That’s got to be the line of the day.
Speaking of cows, there’s controversy in America about whether President-elect Barack Obama is going to impose a ‘cow tax’ on farmers because of the greenhouse emissions of their bovine inventory. Maybe farmers will now give their cows Digene to try and earn Methane Credits. If you’re a cow, my sympathies are with you.
(Links via email from Mohit (Dogbert), Mahendra and Balkrishna Nadkarni (cow tax). Previous posts on cows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 , 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 14 December, 2008 in
News |
Old memes |
Cows
DNA reports:
While her Bollywood aspirations are very well documented by now, not many know that Saira Mohan has another passion — art. Big deal, you may say?
Well, it is, if you consider her method. The gorgeous US-based, Indian supermodel prefers to paint in the nude! “When I am in the mood, I cover a big canvas in paint, and then disrobe completely,” she tells us over the phone from her home in Chicago, where she lives with her banker husband and three-year-old son.
This reminds me of an obviously apocryphal story a friend told me a couple of decades ago. The story concerned MF Husain, who got painter’s block one day and couldn’t think of what to make. Finally, in desperation, he took off all his clothes, poured red paint on himself, and went and sat on a canvas. He called the painting ‘Apple’, and it sold for Rs. 10 lakhs.
If Ms Mohan was to get inspired by that story, would you put her apple on your wall?
Posted by Amit Varma on 12 December, 2008 in
Arts and entertainment
A few days ago, I blogged about how Deepak Chopra, on the Larry King Show, said that the Mumbai attacks might have been caused by Barack Obama’s friendly overtures towards Muslims. Well, the irrepressible Sitaram Yechuri has come up with an equally crackpot causation:
What brought the terrorist outfits to our shores? With the Indo-US nuclear deal you are seen as an ally of the US, a strategic partner. There seems to be a total lack of appreciation of this thought from the government’s side.
I guess one should be happy that Yechuri hasn’t blamed India’s liberalization for the attacks. The world is like a Rorschach Inkblot Test for our politicians: they interpret it according to their worldviews, which may often not correspond to reality. The Indian Left parties’ pet hates are capitalism and the USA—the influence of both is virtually ubiquitous, and so anything that goes wrong anywhere can be blamed on one or both of the two.
I can imagine the following scene:
Yechuri arrives at his breakfast table in the morning, in his trademark red pajamas, and browses through the newspaper. His wife comes from the kitchen to place a hard boiled egg in front of him.
Mrs Yechuri: Anything interesting in the papers, darling?
Sitaram: Mmm, not yet, still looking. (Sees something and jumps up.) Yes! Yes! Found something!
Mrs Yechuri: What?
Sitaram: This is happening because of American imperialism! This is happening because of rampant consumerism! In fact, the BJP is also to blame for this!
Mrs Yechuri: What is it? What are you talking about?
Sitaram: This news in Hindustan Times: Techie grooms go out of favour.
(ToI link via email from Anu.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 12 December, 2008 in
Dialogue |
India |
News |
Politics |
WTF
I love this photograph:
(Pic courtesy: DNA.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 12 December, 2008 in
India |
Miscellaneous
Anything that contains the words, “The World Blogger Championship”, obviously must be encouraged, especially if the championship in question is a championship for bloggers, not of blogging—for how can you compete in blogging? Pokerstars.com, where I spent a fair bit of time these days, is hosting the fourth annual World Blogger Championship of Online Poker this month, and I intend to take part. To participate, I’m supposed to verify that I’m a bona fide blogger by posting the code below on my blog—so here goes:
*
A couple of nights ago, a few bloggers, Mr Sabnis, Lord Khanna and Sir Srivathsan were at my place, and we played an all-night poker game. It could, in a manner of speaking, be considered the Mumbai Blogger Championship of Offline Poker. I began the night with one matchbox and ended with six, so I am pleased to say that that particular championship belongs to me. Now for the world…
Posted by Amit Varma on 12 December, 2008 in
Personal
The WTF lines of the day come from the fashion designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee:
In the light of the recent terror attacks, I feel that we should assert our unity through our Indianness in clothing. [...] Think about it, men and women in Indian traditional wear is the first step towards feeling Indian… and thinking like one. Picture this — men in kurtas and women in saris or salwar kurtas at CST station on a busy Friday morning.
If Mukherjee ever does go to CST on “a busy Friday morning”, he will find most of the women there dressed in “saris or salwar kurtas” anyway. Maybe it doesn’t seem that way from whichever five-star hotel he stays at when he comes here for his fashion shows, but most Indian women wear Indian clothes most of the time.
