Might as well enjoy India’s very last general elections.

The writing is already on the wall. The portents are there for those who want to see them. It is a wonder how our crack political analysts continue to ignore their message, why they refuse to take the final leap of imagination. (That’s not strictly accurate: on Saturday, 29 March 2014, Kanti Bajpai in his Times of India article on Page 16, “Journey Towards Soft Fascism” did hint at the shape of things to come. There may be more such comments I have not read.)

NaMo, pronounced the proper way (“Na” as in “Narendra”, “Mo” as in “Modi”) is a command in Sanskrit to bow down, to worship. Make no mistake. You are being told in no uncertain terms to change your behaviour, to perform an act of supplication. Ignore the message at your own peril, boys and girls.

Modi brooks no opposition to his relentless march to 7 Racecourse Road in Lutyens’ Delhi. He has already put all his potential rivals in BJP (Big Guns one and all, mind you) in their place – in the shade – out of reckoning – so demoralized that it will take them quite a while to recover, let alone even think of retaliating. In this respect, he reminds me of Indira Gandhi versus The Syndicate, c. 1969, a modern reenactment of the legendary David versus Goliath encounter. And, all this notwithstanding all his talk about being a strict follower of party discipline and so forth. http://bit.ly/1lxr2eG

In a smart move to lend legitimacy and glamour to NaMo, they have even commissioned his “authorized” political biography launched close to the date of the general elections. The 310-page tome is written by a little-known British (our former masters, remember? Clever, clever!) author and filmmaker, Andy Marino. Marino’s provenance seems at best somewhat sketchy (PhD in Eng. Lit.). (Are there such creatures in the world as literary mercenaries?) His “literary” output consists of obscure non-fiction (A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry and Hershel: The Boy Who Started World War Two). If one were to take him at his word, though, he has had “a long relationship with India” and has been “interested in its politics and history as far back as I can recall.”

Be that as it may, in his Hindustan Times interview http://bit.ly/Pc9S8A Marino certified Modi’s straightforwardness adding that he was “complex” and “a better administrator or anybody so completely possessed with enthusiasm for what he does. His brain runs non-stop thinking about ways to improve everything, and there’s an incredible energy.”  As far as Modi’s honesty is concerned, Marino says that he checked and cross-checked his answers and found them above reproach. (For the convenience of the dyslexic as well as book-hating readers, Rannade Prakashan and Blue Snail Animation have published a 45-page NaMo comic book, Bal Narendra, apparently in the Bal Hanuman vein. So, no efforts have been spared in nurturing the NaMo mythology.)

The BJP campaign slogan is “Agli baar Modi Sarkar” (Coming next: Modi Government). This has the same shade of the recent abject capitulation by Penguin and Aleph about Wendy Doniger’s books on Hinduism. Of course, the reason for not promising a BJP Sarkar may be twofold: (1) The earlier BJP rule was not entirely free from taints of corruption and scams. (2) If Modi comes to power, it will be most likely as the leader of a coalition. Like Manmohan Singh, he too will have to face the vagaries of running a coalition government. Eventually, given his popular support and, more important, his forceful and aggressive personality, he may be able to drive a tougher bargain with his partners. As time passes, NaMo will begin to better appreciate the systemic impediments in his path. Once again his inherent nature will not allow him to accept defeat meekly. His only option then will be to take matters in his own two capable hands.

As liberal conventional wisdom would have it, NaMo’s final ascension to absolute no-holds power, if it ever comes to pass, may seem a disaster. The other way to see it is as a happening belonging to the class of what Robert and Elizabeth Bjork of UCLA Bjork Learning & Forgetting Lab have called “desirable difficulties”. It will allow the decisive Shri NaMo to dismantle the wasteful democratic superstructure of elections at both central and state levels thereby saving the country enormous amounts of resources and removing in a single stroke one of the biggest causes of corruption. Decision making and implementation can be speeded up. Work ethics and discipline will improve by leaps and bounds as in the days of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. Business and “development” will get the priority that Middle India is hankering after. India will be able to compete with China on a level playing field. All this would not happen overnight but during the course of the next five years.      

Remember, though, that all medicines would be placebos except for the patient’s belief in their healing power.

Second thoughts.

