To hell with News !

Because this is the sort of news that is dished out even by the BBC - the best of a sickeningly bad lot. What have we come to ? is this really the sort of thing that the public care about or want to read ? Why does making money have to mean that only the most stupid crass, gross and sickening things get printed ? Im through with this. Im done with mass media and conventional ideas of culture and entertainment. It makes me angry and sad. how did things come to this ? bombs, death, fun, murder, sex, lust, consumption consumption and god. I hate the whole lot.

The Opportunity for a New Rennaissance

Image Source BBC

A Soyuz rocket leaves the Bainkour Cosmodrome to take a new crew to the ISS, representing the greatest achievement of our species and all that is good in it. It is symptomatic of a remnant of the pioneering spirit that has led us to the domination of our biosphere and made us the most successful species (in terms of complexity and versatility) that our planet has ever seen. It is no mean achievement, and many times in our past we might have become extinct had it not been for some fortuitous circumstances coupled with our own ingenuity. What has distinguished us from all other species goes beyond what we label "intelligence". It is not merely the capacity to process information and manipulate the environment with our opposable-thumb-equipped appendages, but the desire and the drive to learn and explore and stick our neck out, that has set us apart.

In the past the great expansions of our species and the great migrations (including recent ones like the American conquest of the wild west and the Russian conquest of Siberia and the far east) have been driven by economic factors - a thirst for resources and food, driven by the people at the bottom of the pyramid, who had the least to lose and most to gain from taking risk and braving the dangers of the unknown. The rich might finance the discoveries and administer the empires, but it is always the poor who actually make the land their own and make it productive, and provide the expendable numbers who die and reproduce to push ever further the boundaries of the domain of mankind.

We already dominate the land masses of our planet, and we are fast stripping them bare and the unsustainable nature of our civilization is making itself obvious to even the most obtuse among us. Millions of our fellow men go hungry because we just cant be bothered about feeding them, our civilization has insulated most of us from human suffering and has insidiously sucked us into a vortex of shallow entertainment to the point where we are perpetually bored. This is a result of the complete lack of opportunity for worthy exploration and meaningful risk in our societies today. The only risks we take - in mountains and rivers and jungles - are for our entertainment and pleasure. Perhaps today, even when so many of us have so much leisure and vast resources and knowledge bases at our command, the number of explorers and pioneers as a percentage of the population is at an all time low. And so our kids do drugs and play video games and preach jihad when they should be picking up the skills that will stand by them on some worthy task.

The reasons for this web of interrelated problems lie in the fact that our species is at a crucial point in its history, we are at the base of a great leap, one that we cannot break up into manageable hops and cannot hope to take in the natural course of events - because, the next phase in the expansion of our species must play out in the vastness of space and the depths of the ocean. It is not possible for individuals or small groups to participate in this,without heavy investment from the defining institutions - nation states - of our era. The very nature of the challenges we face is such that they require us to act together as a species rather than as a collection of random individuals, and so far, we have shown ourselves to be quite incapable of doing anything of the sort. We have been vacillating for decades if not centuries, bickering and butchering, we have become soft and feeble minded. The lives of men - and any meaning that might be found in them - are determined by the quality of the ideals and utopias they choose to pursue, and we have spent too much of recent history in the bloody and perfidious pursuit of narrow, contradictory and stunted ideas. Men need worthy challenges and dangers to bring out what is best in them, men need impossible odds and mighty causes to bind them together and it is up to our leaders, who are in the privileged position of being able to allocate the truly vast resources brought together by our civilization to give mankind the chance to galvanize itself, to sally forth into the unknown and conquer and toil and set up new worlds.

The conquest of the oceans and of the solar system will provide inspiration to a disillusioned race, it will revitalize the population, it will provide chances for the risk takers to seek fortune and the the frustrated to redeem themselves, it will be the most splendid stage men will have ever had to cover themselves with glory. It will distract the devout among us from the rantings of priests and save the skeptical from the blatherings of politicians, it will force the greedy to be brave and the offer the bored a chance to be audacious, Men will see vistas and wonders hitherto unimaginable, and that is why we live is it not - to go further, venture deeper, learn more than ever before ! What can be more pointless than stagnation and the pursuit of money and riches without tying it into exploration and knowledge ? what can be more boring than living exactly like our forefathers, seeing only what they have seen (now polluted, and on a computer screen), what can be more sad than young men looking for adventure in computer generated illusions !