And anyway, what is an Indian dress? If one gets anal about it, and takes a historical perspective, one could argue that stitched clothing came to India from outside, and salwar-kurtas and saree blouses thus don’t qualify as Indian. Equally, I would argue that the jeans and T-shirt I’m wearing right now are as Indian as the churidar kurta I wear on special occasions—to begin with, they’re manufactured here. Perhaps Mukherjee, or Sabya as the DNA article refers to him, feels less Indian when he wears jeans—I don’t.
And while I wear kurtas quite often, the reason I mostly wear jeans with them, and not a churidar or suchlike, is a practical one: Jeans have zippers. With ‘Indian’ clothing, the logistics of relieving oneself, when one needs to pee, can get daunting—especially for a lazy half-bong like me.
‘Sabya’ also says in that article that he is “actually planning to approach the Planning Commission of India with this suggestion.” How I’d love to be a fly in the wall when that meeting takes place. A fly in jeans.
Posted by Amit Varma on 12 December, 2008 in
India |
Personal |
WTF
If Mahinder Watsa did not exist, we would have to invent him. Who else could get so many thousands of people to display their utter ignorance of sexual matters? Consider this question on Ask The Sexpert:
I indulged in unsafe sex on the ninth day of my period cycle. My friends asked me to have papaya to avoid pregnancy, which I did. Now, I am waiting for my periods. Should I take any other precaution? Please help.
Mr Watsa, naturally, sagely answered that papaya does not help in these matters. This reminds me of a chappie I knew in junior college who was just discovering his sexuality at the late age of 16. One day he called me and said, “Amit, I have a question to ask.”
“Go ahead,” I said seriously. “If it is within my domain of expertise, I shall do my best to answer.”
“Amit, here’s what I want to ask. How does one, um, how does one, ah, how does one, eh, [whispers] masturbate?”
I scratched my chin. What to say to this now? I decided to mess with him.
“Oh, that’s easy,” I said. “Just catch the tip and squeeze it hard.”
“Thank you, Amit! Thank you!”
I went back to whatever I was doing, and half an hour later he calls me again.
“Amit, there’s a problem.”
“What happened?”
“I followed your instructions but, ah, but, er, [whispers] it’s hurting.”
So there you go. If this was to happen today, the dude would promptly write a letter to Mahinder Watsa, and Mr Watsa would, in all seriousness, proceed to explain how one masturbates.
Oh, wait.
Earlier posts on Mr Watsa: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
Posted by Amit Varma on 12 December, 2008 in
Personal |
WTF
So I’m back to blogging after what I think was my longest break ever of 11 days. I hope you’ve been good in all this time. Have you been visiting other blogs? Naughty, naughty.
I’d promised in my last post to blog some thoughts on the aftermath of the attacks, but there was an overdose of facts, alleged facts and opinions around me, and I didn’t see any value joining in myself. I got many invitations to light candles, hold hands in unity, and join ‘say no to terrorism’ Facebook groups—as opposed to the ‘say yes to terrorism’ groups, I guess-- but I declined them all, not seeing the point to them. I mean, they’re useful in terms of making an individual feel better in a time of sorrow and anger, and building a sense of community—but no more than that. It’s just temporary feel-good-ness
The continuous flow of outrage has amused me a bit. Why now? The LeT and other such groups have been fighting a war on India for years now, so the fact that there are terrorists out there who are plotting against India is hardly a revelation. Equally, my question to all those people complaining about how our governments have let us down is this: Where were you for the last 61 years? Ever since we achieved independence, our government has been designed to rule us, not serve us, and is like a massive beast feeding itself and getting fatter and fatter, while we labour under the illusion that this beast serves us. Hello? This beast serves only itself, and none of what went wrong, either with our security or with our response to the attacks, was atypical. This is what our government is, and has been for six decades. Why weren’t we outraged earlier?
*
Still, better now than never. There was a semblance of accountability after the attacks, with Shivraj Patil, Vilasrao Deshmukh and RR Patil resigning, and you would hope that this motivates their replacements to get their act together. But remember—one of them is Chhagan Bhujbal, and his return, after his earlier resignation because of the Telgi scam, holds a lesson for the Patils and Deshmukh: all this is a charade, and public memory is short.
The biggest issue with our government is one of accountability. Governments are held accountable by elections, but, alas, most politics in our country is identity politics, fought on the basis of caste, religion, ethnicity etc. Issues rarely decide elections. (Also, all politics in India is local, and no single issue can possibly decide a national election.) Will it be different this time? Perhaps. But if the Manmohan Singh government fails to bring the LeT planners to justice, what are the options you have? The BJP, under whom IC 814 took place?
*
We were lucky in capturing one terrorist alive—without Mohammad Ajmal Kasab’s confessions, we might have had indications that these attacks were the handiwork of the LeT, but no proof strong enough to convince the international community. Because of the details given to us by Kasab, some of them independently corroborated by the Indian and US intelligence establishments, there is no doubt about either the organisation or the people involved. That opens a window of opportunity for us to act tough, and we have to exploit that window, or rue the missed chance forever. We have the high moral ground right now, and we must act.
