Thanks to a little experimentation (maximum optical zoom, macro closeup enabled, exposure down to -0.7) and a lot of luck. This one came out all right, but I had to discard ten shots.
If you’ve got the bandwidth, do click the photo and then see the original size as well. You’ll get a stunning view of the pollen sacs on her back legs.
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Posted by Aadisht
I have no clue about how football works, beyond a vague idea that you have to kick a ball into a goal, with the annoying restriction that this only counts for one goal. However, I am getting into the spirit of the thing and supporting Ghana. My brother has offered me 10-1 for the Brazil match, and I have bet 50 Singapore dollars.
Yes, yes, Brazil is supposed to be a good footbal team, and Ghana are supposed to be not as good, but I wouldn’t know about that. On the other hand, Ghana’s supporters are big fat jolly black men who sing and dance, while Brazil’s fans are women with big bosoms. You can’t trust them.
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Posted by Aadisht
I’ve made a long-overdue start on Indian language fiction. I’ve finished three of the five Ponniyin Selvan books (in English translation), read Parineeta (again in translation), and am currently reading Premchand’s Nirmala (in the original).
The interesting thing about Parineeta is how different the original book is from the movie. In the book, the hero doesn’t flout parental authority and break down the boundary wall. What actually happens is that the girl’s uncle dies and then the guy’s father dies. Immensely received that he doesn’t have to face the prospect of his father’s wrath, the guy goes and tells his mother that he likes the girl. The mother is delighted. This is the end result of twelve chapters in which everyone suffers from inner conflict and sulks, but does nothing about it. The Bongness of the whole situation is overwhelming.
As for Premchand, a mere two chapters show why he is compared to the Great Russians in the little biography that precedes the book itself. All his characters are miserable people, tramelled upon by an uncaring world. I wouldn’t go so far to say that Nirmala is ‘a grey study of hopeless misery, where nothing happens until page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decides to commit suicide’, but when an author begins a chapter with ‘विधवा का विलाप और अनाथों का रोना सुनाकर हम पाठकों का दिल दुखाएंगं’1, you begin to get the feeling that here is someone who firmly believes that the brighter side of life does not belong on the printed page.
Ponniyin Selvan could not be a greater contrast. I does not tackle burning societal issues the way Parineeta (bourgeois conformity) and Nirmala (dowry) do, unless of course you consider the royal succession of the Chozha empire a burning societal issue. The characters in Ponniyin Selvan may be evil schemers at worst, but they are cheerful evil schemers. And compared to the characters of Nirmala and Parineeta, who mostly sit around in gloom while bad things happen to them, they are hives of activity- escaping through secret tunnels, thirsting for Veera Vaishnavite blood, making sea crosses to Sri Lanka, falling in love with princesses… the list goes on.
This is easy to explai, of course. An author living in Madras, with all it entails- cheap accomodation, tasty grub, bajjis at Bessie beach and South Indians as far as the eye can see- cannot help being cheerful. It spills over into his characters. On the other hand, someone from Bongland or HTland, determined to draw a realistic portrait of life will find nothing to portray realistically except social evils and gloom. It’s just the way it is.
1: This roughly translates to ‘The author shall now make the readers’ hearts ache by relating to them the lamentations of (the) widow and the weeping of orphans’. It sounds even more depressing in the original Hindi.
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Posted by Aadisht
Interesting learning: the import duty on motorcycles is 105%, 135% on cars, but zero on tanks.
Damn. Now I want a tank. Fortunately, the internet is a wild and wonderful thing, and it turns out that these people have tanks for sale.
But they only have Czech manufactured Soviet tanks. What a shame. I would have liked a Panzer IV.
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It seems that people try to evade stamp duty (a tax imposed on the sale or transfer of real estate) by reporting a low price on the invoice and then paying the rest in cash. The Delhi government’s brilliant idea to solve this problem and get all the tax it’s missing out on has been to fix a minimum price on all real estate. (Incidentally, I am stunned that the Slimes of India, which broke this story did not come up with a pun involving price floors and floor areas. It just goes to show you that there is hope in this world. Or more depressingly and more likely, that the SOI staff doesn’t know enough economics to know what a price floor is.)
Anyway, I can’t see how this will remove corruption. For existing areas, it will of course only reduce corruption. People will be forced to pay at least the price floor on the invoice, but will still make up the rest in cash. But that’s for existing areas.
