Season for violent committee meetings yet?

“Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” —George F. Will

Why bother?

If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. - Michael Pollan in his NYT Magazine article Why Bother?

Happy people

Ireland... a land of high divorce rates, teenage pregnancies, and ....happy people!

How so? Read this fascinating article about how this country of 310,000-odd people has succeeded in creating an utopian-sounding society, despite being beset with would be seen by most other societies as myriad problems. And to think it was one of the poorest nations in Europe at the start of the 20th century.

How did it manage this? By being very practical.

It is a largely pagan country, as the natives like to see it, unburdened by the taboos that generate so much distress elsewhere. That means they are practical people.

Link via a post at India Uncut.

Thin as a playing card

"I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, and somehow the activity of writing can change everything." - Joyce Carol Oates

"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience." - Henry David Thoreau

It's time to write something! I hope to join a writing workshop for writing fiction and memoirs in June.

Jodha Akbar

No... not the recent movie by Ashutosh Gowarikar but a short story by Salman Rushdie (published in the New Yorker recently).

Although I have merely seen trailers of the movie and so far have read only the first paragraph* of the story and although I have immense appreciation for the amount of work that goes into making a visual spectacle of a movie like the one made by Gowarikar, I would rather indulge and luxuriate in this orgy of seductive words than be seduced by the visual feast of Aishwarya Rai and Hrithik Roshan on the silver screen. That said, in the last decade or more, Rushdie's recent novels have left me horribly unsatisfied.

* At dawn the haunting sandstone palaces of the new “victory city” of Akbar the Great looked as if they were made of red smoke. Most cities start giving the impression of being eternal almost as soon as they are born, but Sikri would always look like a mirage. As the sun rose to its zenith, the great bludgeon of the day’s heat pounded the flagstones, deafening human ears to all sounds, making the air quiver like a frightened blackbuck, and weakening the border between sanity and delirium, between what was fanciful and what was real.

I am back

After another hiatus of almost 5 weeks, I am back in town and will resume blogging shortly. Thanks for the patience. Life has been pretty tough this year...and blogging has been put on the back burner for most of this year but I promise to be back with more intent and purpose than ever before soon. Watch this space! :)