And how should we act? Unlike most commentators around me, I believe that I simply don’t have enough information to be able to comment on specifics. We don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes between the India, Pakistan and US governments, and I am inclined to give Manmohan Singh the benefit of the doubt, for now, when he says that restraint can be a sign of strength. Sure it can—but only if it achieves results. Rahul Gandhi’s words, that “there is also a cost to killing innocent Indians”, are encouraging—and this government must be judged by whether it can inflict that cost, and punish the perpetrators.
*
And that’s it for this post. Regular blogging resumes. Such relief comes.
Posted by Amit Varma on 12 December, 2008 in
India |
Personal |
Politics
There will be no birthday celebrations, but India Uncut turned four today. The first post of this blog was written on December 1, 2004, and since then I’ve written more than 6000 posts on this blog alone. Most of my blogging has been filter-and-comment, where I link to interesting or newsworthy pieces and comment on them, but I’ve also done a little reportage when I’ve been travelling on journalistic assignments, as well as op-ed kind of posts.
India Uncut has changed my life in many ways. I got much journalistic work because of this blog, including the weekly column with Mint that won me the Bastiat Prize last year. It helped me polish my writing skills, making my posts crisper, and less self-conscious and self-indulgent. I learnt more about the world while blogging, because writing a post on most things involves a certain amount of background research. I fell into many traps, and in the process became aware of them—such as the need to have an opinion on everything, or to have narratives that explain every event, and so on. (I will elaborate on this some other time.)
Many of my old posts make me cringe, either in terms of how poorly they were written, and how shallow the thinking behind them was. But they’re milestones on a journey I’m still on, and I’m thankful for that. Perhaps four years from now, the posts I write these days will also appall me. In fact, I hope they do—that will at least mean that I’m getting better, and there’s still a point to it.
The biggest thing I have gained from India Uncut is the readership this blog has. It baffles me sometimes—why would so many people want to read me? And I’m also deeply grateful for it. The biggest blessing a writer can have is a sense that people are reading him and engaging with his writing. I never had this sense when I wrote my column for Mint, or wrote pieces for WSJ, the Guardian or even a high-traffic website like Cricinfo. With India Uncut, I do—and feel immensely fortunate.
This blog has changed over the last few years—there are fewer posts per day, and since the time I stopped writing columns and op-eds to focus on being a novelist, less detailed commentary on economics or politics. Many of you have written in complaining about this—but I must confess that I never felt at home being that sort of a pundit. It wasn’t my natural ground; and though I’m quite pleased with many of the columns I wrote, and was getting better at the form as the years went by, I always felt that it was a compromise, and not what I would most like to do.
From the time I learned to read, I have wanted to be a writer of fiction, telling stories. Over the years, I have procrastinated, and eventually something had to give. It did this year, and I finally sat my ass down and wrote a book. Obviously I can’t say how good it is—maybe I’ll look at it a few books down the line and cringe, the way I do with some old IU posts. But I thoroughly enjoyed writing it, and felt at home. That’s all I want to do from now on, and I’m reconciled to the relative poverty that implies.
That said, this blog was a happy accident. Once I got used to the medium, I began to enjoy it throughly, and I shall continue to blog for as long as I can. (Or as long as my broadband connection allows me to.) It’s immense fun—and with so much WTFness in the world, maybe it’s even necessary. (For me, not for the world, which won’t change because of a few puny blog posts.) The nature of the blog has changed a bit over the years, but I hope you won’t mind the trade-off once my books start coming out.
On that note, I must inform you that blogging will remain slow for another week. The deadline I mentioned here, for handing in the final manuscript of “My Friend, Sancho”, has been extended by my kind publishers by a week. And I’m still at work. I’ll put up a post tomorrow with some more thoughts on the aftermath of the attacks, and then take it easy. We go back a long way, I think you’d agree, and a few days don’t matter. No?
Posted by Amit Varma on 01 December, 2008 in
My Friend Sancho |
Personal
Before I go back into hibernation, a few links and thoughts.
My friend and former colleague Sambit Bal has a beautiful piece on Cricinfo about these attacks, echoing the feelings I’d expressed in my earlier post of how it seems perverse to think of anything else, do anything else, while this mayhem is happening. He writes:
I was on the streets of Bombay covering the communal riots in 1992, and the serial bomb blasts in 1993. I have seen a mob with swords chase a man and sever his arm from his body; I have seen rioters set an old man alight after garlanding him with car tyres; and I have faced the prospect of being burnt alive myself. For days I left home kissing my small child goodbye with thoughts of the worst. Those days return to haunt me sometimes even today.
