Chutiya vs Dhakkan

So at a party last evening, I quoted Hanlon’s Razor to somebody:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

‘Say it in Hindi, say it in Hindi,’ my hosts implored. ‘Tu angrezi mein bahut bak-bak karta hai!

So this is what I came up with:

Tum yeh na samjho ki woh chutiya hai. Woh sirf dhakkan hai!

I have to now admit that it sounds much better in Hindi.

Mr Hollande Meets His Match

Narendra Modi and Anil Kapoor walk into a bar. The president of France is sitting there, nursing a drink with Barack Obama, who decides to introduce them.

‘Hello, Mr Modi,’ Obama says, ‘meet my friend, Mr Hollande.’

‘Hello, Mr Obama,’ says Modi. ‘Meet my friend, Mr India.’

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By and by, I think the French President’s name might have caused this little mix-up.

Dispensing Stories

On the face of it, this is a great idea:

To elaborate:

A number of the machines have been installed in the city of Grenoble already and are distributing original stories to anyone who wants one for free.

Each story is printed on paper similar to a receipt and people can choose if they want a story that will take one, three or five minutes to read.

Why do I think it’s a great idea? Because it’s a new way of looking at literature, and of pushing it to people with short attention spans. Why do I nevertheless have reservations? Two reasons. One, since these stories are free, there’ll be quality-control issues. Two, they’re printed on paper, which misses the point, because they could just as easily be delivered on an app to the phone of the intended reader, which would be more convenient for that person.

In the long run, no one will read physical books. As I’ve argued before, a book is just the words an author writes, and the rest is packaging. Those of us who are attached to physical books are just attached to a particular form of packaging we are used to, and because we associate it with the joy of reading. That will end in a couple of generations. And there’s nothing sad about that. What matters is that people read, and not the device they use to do that reading.

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You might well ask me at this point what I think of Juggernaut, Chiki Sarkar’s new phone-publishing venture. Well, I think it’s brave and visionary—but I worry that it might be ahead of its time. There is that old saw about how those who look into the future often overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term. I think that might be happening here. Juggernaut’s vision is fundamentally correct, but their pockets have to be deep enough, and their investors patient enough, for them to last long enough to actually succeed as a company.

O Cabbie! My Cabbie!

If Walt Whitman was born in Delhi he’d write something like this:

O CABBIE! MY CABBIE!
by Walt Bhainchod Whitman

O Cabbie! my Cabbie! our fearful trip is done,
The taxi’s conquered every pothole, Gurgaon has been won,
Home is near, what’s this I hear? My cellphone madly ringing.
I pick it up, it’s my better half, and lo, she starts singing:
‘O heart! heart! heart!
So long you’ve been away!
Take a little longer, love
Pick up the groceries on the way!’

Why I Will Not Grow a Beard

A Telegraph report tells us about a study that reveals that more and more men are growing beards because they are “feeling under pressure from other men and are attempting to look aggressive by being more flamboyant with their whiskers.” There are evolutionary reasons for this; apparently, we are wired this way.

You will note, now, that there were more beards in the New Zealand team than in the Australian one in today’s World Cup final. Does this mean that one side was pretending to be macho and signalling aggressive intent, while the other side, um, didn’t need to?

Also, what about Sir?

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While on beards, a friend of mine insists that beards make men more sexually attractive. If this is so, I shall certainly never grow a beard. I can hardly cope with the adulation I already receive, and more would be overkill.

The Bastards Whose Sisters We Must Screw

While reading Tapan Raychaudhuri’s memoir, The World In Our Time, I came across this most excellent Bengali “local ballad” of Barisal from the 19th century. Basically, Raychaudhuri’s great-great-grandfather, Rajkumar Sen, had once been “poisoned by his Brahmin guru and a co-conspirator, one Mr Mahalanabish (no relation of the famous statistician and progenitor of Indian planning).” Here’s a translation of the ballad that sprung up in response, which Raychaudhuri tells us is “still current in that area”:

In the village of Kirtipasha lived a famous Babu,
Rajkumar by name.
What can I say of his noble deeds
Wonderful to recall.
His Diwan, Mahalanobish,
A black sheep born of decent parents
Conspired with the guru
And put poison in his sherbet.
Oh, the bastard, the bastard whose sister must be screwed!
As for the sun-dried rice-eating Brahmin?
Cut open his arse
And take out the sugar, butter and ghee
The scoundrel had eaten all these years
Oh the bastards, the bastards whose sisters we must screw.

I suppose it could be said that this is an illustration of rape being an instrument of power more than a crime of lust—but that’s hardly a revelation. Funky song, though, isn’t it? Mahalanobish the bastard indeed!

Process

The sentence of the day comes from ‘Gulp’ by Mary Roach. Here it is, after a brief setup:

Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered, via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is then converted into the most powerful taboo in human history.

‘A Living Room Full of Guys’

Check out this TED Talk by Tony Porter on how men get trapped in a ‘Manbox’—and women bear the consequences of that. It’s quite excellent, and I especially recommend you watch it if you’re a parent.

III = III + III

Jonah Lehrer writes in Wired:

Here’s a brain teaser: Your task is to move a single line so that the false arithmetic statement below becomes true.

IV = III + III

Did you get it? In this case, the solution is rather obvious – you should move the first “I” to the right side of the “V,” so that the statement now reads: VI = III + III. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of people (92 percent) quickly solve this problem, as it requires a standard problem-solving approach in which only the answer is altered. What’s perhaps a bit more surprising is that nearly 90 percent of patients with brain damage to the prefrontal lobes — this leaves them with severe attentional deficits, unable to control their mental spotlight — are also able to find the answer.

Here’s a much more challenging equation to fix:

III = III + III

In this case, only 43 percent of normal subjects were able to solve the problem. Most stared at the Roman numerals for a few minutes and then surrendered. The patients who couldn’t pay attention, however, had an 82 percent success rate. What accounts for this bizarre result?

The piece is titled ‘Why Being Sleepy and Drunk Are Great for Creativity’, and is about “the unexpected benefits of not being able to focus.” (The next time your loved one asks you to pay attention, just snap back at her that you’re busy being creative.) That might just explain absent-minded geniuses—their absent-mindedness is part of the reason they’re geniuses, and not some regrettable offshoot of their abilities.

Um, what was I saying?

The Sadness of Dogs

The New York Times reports:

A video of a dog apparently mourning the death of his owner at a funeral has gone viral, prompting an outpouring from viewers around the world.

The footage was captured by a woman whose cousin Jon Tumilson, a member of a Navy Seal team, was killed in Afghanistan when his Chinook helicopter was hit by enemy fire on Aug. 6. A funeral service was held for Mr. Tumilson in Rockford, Iowa, last week and attended by 1,500 people.

But also in attendance was Mr. Tumilson’s loyal Labrador retriever, Hawkeye. The dog wandered over to his owner’s flag-draped casket and lay beside it throughout the service. [Link in original.]

Humans have ways of coming to terms with death. We rationalise, divert our minds to other things, and find different ways to move on. But a dog can’t do many of these things. So how does it cope?

From later in the piece:

“There are famous stories of dogs returning to a grave site every day for five years, and you can’t account for that by saying he can smell the body there,” she said. “In fact, dogs return to the grave sites of their companion dogs and animals that they grow up with.”

It must be hell.

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Here’s the video: