hoohaaaa

The world would be a lot less funnier if it were not for kooks like this, who seem to abound everywhere.. :)

A Florida theater has changed the name of The Vagina Monologues on their marquee in response to a driver's complaint. The new name? The Hoohaa Monologues.

Serious....not making this up though it sounds like something out of The Onion...it is so funny and so stupid on so many different levels. Damn... now I know what that perv Al Pacino kept saying in the appropriately titled movie, Scent of a Woman.

Now someone explain to me what haahaa-heee means and I will know what she meant by Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee :)

Economics of Globalization

Have got the book, Making Globalization Work, by economist Joseph Stiglitz, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001, and hope to read it soon.

The Amazon.com publisher's blurbs have this to say about the book:

Stiglitz's seminal Globalization and Its Discontents (2002) argued that globalization has not benefited as many people as it could, a failure attributable to structural flaws in international financial institutions as well as limited information and imperfect competition. With this selection, the Nobel Prize-winning economist suggests a host of solutions by which globalization can be "saved from its advocates" and made safe and worthwhile for the poor and rich alike.

and

Stiglitz focuses on policies that truly work, offering fresh new thinking about the questions that shape the globalization debate, including a plan to restructure a global financial system made unstable by America's debt, ideas for how countries can grow without degrading the environment, a framework for free and fair global trade, and much more. Throughout, Stiglitz reveals that economic globalization continues to outpace both the political structures and the moral sensitivity required to ensure a just and sustainable world.

More about the book after I read the book as I think it is particularly relevant for India... especially in the context of making globalization work not for a select few but for the millions - afterall, the stark contrast of the successes of the minority taken forward due to the effects of globalization and those that are left behind (750 million of them!) is nowhere more evident than in India...

For now listen to a lecture he delivered in Chennai on Jan 4, 2007 and read this interview from November 2006 with the journal Oxonomics in which he calls for new forms of global governance and diagnoses some of the problems of the International Monetary Fund.

Also listen to this earlier lecture about "the questions that shape the globalization debate, including a plan to restructure the global financial system, ideas for how countries can grow without degrading the environment, and a framework for free and fair global trade."

Read this article by Stiglitz in NY Times -- How to fix the global economy

And lastly, there are many other links available through Wikipedia...

---

And for a counter-point from a big globalization advocate.. read this book review of In Defense of Globalization by Jagdish Bhagwati, also a faculty at Columbia University, like Stiglitz.

For more, see posts at the IHT maintained blog - Managing Globalization, which has Q&A sessions with Stiglitz, Bhagwati, and Jeffrey Sachs, another famous economist - Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University & head of the UN Millennium Project, (read more at my post on "Fighting poverty & hunger.").

Blogs to read

Some good blogs that I would like to recommend today are:

Guy Kawasaki's Blog
Freakonomics Blog
Tom Peter's Blog
TED Blog
and Seth Godin's blog. (Also read his various books... and download his free e-book)

Instead of surfing Dailykos.com, Plastic.com & other sites for political and sports news, I should be reading the above blogs daily and not merely take a perfunctory look once in 6 months.... but then what fun would life be without the ecstacy of the arts, the joys of literature, the agony of human stupidity in politics and other daily affairs... variety, after all, they say, is the spice of life. But I admittedly suffer from a lack of focus and drive or ambition in any one area and that reflects in the range of sites I surf, the variety of topics that interest me, and this blog is just an extension of the same!

Communication

I saw the movie Babel (trailer) on BA on my way back from Mumbai recently. Unfortunately, thanks to the travails of traveling, I fell asleep mid-way and lost about half an hour of the movie. But it is no doubt a good powerful movie and worthy of the attention it is getting via various awards and nominations; though surprisingly Yahoo! Movies has overall ratings of B (critics) and B- (Yahoo! users). It won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama & been nominated for 7 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. It was also considered a top contender for the Palme d'Or at Cannes but did not win, though Inarritu did win the festival's best director prize.