In the long run, this will of course increase corruption. Real estate developers who are coming up with new neighbourhoods will be bribing local officials to get their neighbourhood classified as a particular class- either upwards or downwards, depending on what they think the market will take. Whenever rates have to be adjusted to account for inflation or changes in market conditions, builder and landlord lobbies will swing into action to get the rates fixed.
We’ve already seen the effect of sixty years of a price ceiling in Bombay. Do we really need a price floor in Delhi?
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Readers of Maajorly Shadymax Arbit Fundaes are obviously too intelligent to be taken in by this Pankaj Mishra editorial, which manages to contradict itself repeatedly and also indulges in some very selective reporting of facts.
To take just one of the contradictions, Mishra first claims that when China adopted free market policies, the result was a 25% inflation rate in the late 1980s, and even says that the Tiananmen Square protests were not for greater democracy and accountability, but against rising prices (So was the Goddess of Democracy actually the Goddess of Low Prices?). But he then goes on to say that China’s adoption of free market policies is undermining European economies through cheap exports. You can’t have it both ways. Why do ‘neoliberal’ policies cause inflation in the 1980s, but 15 years on, with greater adoption cause deflation? And why are rising prices bad in China, and falling prices bad in Italy?
Tim Worstall has a rebuttal up on his blog. It makes some very excellent points about the things not mentioned in the editorial, and leaves Mishra looking pretty silly.
I disagree with Worstall’s opening paragraph, though, where he says Mishra seems to be suggesting that India and China need a healthy dose of socialism. Actually, Mishra’s beef with free market economics is not that it doesn’t work, but that it is a Western idea based on Western values, and thus unsuitable for India and China. If you were to take this to its logical conclusion, socialism is also ruled out as it too has Western origins. Mishra would presumably be satisfied if India and China were operating under pre-imperialistic conditions. Of course, this would mean scuppering democracy, free speech, the university system and bringing back untouchability, sati, absentee landlords, and foot binding, but at least these are homegrown concepts.
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On the topic of vegetarianism, the Master wrote:
Cut him off from the proteins and the amino-acids, and you soured his normally amiable nature, turning him into a sullen hater of his species who asked nothing better than to bite his n. and dearest and bite them good. But give him this steak and kidney pie outlet, thus allowing him to fulfil what they call his legitimate aspirations, and chagrin would vanish and he would become his old loveable self once more. The dark scowl would be replaced by the tender simper, the acid crack by the honeyed word, and all would be hotsy-totsy once more.
This could explain why Gujjus are so ornery, and go about rioting and vandalising and whatnot. All they need to do is have a nice steak, and they will overflow with love and benevolence once more.
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If I had a huge gorilla behind me, I’d be screaming with terror and running away with my valuables too. And the gorilla might be angry because he’s next to a Himesh Reshammiya poster.
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I saw a TV commercial that enraged me. The first time I didn’t pay a great deal of attention.
A little boy, a well-fed kid, is by himself and finds his shoelace his undone. He decides then and there to learn how to tie it by himself. The camera lingers on him, on his intense look of concentration. He experiments, draws diagrams in the mud. It goes on and on; it looks inspiring. Finally the punchline of the card comes up. I thought it was going to be for a breakfast cereal or a milk additive for your children.
But then, besides his look of triumph you see a message for Surf Excel- “When kids set their mind on something, dirt gets in everywhere. So use Surf Excel to get dirt out of tough corners.” My jaw actually dropped. What was the message of this ad? That no matter what a kid’s learnings are, all that matters is that his clothes are clean? How crass, even cruel can you get?
Am I missing out on something here? I’m still angry- was it meant to be funny? Millions of boys and girls in this country spend their childhood in a school system that discourages self-learning and creative thinking- while we lucky few can write blogposts. Let’s subordinate their creativity to washing powder while we’re at it. Surf Excel is owned by Hindustan Lever. Shame on it, and on its advertising agency.
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So now the government has decided to go ahead and censor TV directly, without even bothering with a regulator.
The Hindustan Times reports that music channels will now have to run a scroll apologising for playing ‘obscene’ videos. And stop showing them henceforth.
What fun. I suppose next news channels will have to apologise for sensationalising news, and stop showing sensational news. And once that is done, they can stop reporting bad news and criticising the government altogether. After all that could hurt somebody’s feelings too.
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