It is time mankind dared to live and dream again. It is time we realized, as our faraway ancestors did, that our species and the pursuit of knowledge and the exploration of the unknown are things glorious and magnificent enough to die for. The physical and psychological challenges of space and the deep ocean await us, we must accept them, we must live again !

St. Andrews

The Playing fields of the University

The landscaping along West Sands (beach)

A view of the beach.

Tri-colour :) I am rather fond of this one :)

At least Google has them figured out.

The Scientist

In lonely valleys
along forgotten streams
In solitude and peace
the scientist dreams.

With eternal questions
and wondering eyes
he dreams up celestial catastrophes
and quiet blue skies.

Glimpsing subtly vast infinities
And profoundly delicate forces
With arcane equations
From elementary physics courses.

He ponders equanimously
waltzing galaxies and life on mars
unconcerned by his airy prison,
Splendidly encrusted with glittering stars.

Writers and Poets and Painters
Talk pompously of beauty and art
but in the revelation of the loveliness divine
theirs is a minute and transient part.

In Churches and Mosques and Temples,
Fools dish out answers and lies,
In the minds of the god fearing faithful
Truth withers silently and dies.

Beset with Gods and fears and fairies,
He champions the freedom of thought
In books and classes and bars
Battles for our future are fought.

He asks nothing of his world,
He does not expect life to be fair,
In his humbleness he sees the truth,
Which is that It just does not care.

He has touched the beauty of this realm,
So it does not pain him to see
The Void that lies past the moment
that he stops and ceases to be.

- Yours Faithfully

Kashmir and beyond : Further Thoughts

In my last post (Kashmir : Give them Azadi) the implicit assumption I had made was that the entire Jammy division was predominantly Hindu and would thus stay with India. As the map above indicates (if it is accurate), this is not the case. This changes several things since this means that the section of Jammu that is likely to stay with India unequivocally is not contiguous to Ladakh (in which sector India will not have any problems winning any plebiscite) making the strategic cost of giving all the Muslim parts of Kashmir azadi a lot higher, and making it very very difficult to contain anti-India activities (should there be any, and as I have indicated previously, we must expect the worst) in Himachal, Jammu and Ladakh. Also, this leaves Ladakh very exposed indeed, since it will then be precariously placed between 2 hostile powers, with only one road connecting it to India (the Manali-Leh highway) which is open only 2 months or so in a year. In the case of large scale aggression, the defence of Ladakh will be untenable.

Of course, it is possible that the Muslims of the Jammu division will not want to be part of a new state dominated by the Kashmiri's of the Valley (and such a split was indeed indicated in the participation of Muslims in the recent protests in Jammu). If this is indeed the case, then my analysis of the previous post holds. There is of course a third possibility - we hold on to the whole of Jammu division regardless of how it votes, but that rather defeats the purpose of the whole exercise I think. However, as the map below indicates (IF it is correct), the Muslim parts of Jammu division share a common language and culture with the Valley, so the reports of Muslim participation in the protests in Jammu likely referred to the Indian Muslims living in Jammu the city and surrounding areas.


This does severely restrict the possibilities that India has in terms of granting Independence. I am inclined to view these maps with scepticism however, since they originate from a site that seems Pakistani, and both the maps just might have a certain amount of disinformation built in. (It is however, a fascinating site with lots of geographical information about Kashmir and the surrounding region and detailed survey maps)

The more I read about the tensions and conflicts in our neighborhood and beyond, the more convinced I am that India needs to scale up its military in a significant way, the debilitating shortage of officers in the Army and pilots in the Air Force is shameful, and the Govt. of India must take urgent steps to rectify these circumstances. Also, a blue water navy, AWACS and in Flight Refueling systems to increase the range of our aircraft are necessary if we are to harbor hopes of power projection into the heart of the Eurasian landmass. Kashmir is the closest modern India has ever been to this region, and Indira Col above the Siachen glacier is the magnificent watershed between the Indian Subcontinent and Central Asia. We have spent a lot of blood and money on being there, and handing it to anyone on a platter is hardly an option.

