OOPS!

Talk about whimsicality!

While fiddling around with the comments list on my blogger control panel I accidentally deleted all the more recent comments there.

I am, of course, deeply dismayed. My deepest apologies to all who had written those comments. Please don't stop writing, and I promise not to be so silly ever again...

Taking a break

I have written sixty times on this blog this year. Over that same time, the followership has risen a bit, and so has the number of visits. The figures are not bad, but I would have been happy to have more followers, more visits and more comments. I have this suspicion that not enough of the readers of my other blog visit this one frequently. I do, do hope that they would give it a try. As I have said before, it offers a different flavour, and you would get a more well-rounded mental picture of me if you read both. I have said that this is not merely a fun blog, but one dedicated to whimsy. That is a much broader, deeper idea: so I write about everything from noses to mobile mania to mangled English and pretty doctors and what have you, and I expect my readers not only to smile with me but muse along, too, and perchance to jerk awake and revise some of their long-fixed opinions now and then…

Anyway, I shall take a break for a while. Sixty times a year is quite a bit; many blog-writers I know cannot write more than two or three times, unless they are writing fatuous nonsense three times every day. Take time to explore older posts on this blog, and comment on some of them, as Rashmi has done recently. Good critical commentary and suggestions will of course be welcome, too. Some of you might discover, if you give it time, that it grows on you, even if I say it myself. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas.

No 'chat-ting'!

My older ex-students often tell me they cannot access me by chat on gmail, or even look up my blogs, because, though they are stuck before computers all day long, most colleges and offices - out of sheer exasperation with how much employees tend to waste company time on the net if left to their own devices, I'm sure - have blocked out all sorts of facilities, including blogs and sites like Facebook and orkut.

This morning one old boy told me something that really takes the cake. Apparently the computers in his workplace are loaded with some sort of filtering program that blocks out anything that has the word (or wordlet) '-chat' in it. As a result, he said, he cannot even look me up by name on Google Search (I being a Chatterjee)! The same goes for Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay...

A great speech mangled

In a cartoon titled 'Gaurav' in The Telegraph today, the smart young teenage hero is thrilled to see that The History Channel on TV has dubbed Dr. Martin Luther King jr's famous speech, not into Hindi but Indian English, so that the great man seems to be saying "I'm having a dream that one of the days, my baba-logs, you know, will not be judged by skin and all, yeah? But by their good character only..."

For the benefit of the mystified, the relevant line in the original speech was I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.