Flawed Stories, Fallen Idols and Coming of Age

There was a time when I was in love with newspapers. I loved reading newspapers, as many as I could get my hands on, reading everything I could, even if I was repeating a story from another newspaper. I'd love to tell you that this was about trying to see a story from every possible angle and get the richness of five viewpoints in my little pre-teenage to teenaged head, but the honest truth is that I just got drawn to them automatically. There was a point when we used to get six newspapers at home. Except for the Hindi newspaper, I used to read all the other newspapers cover to cover. Of course, I couldn't read all of them altogether at once. So that's where I developed that habit of screening and making mental notes on signals that each piece sent up. To this day the habit helps me get through articles without actually reading them. It also helps understand article and story structures in intimate ways.

Anyhow, digressions aside, newspapers were my windows to the world. That was till I grew sick of them. Again, I'd love to tell you that there was a rational process to it, but the truth is that I had had enough.

Stories are never made in a linear fashion. Never, ever, in the way newspaper articles or books or history texts make them out to be. Causality is never unmuddled and highly debatable. Grey is the colour history texts need to be written in. Black should be reserved only for tombstones, which have an obligation to present only one version of the story. Newspapers, ironically, with the colour they add superficially, tend to take everything more towards black and white. Consider the story of Tesla, for instance. The most popular version of the story is that Elon Musk was the one who had the greatest role in getting the company to where it is. The truth is probably more debatable. Here is that story, or atleast the best version I know of it. Another case in point is the story of Twitter.

These are more popular stories that I've picked up to highlight a point. Imagine stories which don't have stakeholders willing to get things right at the source because it is expensive, difficult to understand and just not in tune with the news cycle format or the simple linearity that books and texts are faultily designed to follow.

A result of all of this has been a slow and disappointing realization - my version of the world is flawed by my standards. Deeply flawed. The idolization and adulation I have for certain people is based on such linear, uncomplicated stories which might be written by not-so-thorough writers. It's almost like I'm collecting filtered water at the end of the tap, with full trust that everyone along the way has done the best job to keep it drinkable and that my act only adds to its quality, while the truth might be that the source itself is highly contaminated, to say nothing of what else might have happened along the way.

Maybe this is what they refer to as "growing up" or "coming of age". Thankfully, it also comes with a realization that trust can rarely be unconditional. In a sense, it is a beginning of a new kind of way to understand the world, where the storytellers are subject to as rigorous an examination as the story itself. It's a little more difficult - newspapers, books, people, everything and everyone has to be critically seen in that light. With people, it becomes more muddled - when an act is committed, it has consequences. The idea is to backtrack and assign trust based on intentionality.

So how does it work in the real world? Friends don't get it. Partners go bonkers with the fastidiousness and obsession with trivial details. But it helps calm that thing inside which is always pushing me to do the right thing, whatever it is at that point in time, to the best of my understanding. Of course, it might be wrong later. But everything I'd do will be praised or criticised, and with me at the helm, there will be extreme reactions. The only thing that'd help me get closure on anything is the knowledge that at the time the act was committed, I did the right thing.

Genuineness, Machine-Gun Fire, Writing and Fraud

I've stopped writing. This. This is one of the reasons. This machine-gun fire style of writing that I used to go back to wh...wait, no no no, this is not it. This is what I don't like in others' style of writing. The act of composition is not and should not be riddled with full stops, it's not a plot sheet for a shooter. A composition, especially so in our times, is an equivalent of a painting. It has always been the equivalent of a painting, but far more than that. How else do you explain the idea of finding a book of four hundred pages containing ink splashes in the name of a script being more riveting than paintings?

What, in my view, should be true of every composition coming out into the public domain, is that they should be rich in thought, especially genuine strands of it. It shouldn't be a reactionary piece, like this one that you're reading. That shows that there is nothing genuine in the inspiration - you've used another's set of thoughts as springboard to unleash a polemic and garner applause and comments.

