The trouble with Harry.

Not Hitchcock’s second favourite film out of his own ouvre, the black macabre eponymous comedy (a capital T in ‘trouble’, though) about the corpse that wouldn’t stay put in one grave. Harry as in ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’, meaning you, me and whoever. The trouble is, we live in linear, sequential, serial Time. Unlike in the digital realm, you cannot undo. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/undo-way-to-go.html. Or, retrieve the past to amend and relive it. Then why do we have alumni meets? Are we just aping the West? From what I can gather, these occasions are looked upon even there more as opportunities to show off how better off you are and how much better you have fared than all the rest of the lousy losers? It’s no problem for a guy like me blessed with an easily and swiftly erasable memory. And, no envy. I’ve listened to the heart-rending confessions of battled-scarred veterans just back from one of these journeys down the memory lane. Full of self-pity, regret, jealousy, a sense of failure. If you cannot handle the aftermath, why accept the challenge in the first place? Because someone dared you? Avoid. Run. Duck. No pain is gain too. Less is more, hombre.

Undo. Way to go.

Why is a PC more user-friendly than everyday living? Because it gives us the Undo option. Were such an option there in life, we could well have used it to undo the colonial institutions and the colonial attitude that dog us. (Mark Tully found them persistent in India on his return after a gap of twenty odd years.) It is these, rather than corruption, that goad the Indian elite to ignore, if not to downright despise, the poor and the destitute amongst us. (This is what he's hinting at in his The Defeat of A Congressman [Introduction].) Else, how can we account for the indignities that are the everyday lot of the terminally deprived in this secular democratic republic?