Masala addiction

There is something in the spices, in the masala. You just have to taste it a couple of times and it enters your blood. The cells taste the fragrances enclosed in its molecules. And, then you can't resist its call. Days can pass without feeling the yearning for it. Yes I have outgrown it, you think. But the yearning comes back suddenly while you eat the wholesome nutritious, bland, spiceless food. If you are a masala lover once, you are a masala junkie forever!

Hindi films are like that. Once you have tasted them, you can't forget them. In spite of their silliness, their exagerated emotions, their illogicalities, their absent storylines, their corny songs. No, they are stupid, you tell yourself. Give me a hollywood blockbuster any day, I tell myself. A nice French or Italian flick. And then suddenly one evening, you are running to your friendly neighbourhood pirated video store, the hollywood blockbusters forgotten, your heart yearning for some song and dance masala laced with crying mothers, lovetorn couples, destines singed with unsurmountable barriers, that yet once again avoid the tragedy just by the nick. The wonderful world of Bollywood.

And then I found bwcinema dot com. Goodbye to pirated disks, that suddenly block in the middle of Shahrukh Khan telling Kiran Kher, "Mother, I am back!" You just need a good connection and you can watch all the masala without going out of your homes. Three days of unlimited films for as low as 3.99 dollars, the site said, and the suddenly the four day long weekend had found its purpose. And perhaps, this time, I am not going to fatten the Bangladeshi or Pakistani shop owners and be a traitor to India, I had thought. Perhaps, the film producers will get a percentage for each download.

I started with Morning Raga with its lovely carnatak music and a wonderful Shabana Azmi. IFFA awards and Filmfare awards followed. The first day ended with the reluctant patriotic fervor of Rang de Basanti.

I hardly slept that night, waking up at five in the morning to watch Ankahee, the Vikram Bhat-Sushmita Sen autobiography. And then I crashed, falling down asleep for eight hours straight. Chup Chup ke with crazy Paresh Rawal and Rajpal Yadav accompanied my hurridly cooked chinese noodles. A pity they had to spoil it with Shahid Kapur and Kareena.

The third day started with Corporate and I was starting to get over my yearning. I tried to follow it with Kabhi Alvida Na kehna, that had lousy print and even worse sound worthy of friendly neighbourhood pirate video shop. Is it legal, I asked myself? I mean, four days after the release of the film, here they are showing it on internet with a pirate print and they are based in USA and no one can do anything about it? May be this site is run by sons of Al Capone? Anyway, I gave up after fifteen minutes. Then I tried with Onkara. This print also looked pirated with the screen wobbling, as happens with camera prints, when someone tries to shoot the film with a handheld handycam in a cinema hall. So I shifted to Fanaa. This time the print was good even if the film's faked emotions were irritating in spite of wonderful Kajol. Finally to finish the feast, I had Chicken Tikka Masala, all about British humour about parents trying to marry off their gay son.

Now I feel like puking. My head hurts. If I look at the TV screen, red and blue spots float in front of my eyes. Wish I can burp. It is indigestion. I just want to curl up in my bed and not to think of any masala movie for a year. The yearning is gone and it seems it won't be back for long long time. Now from tomorrow, I can go back to my sane hollywood blockbusters and the intelligent Almodovars.

Hindi films? I screw my nose. They suck, I tell myself. Till the yearning comes back again, I am free.

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Climate change in Europe

Last week I was in Geneva for a meeting. As usual, World Health Organisation (WHO) had booked me in a hotel near the central railway station. When we landed in Geneva, it did not seem like very hot, compared to the hot Bologna that I had left behind. But, when I reached my room in the hotel, it felt as if I had entered a furnace.

While the bed had a woollen blanket as usual, there was something new in the room - a small table fan. Switzerland had always been nice and cool. In the summers, it did get warm in the day but most of the time, nights were cool, needing something warm.

After the arrivasl of fans, how long is it going to take for Switzerland to turn from paradise to hot baking furnace?

During nineteen eighties in Italy, I had never seen a fan in any house or office. To be honest, I had never felt even the need for it. I think that our first table fan, we had bought it in 1993 or 1994. Then in the next years, we bought more of them, so that we had one for each room of the house. During the same years, fans were installed in our office as well. Finally, this year, we have air-conditioning, at home and in office in Bologna (Italy). Everything has happened in the last 10-15 years.

Any way the hot temperatures in Geneva had some nice side-effects also. People were having fun with the summer along the lake in Geneva. Drinking beer along the small pubs, sitting and chatting on the grass wearing bikinis and swimming costumes, swimming in the lake.

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In Geneva I met Gregor Wolbring. He spoke about new technologies like synthetic biology and nanotechnology, and their convergence that is going to change the world completely as we know it. It is all going to happen in the next ten or twenty years, he says, and the real disabled persons will be those will not be able to afford the new technologies for enhancement of their bodies and minds.