I am thinking in terms of "empire" of course (Arundhati Roy would be very angry indeed), and in many ways that is not helpful, but one has to appreciate the fact that there are places which from time immemorial have been points where races, cultures and peoples (which organize themselves into Empires ) have crashed into each other. Never in history has the Himalaya been straddled by a kingdom, never has the Gangetic plain and Tibetan plateau been part of the same nation. Never has India broken through the Northern wall that isolates us, this is the nearest we have ever come - at Indira Col. Will an Indian force ever control lands on either side of that dramatic, beautiful and immensely powerful geographic laxman rekha ? Not in the forseeable future. But we are making progress - there will soon be a fully functional IAF base in Tajikistan at Ayni,/Farkhor which is 2 km from the Afghan border, not very far from the Wakhan corridor and Pakistan, and if we can maintian good relations with Russia (which is not a given any more, after the fracas about the Admiral Gorshkov and our current affair with America) more can follow.

How many ironies History throws up ! Once upon a time the Wakhan corridor was given to Afghanistan by the British to create a buffer between the ever expanding Russian Empire and Britains Indian possessions. The British fears of a Russian invasion of Afghanistan (which prompted the Brits to fight 2 disastrous wars in Afghanistan themselves) in order to threaten the greatest colonial prize of them all - India - never materialized as long the British were here. When the Soviets (Russians by any other name..) did invade, it was the Americans who were most worried, because they had interests in Iranian oil, so they financed and helped (through Saudi intermediaries - Osama) a Tajik warlord - Ahemed Shah Massoud to make the war too expensive for the Soviets who ultimately withdrew after suffering heavy losses. In this process they used Pakistan (formerly a part of British India) to create and train the Islamic army of brainwashed irregulars, who later went out of control and overran Afghanistan. When America wanted to go after these guys because they were hiding Osama (who after 9/11 was Public enemy No. 1), the Americans turned to - guess who - Ahemed Shah Massoud, relying heavily on Russian(!) and Indian support to equip and train the Northern Alliance of warlords which eventually overthrew the Taliban. Through this, India finally got a foothold in Afghanistan, and opened a military hospital in Farkhor on the Tajik-Afghan border (with blessings from Russia of course). When Al Queida (formed by Massoud's former comrades in arms) managed to attack the Lion of Panjshir, the hero of the war against the Soviets, using a bomb concealed in a camera taken by 2 chaps posing as western journalists, he was rushed to the foreign medical hospital in a former Soviet country and breathed his last tended by Indian doctors.

Central Asia is extremely energy rich (alone reason enough to go there), provides access to immense resources and trade routes, is a reasonable sized market, has vast spaces for Indians to settle on, and is important for our security - if we are in a position strong enough to open a Western front on Pakistan, they will never attack us. However, if India is to have a realistic chance of breaking out of the subcontinent in terms of influence and economic reach we must find a way to stabilize Kashmir and consolidate our military presence there in terms of large, long range, sophisticated airbases and eventually, we must open the ancient trade routes to central Asia, and we can only do this if we are in a position of overwhelming strength which we will never be unless there is Peace in Kashmir. Apart from Kashmir, India needs to settle the fires that rage through it before thinking of exerting its influence overseas. Naxalism and the closely related phenomenon of alienation of poor rural and tribal communities, infrastructure development and a subtle but implacable nationalism achieved through a vigorous and positive campaign to engage and integrate the minorities into the mainstream. Carefuly chosen infrastructure projects and wise investments in heavy industry and careful nurturing of the agricultural sector to preserve social cohesion in rural India are all vital to ensure that India grows out of the "sub" and takes its rightful place on its continent and the world.

Image sources : Blank on the map, Maplandia

Kashmir : Give them Azadi

Thats not as radical as it sounds. You see, "Kashmir" is only a very small part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. For the uninitiated, J&K consists of 3 major regions - Jammu, the Vale of Kashmir and Ladakh. Ladakh is culturally close to Tibet and is largely Buddhist, while Jammu is very like Punjab. In any plebiscite, these 2 regions will certainly vote overwhelmingly to stay with India. The Valley of Kashmir which is quite small in area but has a large population which is now overwhelmingly muslim (after the Kashmiri Pundits (400,000 of them) were systematically massacred and forced out in the early 1990s) will almost certainly vote for Azadi or union with Pakistan.

Let them go.

The major objections to such a move are strategic and not ideological or value based. One of the 2 highways that goes to Ladakh passes through Srinagar (the other being the Manali-Leh route) and is as such a vital road to keep Leh and the Siachen Glacier supplied. Ladakh is contiguous with the Aksai Chin region occupied by China and is a theatre where the Chinese have been making repeated incursions and provocative moves in the recent past. This means that keeping Ladakh well armed and supplied is vital.