You can read the review in the LA Times and Roeper's review in the Chicago-Sun Times but I recommend you go in and see it without reading any reviews.

Amitava Kumar blogged about Babel some time back, calling it a movie about 'our moment of globalization.' Today, he revisits the movie and links to a review by Michael Wood, who writes about how the movie is more than your typical hyperlink movie, with multiple plots all tieing in to reflect the global fabric we all are a part of but is more about 'the sense that we are always about to step into an aftermath we can’t imagine.'...

To me, the movie was about the universal difficulty human beings have in communication - words come out but no one wants to understand or cannot understand - and the tragic fallout of this disconnect. Michael Wood puts it much better than I can, writing:

The stories of Babel are not about the limits of language but about the limits of understanding.

Indeed! We are confronted with a multitude of languages and different mediums of communication and yet there is so much confusion due to people not understanding each other. In the middle of all the chaos, the interaction between Brad Pitt's character and the Moroccan man who helps him, is a lesson in how basic human instincts can guide us to a common understanding despite the differences. So, does the universality of the human condition allow us to overcome these obvious limitations in communication in a globally interconnected world or are they unsurmountable because we lack the desire to understand? The disconnected feeling of the deaf-dumb girl in Japan or the disconcerted pleas of the Mexican lady at the US border...

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. - G B Shaw

The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate. - Joseph Priestly

---

I had liked another movie, Crash, surprise winner of the best movie at the Oscars last year, much more but I really should not be comparing the two movies... esp. given the soporofic condition in which I saw Babel. Like Babel, Crash also talked about the interconnectedness of various people - although the scope was not global and everything happened within the confines of a city (Los Angeles), the message driven home was that we are all connected in ways we do not understand despite the prejudices, the stereotypes, and the hatred that divides us all..

A few years back, I had started seeing Inarritu's previous movie, Amores Perros (Life's a Bitch), but I was not in the mood for a gory movie - so, after the initial dog-fight scene, the DVD was taken off. I have his other movie, 21 grams, also with multiple interweaving plotlines, and enjoyed it very much. I thought that Traffic was also an Inarritu movie but just found out it was by Steven Soderbergh. Anyways, Traffic remains one of those good must-see movies that I never get around to seeing despite seeing it in the shelves at the public library (for free viewing!) many times...

The other movie to see is the Penelope Cruz starring Volver by the one and only Pedro Almodóvar. This movie has also gotten great reviews and all sorts of awards/nominations. Hmmm...too many good books to read, too many good movies to see, too little time, too little discipline...

Death be not proud - 5

Larry Stewart, known to the world as Kansas City's Secret Santa for his practice (from 1979 to 2006), died at age 58 on January 12, 2007.

He had made a habit of anonymously handing out small amounts of cash, typically in the form of hundred dollar bills, to needy people. The total amount he gave away is estimated to be 1.3 million dollars. Stewart successfully kept his identity hidden until 2006, when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which would later claim his life. He chose at that time to reveal his identity as part of an effort to encourage others to practice philanthropy.

David Rattray, a well-known historian and tour guide of the 1879 Anglo-Zulu war in South Africa, was brutally murdered on January 26th at his farm in KwaZulu-Natal in circumstances that are under investigation by the South African police.

Molly Ivins died last week (Jan 31st) of breast cancer. What a loss...so now which Texan will pick on the Bush family's exploits!! Expectedly, tributes pour in for this fiesty lady...

Alan MacDiarmid, 79, Professor of Chemistry at UPenn and Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry in 2000 along with Alan J. Heeger and Hideki Shirakawa for the discovery of conductive polymers, died yesterday.

He apparently died "after a fall down stairs in his home in the Drexel Hill suburb of Philadelphia while rushing to catch a flight to his native New Zealand, said his wife, Gayl Gentile. Dr. MacDiarmid was ill with myelodysplastic syndrome, a leukemia-like disease, and had expected to live only a few weeks, during which he wanted to go to New Zealand to say goodbye to his siblings, his wife said."