The other day, while watching Deepa Mehta’s 1947: Earth, it occurred to me that the only victim of partition I witnessed at first hand was a hapless hack Victoria driver being butchered in the 13th Khetwadi Lane facing my 233 Khetwadi Main Road terrace. http://digbig.com/5bafde. Why the “cracking” of India as Bapsi Sidhwa called it could not be achieved without bloodshed and strife and monumental human tragedy is something that has always puzzled me.

Looking around for clues, I’m dumbstruck by the unconscionable haste with which partition was announced and carried out. On 4 June 1947, quite out of the blue, Lord Mountbatten announced at a press conference http://digbig.com/5bafnh that the British would quit the sub-continent by 15 August of the same year, i.e., in less than 3 months − instead of the earlier set deadline of June 1948 for the transfer of power. Eleven months earlier, on Jinnah-decreed Direct Action Day, 16 August 1946, policemen in Bengal were allowed to go on a holiday by Governor Fredric Burrows with Lord Wavell’s tacit assent. The Calcutta massacre went on without police or military intervention for three days. http://digbig.com/5bafng. It is as if the British Raj had washed its hands of the erstwhile Jewel in the Crown and wanted to get the hell out of India at the earliest without involving itself further in the emerging mess.

Had Churchill been the British PM instead of Attlee, the holocaust might have been avoided or at least postponed for a while given that he would never have agreed to the colony’s independence readily. That would have been a blessing in disguise as it might have given the Indian leaders time to think up a cogent and workable plan of action for an orderly partition and the massive migration involved when the moment arrived.

Incredible India II.

At the end of the last post, I wrote: “The saga of incredible India goes on…”. It did. The visit to the VP Road Police Station yesterday was a big surprise and revelation. PC Nalwade was the very antithesis of his colleague who had paid me a visit on Tuesday: smiling, polite, soft-spoken, knowledgeable. His colleague, a woman PC, matched his demeanour perfectly. The questions were respectfully put, the answers smilingly recorded. They explained that my passport reached me prior to the police enquiry probably because of my age. Getting it police-checked was optional, the risk being I could be prevented from flying if they noticed on the computer screen that I had not been police-checked. Fair enough. If only all of Mumbai Police behaved like these two …

Incredible India.

Will wonders never cease in incredible India? On 5 August, i.e., last Wednesday in case you are not in a Gregorian mode, I searched the India Passport website http://digbig.com/5badws and was duly informed that my passport was ready and was expected to be sent to me by 04-09-2009 subject to all documents being in order. On the afternoon of 5 August, i.e., of the same Wednesday in case you are still not in the Gregorian mode, a Speed Post person dropped in at home when I was out on work and left an intimation for me to pick it up from the Kalbadevi Post Office the next day between 10.30 am and 2.00 pm. Which I eventually did as directed! Incredible India had one more surprise in store for me. Yesterday, i.e., on 10 August, in the afternoon while I was once again away on work, a policeman dropped in to do the police check – a pre-condition to the issue of a passport. He was told I was out and the passport had been already received. I wonder if there are more wonders to come in incredible India.

Update: No sooner had I finished and poasted the above than one more wonder came my way from incredible India. It was in the shape of Police Constable Hanurkar from VP Road Police Station. After comparing my mug with the picture on the form in his hand as well as the one on my new passport, he invited me to present myself on Thursday morning at the said Police Station to meet a certain Mr Nalwade with two copies of all documents submitted with my passport application and three copies of my photograph. When I protested that the passport was already in my hand, he said “they” had to “complete” my file – whatever that means. He also broadly hinted that he had had to make two trips to my residence on my account. The saga of incredible India goes on…

Evangelist.

All those who crib and gripe about Hindi movies neglect to mention their one monumental achievement.

Almost single-handedly, they did what the national government couldn’t.

They made Hindi acceptable all over India so much so that even its most vociferous opponents eventually joined the band wagon.

If that isn’t something, tell me what is.

Now the Hindi movies made for the Indian Diaspora as well as the domestic multiplexes are probably doing for Hinglish what its mom never thought it being capable of.

Becoming global.

Kya yaar, Doni?

Ray of no hope.