Secondly, once the Valley of Kashmir is free (and if they remain free, I respect them and wish them well) or a part of Pakistan (in which case they will have made a mistake, and it'll serve them right !) one must expect that it will become a hotbed of terrorism and anti-India activity. Therefore, we must ensure that all around the Valley of Kashmir we control the passes and the heights. Our armed forces must be in complete control of the borders before any independence is given, and must oversee the opening of the borders with Pakistan (if that is to happen) in an orderly fashion. Most important of all, we must spend years (maybe a decade or more) developing an alternate route to Ladakh through the harsh terrain of the trans Himalayan ranges that avoids the Kashmir Valley altogether. We could also take this opportunity to strenghten the road and military infrastructure along the border with China in that region.


India can only gain from this arrangement. The land area we are giving up is small (though beautiful, fertile and heavily populated), and through careful preparation it might be possible to keep the strategic disadvantage to a minimum. Kashmir is a huge drain on our resources, financial and military. India spends 10 times more per capita on Kashmir than on any other state (excluding military budgets, this is simply aid from the Union budgets) and the social indicators in Kashmir are among the best in the country. For years, India has sunk billions and billions of dollars into the beautiful black hole that is the Vale of Kashmir and it will remove a huge burden on the exchequer once it is off our hands. Not to mention the fact that something like 200,000 troops will be free to go home, rest and redeploy in more useful places like the Bangladesh and China borders, our capacity to face bullying from China will increase manyfold.

Besides, what more can we do ? I think I am right in saying that Indians do not see themselves as imperial occupiers, we do not want to be imperial occupiers. India wanted Kashmir to be a happy prosperous and peaceful part of the Union. India was willing to give special privileges (as we have, in many cases being unjust to Ladakh and Jammu, and that anger is now boiling over) and infinite amounts of money. The classic case of the beggar giving away his bread to win hearts and minds. And yet, and yet it remains a dangerous place for our soldiers and policemen, it remains a place where security forces regularly have to fire on protesters, where Hindu and Sikh communities in remote mountain villages where they have lived for centuries are massacred, where the population justifiably feels repressed and humiliated by a huge military presence that dominates their daily lives. We can do no more, its time to accept defeat, strengthen our hand strategically for the post Kashmiri independence situation, and get rid of the issue.


Maybe things will work out, maybe they will manage themselves well and Indian tourists will flock to Paradise on earth, but we must prepare for the worst and expect that they will find more reasons to attack our country and murder our citizens. We must give them freedom, and we must ensure that they cannot harm us once they are free. Kashmir is a disgrace to India, we are an occupying force, our soldiers kill and die there every day, they hate us, they celebrate 15 August as a black day, they wish us death and sing odes to Pakistan (of all the messed up places !) - why should we spend our money (and we are a desperately poor country) and the lives of our soldiers on them ? What do we gain ? Hate and international embarrassment and frustration. Its just not worth it.

Let the Valley of Kashmir go its own way. India has more pressing matters to attend to.

Image sources : Wikipedia, BBCnews

ichi go ichi e

Ive been in back in Gent for my summer-internship-leading-up-to-masters-thesis for 3 weeks or so now, and its been one of those extremely rare times in my life defined more by friends and social activities than anything else. That it was so was helped by the fact that the Gentsefeesten - an annual 10 day extravaganza of free music, all night food and drink that all the locals look forward to for months - just wound to a close, and provided everyone with a reason to hang around in Gent all this while.

O, A, Mi and Mu were the people I spent a lot of time with, especially O and A. The first five days I was here I spent working and meeting O every evening. The work, thats been very interesting as well. New software, new concepts, things I have always wanted to do. Its just so terrific when childhood dreams come true, and now that I think back I realize that most of my most cherished childhood dreams were geeky in the extreme. More accurately, the path to most of my most cherished childhood dreams led through dedicated geekism, and after my 4 year diversion in NITK (of my own making, it was a splendid place to be a geek) Im slowly diffusing towards it, with plenty of random walks and back tracking and looking around all wide eyed and lazy. I will one day understand cosmology, quantum physics, causality, Information theory and black holes. I know that however random my actions might seem, somehow, slowly they lead me to where I want to go. Its a comforting thought :)

I love the universe we live in. I love the little bit of it I understand and work on, the tiny fraction thats my domain, and I find it thrilling that deep and wonderful concepts lay waiting to be pondered upon. I like walking in a familiar but foreign city with people I dont relate to but feel a connection with. I like spending time sitting around while nice people chat inanely, and adding my bit of unpopular gyan once in a while. I like feeling accepted and unnoticed. Its been a strange year - full of solitude and yet not really bereft of people and occassional sparks of genuine friendship. Science, excitement, pressure, and my ever present flaws its all added up to a wonderfully complex and interesting set of memories.