I stopped writing because I started seeing similarities in every composition of mine. If they're boring when done by another writer (Think Sidney Sheldon), imagine how boring and sapping they'd be when they come out of your own mind and hands.

Jairam Ramesh and the World Class argument

Do IITs and IIMs, our premier institutions, promote a culture of excellence? Jairam Ramesh's controversial comments about the students being excellent and faculty being less than �world class� created quite a ruckus. A cross-section of students and teachers from these institutions give their views on whether the research and teaching are of international standards. Do we as a society value excellence and have the wherewithal to actively pursue it?
STRIVING FOR EXCELLENCE OR JUST SURVIVING?
Mohit Sharma

I wish Jairam Ramesh had not made that statement. It is excusable and ignorable when it comes from fashionably cynical kids on campus. But when a man of his standing and experience makes such an oversimplified and scathing assessment, there is the very real danger of people taking his word at face value, given how he has been a part of the system here at IIT. In one stroke he labels faculty members as incompetent and the students as world-beaters. If only the world was as black and white.

No one would disagree with him on the major premise of the IITs not being world-class research institutions. For an institute with such name and pull our research output in terms of research papers and patents is far too low. How do you decide whom to pin the blame on? Top institutes around the world have two common features: access to funding and autonomy. The world class institutions that the minister refers to, one among which is University of California at Berkeley (a state university), have budgets running into hundreds of millions of dollars. Stanford University, a private university, has a multi-billion dollar budget, in addition to a Goliath-sized corpus. In comparison, our research budgets rarely exceed a few million dollars, and we have, at best, a pittance for a corpus.

What the students Think : A gross generalisation only undermines the abilities and efforts of the few people who do make a difference to the institute�s research output.�A comment like this shouldn�t come from a person of such high standing in Indian governance, an alumnus, no less. He is in a position to influence the direction the IITs and the IIMs take. Arundhati Anand Velamur, an alumna of IIT Bombay, Class of 2010 Jairam Ramesh himself said that his ministry is doing a PPP to come up with that centre in Jamnagar on marine biodiversity. He also said that in a governmental set-up, it is not possible to do world class research. I guess he made a fool of himself by making contradictory statements, unless he really believes that the IITs are completely autonomous. Vinay Sharma, an alumnus of IIT Bombay, Class of 2008. As far as the faculty goes, I feel that we could do much better with some newer and younger faculty members. This would not only help solve the problem of shortage of faculty but younger faculty generally seems to have enthusiasm towards research. Our faculty is involved with some world class research, still, that is more in spite of the system than because of it. Pritika Goyal, a final-year student at IIT Delhi. IIMs definitely derive a lot of respect in industry and community due to the extremely competitive entrance process. There are a few world class faculty members in IIMs who have a sharp influence on the journey of a student at an IIM and thereafter. Any blanket labelling would be inappropriate. Misha Pratap, an alumnus of IIM Lucknow The first reaction is to be defensive and question the claim. We must take it as an opportunity to introspect. Jairam Ramesh is not completely wrong but criticism is different from critiquing, which we must do. Ankit Sukhija, an alumnus of IIM Calcutta, Class of 2011

Research needs money. Research needs a lot of labs and facilities. And most of all, research needs a culture. We are better equipped on all three counts than most other Indian universities, but we need a lot more if we are to compete with the big boys and call ourselves world class.

On the question of autonomy, we need to ensure that our institutes have enough of it. Give the IITs and IIMs more control over the donations made to them. Let them choose how many students they want and how they wish to admit them. Stop controlling their merit lists with quotas. Free them from the clutches of the government. But the minister already knows all of this and does not need a college student to lecture him on it I would assume.

Let us get to the elephant in the room then. Are our faculty members world class? Dicey question. I had asked a senior the same thing in my first year. His response, �Look, you are going to have good professors and bad professors in universities all over the world.� In a way, that sums it up. I could reel off names of professors who have been masters of their respective specialisations and attending whose classes has been an absolute pleasure.