I am ashamed to confess that I was no fan of Satyajit Ray to begin with. http://digbig.com/4yqkf. When I joined Clarion-McCann back in 1965, the Bengalis there with whom I had to hobnob used to speak of him in a hushed, deeply reverential tone. That must have kind of put my back up. I started to almost despise Ray for no reason at all but did not articulate my views to fellow Clarionites for obvious reasons. It was only later when I started to understand the rudiments of what cinema was all about http://digbig.com/4yqkh that I did a complete about-face on Ray. This morning I read a piece in Mumbai Mirror (Interval by Chako) about a free screening of a Satyajit Ray film, Charulata, in fact, in – hold your breath! – Kolkata recently. There was only a solitary person in the auditorium – a homeless vagrant who had wandered in for the free air conditioning. Even he wanted to walk out half way but was detained by the two Ray enthusiasts who had organised the show. By contrast, the Satyajit Ray retrospective at the Lincoln Centre, New York, this April, organised by the eponymous Film Society, draws huge crowds of cinema aficionados with seats sold out weeks in advance. http://digbig.com/4yqkj. Chako also draws our attention to the fisticuffs in Venice between a female professor and a male journalist over the last ticket of Devi, a part of last year’s local Satyajit Ray retrospective. “A Ray film invites you in, but also demands that you accept it on its own terms. And those who open themselves to Ray's method are in for some of the richest experiences the cinema has to offer." This is the opinion of Richard Pena, the Film Society's director of programming. Pauline “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang” Kael described Pather Panchali, the film that brought Ray to the world’s notice, "beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love". Akira Kurosawa wrote: “The quiet but deep observation, understanding, and love of the human race, which are characteristic of all his films, have impressed me greatly. Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.” “Ray's magic, the simple poetry of his images and their emotional impact, will always stay with me,” wrote Martin Scorsese. All of which brings me to the question that has always bothered me. Why are Indians so grudging in accepting genius amidst them? Why are we so petty minded? The problem, I reckon, lies in Ray’s propensity to portray life at its most humdrum as he sees it (“a 5-minute close-up of water being poured from a pitcher”). “We don’t go to the multiplex except to be bedazzled and razzmatazzed, man. We want kitsch-laden, glitzy tripe, man. Hang realism, man. For us, reality Tv with Rakhi Sawant is the only reality we can face. We are Indians. We are like that only.” Chako lays to rest the usual, most-bandied accusation against Ray that he got his fame by selling India’s poverty to the world. He points out that only the first Ray film was about the rural poor. The rest of most of his ouvre was about the affluent and educated Kolkatan Bhadralok of which he happened to be very much a part.

Fin de siècle.

The French, they say, always have a propensity to put across things rather stylishly. Literally speaking, “fin de siècle” means “end of the century”. The phrase contains a hint of a suggestion, though, of the end of an era and the onset of the coming one as well as of a time of degeneration and a time of new beginning. In a broader and worldlier context, it connotes a sinister mixture of decadence and opulence. All of which sounds a mouthful and bombastic and pretentious. Reading Hanif Kureshi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (Faber and Faber, London, 1990) is one entertaining way to get an insider’s view of a fin de siècle. The Whitbread Prize winning novel is set in a decaying London just before the onset of Thatcherism when Britain was said to have become totally "ungovernable”. The protagonist, Karim Amir, a second-generation British-Indian, is the bi-sexual son of the Buddha of Suburbia, Haroon ("Harry") Amir, who had emigrated from India in the late fifties or early sixties. Pop music in the times of the Punk Rock supremacy, theatre, art, deceit, fast-changing sexual mores, race relations, fake gurus, social climbing and “moving away” from the decaying suburbs are what The Buddha of Suburbia deals with in an often farcical vein.

Stranger than fiction?