I have learnt a lot from people around me - Peru being the chief contributor. He was just what I needed when I came to Belgium after those cynical and dark, yet brilliantly enriching 4 years in NITK. He is sincere in a hard hitting idealistic sort of way. He is enthusiastic about academics in a agressive passionate manner. It was an eye opener. It freed me from my baggage, and it set the standards for good attitude in the class. I was vulnerable to change, and because of him, I changed for the better. Then there is Abhi of the pleasant and popular disposition, good cook and with the remarkable gift of causing everyone to like him. Olga ! well. the sharp, the enthusiastic, the clear and decided, Ukranian and blonde, smiling and quite charming. Mingyee, Mukesh, Raj.....and Aditya, the person I probably spent the most time with in the first sem. Relaxed and (by his own admission) firmly unambitious yet stimulatingly intelligent and hence always happy. Made good coffee, and his room had free fast wireless :D and then of course there were Roel and Irina. It was a pleasure and a priviledge to attend their lectures. He is the straight talking gentlemanly buddha of the highest integrity, the man who knows everything and she is the Lady, caring and brilliant. A grandmother and a scientist, comforting with her presence and exhilerating with her ideas.

I feel wonder more easily than I feel affection and I feel indifference much more easily than I feel loss, but this course with its frequent shifting and transient student populations has taught me something. The importance of the here and now and the people in it. One never comes back, there is never a second time.

ichi go, ichi e - One time, One meeting.
this moment, this thought, this action, is all that exists, and might be all that ever exsists - give it everything.

Almost everyone leaves in the next few days, leaving me here for one more month to roam the all too familiar streets, alone.

Who am I ?

Im a twenty three and a half year old electronics engineer studying photonics and trying hard to maintain the wonder and excitement I felt as a child looking at the stars. I dont know how this blog will develop, but I dont think it will be a place for gloomy rants and long self referencing meta blog posts. It will, I hope, be informative and interesting and will acquaint the reader with some of the stories I have seen and heard - about people, places, science and life.

I look forward to writing !

Questions for a PGDM

why are food prices rising all over the world ? how is the price of oil determined ? what justification is given for the assertion that wealth trickles down ? what do consultants do after 5 years of consultancy ? what are they good at ? why do derivatives and other financial "products" exist ? what purpose to they serve ? why are the richest and most cash rich sectors (investment banks, consultants etc etc) the ones that create no wealth ? why do people with bad credit histories provide the major portion of bank profits ? why is fractional lending allowed at all ? what controls the amount of money in the economy ? what relation does amount of money in the economy have to real income ? what is real income ? why cant we have a fixed amount of money circulating ? does that even mean anything ? what percentage of consulting income is result dependent ? what percentage of consulting income in india is from family owned businesses and what percentage from government ? why do pgdm related jobs like investment banking and consulting tend to be so elitist and opulent ? why is the guy who makes a better chulha not rewarded more than a man who talks nebulous bullshit in the current economic system ? the pharma business is the most profitable in the world, followed by food, why are these not govt controlled to ensure food, medicine pricing and availability ? who controls commodity prices and availability and how ? who regulates them (both prices and people) ? what justification is given for the assertion that there will be less corruption if the private sector controls sectors that are currently govt controlled ? in a free market, what represents a person with no money ? where did the money lent out in the sub prime crisis go ? if it is circulating in the economy, some one must have it, so why is there economic slowdown in the US because of that ? what punishment has been meted out to the rating agencies who messed up on such a large scale ? why do IIMs need to have such ridiculous fees when they require no expensive labs, no special equipment apart from good class rooms ? do corporations HAVE to increase profits for shareholders ? cant the charter mandate instead a maximization salaries of employees or minimizing acres of rainforest cut ? why should corporations have the same rights as citizens ? why is no human liable for the misdeeds of a corporation ? how foolish is that ?

as more questions occur to me I'll put them in another post. Please feel free to comment and clarify, correct, explain any of the above, or connected things.

