No subservience please, we're French

As of yesterday, Monsieur Sarkozy has prohibited the entry of suberservient women into France. Well, he didn't actually say that in so many words, but he said two things, and I quote a fragment from this news item (just to pick one of several news stories on this topic):

"The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience," he told members of both parliamentary houses gathered for his speech. He added: "It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic."

When read together, that's what it means. No entry for subservient women. By extension, this should apply to all women, not just women in burka and/or of a particular faith. After all the French are a secular people, and their laws, I assume, are to be uniformly enforced across people of all religions. 

I am trying to imagine a scene at the passport control check point at the CDG, where a portly middle-aged French gendarme is trying to ascertain whether the woman before him is or is not subservient. How does he do this? He will have to issue a string of commands and if all of them are disobeyed, stamp the woman's passport for entry. Can get pretty challenging for the average Jacques. Same thing at work, same thing at home. Merde!

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Tolerating the intolerant

The overwhelming energy of the waves of protesters in Iran, over so many days, can only come from a long-standing deep-rooted sense of frustration and anger of an oppressed people. This goes beyond asking for a recount, beyond demanding a re-election, beyond supporting the opposition candidates. This is a sign that the Iranian people have had enough. 

Enough of several decades of the fascism of religion-based intolerance. This is a revolution against a revolution, not a revolution within a revolution. And that, I think, is what the guys at the top of this unholy mess are really, really afraid of. In my humble opinion.

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More on RSS: Feed owner wants to block subscriber

Barely a day after I wrote this, a 'senior ideologue' from the RSS says this. Obviously, they read my blog post and saw the wisdom in what I wrote here. (That should be a broad hint to you too, dear reader.)

OK don't choke on your beverage, I was just joking. But uncanny, no? Or is it just my 'keen eye for the obvious' as my former boss used to indulgently quip?

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Arguing with idiots

They say never argue with idiots - they bring you down to their level and beat you with experience. I try to follow that as much as possible but sometimes I get tricked into debate with idiots disguised as savants. 

As I have been lamenting for a while now, we live in an age that confuses education with literacy, and higher education with information gathering and skills training. And so we encounter pundits who specialize in data collection (spun around as 'knowledge') but who have no insights into any of it whatsoever. They have information on all kinds of topics oozing out of their ears but are conceptually callow, unable to hold a line of reasoning, or even to follow it when it is put before them. They enjoy ephemeral moments of victory when they manage to stop your argument in its tracks by throwing arcane information at you (including facts, figures, quotes and whatnot) that you were either unaware of or did not consider germane to the point under discussion. By the time you recover your ground to point out a fallacy or the lack of relevance, they're already feeling smug in the belief that they've made their point. More often than not, this is the only weapon in their armory.

A lot of this has to do with the quiz culture - the race to prove that one's brain has a larger memory bank (coupled with a more efficient data archival and retrieval capability) than the next guy. No fault of theirs, really. This is just an extension of the evaluation methodology embedded in our 'education' system. Cram, cram, cram and 'give' your exam (as opposed to 'take'). I generalize, of course. I also know exceptional individuals who are conceptually sound, with sharp minds augmented by a vast storehouse of information, and with wisdom beyond their years. These are produced in spite of the system being what it is, and not because of it. So even more credit to them.

OK, back to being a snob. Here's my version of the old adage: never argue with voracious data-gatherers - they bring you down to their level and beat you with minutiae.

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Nice shtick if you can make it stick

Several words that have entered common parlance - such as kosher, chutzpah, spiel, kvetch, glitch, etc. have their origins in Yiddish / German vernacular, and I acknowledge the contribution of Yiddish / German and other Americanisms in general, to the growth of the English language. However, there's this tendency among some people to liberally garnish their lexicon with expressions like 'oy vey' and 'shoel' borrowed from the colloquial NYC vocabulary, which I find a bit irksome, because one has to look up these words just to understand what is being said (which may not be much, after all). Other than Yiddish, there're also colloquialisms from Hispanic dialects, African-American slang and corporate cliches (all very different worlds), some of which just constitute bad English (e.g., the word 'dwelve', which was the topic of an earlier post), that such folks like to throw around. And on the other side of the Atlantic, there's the tendency to casually slip in classy-sounding French expressions - e.g., soi-disant, for self-styled.

This is particularly true, I've observed, with certain categories of Indians: Indians writing in English, Indians living in the US or UK and Indians from India who mingle with Indians of the former categories or who travel frequently. I guess there's a certain kind of cool associated with this - a certain kind of with-it-ness which these people like to feel as they mouth such words, relishing the way they roll off their tongues, announcing their arrival in (or belonging to) the world that matters, when they could as well say what they want to say in plain English. It is the same tendency that causes some of us to use big words and bombastic language, sometimes even at the risk of malapropism. In short, these are just pretensions designed to display sophistication, and I give them a wide berth eventually, having overcome the initial irritation. Of course, in humourous writing, a lot of this is done in jest and contributes to the risibility of the piece, and that's a different thing.