I’m talking Indian reality. The idea of pollution has forever been at the centre of it. Take Gandhi. He was always thinking and talking about purifying himself and others. His innumerable fasts and weekly days of silence and perennial enemas were for purification of the soul and of the body. Gandhi was not the only one obsessed with purity. Most Indians are in a lop-sided sort of way. They keep their homes scrupulously clean and yet don’t seem to mind, nay, even notice, if the neighbourhood is turning into a garbage dump. There are latter-day urban Indians who look upon a menstruating woman as a polluting influence in a home. I remember back in the late sixties or early seventies a young colleague of mine saying to me that he found it repugnant that women "bled every month". These were his exact words. I was taken aback and tongue-tied. I think I blurted out something about Nature and slunk away. What I did not then realise was that the young man, who by the way was not a Hindu, was merely parroting the deeply ingrained belief of his compatriots. To quote the JNU Professor, Dipankar Gupta: "According to the caste principle, all routine substances that come out of one's body, like perspiration, excreta, and menstrual blood are polluting even to oneself. By the same token, hair is also polluting which is why a ritually proper tonsure is a shaven head. The traditional roles of the barber, washerman and scavenger were precisely to absorb specific pollutants so that members of the upper castes could remain 'clean'." http://digbig.com/4yenx. (Gupta earlier in the same article quotes the anthropologist Mary Douglas who once pointed out that "dirt was simply 'matter out of place'. Food on the plate is the way it should be everywhere, but becomes dirt when it is on the floor. Shoes on one's feet are fine, but if placed on the table then that's dirt." She also wrote the following: "Rules about eating and not eating certain foods, touching or not touching certain people (castes) or people at certain times (during menstruation, mourning, etc.) have nothing to do with 'primitive' ideas of hygiene." http://digbig.com/4yeny.) If all this makes sense, the Mangalore pub incidence is not Talibanisation of India. http://digbig.com/4yepa. One of our long forgotten ancestors thought of it æons ago. Indian truth is stranger than fiction. Imagine in a land where more than half the population goes to sleep hungry, hunger strike is a powerful weapon of protest and political blackmail. What's more, it works.

Nobody's perfect.

In Sydenham College of Commerce & Economics, then partly resident in the now-demolished Sukhadwala Building, close to Kitab Mahal http://digbig.com/4ydja and Excelsior Cinema http://digbig.com/4ydjb, you had to climb steep rickety stairs to reach the FY Commerce lecture hall on the third floor. If you had patience, you could wait and try your luck with the rattling elevator. This was back in 1952. I had just passed my SSC exam and enrolled for the B Com course only because one of my cousins http://digbig.com/4ydjc had become a Chartered Accountant. I wanted to emulate him, I guess. Anyway, that's how I came to know of Joan Robinson. Professor Gangadhar Gadgil used to teach us Economics or Eco as we called it. He wasn't as good a teacher as he was a Marathi littérateur, I'm sorry to say. He lectured deadpan and made Eco sound a parched, scorched, desolate, harsh, coarse, grating and excessively rude discipline. Reading Joan Robinson, thanks to my ingrained habit of going to the source, made me realise how much fun it could be. She had quite a writing style all her own. She was perfectly lucid about imperfect competition. From her, I learned the "monopsony" concept, the buyer-side equivalent of monopoly. We did not hear of it in the lecture hall. It's amusing to note that the most striking latter-day example of monopsony is the government as the sole buyer of sophisticated weaponry in a national market. The entry of the terrorist buyers turns the scenario "duopsonic". By the early fifties, India was already showing clear symptoms of morphing into a state monopoly. In the automobile market, a duopoly was emerging. This reminds me of her perceptive remark about India made popular by her illustrious student, Amartya Sen: "Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true." It seems she lived for three years with her husband, Austin, in India before the country got its Independence. "I don't know mathematics, therefore I have to think" was her other oft-cited remark. Her ability to put into words really complex mathematical concepts was the result of this realisation on her part. Reading her and W Arthur Lewis, the first Novel Prize winner of African descent, spurred me to do research in development economics for my M Com degree. http://digbig.com/4ydkx. Unfortunately, Robinson could not get the Nobel Prize for Economics although Business Week had tipped her as the likely winner in 1975 echoing all her colleagues' expectations. Her Indian ward, Amartya Sen, did. The reason she missed the bus was, it was rumoured, her increasing leftist leanings as she aged. For instance, she openly expressed her admiration for Mao Zedong’s China and Kim Il Sung’s North Korea. In the meantime, perfect or pure competition continues to remain the neo-classical economist's ivory-tower fantasy. Maybe, he wasn't paying attention to Jerry Louis' repartee to Dean Martin when he called him a perfect fool. "You're wrong, Dean. Nobody's perfect."

Smarter than a 5th grader?