Chitrangada is Coming Back !

.

I put the same photo again, because I find it stunning. Take a look at this article from Tehelka which gives a good account of her history and the effect she had on people, including me. The article also talks about her upcoming movies and her own reasons for leaving when she did.

Finally, something positive happens to Bollywood !

The Greatest Ever

An article by Rohit Brijnath, this is a moving tribute to Dhyan Chand. It was part of India Today's 100 People who shaped India series of articles. This is the link to the whole article on the India Today website. Notice how shoddily we have always treated our heroes. We are a hugely callous country. We dont deserve our heroes. We certainly deserve our politicians. If you know what this article talks about, and if it does not move or sadden you in any way, chances are, you're Indian.

They say you can judge a man's legend by the quality of myths that surround him. By that measure itself Dhyan Chand was an extraordinary man. To hear tales of his craftsmanship was to wonder whether his stick was designed by Merlin himself. They broke his stick in Holland to check if there was a magnet inside; in Japan they decided it was glue; in Germany, Adolf Hitler even wanted to buy it................

..................................................................................................................................................

........When he fell ill, liver cancer it turned out, and came to Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences, they dumped him in the general ward. A journalist's article eventually got him moved to a special room, but that public memory had to be jogged tells its own story.

In Jhansi they had a funeral, not in the ghat, but on the ground he played on. Players came, but it seemed a little too late. It made it hard to forget the first few words of his autobiography Goal: "You are doubtless aware that I am a common man." He wasn't but he died like one

But we did not

India lost 2-0 and will not be playing at the Olympics in Beijing.

I want India to win . .

against Britain tomorrow in Santiago. India has played in every men's olympic hockey tournament since 1928 (and won 8 of them) and in order to play in Beijing, India need to beat Britain tomorrow in the final of the 6 nation qualifying tournament from which only one team will play in the olympics. India lost only one league match, and that was to Britain a couple of days ago, a very rough match in which 3 players were reprimanded for bad behaviour, and India lost in in the dying moments when Rob Moore scored for Britain to give them a 3-2 win. (bringing back memories of that last minute goal we let in against Poland in Sydney (to make it 1-1), we were 1 minute 41 seconds away from our first Olympic semi final in 25 years.) That was only Britain's 10th win over India ever.

China, Korea and Pakistan, South Africa, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium and Australia have already qualified for the olympics. Belgium ? Korea ? and India is struggling ? This story goes back to the 2006 Doha Asian Games when for the first time ever India were ousted in the group stages due to a loss to China who are considered minnows in Hockey. India had won a medal in every previous edition of the Asian games, and apart from a Bronze in 1986, we won either gold or silver. That failure to qualify for the semis and win a medal at the Asian Games meant that India did not automatically qualify for the Olympics. And so here we are . . . Needing to beat Britain to get to the Olympics. and once upon a time Beating britain would have been no problem at all, Pakistan beat them 8-2 or something in the last olympic games, but they have a higher world ranking than us (they are 8th and we are 9th) and nothing can be said about the Indian Hockey team anymore. We lost the league game to them after all.

What happens to Indian Hockey if we dont qualify for the Olympics ? so much history, so much pride, and once upon a time so much glory went with the Indian team's exploits at the Olympics. The coverage in the Indian media (from what I could gauge over the internet) was desultory, and apart from one article on Indiatimes by the coach Joaquim Carvalho none of the articles went to the heart of the situation the Indian team finds itself in. There were no statistics anywhere, (I got a few numbers from a Pakistani newspaper, which sounded like it really wanted India to qualify, if only for the sake of tradition) no analysis, no recoup of the Indian team's recent results, no analysis of the system for qualification of the olympics (I had to go to the olympics website to check which teams had already qualified) nothing. The fate of Indian Hockey in the near future hangs in the balance, generations of pride and a splendid record hangs in the balance and the country refuses to notice ?

Its a shame. Shame on all those who call themselves sports fans and sports journalists in India and shame on the Indian public which obediently drinks whatever rot the BCCI dishes out and refuses to look around for itself - there is greatness and pride in all sport and very very few sporting teams in history have provided as much drama, brilliance, glory, and now tragedy as the Indian Men's Hockey Team.


If I could go back in time and choose a sport again, I'd choose to play Hockey.

Its gone too far

I, P B, hereby declare that I will not watch, read about, talk about, or in any way encourage the proliferation of any event, product, person or subject that has any connection to cricket in India.

