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...)