The Great Ganesha

Picture Source: Manhattan Elsewhere

The wife pointed me to overstated.net, a blog by a Bay Area software engineer. I realize how exciting that sounds, but there’s more. The guy has listed, for every SF neighbourhood (left), a counterpart in NYC (right). For instance:

Financial District
Midtown

North Beach
Little Italy

Union Square
Soho

Soma
Tribeca

Haight Ashbury
East Village

Castro
West Village

Mission
Williamsburg

[link]
This is just a selection, and I’m [...]

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[Originally on Desicritics]
…or “the puckish humor of Pop Art [combined] with the serene and cerebral qualities of Minimalism” [link] depending on your point of view.

Stingel’s Buddha
An article in last Sunday’s Times talks about Italian artist Rudolf Stingel and his association with Buddha and India:
Mr. Stingel?s associations with Buddha are longstanding. As a [...]

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Was reading the news this morning and I came across the following quote:
?It?s just the most fantastic thing to be free. It was an appalling experience…occasionally quite terrifying.?
?It became hard to imagine normal life. I dreamed several times of being free, but always woke up in that room.? [link]
It’s from BBC journalist Alan Johnston [...]

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[Also on Desicritics - with a few interesting comments there]
I’m a big fan of Emmanuel Derman. Both he and I are in the same field (quantitative finance) and he’s a much accomplished and widely published academic and quant, who’s at the top of his field. He gives good reason to us young ‘uns to [...]

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(Crossposted at Desicritics.org [link])
When you come to the end of all the light you know, and it’s time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: Either you will be given something solid to stand on or you will be taught to fly. [...]

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The title results from having recently seen Munnabhai Part 2. But seriously, I just wanted to send Gandhiji some belated birthday greetings. On October 2nd (yesterday) he celebrated his 137th birth anniversary. Happy belated birthday, Bapuji.
My family has some close ties with Gandhi, as I’ve written about in an earlier post. The matriarch of my [...]

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Perhaps I’m getting soft in my old age, but as I was walking to the library today, I was hit in the face with this dash of red. Appropriately, the sign said ‘Stop’. And so I did.

my mind is… (XXV)
my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and taste and smell
and hearing and [...]

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Here’s to the profound religious experience that comes from doing a job well and being grossly underpaid.
Having successfully survived another meeting with a couple of my committee members, one of whom routinely strips me naked and flogs me, while the other idly stands by and watches with a smile, I decided to finish up [...]

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With most people reeling over Germany’s loss yesterday, Agassi’s exit from Wimbledon and his impending exit from the Grand Slam circuit after the US Open, was old news for many and perhaps even non-news for some. But for me, it was the end of an era. An era which the BBC has gone so far [...]

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What's NOT made in China for a change, are civil rights. Yup, you heard right. Nick Bryant, the BBC's South Asia correspondent just wrote a book entitled The Bystander: John F Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality. The entire book was written during his sojourn in South Asia. So what does the civil rights [...]

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