He has a soft smile, gentle way of speaking and dreamy eyes. And he has a special wheel chair, that looks simple and has side bars, that you need to move gently to move ahead or back. Listening to him, I feel as I am transported in the world of Asimov.

Yet, take a look at his webpage and his coloumn, and check his credentials, he teaches in the university and is part of some important sounding committees. So it is no science fiction but a new reality he is talking about. He tells about it in a simple way, making it easy to understand.

For a moment, I daydream about enhanced human beings but then that images contrasts so strongly with the reality of poverty, lack of most basic things, disease and death that stalks lives in so many parts of the world! Would that dream be for all of the humanity or will it be sold to the highest bidders, I ask myself.

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In the pictures below, I am with Gregor Wolbring.

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Virtual holdup & hijacking

It has been sometime, while navigating on internet, suddenly a sign appears "Attention, the scanning of your system is not complete, your system is unsafe, if you want free scanning of your system to identify errors ...". I have tried to ignore it. I have tried to click on "cancel". I have tried to click on the cross at the right hand corner to close it.

No matter what I do, it takes over the webpage I am looking at and hijacks it to "www.it.bloodyerrorsafe.com", leaving me trembling with rage each time. (The "bloody" in the address has been added by me, I don't want them to claim that they are so popular that people are linking their blogs to them)!

I call the people running that site by all names possible. I walk around in the room to calm me down. And, of course, I close the internet explorer. Some times I disconnect and reconnect, hoping that they are gone. Cursing them all the time, scumbags, oro-genitally mixed up, òç*+#ò@... And I take deep breaths and tell myself, "This world is pure maya, no need to get so heated up son. Relax. It is hurting only you while those bastards, they must be smiling their way to the bank with all the money they can get from people clicking their site!"

I try to imagine where they can be based. They must have an office in Jersey island, with another hack who can't find anyone to love him hiding in Cayman island and their server running from Easter islands, with the boss sitting in Florida. Do you think I should go and apply to the international court of justice in the Hague to persecute them?

Or is it the duty of our Government to protect us from unwanted intrusers even if the gang is scattered in all the corners of the world and worse still, even if, the brother of the big boss is governing (ha, ha!) Florida!.

The list of modern stress syndromes is getting longer every day.

Like all those people sitting in their cars, stuck in the traffic and snarling with rage. Their stress has been recognised. Even people typing continuously on their keyboards have legitimate stress. And those looking at the computer moniters all day long, they are indeed stressed.

Perhaps it is time to add another stress diagnosis. Internet holdup and hijacking.

If you have gone through it, you will agree that there is no virtuality in this stress. You have no psychological pleasure in it like collecting the spam mail and throwing it in the rubbish bin and then watching it pass through the thrasher till the bits and bytes are flushed down the cyber-toilet.

So there is no other way, except to take deep breath, hold it and count up to seven, then exhale slowly. Repeat it five times.

How do you feel now brother, ready to forgive them?

Forgive those scumbags, éòù+è#@ ... Ok, let's do it five more time! Take a deep breath, hold it, count slowly upto seven and now exhale slowly.

Ignorance is better?

We were in a rural area. It was a refugee camp and I was there with a delegation of United Nation High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). We were looking at issues related to persons with disability in the refugee camps and before that visit, I had already been to some other refugee camps in Africa.

The road leading to the refugee camp, left the city to meander through fields dotted with small huts. Thin and dirty children in tattered clothes occasionally stood by the roadside to look at our big UN vehicles passing.

If outside was poverty, inside the refugee camp seemed like the land of plenty. There were lot of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) with lot of expatriate staff. In the health centre, their was plenty of staff and no medicines seemed to be lacking. I had a long conversation with an Australian speech therapist working with children who had speaking difficulties, asking her about the general conditions inside the camp and the different services available there.

"What about the local people living outside the camp?" I had asked. Persons outside had looked malnourished and without any services, left to fend for themself in an isolated remote area. "No, we can't provide any services to the locals", I was told. It was because of policy decision by government here. UNHCR staff and international staff were responsible only for the refugee camp and they were prohibited from having any kind of interaction with the local population.

But international NGOs could have started separate projects for the surrounding countryside, I had insisted.Isn't it terrible to pass in front of those huts everyday and see them so poor and so vulnerable? There are only funds for emergency, no one gives money for ordinary poverty, they said.

The person showing us around took us to the high school in the refugee camp. It was a wonderful place with nice uniforms, a large field where children were playing, and some committed expatriate teachers, who explained their work including the use of internet to bring the world to the refugee camp.

I was a little upset. I thought it was discriminatory with all these resources that they had in the UN, giving the world to the refugees inside the camp walls, while just outside those walls, people of the same skin colour, same language, similar facial traits could die of hunger, their children faced malnutrition, and died of usual simple illnesses like diarrohea and mealses. So perhaps, I was condescending in my interaction with the students of 12th standard. I don't remember the exact words of my question. Perhaps it was something to do with their future.