The other extreme then - do we have people in our institute doing Nobel Prize-winning work? I took this question to our mess tables and the consensus was a resounding �no�. Nobel-winning research, one must understand, is a lot about the environment you work in and this is where the importance of a research culture kicks in. The world�s top universities, apart from having generously funded and well-equipped laboratories, have highly competitive lab groups with a motley mix of undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral students. They compete against each other and against researchers from the rest of the world for rewards in the form of more funding, journal papers and patents. The environment is such that everyone around you aspires for those rewards and good ideas are in abundance. This is one area we can work on. But to pin all the blame for a less-than-average research culture on faculty members is unfair.

Which brings me to the other part of the Hon�ble Minister�s assertion - are our students really world-class? Are we potential somethings waiting to explode, given the right encouragement and facilities, and inhibited only by less-than-world-class professors and the system? Most students here are brighter than average, true. Sadly though, there is a whole huge bunch of us who are just not enthused by engineering. Quite a few of us were driven to IIT and engineering only for the brand and because it was not fashionable in our cities and towns for high scoring folk to get into liberal arts. The result? A lot many of us put in just about enough effort to scrape through our exams every semester and channelise our energy elsewhere � clearly not ideal raw material for a good culture. Which is not to say that there are not students in the institute who are not passionate about science and research, I know a few of them myself. But then, they are exceptions rather than the norm.

The IITs are not really thriving. We barely seem to be surviving, as the minister rightly points out, and it is more on reputation than anything else - a reputation built up by our more illustrious alumni from the last 50 years. In that sense, the students we had at the time (the Hon�ble Minister was a student here) were, in all probability, world class. The sense of this system�s future that I get after being a part of it for five years, however, is not a very positive one.

I believe the minister would be serving the country better by directing his broadside towards his own government than his alma mater. He is smart enough to know what needs to be done without any one of us telling him. Simplistic, fatalistic demagoguery is okay when it spews forth from the mouths of his less illustrious peers. But you, Mr. Jairam Ramesh, we believe in you enough to hold you to a higher standard.

(The writer is a final-year student of civil engineering in IIT, Bombay)

The Present

Suppose that you started out this new year, promising yourself that you'll have fun. Lots of it - uninhibited, unadulterated and guilt-free fun. Now assume that you even did (no, I'm not passing judgment on your sad lives :)) Today's the twenty sixth of February. Today, you're feeling all down and in the dumps. As happens with prolonged low periods, you tend to twist and corrupt every good memory of yours so that it suits your purpose. For instance, in a sad state, you'd tend to look at the sad parts of all those memories. Or, when you're accusing your spouse of cheating (I hope it doesn't come to it) you'll tend to look suspiciously at everything you guys have done together.

Similarly, with sad states, you'd tend to look at everything through that lens, and you'd feel that you never had fun. Now turn the situation on its head. Assume that you've had a super sad year so far, but today, for some reason, is super happy, optimistic and so on. Won't you have a positive outlook about everything in life?

I know it sounds somewhat simplistic, but do think about it - whatever we do today, does it have such strong a connect with the past or the future as we make it to have? My guess is that putting it at even the tenth fraction would be overstating it.

Closet Patriot

I'll say it out loud - I really don't like standing for the national anthem sometimes. The entire thing is in a dialect I only half-understand, and even the parts that I do understand, they sound rather hollow at times. Then there's the entire business of realism and objectivity - the national anthem is a paean to our great nation and, let's admit it, we don't always feel the love. I, atleast, don't.

There are times when I want to protest, when I want to make a statement and times when I simply find the entire process of mechanically standing up to the national anthem and the accentuated action of saluting the national flag boisterous and showman-ly. It's not the way I want to pay respect to my nation.

But, ironically, that's exactly what I'm not only supposed to do, but also compelled to do (by law).

True respect can never be forced, or so I think. Only when you have people standing up for the national anthem and saluting the national flag, when they could have been doing anything else at the time, do you and those people themselves feel the genuineness of their respect and pride.