Here's a story.

After much huffing and puffing and tension, my exams finally got over on the 28th of Jan 2008. and then, instead of breathing a sigh of relief and enjoying for a few days, I had a take home exam to do to be sumbitted on the 13th of february for a subject we freshers had been advised not to take on account of its advanced nature (and so of course, I went and took it. I insist on finding new instruments for my lazyness to torture me with). I had reconciled myself to my 10 day holiday being washed out in yet another tense period of wasted time and desperate concentrated work coupled with irritated house-hunting (the latter the courtesy of the VUB housing department), but my parents had other ideas. They had decided that I was working too much (hear ! hear !) and needed a vacation. They dint say it, but they clearly thought I was becoming(?) psycho, sitting in my room all day, eating by myself, not meeting people and generally brooding over a cold grey cityscape and inscrutable equations and growing slowly but surely fatter and balder. (all of which happens to be true) So, when my dad visited me on the 29th, he was quite insistent that I finish my paper before friday (thats today) and go meet some friends in Switzerland over the weekend. the more he spoke of it, the more inviting it seemed, and I promised that I'd do something about it. So, after I got back to my room before lunch on the 30th (I was in Brussels with dad) I promptly took my computer over to Aditya's place (apart from being a splendid chap with a large room, his landlord provides free, fast, unlimited download wifi access) and proceeded to watch some 10-15 episodes of the Xfiles well into the night.

I slept feeling quite guilty. So the next day (the 31st, yesterday) I woke up before lunch and found out that the housing problem had been kind of, more or less, solved, but my internet was not working and my phone was lost. Understandably, I thought myself exceptionally vulnerable to attacks by hi-tech psychopaths and alien abductions, so I spent most of the afternoon fixing my internet and finding my phone (which I had forgotten at Aditya's place obviously) and so on. I gave my nonlinear optics a cursory glance and in the night, settled down for another bout of the x files in my room. By the time I slept I had realized that the time had come for desperate measures.

I woke up today morning and decided that I must go to Switzerland and meet the few friends I had there and take a break (theres irony in there somewhere). I realized (admitted is a better word perhaps) that I'd never get down to work unless I gave myself a fixed inflexible deadline. So the obvious course of action was to book my tickets to switzerland and then make myself finish the needful before then. So I thought to myself - thursday I go to Switzerland, spend friday and saturday there, back on sunday, and next semester starts on monday, so by wednesday, I have to finish my exam, attend a meeting in brussels on monday, wind up my affairs in Gent, arrange for my luggage to be shifted to Brussels in my absence, and make arrangements for Aditya (who is staying in my room for a week because his contract expired in January).

Easy.

So I started looking at the various low cost airlines. I needed to go to Zurich, thats where the chaps are, but Zurich turns out to be an expensive place to fly to. So I was prepared to fly to anywhere in switzerland, and there were 10 open tabs with any number for airports and flights and few were affordable. Finally, I saw a list which read something like

Basel - EUR180
Bern - EUR132
Geneva - EUR156
Zurich - EUR1023
Nice - EUR3

AHA ! I said to myself ! finally ! So I clicked on the last dot, filled in my card details, paid, got my ticket in my mail and as I was about to print it out, I saw something that should have been horribly obvious right at the beginning - Nice is in FRANCE !!!!! its 600km from Zurich ! and the flight is on Tuesday !!

But the deed was done. The gods had spoken. there was no turning back. . . . . since then, I have bought myself a nice medium sized backpack and a good North Face jacket (my first major non food expenses in europe and they wiped out my savings for january) and helped Aditya move to my room and fixed an appointment to wind up my room contract on tuesday afternoon. I leave for Nice on tuesday night, reach there at 10. I'll spend a day or two around Nice I guess and then go to Switzerland either via Grenoble or Milan (I've been to north Italy, so Grenoble seems a more interesting but less convenient option) and my flight back from Geneva reaches Brussels at the exact time that the first class of my next semester is supposed to start. I dont know where I'll stay in Brussels when I get back and what I'll wear to college on the first day, but I dont care.

