Thursday, June 28, 2007

Is milk an unrecognised source of climate change?

I was watching Veer Sanghvi in a programme on “Travel and Living” the programme is about different foods of India, today he was speaking about India’s fetish for milk.

He guided me through a variety of facts – India was the largest producer of milk and yawn and yawn and yawn. I woke up when he began to meander through varieties of milk products – the zillions of sweets, clarified butter, cottage cheese, cheese, yoghurt and so on.

And then it hit me – milk can also be a cause of Climate Change.

No I am not talking about cows farting (http://www.danamania.com/temp/cow-fire.jpg), or about grasslands and all that. It’s all about the processes that milk and its products go through. It begins from pasteurisation, to the boiling of milk to make sweets to finally the process that makes the sugar.

If one were to calculate the number of sweet shops, the variety of sweets, Indians love for sweets and India’s population one would come to a climate change inducing amount of fuel used.

So what can be done to reduce the impacts of Indian sweet making on the climate? The first step for this industry would be to use jargons such as ‘energy efficiency’, ‘alternative fuels’ which every suresh, ganesh, ramesh is using. Maybe another thing to do immediately would be to reduce our consumption of milk. If we don’t do something now then we will have to do something more drastic like cutting on our sweet intake – but that may lead to Indians doing what they like best – burning things (buses, flags, effigies, people etc) which may be the last straw on the camel’s (pronounced climate) back.

Maybe it would be more palatable if everyone switched from incandescent bulbs to CFLs in the interim while the government creates a committee to study the impacts of milk on our climate.

Sunday, June 24, 2007

If (with apologies to Rudyard Kipling)

If thinking of you could bring peace, there would only be 'make love'
If thinking of you could fill every pothole, suspensions would breathe easier
If thinking of you could reduce weight, there would be no guilt after a chocolate
If thinking of you could fill my glass of whiskey, I wouldnt have a waiter hovering around me
If thinking of you could give me a cigarette, passive smoking wouldn't be a health hazard
If thinking of you could fill my bike's petrol tank, Bush wouldnt have an excuse to attack Iraq
If thinking of you could clean a house, who would have heard of Cinderella?

If only thinking of you - - - - - - - - - -

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Tête-à-tête


Terraces serve different purposes across different regions of India. In the north owners of houses build a suite (called a barsaati) on the terrace to rent out to bachelors. Such places are lovely because they come with a large terrace and sometimes with the owners clothesline too.

The concept of a barsaati is not so prevalent in the south. The terrace is used to hang clothes, put the water tank and dump unwanted stuff.

Occasionally terraces provide space for private conversation.

Childhood


Cycles unlike most times at school were a happy part of every childhood. Cycling to school, slow-cycling races (yes its an oxymoron but we had those too), picnics during summer holidays, or just cruising around the neighbourhood was what we did.

I remember inflating balloons and tying it to the strut of the rear wheel of my cycle so that it rubbed against the spokes. As the wheel rotated the spokes would rub against the balloon and make a god awful sound much like a cruiser without a silencer.

Then we would raise hell through our neighbourhoods until we got shouted out or our balloons burst.

I took this photograph in the evening, there were children around playing but none of them on bikes. Maybe because our apartment complex offered no place for them or maybe their parents refused to permit them to cycle in the by-lanes where vehicles zip by taking advantage of its emptiness.

Owning a cycle for a child has become an empty rite-of-passage.


Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Heroes to Worship

Every one wants to be linked to someone famous so that some of the glitter gets rubbed off on them – that’s why Pg 3 is doing so well. Here the nobody makes an effort to join the rarefied stratosphere of the somebody.

However in India there is another trend that is being noticed. Nobody's are including somebody’s in their everyday life for the same reasons. A case in point is the twist given to the predicament of Sunita Williams - the US astronaut stuck in space.

School children from unknown villages hold her mugshots and pray for her ‘safe return’ and the newspapers print this snap the next day. Well from this you could say that the Indian government's efforts to make accessible information technology to everyone has been successful but the truth of the matter is that some unknown school gets a photo in the papers by praying for a person lost in space.

