Green Green Shine and Sheen

Kyle is an accomplished "Doctor" who can treat laggardness faster than you can spell it.
Kyle is a known supporter of the Green Party for US national elections.
Kyle is the only official reader of this blog.

What a lame way to acknowledge Dr Burke's contribution to enrich (one) human's life on earth.

Recently Germany held his national election and the Green Party secured close to 11% of the votes. That is a remarkable figure to attain (in two decades) for a non-mainstream party.

The Green Party, in different avatars around the world, are formed by people who are concerned about the environment; primarily, natural environment, but also social-economic conditions around us. They are about "All Things Good". Google-era netizens are encouraged to think of their "Do no evil"-overlord. Like most parties, except they are _also_ concerned about trees and clouds and bubble clad waves.

Talks are on in India for a similar Green Party. While I wholeheartedly welcome the initiative and would put all of my 2oz weight behind it, the situation is different in India. Like most things copied from the "West", adaptations are necessary and very much crucial, for any concept to survive the Indian potbellies. The usual hurdles are prejudice and fanatical conservative ideals. Of the two broad classes of ideas in matters of social customs, the "timeless" ones end up getting hurt to protect the "time-bound" ones. "This practice of blah is going on for 237 years." is hard to beat even when "blah" has fallen out of the grace of time. Bonus if the harbinger is from outside the community.

Another hurdle is the very Indian fight to survive Indian evils. Hunger, poverty, ill to family, ill to God, ill to any dent in social customs. Most good speeches are still made from high up podiums. The people at the frontline are just too busy to fight. You speak to them about emissions. At the best you get an absent minded nod. He doesn't care. He has to earn money to take his ill mom to a clinic. The nearby hospital has redefined the notion of "free treatment".

Yet the effort to launch an official political platform is laudable. To think beyond "isms", think beyond social strata, with objectives that do not change with upcoming elections. A true green party.

three colours : Blue Red White - liberty fraternity equality

Trois couleours - Bleu/Rouge/Blanc is a trilogy of French/Polish movies directed by one of the masters of modern cinema Kieślowski'.

This was recommeded to me by a close friend long time ago; he said the movies would appeal to my taste of visual narrative. I saw the "Red" part on the TV a few days ago and just finished watching the "Blue" one. If you appreciate eloborate story telling and are easily mesmerised by breathtakingly beautiful shots, then you should make an extra effort to watch this. Other than the superb direction, another reason I liked Blue is because of its music. Possibly after Ray's Pather Panchali, I have seen no other cinema which uses excellent music to enhance the experience but does not let the music come in the way of the movie.

Edit: Not hard to guess, I watched the "White" story soon after. This one is about "equality" and is a soulful story of equality through venegance. Mind the word "soulful" - there is nothing gory about the revenge. I liked this one the best of all three.

Don't Panic

Trident (Booksellers &) Cafe on Newbury Street could easily be labeled as the best cafe in this blue-green planet. But Don't Panic! It is not.

Say, you are in the USA.
Say, today is Labour Day (which in 2009, happened to be on the 7th day of the 9th month).
Say, you woke up with a ravenous urge for omelette and pancake ... no ... pancakes ... and fries.
Now, say today is not Saturday or Sunday (e.g. Monday, which is worse because not only Monday is not an S-day but also just one day after an S-day - I mean what can be more worse).
And you thought ... gee ... I'm gonna hit Newbury Street and just find an all-day breakfast place among the numerous listed-unlisted, famous-deserted, pricey-cheap food places there. After all ... today is a holiday! And brunches are made to be consumed on holidays.

All of this would be good for you ... could be good ... for I, since I am the one writing this whiny blog here, didn't get a chance to try other options, if you arrive at Newbury street before 12 noon.

But brunch is breakfast+lunch, ab initio, so on that eventless day, in USA, having gone to sleep the night before wanting to go to a brunch the next day and having decided that, after looking at yelp and boston-citysearch, walking along Newbury and deciding one among 20 based on some super-cosmic-hyper-complicated algorithm would be relatively easier, for I was more worried about finding the places open on "Labour day" than they serving brunch (if they are open on a holiday, they must brunch - this sounded one of those gotta-be-true statements to me), at about 1pm I walked the entire stretch of Newbury street once forward and then back, walking past restuarants saying that they don't serve brunch on Mondays or their breakfast menu is only till 12, only to find the saviour of a sickening stomach, Trident Cafe (near Newbury St/Mass Av).

Don't try to parse the above "sentence". Don't even bother reading it.

Just remember that if you want a good brunch, you can always fallback on Trident Cafe. For two good reasons. Their (probably bottomless) coffee is really good (take it without milk and sugar) but more importantly, their menu says (only) "BREAKFAST" in BOLD, BLACK letters on the front cover. Now isn't that just good to know ?!

Emotion Reason Justice Law and Human Rights

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen is in Kolkata to talk about his new book The Idea of Justice. I read about the launch of the book in the UK and it was reported to be a phenomenal success. Yesterday's The Telegraph has his interview on some of the ideas he discusses in this book.

I have never seen him in person. That's a shame because he came to my school to give a lecture but I didn't go. All those who went or asked me to go was excited because "he is definitely going to get a Nobel prize". That must not have proved to be a sufficient motivation at that age.

Meeting him is one of the things I would like to do before ... well ... him and a few other people that I am slightly crazy about.

Emotions can be very murky in the court of law. But it would be wrong to blatantly ignore its satanic powers (in the context of justice). I liked his response to the question What is the place of emotions in your theory of justice?