As usual, I'm in a tight corner, but I can assure you, its a lot better than being rooted in front of a flickering screen in a dark room feeding on cheap vicarious thrills ! I'm looking forward to wide landscapes, the sea, the mountains, the flavours of faraway cities and the winds of foreign lands :-) Should be fun, especially after 4 months of motionlessness :-)

And there is the small matter of doing 2 months worth of work in 2 days, but thats routine. Thats precisely what my Bachelors degree was about :-)

Thats Chitrangada Singh - for those of you unfortunate enough never to have seen her before. Her first movie was the superbly made "Hazaaron Khwaahishein Aisi" (2003) - a movie that lingers in the mind long long after its over. It is set in the 1970's in Calcutta and traces the stories of 3 characters who - in all their flawed tragedy - symbolize the spirit of those times. But the movie goes further than that, it makes the viewer ask himself fundamental questions about his own ideas of morality and idealism. It left me slightly disturbed and slightly sad. I watched it more than a year ago, and it still comes back to me sometimes, undiminished in its power, pain and the aftertaste of melancholy. And the most stunning performace in the movie belongs undoubtedly to Chitrangada Singh. 'The Lamp to the other characters Moths' as someone put it. She carries herself superbly, and is polished, understated, intelligent, sensual and flawed in her choice of men (in my opinion anyway :D ) Shiney Ahuja puts in a splendid performance in what is his debut movie as well, and his character provides the conscience for the movie, an upwardly mobile, ambitious and crude, but faithful and passionate counterpoint to the self righteous, misplaced and ultimately fickle idealism of the well heeled and well off. A movie well worth the time, surely one of the most remarkable movies ever made in Hindi.

Chitrangada acted in only one other movie called "Kal - Tomorrow and Yesterday" (2005) which was a well made thriller aimed at the so called multiplex audience. And then she got married to "ace golfer" Jyoti Randhawa and has never acted in a movie since. Mr. Randhawa had better be shaking up the golfing world in a big way soon, because he has taken away the lady who is Indian Cinema's best young actress by a long long way. Had she continued (and she still can come back) she could have been to our generation what Smita Patil was to the last. A beacon of intelligence and beauty in a world populated increasingly with 'item girls'.

She will be missed !

__________________________

ख्वाब तो मैंने बहुत देखे है, लेकिन दिल लगा कर खेले हुए बरसों बीत गए. शब्द बड़ी आसानी से निकलते है मुह से, मन मे महल बड़ी आसानी से बनते है, लेकिन डाव लगता नही है मुझसे, ज़ंग लड़ी नही जाती, मंजिल तै नही कर पता हूँ मैं - लाब्जों की दीवारों के पीछे छुपकर मुकर जाता हूँ मैं. हारना तो मैं जानता ही नही हूँ - मैंने खेलना ही कहाँ सीखा है ! ख़यालों मे खोया, फ़र्ज़ निभाना भूल चूका हूँ मै. बडे दिन हुए सिर उठाके चले हुए - हर मोड़ पे गलत रास्तों पर बिखर जाता हूँ मैं.

"हजारों ख्वाहिशें ऐसी
की हर ख्वाहिश पे दम निकले,
बहुत निकले मेरे अरमान
लेकिन फिर भी काम निकले . . "

I have seen the light

I write this to remind myself of that fact.

Exams, Cricket etc

I've become very bored and too comfortable in the middle of the exams. I liked my subjects while I was studying them, I was excited, but now that the exams are here they have become a drag. I fail to see how performance in an exam can be a good criterion for judging a masters level student's aptitude for research, and they are certainly a HUGE waste of time for all concerned, so I'm very surprised to find the intense, lengthy exam periods these people in Belgium have. I am keen to get done with them as soon as possible and get on to the next semester of learning. I am quite disappointed to find that "careless mistakes" are still very much a part of me, and my math exam which could so easily have been a triumph has left me feeling quite disappointed and a little bit helpless. To be honest, at least some of the lack of focus that might have resulted in the mistakes I made will have to be attributed to my excessive involvement in the tumultuous exploits of the Indian Cricket Team.

There have been reams and reams written about the Sydney match, and I have soaked it all up. I have read every blog, every article and followed every comment and its aftermath. I have seen all the videos on youtube and I have reached the conclusion that the whole matter is too obvious to comment on, and that I have nothing to add to the huge body of material already published (and indeed, is still being published). But, I do support the Indian team, not just because they are the Indian team and the underdogs but because most of them are gentlemen worth emulating in many respects.

I do wish they'd come up with some steely performances and win though. I miss India !


Update (20-01-2008) - Yesterday, they did exactly that ! A magnificent win at Perth !