There should be nothing wrong with flag-burning or wearing the three colours on your person. Or the point of the tricolour standing for freedom (of speech and expression, amongst other things) becomes somewhat moot.

Acquired Taste

Recall the first time you had alcohol. I'm willing to bet my right hand that you thought it had a horrible taste. It was probably a similar situation with wine (if you had it early on during your transition from a teetotaller to a social drinker or general drunkard) There's a pretty good chance that your mates would've backslapped you, with the unsaid comment - you'll start liking it soon enough. And not long thereafter, you're not only a regular drinker (social or, well, unsocial) but you even have a favourite drink!

For those of you wannabe cheese connoisseurs, most varieties of cheese taste like shit. And yet, you have all the experts fretting over it.

Implicitly or explicitly, either you're told or you realise for yourself that it's all about acquiring that taste.

What is an acquired taste all about? Correct me if I'm wrong - you're subjected to (or you subject yourself to) a vile practice or pursuit. Initially, it feels horrible. But once your worldview gets limited to this practice, you start finding positives in it ; the same way a quadriplegic tells you that not having limbs was the best thing that happened to him. If your world was to be mapped on a scale of 100 and alcohol came in at 5, you forcefully rescale your 100 scale over the 5 rating points of the original scale. And in that universe, alcohol is heavenly.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it is bad. I'm just trying to understand how it works.

Free Choice

We've all had times in life when we've been told - Choose X or Y. Not choosing is simply not an option. In fact, your silence/inactivity is taken as an affirmative answer towards one of the choices - "My lord, is aadmi ke paas is aadmi ki chuppi is baat ki gawah hai ki khoon isi ne kiya hai". Then there are times when all choices suck so bad that you won't want to any of them - like when your mom asks you to choose between karela, bhindi and jackfruit for dinner. (I despise bhindi)

What is freedom? For most of us, freedom would be the existence of choices. After all, what's not free about being able to choose what you like and doing it? Oh wait, what if you don't like the choices on offer? What if the choices that have been put up are really just a sham intent on shifting the blame of choosing from a bad set upon you, which would grant a moral caveat of sorts to the provider-cum-executioner of your supposed wishes? For instance, if my mother really wants to make one of her three favourite dishes, all three of which I despise, and she asks me to choose from the pack, would that really be a free choice?

Passive intake of information

Bear with me for a short while here. There is a short snippet in one of today's papers which says "Boney M frontman is dead". He was found dead in his hotel in St. Petersberg. Most of us know of Boney M only by their song Rasputin which also mentions Russia somewhere. We also know that Russian officials, probably, will not think twice before torturing and killing people who project a different image of their country as opposed to what they'll project. (You've probably read of this in some newspaper). Is it so far off to assume that you'll connect the two, on the flimsiest of grounds? Note that since it is a snippet, you would probably not even be thinking of such a logical connect. Your subconscious will make short work of the task.

And there it is. This, I think, is exactly how we read and interpret news - most of us atleast, given the hundred restrictions we operate under. I think this is dangerous.

Fact of the Matter

A few days back we had the Russian president visiting our campus. His visit happened to be at the same time as our college's cultural festival. Were they related? Nah, not a chance. So when a news article by a "journalist" who is attached to our college it seems, reads like this "Medvedev is visiting IIT-B during Mood Indigo, its annual cultural festival.", what do you infer?

This is not even the tip of the iceberg. The session with the president, which I happened to attend, was peppered with rather insolent questions which smacked more of showmanship than genuine curiosity and understanding. Yet, it was an innocent little session with a couple of hundred college students and a few greyheaded professors. Had you been watching the news later in the evening or reading the following day's papers, you would be forgiven for assuming that he made bold political statements from the pulpit as opposed to mere clarifications to infantile queries. This got me thinking about the whole process of conveying information which the media supposedly does.

