In a conversation with Rajdeep Sardesai, Sandeep Patil remembers being Sunil Gavaskar’s roommate in 1983:
I asked him if would be able to even see the balls of West Indians. He asked me what do you mean by ‘the balls of the West Indians?’ I told him the cricket balls that will be bowled by Marshall. I had not faced West Indians then and Sunil told me that you have faced Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thompson; you will be able to see the balls. I saw the ball and I hit a six.
My favourite bit in the interview, though, is when Sardesai asks what Kapil Dev said to his team in the dressing room after India was dismissed for 183 in the final. Kapil replies:
I just said c’mon Jawaano, let’s fight it out.
Through a nostalgia-tented lens, of all this seems charmingly uncomplicated. But in my view, the politics is less today and our cricket is much better. (Not the West Indies’s, sadly.) Still, it’s good to remember.
*
Many readers of this blog, shameless young kids all, were born after that 1983 World Cup. Those of us born before it are often asked where we were when the final was won. I was nine at the time, and hadn’t yet begun following cricket. I vaguely remember being in a room with many family members, all of them rather excited. When they began jumping up and down at the fall of the tenth West Indian wicket, I looked at the screen and sagely remarked: “But they still have one batsman left.”
(Link via email from Sanjeev.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 22 June, 2008 in
India |
Personal |
Sport
In all my time of blogging about WTFness, I have never come across such audacity:
A Malaysian of Indian origin, who was sentenced to 36 years in jail four years ago for repeatedly raping his minor daughter, wants his jail term reduced because he used a condom while committing the crime.
[...]
[The rapist’s lawyer SI] Rajah told the court the sentence should be reduced since “the accused used a condom every time he committed the offence”, the New Straits Times reported Saturday.
I think the man should be forced to wear a condom for the rest of his stay in prison. At all times. The same one.
I could add to that, but never mind.
PS: Remember Fritzl?
(Link via email from Mahendra Shikaripur.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 22 June, 2008 in
News |
WTF
I love Chris Albrecht’s response to the news that “Sega is rolling out a line of 15-inch robot girlfriends that will kiss on command”:
I never like to buy the first generation of any tech product, so I’ll wait for EMA 2.0, which replicates the girlfriend experience even more by giving you a kiss, then pausing and looking at you. You ask her what’s wrong, she says, “Nothing.” You ask if it was something you did but she just sits there, crosses her robot arms and says, “It’s fine.” You say obviously she’s not fine, to which she responds with, “I’m fine. Whatever. Nothing’s wrong. Let’s just go.” And you say no, let’s talk about it, and she says, “We’re late, let’s just go this party and we can talk about it later,” ruining your whole evening as you try to figure out what exactly you said and — oh. Wait.
In other words, men will find themselves in a position where they can figure out neither their women nor their gadgets. What’s left to do then?
(Link via email from Ajay Bhat.)
Update: Heh.
(Link via email from Satyen Kale.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 21 June, 2008 in
Science and Technology
People keep talking about how mobile phones are as much entertainment devices as they are communication devices—I agree. No, I’m not talking about listening to music or watching videos or playing games on the phone—I’m referring to the remarkable spam SMSs I keep getting. Just see this sample from the last few days, represented with spelling and punctuation as in the original:
Sender: 53131
Message: Aap jyada haste hai, sochte hai ya Gussa karte hai? Ab janiye apne baare mein. SMS DOB Birth date and month (DD/MM) to 53131. For eg: DOB 0508 to 53131 Rs 3/SMS
*
Sender: 54545
Message: Love is gentle, Love is blind! Are you in LOVE? Check with our Love Doctor to know if you are in Love. SMS LD to 54545 and answer few simple questions. Rs3/SMS
*
Sender: 51515
Message: Is ur personality as precious as a pearl to u? Use ur name to find out more about ur personality. Sms NAME (ur name) to 51515. Eg: NAME Preeti to 51515. Rs3/sms
*
Sender: Just Talk
Message: Kaash kabhi aisa hota ki koi apna hota jisse karta sari baat call 55365. Rs 9/min aur kahein apni dil ki baat.
*
Sender: Voice Chat
Message: Friendship is a promise spoken by the heart and Voice Chat will help you do it. Call 55121, chat with ur desired partner. Just Rs2/min. Subscribe now Rs30/month
Needless to say, I haven’t tried any of these services, though I’m tempted to find out if my personality is like a pearl, as I’ve always suspected. But clearly there is a massive market for all these studies, and if I was a sociologist, I’d be going through the SMSs I get very carefully. There’s a picture of India here that is as true as any other.
PS: You were about to crack a joke about Rediff message boards, weren’t you? Well, don’t.
Posted by Amit Varma on 21 June, 2008 in
India |
Small thoughts
A question like that makes absolutely no sense, but it must be asked—because I say so. Here’s the evidence:
Exhibit 1: According to this survey by askmen.com, India is not one of the ten horniest countries in the world. The nationalists among you should be distraught at the news—what has the country of the Kama Sutra come to (no pun intended)?
Exhibit 2: On the other hand, Google does no evil and Google Trends does not lie. Indian cities top the list when it comes to searching for ‘sex’, ‘naked’, ‘boobs’, ‘fuck’ and ‘Salma Hayek’.
My expert conclusion: We lag behind when it comes to overt horniness, but are No. 1 at repressed horniness. This calls for a freedom movement. (Jokes about a Danda March will not be tolerated. Don’t even think about it.) No?
