Riggers, teachers...

When the redoubtable (and irrepressible) T. N. Seshan was India's Chief Election Commissioner, he once publicly remarked that some rigging in our elections was always to be expected, since we Indians have rigging/cheating in our blood: after all, he said, our holiest book is called the Rig Veda!

Last night an old boy was lamenting that many college teachers, whether or not they can or want to do anything good for you, are free with threats about how much they can hurt your career if you manage to rub them the wrong way. Well, after all, I reflected aloud, that is only to be expected, wasn't it: look at how Dronacharya is regarded as a 'model' teacher by so many (the Government even gives an award in his name), and look at how he treated Ekalavya when that self-taught unfortunate dared to upstage his favourite pupil Arjuna, whose guardian paid Drona his salary! To put it in trademark Indlish, we are like that only...

Eyes

The saddest thing in the world, said Helen Keller, is not that some people don't have eyes, but that so many people have eyes but cannot see.

If she had been around, I'd only have asked her whether she didn't agree that there is so much nastiness and commonness in this world that those who can indeed see must start wishing, after a point, that they could stop seeing...

My love life, calculated

I saw a cartoon a while ago: husband and wife sitting in bed, scanning their mobile inboxes, and the husband saying 'Our marriage must be on the rocks... you haven't sent me an sms all day.'

Today my mobile service provider sent me one of those promotional short messages they routinely send out to millions of subscribers: for three rupees a minute, I can call up someone designated 'Love Calculator', and s/he will quiz me and let me know whether my wife loves me or not.

I cannot stop marvelling at the speed with which technology is bringing around all-round cultural progress...

Nobel? ha ha ha ha ha...

Barack Obama has been given the Nobel Peace Prize.

I neither can nor need to add to the humour here.

Just by the way: Gandhi wasn't good enough for the Nobel Committee. Enough said!

Plus ça change…

This news item in today’s paper says that a lot of people in Indonesia are blaming the earthquake – and other recent calamities – on their President because numerologists and other experts claim that he has an ‘unlucky’ name (or, for variety, an unlucky date of birth)! Other experts have strongly refuted the claim, insisting that the President’s stars are in fact ‘lucky’ for the country.

There is a saying in French: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more it changes, the more it remains the same). I sometimes watch how fervently our mothers tie all sorts of charms and amulets around various parts of their children’s bodies so that they may "do well in science" and get into the IITs or medical schools. Their children, if they at all notice the contradiction, find nothing embarrassing about it; indeed, some of them, having grown up memorizing science textbooks to get their master’s or doctoral degrees, get very angry when I laugh at their ‘scientific’ pretensions.

One has to pinch oneself sometimes to believe that one is living in 2009, not 1209.