I, like millions of people of my generation who like to keep themselves abreast of daily happenings, have been brought up on newspapers and encyclopediae. Our kids are told that reading newspapers is a good thing and, naturally, we tend to assume that whatever we read is true. Why should it be otherwise? Aren't reporters out there to seek out the truth? Do they not have ethics? Aren't editors the torchbearers of civil society and the conscience of the government? As I've learned the hard way, they aren't. Look at the Niira Radia controversy. More importantly, look at the way things have been covered up by the mainstream media. No discussion, no self-regulation, no brandishing of the book of ethics. Vir Sanghvi, thankfully, has had the shame to stop writing Counterpoint every Sunday. Barkha Dutt has continued unabashedly on her TV channel with her self-righteous bitchiness.

All of this tends to make you rather cynical of your own knowledge of the world. After all, we've hardly ever been in a crisis situation (most of us) and even if we have been, there has been no possible way for us to know that situation from a holistic perspective. We have to rely on our newspapers for that. The newspapers and the media in general, though, makes you very cynical and negative about what it tells you. You realise that there is a difference between what happens and what gets reported. It's like a child discovering that all the gifts he thought Santa'd put there for him, are actually being put there, stealthily, by his parents.

Induction

There is a chemical phenomena called induction, especially common in organic chemistry where individual molecules in a chain can affect polarities of the molecules next to them. So these other molecules, which have no business being polar otherwise, act deficient in one respect and enriched in another.

We had our placement process starting some time in September and I never really accorded a lot of priority to it, to be honest. I had to test out different things and I decided I wasn't going to be one of those people whose emotions rise and fall with the latest updates on the placement blog. But then, everyone around me started worrying about it, even though they'd never wanted to worry about it. Consequently, and I do think that this came as a consequence, I started worrying about it as well. Those final ten days when I was in the muddle, things went from good to bad and back over and over again. Now that I have a chance to sit back and reflect on all those days, I can see how that happened and how it was something that sucked me in rather than something I opted for.

I wonder if the case is similar and much more potent with a career in the industry, so much so that it keeps sucking you in and you put off doing things you love so that you're able to do things which get you money

Secrecy

In the name of national security and public interest, most nations and individuals have gotten away with a lot of bullshit. We all love the idea of democracy and accountability when it is applied to someone else, but we feel mighty uncomfortable with it when someone holds us to the same standard.

In our day and age, where everything is going digital, the idea of "secret" is fast fading. We will soon reach a time when everything would be open. There would be nothing as a secret, especially not the national security type. Wikileaks will and should spur similar efforts around the globe. Governments and bureaucrats will resist as hard as a few of us ordinary citizens would. But it is an idea with an air of inevitability. After sometime, when we realise that openness is here to stay, we'll hopefully strive to work on the cause of these - the fact that we've not been responsible enough in our jobs, especially in our duties towards fellow men and women.

Leftists, liberals and the media

In the last few days I have increasingly become aware of the fact that I am a liberal. I tend to accord great importance to newspapers and magazines. To ensure that I'm not being biased towards a particular viewpoint, I turn to other magazines and newspapers or to blogs. The blogs I turn to are the ones which say something meaningful and not the ones with crazy abbreviations like omg!!! or lol.. That is just not the way you argue a point.

But the bias still hasn't gone away. I still cannot make any sense of why any American would vote for the Republicans, why self-respecting Marathis support the Shiv Sena or the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena or why cruel nonsensical rituals with questionable bases even amongst religious scholars exist and thrive to this day.

So I decided to wiki "media bias in the United States". It turns out that most people who are in the business of writing articles I read are, also, liberals. Quite an overwhelming percentage of people in journalism espouse those same causes that I do and have the same core values as me, which automatically make us either liberals or leftists, depending on the priority we accord to these values.

The problem is, as I said, that people still vote Republican, that the old European nations are still passing laws that bar Bohemians from entering their nation, that Arizona has perplexing anti-immigration laws. How do you understand this? The problem gets exacerbated further when you read something from those conservative voices. It just doesn't make sense, what they write and what they stand for.