A young man sitting at the back stood up to answer me. I think that he said some thing like, "We are prisoners in this cage. This wonderful school, these wonderful teachers, our learning internet, our learning French and English, what use is it? It only serves to make us feel worse. We have no future. UNHCR can provide only school education. There is no university here and I can not go outside the walls of this camp. And, after passing 12th, all these wonderful programmes finish. Then we go back to our families in this camp, to work in the fields. For working in the field, I don't need any of this knowledge that I have got, it will only serve to remind me about the wretchedness of my life, to know how much we are missing. It is terrible to know what we could be and be forced to be nothing."

I was suddenly reminded of this episode while reading the story "Sudama's children" about poor kids in rich private schools in Delhi in the latest issue of Outlook. "There are two kinds of pain—the pain of growing up in a jhuggi with little hope of change, and the pain of adjustment in studying with well-off kids in a private school. How do we know which is worse?"

I think of that youngman's heartbreaking answer in the refugee camp and the choices he had. Yet, compared to the life of living in poverty, outside the refugee camp, where hunger and disease are likely to kill you young and at the best, you will grow up to eke out a miserable and difficult life from the fields! What would you choose if you had this choice?

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One up for the talibans

The headlines, "De Vinci code banned" depresed me. Even though there were some protests when "Sins" was released, in the end, the film was released without people burning down theatres or cars. Reading the news was slightly better. It does not say that the film is banned, it only says that a group of persons will watch the film and decide. I hope that they decide to show it.

We need sane persons in India. Very badly. It seems we are running out of them.

Every group of religious louts is just waiting to pounce on the slightest provocation.

Now Aamir Khan is warned, how dare he speak about Narmada Bachao or against Narendra Modi? They will not let his Fanaa to be released in Gujarat, they say. Show him the Hindu might?

The Sikhs have done it too. Jo Bole so Nihaal is a caricature. The child in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai is a caricature. How dare they?

The Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, everyone is ready with the petrol cans. They define themselves as saviours of their religions. Dissent is equal to blasphemy they feel. Armed with hockey sticks or worse, they come out with their torches. And the soveriegn Government representing the people bows its head and presents its butt so that it can be kicked by any thug, ready for banning any thing so that "it does not disturb public order" (except when you dare to protest against the Government, then the police is ready for the lathi-charge).

So we are going for a taliban rule in India. Only insecure louts will decide what we can read, see or think? I am not saying that we have to be agree with everyone but you can disagree on something and still be civil? Amartaya Sen talks about the ancient traditions of dissent and criticism inherent in Hinduism and in Indian culture in his book "The Argumentative Indian". Yet, those traditions are being corrupted everyday and we are prisoners of fire-wielding hardliners, who have decided that we Indians are not mature enough, we need censorship, and that they will decide for us.

If a country (Italy) that hosts the Vatican itself, can show De Vinci code, it seems strange that India has to worry about the feelings of few sensitive Christians who do not like it!

Heaviest element known to science

Got this from a colleague in an email (I don't know who originally wrote it but it is wonderful):

A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element has been named "Governmentium". Governmentium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Governmentium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete, when it would normally take less than a second.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 4 years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration.

This hypothetical quantity is referred to as "Critical Morass." When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium - an element which radiates just as much energy as the Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.

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Democracy and extremism

Yes, I know it is long time since I wrote anything on this blog, except for publishing friends' appeals from Nepal. Now it seems the King in Nepal has decided to give in to the people's movement and peace may return to this beautiful land.

I am thinking about Maoists and if they pose a threat to the country.

I have always maintained that dialogue and democracy are the best way to deal with extremists - by extremists, I mean, those who believe in extreme changes, not necessarily violent. In that sense, I don't agree with repression, banning, jails and fighting to overcome or to contain those we consider "extreme". I believe that if extremists can be made to participate in the democratic dialogue and if they find public support, to be the government, their extremism will be tempered and they will need to become less extreme to fit in with the system.

The increasing forces of globalisation, meaning increasing inter-links between people and countries, should be a safeguard since extremist governments, even if elected, can not break those links and live in isolation.

Another aspect of globalisation is the increasing presence of media, so that when "news" happens like dead bodies floating in Victoria falls in Rwanda, the world will see it. Thus violent abberrations, sooner or later must go away other wise you become an international pariah.

Unfortunately, both aspects of globalisation can be easily manipulated. When economic interests are there, other countries become tolerant of dictators and murderers, and close one or both eyes. And, the international media is fickle, it comes to catch the goriest pictures but here the supply is greater than demand, so it soon leaves to catch other gorier pastures.

So I think that maoists in Nepal should get a chance to participate in the elections and if they win the elections, they can get a go at the system. Yet, I am worried if the democracy rules are valid for everyone?

How about people or groups, who think that they don't believe in democractic ideas but play along only to get into power and then start their dictatorship and repression? And if through democracy, we end up with a Pol Pot and millions of dead, whose fault was it? Or with Talibans?

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