So in a lighter moment today, after having come upon the word 'schlocky' in something I was reading, I composed the following sentence, which is contrived in order to make a point: A schlemiel and a schnook schmoozed as they schlepped their schlocky stuff around, while a passing schmuck turned up his schnoz at their schmutzy schmutter. Go figure!

To aspiring Indian writers in English, a word of advice: nice shtick if you can make it stick, but its not literature. When you're writing, keep it as simple as possible. Focus on the art more than on the craft. By all means indulge in the rich beauty of the language as a means to express yourself, but lay off the affectations, don't show off your vocabulary. Its a fine line but in the discerning eyes of a mature reader, you drop a couple of notches with every instance of pretentiousness. Shalom!

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To: The BJP Cc: The NDA Subject: Who moved your RSS feed?

Before I go on, a clarification about my politics: I believe in moderation and balance, in taking the best of many worlds and forging frameworks that promote growth and prosperity. The Left does not offer that, neither does the Right, because they are both extreme ideological positions at opposite ends of the spectrum. Economic policy apart, I am also not culturally in in tune with either of them. Definitely more so in the case of the BJP / NDA than the CPI / CPM et al. The Congress becomes my default vote simply because there are no other choices at the central position, though I find many things wrong with them, including their rule-by-dynasty culture, to say the least. In short, to me it is the lesser of the evils.

That said, about a month ago, when the election results were out, I was not as happy that the Congress won as I was relieved that the BJP lost. After all that bumptious belligerence, that supercilious sneering, those invidious invectives and those ad hominem abuses hurled at Dr. Manmohan Singh (which formed the plank of their campaign, from what one could see), they were stunned into silence. Apparently they were just not in touch with the ground reality of the Indian electorate. As is now evident, there was a lot happening behind the scenes over the last few weeks. Some ideologues spoke out bravely, and the cookie started crumbling in public view. And today we are seeing the extent of their ideological bankruptcy. Read about it here and here and elsewhere - it is breaking news at this time (sadly, the word 'breaking' is quite literally applicable here).

This is not good news, simply because we don't want a weak opposition sitting in Parliament. A fragmented Left and a confused Right are bad for democracy, period. This is what lets the Congress get away with stuff that won't be good for the country.

Get your act together, guys - do your job. You can introspect all you like and beat each other up, but do it in private. Don't forget your responsibilities: your country needs you to serve on the opposition benches. And, going forward, cut out your RSS feed - there is more to free market capitalism than the pursuit of Hindutva, whatever that may mean.

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Bill Maher on Sonia Sotomayor

Quotes on Sonia Sotomayor from 'Real Time with Bill Maher' - May 29, 2009

Sonia Sotomayor, her background, wow, graduated first in her class at Princeton, Yale Law School, a prosecutor, a sitting judge for the last 18 years. Or as conservatives call it, "unqualified." 

Here’s a woman who was raised in the Bronx, tough neighborhood, without a father. And that's how you know America is a great melting country - when your Supreme Court justice has the same back-story as your lap dancer.

There were other good ones (including an ad hominem one at Rush Limbaugh) but these were the best.

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The world is divided into two kinds of people - those who know how to use the 'Subject:' line in an email and those who don't. The latter category consists of two sub-categories - those who leave it blank, and those who fit their entire message into the subject line (I guess such people are most comfortable with texting and tweeting), and enter nothing whatsoever in the main body of their email. I wonder what stops people from writing a succinct line that sums up what the mail is about and then writing out a brief message in the main body. Or in reverse order, if that works better for them. Perhaps some people just lack the ability to abstract the essence out of something, even if that something is a message they themselves have composed. 

In the world of telephony, these tendencies play out almost exactly the same way, "translating" the inability to define a subject from text to speech, as it were. There are those who know how to leave a crisp voice mail message, and those who don't. Under the latter, again, two sub-categories - those who get to the voice mail beep, say nothing (sometimes you can hear them wheeze or breathe heavily under the tension of having to say or do something) and then hang up, and those who, after a pause, manage to overcome their "speaker's block" with a hesitant "er... er.... hi this is so-and-so, I wanted to talk to you about something, please call back". Talk to you about something. No clues as to whether it is urgent or can wait till the next day or the next week. No clue as to whether its something about you or something about them or someone else. No clues as to whether its good news or bad news. No clues as to whether they want to give or to take. Go figure!

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