Watching the original US game show yesterday night got me thinking about the contrast between how Indians and Americans look at people. The Indian version is SRK-centric, over-hyped, loud and garish. A preening Shah Rukh Khan is the hub of the show. The American version, debuted in February 2007 and replicated in several other countries, rightly focuses on the participants. It seems lighter, more fun and natural. The Emcee, Jeff Foxworthy, a stand-up comedian, doesn't behave like God's gift to mankind. Everyone else appears to be acting as natural as they can under a camera's gaze. They cheer and laugh but not overmuch. The atmosphere says "Let's have fun", and not "Let's worship God's gift to mankind, fawn on him and kowtow to him". There are no superfluous visiting celebrities cluttering up the action. In spite of all this extra baggage, the TRP score of Kya Aap Panchavi Pass Se Tej Hai is nothing to write home about. So, what's the problem? I haven't a clue. Maybe, the Indian idiot box viewer is no idiot. Maybe, he instinctively feels a screen star belongs to the big movie screen, not in his living room. Anyway, better ask the fifth grader. She or he is smarter than me, I concede. Remember The Beliot College Mindset? http://tinyurl.com/4w8xsk. P.S.: The Cultural Learnings blog http://tinyurl.com/5jmnkp hints at the "school kids" on Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader? being Screen Actors Guild cardholders and coached in advance. Also that their school chums peer-pressure-and-wisecracks act is a sham. A reiteraton of the same "scandal" theme is found here: http://tinyurl.com/6s6le7. If there is even a grain of truth in this, who comes out the smartest in the final analysis? P.S.2: Can you think of a smarter gift than the new digital camera that recognizes faces and waits for the subject to smile before it clicks? http://tinyurl.com/6f6z8t.

To be or not to be.

That’s the question the Indian State should be pondering deeply right now. To be or not to be a client-state of the United States of America, to be precise. Thank the Comrades for bringing it to our notice. At the latest count http://faculty.washington.edu/majeski/decline-pap-5.pdf, i.e. as of February 2005, the self-appointed Leader of the Free World had 81 client-states (43 per cent of the countries in the world). This list is based on the US State Department information on Treaties in Force and Fiscal Year 2006 Budget Justification. Around 1945, Great Britain, France and Russia had about 50, 30 and 20 colonies/client-states respectively. The vacuum created by the decay of European Imperialism was filled by the US propensity to acquire and maintain client-states for strategic reasons of its own including its self-determined roles as the Leader of the Free World and the Global Peacekeeper. It is in this community of 81 would-be peers that India is likely to lose face were it to try to renegotiate the 123 Nuclear Treaty. That’s a fate worse than Death, I guess, if one were to judge from the headlines in the Indian Press. When India chose to remain “non-aligned” and Pakistan enrolled as a US client-state after partition, we know what happened. As is well-known, the relationship between the “central star” (the US) and its satellites (say, Pakistan) is identical to the mother country (Great Britain) and her colonies (say, British India) under Imperialism. The leader of the pack offers the satellites goodies (Green Revolution in Pakistan in the fifties, two decades before India got hers) in return of flooding her markets cheap made-in-the-US goods. This involved large-scale mechanization and capitalization of the agricultural sector and the generation of a huge market for the based-in-the-US agribusiness (seeds, fertilizers, pesticides). Our brush with WTO has already taught us what to expect in the future. Even then, I wonder why the US wants to add to its liability by getting hold of one more client-state. All the biggies among US businesses have already made it to the Indian shores. Having got into the habit of acquiring more and more clients, maybe it just cannot deny itself the pleasure of getting one more. I’m being facetious, of course. The US white culture is a culmination of its history of stealing land from the Native Americans, slave trading, dehumanization, exploitation and Imperialism, as even a casual observer of history can vouch. In view of this backdrop, Imperialism may now almost have become life blood for the Leader of the Free World. And, the supreme imperative to be the ultimate arbiter of Truth, Justice and the American Way to the rest of us lesser mortals, most likely.

Talking pictures.