My issue, I think, is that I still trust the writers of the world for my viewpoint. Because you write, as opposed to the legions who don't, you're bound to have a bias towards a certain something. Could it be towards logic and high principles? Maybe. I guess the right wing appeals not to your logic, but to your sentiment. Their bits of speech and text are not for intellectuals who read newspapers and magazines but for the streets where pithy slogans and drumroll speechmaking takes you through. I'd have dismissed it as inconsequential as I did in the past, but the fact is that there is a substantial part of the population (and a substantial part of us) that acts on sentiment(or whatever it is that they appeal to) rather than logic. I'm still trying to figure this one out.

Scrapping Such a Long Journey

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20101102/edit.htm#7

Recently, Mumbai University scrapped a book written by a Canada-based Indian Rohinton Mistry from its undergraduate curriculum. Mistry had been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize not so long ago. The book was scrapped in response to protests by a student group called Yuva Sena. They alleged that the book attacked certain popular individuals and slandered certain political groups, apart from attacking the ethos of Mumbaikars in general and was unfit to be included in the university’s curriculum for English undergraduates.

Yuva Sena is headed by Aditya Thackeray, who happens to be the son of Uddhav Thackeray, who in turn is the progeny of Bal Thackeray. The book in question is about a certain Parsi called Gustad Noble set in the year 1971 in the city of Bombay. The individual in question is Mr Bal Thackeray and the political group is Shiv Sena. The book talks about this man’s life unravels.

When tracing out a character, I would believe that good authors tend to cobble up a character which would be as close to their imagined reality as possible. Mistry’s imagined reality happens to be the same as our everyday one. It’s just that Mistry made the mistak of writing about his character’s political views in a place where political overlords tend to smash people to bits before negotiating with them.

The Mumbai University Vice-Chancellor was competing with Dominos’ 30-minutes-or-free offer in promptness of service when he delivered the scrapping order within a day of the protest. The Sena defends the action by talking about how moral censorship is necessary to pass on the right baton to the next generation. Sanjay Raut, Executive Editor, Saamna,the political mouthpiece of the Shiv Sena, writes in his column in a newspaper that the nature of censorship is such that the censor decides what is acceptable or not based on his/her own morality.

This becomes a problem when the demographic group you seek to protect from such influences is neither in need of protection nor “thinks” it needs protection when you live in a liberal democracy where such a view matters. Our generation today has been fed on a generous dose of liberalism. Liberty is one of our most cherished ideals and we fiercely protect our right to freedom of speech.

The Sena’s action is in direct conflict with this principle, as is evidenced by the huge hue and cry raised by students of the college on various social fora. The English undergraduates whom the Sena wishes to protect from such influences have a worldview far wider than most people would give them credit for, given that they’ve grown up reading a lot. They can discern, far more wisely than most of us, the difference between good fiction and plain bigotry.

In fact, this book was a part of one of those critical appreciation courses where they dissect an author’s work precisely to isolate and understand his intentions and leanings. The BJP, had initiated a similar exercise in the past. My CBSE Class X batch of 2004 had had such a politically motivated change of textbooks in the middle of its 9th-10th cycle because of which the entire Class of 2004 across the country now knows nothing of the World Wars, the rise and fall of Communism, the Russian Revolution, the atom bombs, the Nazis and countless other huge moments of the last 100 years which define our contemporary reality. Instead, the four chapters in our history text read more like insipid tourist brochures for various Indian monuments. This is just one example of how the myopic vision of a political party can render it incapable to prescribe textbooks for students in a balanced manner.

The constituents of this civil society are indifferent people who vent their fury on blogs and Facebook, talk about high principles and reason and feel contented. Clearly, we are no threat to the lumpen elements who want publicity and have the need to display their power. They had their way. We blogged on our blogs and talked at parties to impress upon our peers that we are well read. We chose to put up Sena-bashing status messages for a day and that was that. A book has been scrapped, but hey, no lives lost. Those who want to get offended, will. And as long as there are people who have the means to twist the system into submission, reason will always be a casualty.

The Online Self

So often you come across people online, chat with them and practically build up relationships with them. Then you meet them for real and it is so different. Or vice versa.

There is this character I met who joined our photographers' group one day. Now this gentleman was a fairly ordinary person. In fact, I'd go to the extent of calling him a wannabe. Fairly simple and uncomplicated. Then he added me on fb. So as is my wont, I checked out his profile and was surprised. This was nothing like the guy I had met in real life.

There was a batchmate of mine. Intelligent fellow, but a very affable one. Again, his online persona is so starkly different and elitist.

I have a theory-our online personas are all about how we want others to see us, while in real life we just can't avoid giving ourselves away. Of course, people try and do the same thing in three dimensions as well but there are some others who always catch up. On a slightly tangential note, could it also mean that our skills at identifying and stereotyping are underdeveloped as far as online profiles go? Or is it really far more difficult?

Hygiene

A few days back our toilet cleaner came up to my neighbour to get his signature on his time sheet. Implicitly, a signature means that the person signing is satisfied with the level of cleanliness of the bathrooms and the toilets. My neighbour signed it mechanically. Then he happened to walk into one of the toilets and found that it hadn't been cleaned. He called the cleaner and asked him why it hadn't been cleaned. The cleaner replied, "Sir, saaf hi toh tha. Jab nahi hota toh hum karte hain na. Aapko nahi laga kya? Lao main abhi kar deta hoon."

A lesser being would have accepted this and let it go. My neighbour, discerning fellow that he is, seethed at this explanation. And with good reason.

Last month Jaipal Reddy made a statement which turned out to be hugely embarrassing for our establishment. To the pictures of dirty bathrooms splashed all over the world's newspapers, he said that there was just a difference in hygiene standards between the countries in the West and us.

Good administration is not just about issuing orders and checklisting the minimums. Either your checklist should be long enough. Or your leadership needs to have it percolate to the very lowest echelons of their hierarchy the reasons why certain things are being done the way they are. The difference-in-hygiene-standards argument was really a firefighting response from the minister who, heart of hearts knew, that the establishment he was a part of, had screwed up, but did not believe or want to admit it.

Humans are good. And the moon is made of Green Cheese

A friend of mine is a teacher at a school in Govandi. Govandi's Shivaji Nagar area was one of the worst affected areas in the 92-93 riots. The area is a shantytown with a predominantly Muslim population. My friend happens to be a "Hindu". So the day before the verdict, he was taking his class as usual, talking like a good teacher is supposed to talk, by looking all around the class and pausing ever so slightly to establish eye-contact with every curious child before moving on to the next. Some miscreant, at this point in time, threw a stone at their classroom which landed on the roof. That lead to the plaster on that small part of the ceiling falling off and making a loud exploding noise.

My friend tells me, "I was looking at this one child who was deeply engrossed in what I was saying. And the way he jumped up from his desk and fell down, with fear looming large on his face, I've never seen anyone so scared."

Another co-teacher of his lives in that area. She's a "Hindu" as well. A couple of days before the verdict, she was visited by these four or five goons of the local Shiv Sena group, who were apparently making a list of all the Hindus and Muslims in that area.

A few minutes back, I came across this: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/world/africa/04congo.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

When these things appear in the papers, you tend to look at them very objectively. Death counts are mere statistics to buttress and argument or to effect a new policy. We are mere armchair philosophers who barely have an idea of how ugly things can get and how forced people are to react in the ways they do.

I have a very cynical view of humanity. I cannot understand how it is that most philosophers still view human beings as fundamentally good. I guess we're just too caught up with the idea of us being special.

You know, we have these urinals for toilets where we are supposed to stand and pee against a wall, much like dogs do. Quite a few people despise this because it is animal-like. I like the idea of peeing against a wall. I feel that it strips away all those layers of impressions we have about us being special and superior to all other beings. Should we be special just because we exist in a certain way?