The Great Ganesha

Picture source: Split Level by Starlen

Are you a man of India? Do you believe in a non-Jesus God? Well, then you should know - your God cannot help you. Why? Because your God is not Jesus.

Yup. It’s that simple.

(via The India Uncut Blog)

To compete with Tata’s ~$2,500  small car, Ford is now coming out with its own version in India.

Ford Motor plans to more than double its investment in India to produce a small car for the fast-growing local market and to build an engine manufacturing plant there.

The company is expected to announce on Tuesday that it will increase spending in India by $500 million, raising its total investment to $875 million, as it focuses on making the country a regional hub for small-car manufacturing.  [link]

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Well, to start with, there’s Zoloft, Wellbutra, Paxil, Celexa, Cymbalta, Lexapro and of course, the oldie-but-goldie Prozac, to name just a few. If you’re not into prescription drugs, you can load up on the over-the-counter codeine derivatives found in your everyday cough syrup. Then you can go “under the counter” (wink wink, nudge nudge). Hell, you can even sniff glue if that’s what you’re into.

But not this Mexican kid. He certainly used glue, but not to sniff it, but to glue himself to his bed, so that he couldn’t be forced to go to school!

Diego had got up early to fetch some industrial-strength glue from the kitchen.

His mother spent two hours trying to free him with nail-polish remover before calling for expert help.

Diego watched cartoons while paramedics dissolved the glue with a spray. [link]

So kids, let this be a lesson to you. This method is legal, it’s relatively safe and you get to watch cartoons while being rescued. If you want to avoid school, don’t do drugs - just glue yourself to your bed.

This Public Service Announcement brought to you by The Great Ganesha. Because we care.

The Great Ganesha is not responsible for irreversible hand damage, bed damage or both. If, in the process of gluing your hand to your bed, you also glue your nose, your face, or any other part of your body, things will get uncomfortable. This message is not intended to endorse avoiding school, even though it comes off as such and the words “avoid school” are explicitly in the message. Also, this is not a legally binding document to show we care. In reality, we don’t care. Finally, ingesting the glue may also cause other digestive disorders like excessive gas, oily discharge in the stool and general abdominal pain. Other than that though, we highly recommend it.

When those Japanese get fixated on a fad, they get fixated on a fad even if it’s as mundane as the eleven-times-table. In today’s NYT:

Bookstores are filled with titles like “Extreme Indian Arithmetic Drills” and “The Unknown Secrets of the Indians.” Newspapers carry reports of Indian children memorizing multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard for young elementary students in Japan.

And Japan’s few Indian international schools are reporting a surge in applications from Japanese families.

At the Little Angels English Academy & International Kindergarten, the textbooks are from India, most of the teachers are South Asian, and classroom posters depict animals out of Indian tales. The kindergarten students even color maps of India in the green and saffron of its flag.

Little Angels is located in this Tokyo suburb, where only one of its 45 students is Indian. Most are Japanese. [link]

Wow. Never thought I would thank my sixth standard (that’s “sixth grade” in Americanese) class teacher, the late Mrs. Sachdev, but thank you, Mrs. Sachdev for teaching me to go beyond nine times nine. I am now cool in Japan.

The backdrop to our beautifully designed wedding reception at ‘Dhanush‘ in Navy Nagar. I got married for the second time in Bombay (to the same person).

Spending five weeks in India after an eight-year hiatus made me painfully aware of a neurological need to go to this place called home. Not going there for almost a decade forced some internal switches to be turned off when, for all practical purposes, they should always be turned on. All’s right with the world when they’re on. Rest assured though, they’re on now.

This trip was a hurricane. I don’t know when it hit, where it took me, how I got there, and when exactly it ended. It’s somewhat relieving that it’s over, but it was also weirdly depressing to get back here. The cold weather, nightfall in the afternoon and gloomy skies didn’t help much either.

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This is not new, but the NYT ran an article on outsourcing tutoring (in math, amongst other subjects) to India. This is part of the “second wave” of outsourcing:

The first wave of slicing up services work and sending it abroad has been all about business operations. Computer programming, call centers, product design and back-office jobs like accounting and billing have to some degree migrated abroad, mainly to India. The Internet, of course, makes it possible, while lower wages in developing nations make outsourcing attractive to corporate America.

The second wave, according to some entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and offshoring veterans, will be the globalization of consumer services. People like Ms. Yamaki and Mr. Tham, they predict, are the early customers in a market that will one day include millions of households in the United States and other nations. [link]

Not much seems to have changed in ten years. Bombay is still pulsating and I’m loving it. For all the hype about change, the city and its people have remained the same. Sure, there are a few more people, a few more buildings and a few more cars, but on the whole, it’s still my city.

Here’s the view from my home. If you can see it through the haze, the leftmost end of the skyline in the distance is Malabar Point - where the Governor’s bungalow is.

Picture Source

It’s been over eight years since I was last home. That’s almost a decade, and quite a tumultuous one at that. But I am headed over to the ol’ homefront tonight, and shall be blogging all about it. So stay tuned.

Who knows? Maybe something interesting will emerge…

Apparently, the reason why 13-year-old SamirPatel lost out on two consecutive Spelling Bees is because he’s not in touch with his roots. Word roots, that is.

In 2006, Mr. Patel lost in the seventh round thanks to just such a word, eremacausis (“gradual oxidation of organic matter from exposure to air and moisture”).

The word sounds like it should come from the Greek eremos (suggesting solitude) or aero (for air). In fact, it is the only word in Webster’s to come from the Greek erema, meaning “gently”.

Mr. Patel crashed out of the competition with a-e-r-o-m-o-c-a-u-s-i-s. This year [2007] he blew his last chance to win a title over clevis (a U-shaped piece of iron). He panicked over the information that its roots were “probably Scandinavian” and opted for c-l-e-v-i-c-e. The ESPN commentators were stunned. [link]

[Originally on Desicritics] 

When I was in Seattle last week, the conference organizers were offering a cruise around the Seattle lakes and locks. I decided to check it out - take a breather from the conference chaos, and heave a sigh of relief after my talk.

At first, I thought “locks” was a mis-spelling of “lochs,” but it’s not. The Hiram M. Chittenden locks are actually a feat of maritime engineering. Being the lazy guy that I am, I’ll just let Wikepedia do the explaining:

The locks and associated facilities serve three purposes:

• To maintain the water level of the fresh water Lake Washington and Lake Union at 20–22 feet above sea level^[2][3] (Puget Sound’s mean low tide).^{[citation needed]}
• To prevent the mixing of sea water from Puget Sound with the fresh water of the lakes (saltwater intrusion).^[5]
• To move boats from the water level of the lakes to the water level of Puget Sound, and vice versa.^[6] [link]
  

We started on Lake Washington on an unusually sunny day.

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