But somehow I felt I understood what was happening then. I couldn’t relate to it, but I understood the thirst for retaliation and revenge, the hatred and the frenzy that temporarily consumed ordinary people. I even wondered about a foreseeable future when I could sit down with some of the rioters and talk about what drove them to such madness.
But this is simply beyond my comprehension. Every time I see the photograph of the young man - who looks not a lot older than my son - dressed in jeans and t-shirt, carrying a machine gun as casually as a satchel on his shoulder, bearing a sinister glee in his eyes, I am reminded of Barack Obama’s words about the killers of 9/11: “My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another’s heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with such serene satisfaction.”
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Another good friend, Prem Panicker, has been putting up some fine posts at his blog. Here’s the latest.
His Twitter updates are also exceptional, drawing both from the live coverage of his colleagues at the scene of action, and from what he sees on TV. For example:
TV LOL: “Intermittent firing has been going on non-stop at the Taj”.
Indeed, Mumbai’s Twitter users have been magnificent over the last two days. If you’re one of them: Salute.
*
This report pissed me off:
Sources said though the plane carrying NSG Commandos was ready by midnight, it could not take off due to the delayed arrival of a VIP, who wanted to accompany them to Mumbai, at the Delhi airport. Worse, the Commandos had to wait for a vehicle at the Mumbai airport until morning.
Also, I see no pressing reason why Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, LK Advani and other political VIPs had to visit the victims at this time, diverting precious resources at a time when the police were already stretched. Why now?
I’d blogged about this VIP syndrome in 2005, when I was travelling through Tamil Nadu after the tsunami. Disasters come and go; our VIPs stay the same.
*
People are calling this Mumbai’s 9/11. In the sense that this city will never be the same again, I agree. But in terms of what we do about it, I’m not sure.
Once it was clear that 9/11 was caused by al-Qaeda, the US went after them, not bothering with niceties like their geographical location. From the information available at the time of writing this, it seems that we can soon be equally certain of who’s behind this. So what will we do?
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Ramesh Srivats captures some WTF moments from the last two days here. But, as he points out, it’s as scary as it is funny. An excerpt:
Commandos are landing on the Nariman Building. They seem to be tip-toeing down. They are communicating to each other through hand signals. Secrecy & surprise are paramount. And NDTV is showing this live!!! With informative commentary on how many commandos have landed and so on. Perhaps NDTV’s research has shown that terrorists only watch cartoon network during missions.
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For decades now, we’ve taken it for granted that our army is better equipped and trained than our police. Our army defends our country from outside attack; our police looks after local law and order, which demands less of them.
But it’s become clear now that that old paradigm has changed. As long as we are threatened by terrorists, we will remain in a state of suspended war, and we need to invest in bringing our cops up to date with urban warfare, in terms of both training and equipment.
The heroism they have displayed in the last two days makes it clear that our police can match the best forces in the world in terms of valour and spirit. But it’s time now to back them up so that if terrorists attack Mumbai again, we won’t need to call in the army.
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Some quick links to end this post:
One of my friends mentioned in an email that perhaps our security forces should ask themselves one question when they are faced with such situations: “WWID:
What Would Israelis Do?” On that note, The Jerusalem Post relays criticism of our security forces by Israeli defense officials.
Check out Sadanand Dhume’s piece in The Wall Street Journal titled “India’s Antiterror Blunders”. In his piece he describes how “the Indian approach to terrorism has been consistently haphazard and weak-kneed.”
My friend Salil Tripathi has a piece in Far Eastern Economic Review in which he writes” “If Bombay maintains its stride, if it continues to exude its characteristic warmth, it is in spite of those who rule it, and not because of them.”
And in “The Longest Day”, Vir Sanghvi writes that “even before the post-mortems begin and the excuses are offered up, three points need to be made.” I don’t always agree with Sanghvi’s analysis—but this is an excellent piece, and he is dead right on all three counts.
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There have been many things I’ve wanted to write over the last couple of days, and many pieces I’ve wanted to link to, but I’ve felt too unsettled and disturbed to put it all together. This city is my home not just because I live here now, but because it embraced me when I first came here. I often say that Mumbai is the only city in India where you can land up from anywhere and feel at home right away. Indeed, if the men behind this mayhem, who allegedly travelled here from Karachi, came here as tourists, they too would feel at home in no time. And I know, despite the pain and the rage that all Mumbaikars no doubt share with me today, that this will not change. Our arms will still be open—but hopefully, so will our eyes.
Blogging might be slow for the next couple of days for the reasons explained here. Subscribing to my RSS feed is one way to stay updated.
Posted by Amit Varma on 28 November, 2008 in
India |
News |
Personal |
Politics |
Small thoughts