I can’t believe my eyes. Or, my luck at finding it. Here’s this simply written book by a successful practitioner from the retail space with gumption and courage of his conviction. He believes in doing things his own way, His credo is non-elitism, simplicity, thrift, transparency, trust, risk-taking, humility and rewriting the rules to suit the Indian reality. I had heard glowing things about him from my friend, Deep Bisen. Reading his It Happened in India was something else altogether, though. I liked the way the book is 'packaged' with an autobiographical narrative punctuated by "real people" commentary. The most fascinating part of his story is about the use of design thinking in communication. Talking in pictures, in other words. One of the earliest uses of this technique in India was by MK Gandhi. He shed his earlier Western garb to dress himself like the lowest common denominator of India. Believing as he did that India lived in her villages, he chose to dress like the villager. No wonder the aam janata took him to their hearts and followed his lead so readily. (Never mind Winston Churchill's "naked fakir" taunt, boys and girls.) The other interesting stuff I found in Kishore Biyani’s seminal textbook about retailing is his exposition of memetics. Gandhi’s “Quit India” was one powerful meme, for instance. (Meme is ”an information pattern, held in an individual's memory, which is capable of being copied to another individual's memory”. Memetics is “the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of memes”. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMES.html.) Being the bania that he was, Gandhi is believed to have said the following: "A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so." http://quotations.about.com/b/a/029356.htm. [Also cited here: http://www.gandhi.ca/gandhi/quotes/service.php.] Gandhigiri anyone? That’s exactly what Kishore Biyani has been telling us. Indeed, his 2-step test to gauge the suitability of wannabe Pantaloon franchisees is based, chapter and verse, on the Gandhian precept. P.S.: Biyani is a Hindi film buff and has two feature films to his credit. It’s interesting to speculate what would have happened had he been associated with the Munnabhai series. Would he have included the above quote in the script? You may want to read an excerpt (‘Family Values’) here: http://www.mumbaimirror.com/net/mmpaper.aspx?page=article&sectid=5&contentid=20070420024335640e8268c46&pageno=1. Another excerpt (‘Early Life’): http://www.business-standard.com/lifeleisure/storypage.php?leftnm=5&subLeft=6&chklogin=N&autono=282781&tab=r.

Meet Edward A Murphy, Jr. He laid down The Law.

Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was no rocket scientist. He was merely an engineer on the rocket-sled experiments by the U.S. Air Force in 1949 to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981). In one of them, 16 accelerometers were attached to different parts of the subject's body. There were two ways each sensor could be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all 16 the wrong way around. When that happened, thus spake Edward A. Murphy, Jr., who was no rocket scientist as pointed out earlier: "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it." The ‘guinea pig’ (Major John Paul Stapp) quoted it at a news conference a few days later and then it spread like wild fire. The Law was later whittled down to: “If anything can go wrong, it will.” The sudden spurt in the volume of wrongdoings by the citizens of this 'spiritual and morally superior' country reminds me of Murphy's Laws. Although now treated as more or less of a joke, I find them very profound. Try this one for size: “If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.” So, no matter what kind of scandal you're thinking of – bribing selectors, printing fake stamp papers, leaking CAT question papers, catching politicians with their hands in the till or whatever have you – Murphy has already codified the Laws to explain every type of corruption and criminality. He has, as the Yankees would put it, all the bases covered, including this one: “If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway.” dmawww.epfl.ch. P.S.: Apart from the first Law, my personal favourite is this one: “Every solution breeds new problems.” Also, of particular application to India is this NBC's Addendum to Murphy's Law: “You never run out of things that can go wrong.” Drop in at edwards.af.mil. That's where Murphy's Law was born.

NOW TRY THIS ONE ON FOR SIZE. Using a PC and the Internet can be both humbling and – if not life- then at least – attitude-threatening. You begin to believe firmly in Captain Ed Murphy's famous First Law. You give up the pursuit of certainty and perfection. Which, come to think of it, is not such a bad thing. It takes off the load of a lot many burdens your conditioning has thrust on your shoulders. You no more find it demeaning to admit an occasional defeat. You can even gradually start to accept life as random events beyond your control. Instant enlightenment at the click of a mouse? Search me.

Scalping for fun and profits. Don’t wait till zero hour.

Now that the World Cup fever is on, this tale comes to mind. My friend, Zubin, told me how he managed at the very last moment to attend the 2004 Grand Prix of Canada in Montreal (13 June 2004). For the privilege, he had to pay a global ticket scalper through the nose. In return, though, he managed to click some prize pictures of his idol, Michael Schumacher, and to grab a piece of his frayed tyre as well. The scalper told him that he had lost a packet on the last Cricket World Cup when England and New Zealand dropped out of contention and India cruised to the finals. Scalping is apparently well and thriving in the West. These smart operators use the Internet to do bulk booking well in advance and then rake in the moolah when the fans who didn’t make it to the box office in time to get the entrance tickets clamour for them at the last moment. To read all about the fine art of ticket scalping and the intended remedy, go here: http://www.gothamgazette.com/iotw/tickets/. Read all about the 2004 Grand Prix of Canada, if you feel so inclined, here: http://www.grandprix.ca/anglais/index.html.