He is one of the few Nobel laureates I have had the luck to hear/see in person... having attended a seminar he gave in University of Akron in 2001-02.

And lastly, today, a sudden end to a bizarre life....

Reality TV star and former Playboy playmate (sorry..no links! :)), Anna Nicole Smith, is dead at age 39. She was pronounced dead after being found unconscious in her Florida hotel room.

India - mostly free

I had highlighted some articles on Independence Day last year on what freedom means in India...

Here are some more recent articles on the subject:

The 2007 Index of Economic Freedom is out. India ranks 104. Read more here. (via India Uncut)

Three articles from the new Indian newspaper, Mint (free registration required).

1. Niranjan Rajadhyaksha's editorial in the inaugural issue of the paper In defence of freedom.
   
2. Mistaking froth for fact -
3. Where's the Freedom Party? by Amit Varma, who has also cross-posted it at his blog.

Is India Overheating?
The government says no. The evidence suggests otherwise.

India overheats..
India cannot run as fast as China without further reform (from the Feb 1st print edition of
The Economist (available in full only to subscribers)

The Indian tiger is on the prowl. This week, in an apt piece of symbolism, Tata Steel, which dates back to the days of the Raj, leapt into the league of top producers when it bought Britain's Corus, which includes the steelmaking remnants of the old imperial power. Nor is Tata alone: younger Indian companies such as Infosys and Wipro are storming international markets.…

Unfortunately, you'll have to read the full article in The Economist itself (aah... no...trust someone to infringe copyrights...here is a link to the article. I am very divided as I link to this URL!). Also, an interesting discussion thread about the Economist article at the Indian Economy Blog.

The topic has been raised by others in December 2006 too, much before the press this month with the Economist cover story and its burning-tail-tiger cartoon on the cover

And finally.... I agree that we are over-heating in other ways too... as witnessed by me last week in Mumbai with temperatures soaring to a humid 35C in January... but lets not get me started on global warming now ...esp. with the temperature a frigid 12F (feels like -3F) here this morning... :)

Mint - India newspaper

On a personal front, I have lost any notions/illusions I had of being a 'writer' after reading the blog posts of Chandrahas Choudhury and Jai Arjun, whose blog I have highlighted before. I could never write this well! These guys are well read in the blogosphere and will hopefully slowly change the face of journalism in India in the near future.

During a recent trip home, I was so sickened by reading the tabloidish, nonsensical fluff in mainstream media publications in India, replete with the worst possible English - chockful of grammatical misconstructions and crazy sentence construction. It is easy to deride how bad Indian newspapers have gotten over time but maybe I just know better now through exposure to excellent journalism and articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, etc., and magazines like New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, etc. So the argument could perhaps be made that things have not gone any worse now in Indian media circles than what they always have been - the denouement of the newspaper to a tabloid-ish tone notwithstanding. Afterall, a movie review to us has traditionally been the nonsensical stuff from the likes of Khalid Mohamad and not the stuff that a Roger Ebert or a Pauline Kael indulges the readers with..

If you want to understand better where I am coming from -- here is an excerpt from something Khalid Mohammad wrote last week in the Hindustan Times, that I transcribed after recoiling in horror.... is this even English!!

Just yesterday, he thought I was a snake. And I thought he was a porcupine. To comprehend what made him behave the way he did - tetchy, suspicious - I sought to pub his mind-set. Well what the hell, after much air-clearing, I found an actor who feels that much wrong has done to him by the pen scrawlers. To give the Kal ka khiladi and today's versatile performer his due, straight off I asked him if he felt he can handle the arch-competition from the Khans, the Bachchans, plus the upcoming insta-fame kids on the block. To which he responded without hemming and hawing. So in the classic tradition, here are excerpts from our conversation.. conducted in a frigidaire cold vanity van parked on the helipad of Film City.

Need I say more?

However, there is hope.... so far, I like the content and quality of the articles I have seen so far in a newly launched newspaper in India called Mint. It is a collaboration between Hindustan Times and Wall Street Journal and is in a nifty Berliner format.