No not just another person – a person who was once upon a time an Indian and through no fault of hers was born in the US – blame it on her parents who hoped to find greener pastures across the seas. This need to include famous people who are no longer residents of India into our everyday life stems from the fact that India does not have heroes of her own, that’s another reason why we also harp about the glories of ancient India. It’s easier to draw a connection to someone famous than to ensure a road to success.

The kind of heroes that are chosen also suggest a bias. No body in India holds a candle to Freddy Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara, educated in a school outside Mumbai India, maybe because it was not infra dig then to search for Indian links or maybe because he was a gay rock star who died of AIDS.

The way things are going we will pretty soon be garlanding apes (our forefathers) for having cocked-a-snook at the food pyramid and for staying awake for the dawn of a new civilisation.

Chairs


The bus from Delhi to Chandigarh was a back-breaker. The seats did not recline, though they were at an angle, the angle ensured maximum discomfort. There was not much space between rows so one got the feeling of being in a cockpit and being surrounded by other cockpits.

I found a comfortable position for my back but the neck had a bad time. Not only did the rocking of the bus ensure my neck lolled around but the seats were devious enough not to give any support to my neck. The seat just sat back and watched my neck do bungee jumps whenever I dropped off to sleep which would ultimately end in my being violently plucked out from the land of nod.

The bus stopped for a snack at 1 am on the highway and I saw these chairs lined up on the road. They were made of cane. They all faced the road as if the road provided entertainment during the day.

Monday, June 18, 2007

Is Face-Off a remake of the original Don?

This thought came to me on a bus to Delhi from Chandigarh while being treated to the screening of the new version of Don.

The movie is about a gangster who is killed by a police officer. The officer chances on a down and out look-a-like and sends this double back to the dead Don’s lair to get information about the gang and its operations.

Now India is an underdeveloped country and Don was made in the late seventies early eighties so instead of using technology to change faces, Bollywood did what it is best at -giving people a chance to live surreal lives- and therefore chose to give some nobody to act like a gangster and bring the evil doers to justice.

A few years later Hollywood used plastic surgery to interchange the faces of Castor Troy and Sean Archer and the result was Face-Off.

I have watched ‘When Harry Met Sally’ umpteen times and loved it every time. Meg Ryans role in this and ‘You’ve got mail’ and for that matter in ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ are sure signs of changes in technology and the mindset of people about technology. In the former two movies Meg uses the computer at work, these are more like electronic typewriters with massive screens, in the latter movie she uses a laptop and uses it more for entertainment (its another matter that she finds Tom Hanks).

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Chandigarh Part 2


We had dinner in this Hotel called Aroma, its restaurant was called somethingelse. The restaurant had a very high ceiling and a small waterfall. There were these columns that must have been taken from the Coloseum and dipped in bleach that were strategically placed in the huge room.
Maybe they were once part of a Domino set - - - -

By Order!


This is a favourite sign off used by bureaucratic India (unfortunately the photo is not a good example because the ‘By Order here is followed by the name of the authority). Usually the ‘By Order’ is the QED of an order leaving the authority faceless. These signatures are used against the public to ‘cease and desist’ something.

Indians love symbols of authority but they never comply with rules.

‘By Order’ is a perfect example of this mentality – Only higher-ups make orders that become headstones that go unacknowledged by the public. Knowing this the higher-ups would rather not castrate themselves in public by putting their name to an order that everyone chooses to ignore.

Chandigarh




I have heard people rave about this city, so one could imagine my levels of enthusiasm while planning my trip there. I knew that it was what one calls a planned city. Which means that a famous town planner is given a plot of land and given a free hand to allocate land, build and create building laws that ensures his own immortality, the famous town planner was Le Corbusier.

I arrived in a Volvo bus with a dysfunctional AC. The conductor was even more solicitous then an airhostess, at the beginning of the journey he visited every seat to ensure that the personal air blowers faced the passengers under them. Once the AC broke down and passengers began to complain he offered to call a cab for them. No one took up the offer.

Entering Chandigarh I got a certain feeling of spaciousness, the roads were wide, there were no buildings blocking my view and everything was green. But this sense slowly changed to bewilderment as I got further into the city. Even though I had heard that the ‘planned’ meant that the city was broken down into sectors I was not ready for what I saw. All commercial activity was put into these two storey red buildings that ran for a few hundred meters in length. Thus it was not strange to see three hotels situated side-by-side or restaurants in a long chain offering a kaleidoscope of cuisines. Also these complexes were on one side of the road.

