The Great Ganesha

Weekend activities included drinking the night away, running to support the gay community, counting soccer football goals and watching Superman Returns (who, incidentally, was alleged to be gay, but is not). However, in a change from the usual, some friends of mine ventured out to participate in the worthwhile pastime of counting horseshoe crabs. The [...]

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I am sure that, by now, everyone has heard about the Reader’s Digest survey that concluded that Bombay was the rudest city in the world. Bombayites are outraged and are defending themselves voraciously. I say: Why? We must be proud of our rudeness. We must shout: We’re rude, we’re crude, get used to it!
I consider [...]

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Are you one of those cynical people who sit on park benches and laugh at the joggers who pass you?
“Ha!” you scoff, “We’re all going to die anyway!”
Berating all joggers, you wait patiently for the next one to die of a heart attack, at which point you will say, with smug satisfaction, “What did I [...]

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And then there were six…
One of my students just dropped the class. A girl majoring in Dance, she somehow found herself in my class. Even though it’s a class for non-majors, the math is pretty hard for someone who cannot think quantitatively (think: most American non-math-major undergraduates). So I had my first casualty of the [...]

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A recent article in the BBC brought to light something interesting. For about 700-800 years, starting in the first or second century BC, the Indians were sending pepper and other spices to the Romans from Muziris, a seaport located in Kerala. The spices would make their way to Egypt, from where they would then be [...]

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Earlier, I had posted something about a Slate article which talked about how, even branches of state governments in the US are outsourcing some of their own phone-answering services. The article mentioned the irony of some states outsourcing the administration of their unemployment insurance. I also wrote about how the call center business was [...]

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The mountain seems to constantly fascinate Westerners. Or the BBC, at any rate. Yet again, Everest is in the news. This time, no one has summitted (or at least, no one worthy of mention in the news), but a climber has used replicas of clothes worn by Mallory and Irvine - who are alleged to [...]

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“I’d really hate to see you go,” he had said.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Is there no way around it?”
“No.”
“All right. In that case, I suppose I must grin and bear it.”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“And we must move on with our lives.”
“Yes.”
And that was it. It had only been two days. Two days of paradise. Two days in which [...]

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So, I finally saw The Da Vinci Code yesterday. My other choice (based on movie times) was X3, and, like a regular sucker, I caved in to the controversy. The average audience member was white, in their upper forties. In fact, where I was sitting, I was surrounded on three sides by white, middle-aged women [...]

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The "date of the beast" is today. And hopefully, you're not hexakosioihexekontahexaphobic. If you're one of the lucky few who are satanists, then you get to celebrate by sacrificing the proverbial goat or a young child. And then proceeding to use its blood to bathe in. Or whatever it is that satanists do. I'm just [...]

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