I don’t regard emotion more important than reason, but we do have reason to take emotion seriously.

I wish I had studied about human rights and justice and related matters to be able to see through some of the things he talked about. But as I was reading the interview, I sort of saw 3 different pillars, slightly leaning against one another, that the idea of rights stands on.

(Human) Rights, Justice and Law.

Following is my 5 minutes reflection on these ... what I would have said should the interviewer have asked me.

Human rights are, at least roughly, the rights a person has just for being a human being. The other rights are given to her/him by some law, and that makes HR so special. Think about it ... the concept is amazing yet so simple ... as amazing as Dubito, Ergo Cogito, Ergo Sum.

Law is a technical gadget, like the belt that the skinny dude is wearing to protect his modesty. It lacks novelty but boasts of necessity.

Justice is by far the most complicated of the trio. Syntactically it means being just. The fuzziness comes from how to measure justness. I think most people would share the same opinion as A.S., which is also what comes naturally to my mind, that justness is what a bunch of people, in a relatively fair and free way, accepts. There is a lot of unspoken detail here. The interview mentions two classical theories about justice - one by John Rawls (author of A Theory of Justice) who requires the people to be local and the other by Adam Smith whose requirement is based on an impartial spectator (I guess the spectator needs to be a human being ... no kidding ... seriously, rowing the waters of the initial years of The Age of Synthetic Thinking with robots and machines, it is time to think about when does 'an orga become a mecha' (*) ?).

I am more inclined, as much as I could be in 5 mins at work, towards the former idea which is similar to the jury of peers idea popular in the USA. The impartial arbitrator who can, for purpose of argument, appear from thin air and disappear after delivering his verdict, does not interest me, not because it is unrealistically idealist, but because often different communities have different notions of right and wrong. Of course, I agree that human rights are something independent of the community but there is often a tendency to interpret other rights as cousins of some human right just to give it a greater edge.

(*) Spielberg's A.I. - highly relevant for the text in the brackets.

Guest post: Lyricism

I was permitted by N. to post his email in my blog. FYI, chocolate and poetry recommendations from N. are positively commendable. Read below.

So far, only you and omitted I can interest in poetry... It is always hit and miss of course, but that is fine, as long as some shimmer of interest is present. Perhaps what I send you in this email will leave you unmoved. That is fine. But it is strange how most anyone I talk to seems to perceive poetry as impenetrable, archaic, rusty, devoid of substance, and so on. But no. There are things which almost require the language of poetry. Sometimes also alcohol is required to, as you put it, tame soul's demons.

I know little about Heinrich Heine. Except that he was a so-called romantic poet. A lovely little poem (search for Der Asra):
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/Heine.htm

This poem has a particularly interesting history in former Yugoslavia. It was translated to Serbian (call it Croatian or whatever) by Aleksa Šantić, a famous Serbian poet. It then found its real life in musical form, sung in the sevdalinka style all over the country. Of course, sevdalinka, a musical bastard of Turkish, Sephardic Jewish, and Slavic traditions, has nothing to do with German romanticism, which is precisely the beauty of this poem's infiltration into Balkans. It is hard to find a rendering which is as minimalist as I would like, but here is one of the best Bosnian sevdalinka singers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBACPA6eMsk

It goes on. There was a band called Azra, I daresay the only band with an actual idea, in the 1980's in Yugoslavia. They were pretty much warning of what was to come, when things seemed dandy. Although the band's music was really "rock" , it began in a way as a sevdah band, inspired by that song, and named after it (Azra).

If one were to start somewhere in knowing and understanding what was Yugoslavia, Heine's poem wouldn't be a bad starting point. There is something really interesting about that.

Sevdalinka songs used to be sung in simple inns (called "kafana"), where you overwhelmed your demons with song, plum brandy, cigarettes, and maybe bean stew. These inns are, to my great sadness, disappearing. What is to replace them?

N.

'Tis not just IIT

Flame me for speaking for my alma mater, but when it comes to brand name, there is nothing known as IIT. Instead there are IIT-K, IIT-M, IIT-Kgp...

First, the government wanted to create IITs and they did so. Now Miss M. Banerjee wants to create an IIT for the children of Indian Railway employees. All of them are so sold out by brand values, the buzzword, that they missed the entire point.

An IIT might be created by finding land, creating buildings, setting up infrastructure and finally invoking the coveted IIT Act which grants it the status. Other than the last step, it doesn't really seem any different than setting up any XYZ-IT. A globally recognised IIT brand is created not by the IIT act, but by vision and dedication and takes decades. India has other prestigious universities which have equivalent, if not more, charisma and prestige; only outshined by an infamous bureaucracy and political posters.

I am proud to be from IIT-K and I am also proud to be from RKM-Narendrapur. RKM-Narendrapur college was just recently granted autonomous status. Like IIT, RKM-Narendrapur has built a brand name over several decades.

Imitiation is the best form of flattery. But imitation can only take you so far.

Obligatory links for reference (the wiki pages have all the relevant links):
IIT : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology
RKM-N: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramakrishna_Mission_Narendrapur

last time it bit me

Bummer! Went to donate blood today and was politely told that

Wait 3 years after completing treatment for malaria. Wait 12 months after returning from a trip to an area where malaria is found. Wait 3 years after living in a country or countries where malaria is found.

I didn't realise those stupid flying monsters of Dumdum could have such faaaaar-reaching effects. It will take more than the free T-shirt to cheer me up.