(Askmen.com link via email from Krishna Prasad.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 21 June, 2008 in
Freedom |
India |
Miscellaneous
This piece of mine was published this Sunday (June 15) in Mail Today.
Even an atheist is tempted to believe sometimes. My mother died about three weeks ago, losing a long battle to cancer, and I found myself faced with false consolations. Ma had been a believer, and the others in my family also tend that way. They could console themselves with the thought that there might be an afterlife, that perhaps she was now in “a better place.” Friends who came to see us told us that they were praying for her soul, and that God had been merciful to her, and that it could have been worse. All this was useful for others – but not believing in God or souls, I had to deal with death as death.
I’ll come to terms with my mother’s death – with some sorrow, one moves on. But I think about my own, and that is harder. If I cast aside the existence of a higher being, I have to accept my own insignificance in the world, and that when I die, that will be that: no soul, no heaven or rebirth, no greater purpose to my mundane life. At low moments, it makes everything seem pointless.
And yet, being an atheist is not a choice I have made, choosing one belief system over another. This is because atheism is not about belief at all: it is about the absence of belief.
Nonbelief
Some people think that atheism means believing that there is no God. This is a flawed perception. The primary meaning of atheism that most dictionaries will give you, though there are secondary meanings that have evolved from bad usage, is of “disbelief” in God or a deity. That means that atheists are not people who believe that there is no God, but people who do not believe that there is God. The difference is huge.
The conviction that there is no God is irrational because one cannot prove a negative. (How do you prove that something does not exist?) However, it is entirely rational to not believe in something whose existence has not been demonstrated. I don’t believe in dragons or fairies because no one has yet proved to me that they exist. Ditto God. I am not asserting that God does not exist, but simply saying that I don’t believe in the existence of God because I see no evidence of Him (or Her, or It). This is not a dogmatic position: if you can prove to me tomorrow that God or dragons exist, I will start to believe in them. Until then, I remain in disbelief. That’s atheism.
People often speak of atheism as if it is a movement or an organised belief system – or even a religion of sorts. That is not true. The Economist published a letter from Chad English of Ottawa a few months ago that summed it up well: “Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby. When you understand why there are no ‘aphilatelist’ conventions, you will understand why atheists don’t congregate.”
Agnosticism
It is a common mistake to view belief in God as running along a continuum in which we have theists (who believe), agnostics (who are undecided) and atheists (who don’t believe). This is based on a misunderstanding of agnosticism, which doesn’t deal with belief at all, but with knowledge. The word ‘agnostic’ is a combination of the Greek α (without) and gnōsis (knowledge), and refers to a person who believes that the truth about something, in this case the existence of God, is unknowable. It has nothing to do with believing or not believing.
Indeed, it is possible to combine agnosticism with either theism or atheism. A believer may choose to believe in God while accepting that some things are fundamentally unknowable. An atheist may agree with that view. I see myself as both an atheist and an agnostic: an atheist because I do not believe in God, as His/Her/Its existence has not been proved; an agnostic because I believe that on this matter, we may never know the truth for sure.
For that reason, I am not militant about my atheism. What other people choose to believe in is none of my business, and I respect their right to their beliefs. But the right to religion does not imply the right to force it on others. I object when people try to coerce others into conforming with their beliefs, believing that their religion gives them the license to infringe on the rights of others. Religion in the private domain and in community settings can be useful, and a force for good, but too often in recent times, it has been used to justify the worst excesses: genocides, riots, terrorism, and all kinds of coercion. We have seen deplorable instances of this from every major religion in the last 100 years (including communism, which relies as much on faith as any God-based belief system).
Thus, it is not religion per se that is a problem, but our attitudes towards it. The right to religion is a human right that should be contingent, like all other rights, on respecting the corresponding rights of others. But many ‘religious’ people have the arrogance to believe that they, the enlightened, are due special privileges that would otherwise be unjustifiable; and many ‘secular’ people are inexplicably keen to pander to them. This endangers the basis of a free society, where artists have been terrorized into thinking twice before drawing a cartoon of another man’s god or painting another man’s goddess, not by the alleged power of those gods and goddesses, but by the primitive fury of their followers.
Consolation
I may not believe in God, but I have no doubt that belief in God serves a purpose for many people. In primitive times, before we understood what the sun was or why there were eclipses and storms, the world must have appeared a terrifying, bewildering place. Religion offered an explanation for everything, and made us believe that we weren’t as small and insignificant as, well, as we are. Besides rendering the world explicable, it made mortality bearable. When someone close to us died, we could tell ourselves that they were in a better place.
As science has gradually filled up the gaps in our knowledge, the God of the Gaps has shrunk, almost becoming redundant. And while the consolations of belief are useful, I would rather reject those false certainties and look for consolation in smaller, surer things. As Austin Cline once wrote: “A person who truly enjoys and appreciates their life will take pleasure in it and enjoy it regardless of whether any sort of afterlife exists. They might believe in an afterlife and even in some sort of wonderful heaven, but they won’t depend upon the existence of such a heaven in order for their lives to have meaning or purpose.”
* * *
I’ve written on this subject a fair bit on my blog; a few posts: 1, 2, 3, 4. If you want to read more about atheism, I can’t think of a better site than About.com’s section on atheism, written by Austin Cline. The left sidebar there has some links to some fine pieces by Cline.
And for more essays and Op-Eds by me, click here.
Posted by Amit Varma on 19 June, 2008 in
Essays and Op-Eds |
Personal
