of a Ukrainian cavalry man. It's nice to dream, isn't it?

Wailing of the Italian Cats (or, An Evening at the Opera)

I've always learnt about things the wrong way. I learnt about the Greek myths from the Freaky Fable spoofs by Alan Coren in Punch. I read excerpts of The Prince in Science Fiction stories. Yesterday I saw the Parma Orcestra and opera at the Italian Festival in Delhi and realised that I'd known about the derivative long ago, and had to wait years to see the original.

We've all see the Hollywood musicals - most of us have, or at least seen their derivative, the Bollywood song-and-dance movie. If you've thought about it, you'd realise that they were based on stage musicals at Broadway and at other places. My fair Lady, Sound of Music, Oklahoma, ... all these were extremely successful musical shows on Broadway before they were made into acclaimed films.

Of course, these shows were the child of a tradition exemplified by Gilbert and Sullivan, and (AHAAA, now we come to the point!) G&S themselves were anglicization of the European traditional opera.

It takes a short time, listening to the soprano and tenor from the Parma opera to make that connection. It's easy if your not distracted by the language, or the beauty of a trained voice. Once you've made the observation that the opera does sound like a team of wailing cats, and you've glanced at the explanatory notes in the programme by the light of your mobile phone, you soon realise that the singing is strikingly similar to what we've seen and heard in the films - the same acting with the voice, the same kind of story-line and the same kind of music. Of course, a purist would say that a Verdi was a greater composer than say a music hall tune-meister, but it's a question of the type of music - they are so very similar.

I enjoyed the show quite a bit, even though we had to sit in one dingy corner, where a view of the stage was obstructed by hordes of people, and we had to see the stage on a screen (The better seats were occupied by Sheila Dikshit, her entourage and VIPs from all the embassies in Delhi). We were surrounded by softly whispering pairs, each more eager for the chance to hold hands than to figure out what was being sung. The conductor, Marco Boni, a gentleman who looked a stouter version of Tom Hanks in the days when he still had hair, and the orchestra played beautifully - at least music has no language or dialect, and the mosquitos had a feast at our expense.

We ended the night with dinner at Flavours, and while waiting saw NDTVs Sonia Singh having dinner with Andy Sehgal of the Oil-for-Food-Scandal fame. The food was as usual good. The service, as usual, was lousy.

Bi-Curious & Other Tales

Today at the lunch table, where the conversation usually veers from the rotten food towards the risque, a colleague of mine dropped a bombshell:

Men notice women. Women, on the other hand, notice
both men and women.

Um um!

No issues on the first part. Almost every man aspires to be a lovable lecher (A title held by Asimov, before he succumbed to the dratted HIV), but usually manages the latter title. The ones who don't are usually either (a) good at hiding their gazes or (b) gay. I used to think Einstein was an exception till I read about his escapades in one of his biographies. If the tales are half correct, he didn't have much time in between leching and sleeping around to cast a glance at E=Mc2. And poor Mileva had to do the tensor calculus for him.

OK, accepted.

But if my colleague is correct, women are (in the words of a journo acquaintance), bi-curious. Not bi-sexual, mind you, or we'd be living in a Joan Russ world, but clearly enough to hurt the egos of a lot of preening peacocks. I mean, what's the use of thinning your wallet to get that stud look if the girls are actually wondering about the vital statistics of the new girl in the corner cubicle? At least half the time. It would be a shock for many of my college friends, who spent most of their waking hours thinking of the inhabitants of Meera Bhavan, to realise that they were being thought of only half the time. What a waste!

Of course if you were me, you'd welcome the state of affairs. When you dress to look like a walking garbage bin, and have been too lazy to shave, and reek of mebendazole laced sweat, you'd be glad if the ladies looked the other way. Anything is better than having to spend hours in looking presentable. Slobs of the world, rejoice. Our keepers aren't bothered about us, half the time.

Yippee!