These buildings bring a very Soviet era feeling to the place which is diametric to the wealth and ostentation that seeps from its pores.

RSS


Sherlock Holmes is led to Prof Moriarty as he sees a link between supposedly unrelated spontaneous crimes. Holmes sees through the opaque mist and finds the machinations of a vast criminal network. Moriarty’s web of criminal influence is not altogether different to the spread of the RSS tentacles into every aspect of Indian life. This Hindu fundamentalist organization which blamed Gandhi for the partition of India has as one of its idealogical gurus Vinayak Damodar Savarkar also the guru of Godse, who murdered Mahatma Gandhi. The RSS has its agents in every sphere of the government, armed forces and educational institutions. All this is under the guise of protecting the Hindu way of life (which includes Hindu Pride) which off course is selective reading of what ancient India was. This organization, through its tentacles, has instigated riots, killed and destroyed property all in the name of maintaining Hindu pride

I was in Chandigarh and visited the Rock garden and saw this piece of art made of waste. This agglomeration of statues of people in brown shorts and white shirts reminded me of RSS members who wear very loose brown shorts that are heavily starched and white shirts. They meet weekly in public parks where they do exercises. Occasionally they also organise parades with a band playing western musical instruments.

Besides being xenophobic and racist this organisation also shows symptoms of multiple-personality-disorder because it uses aspects of western influence while parallely maintaining a diatribe against it and ‘protecting’ Hindu culture from this very influence. Nothing could be more apparent than what Uwe Parpart, Asia Times Online Editor mentions in his article " Destroying the house that Gandhi built" that the co-founder of the RSS B S Moonje met Mussolini in Rome in 1931 and moulded the RSS according to the Fascist Academy of Physical Education.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Companionship




Got up this morning and saw this pair sitting on a water tank.




Whenever I see crows i think of velociraptors. Maybe Jurassic Park did it to me but I see the way they turn their heads is very similar to these raptors.

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Space


Another picture from the terrace of the apartments I am put up in.

What i wanted to do was to get this construction along with the surroundings it is in. But my camera would not allow

Bangalore


This photo was taken from the terrace of the apartments where I am put up. As many Bangaloreans will know this does not show the hideous conditions the roads are in.

Monday, June 4, 2007

Guzzler


I saw this on a garbage truck near my office.

The Aerosmith Show in Bangalore

My colleague could not wait for the Aerosmith concert, he went about telling everyone excitedly what he planned to do - he was going to get drunk and then, once inside, he was going to get stoned. He was more excited about his state of being in the concert than about the concert itself. Its another matter that he came in sober.

The sign that the Smithies were coming were there for all to see – huge mug-shots of ‘THE LIPS’ and his crew stared down at pedestrians and traffic, closer to the day there were directions with ‘RED SECTION, BLUE SECTION’ and arrows pointing to the hallowed ground where the famous five would strut their stuff.

Hindi movies of the seventies always began with two young kids (sometimes twins) getting lost in a fair and then meeting up years later. It seems that that Steve and Mick got separated at birth in a fair in India, though Steve claims he has never set foot here before. Their antics on stage and their LIPS bear more than just a passing resemblance.

The crowds began coming in at 5.30, by 8 it seemed that there were not going to be many people. The crowds pressed to the barricades closer to the stage, it was empty at the back. The innocuous trickle began to have an effect on the ground, the area began to fill up. Soon one could see plumes of smoke coming from various sections. It almost seemed as if these Indians were sending out smoke signals to each, other communicating the number of reefers present.

Petite women with their gargantuan boyfriends began blocking my line of sight, while the stale smell of alcohol lingered after every ‘excuse me’.

I did not know many songs, nor would I have been able to recognise any off them accept for Steve. So whenever I saw a man with long hair on stage I would yell in anticipation.

Finally the show began and the daddies of rock did their stuff. There was one still photographer on stage busy getting Steve in action. The poor photographer was sweating as much as Steve. Maybe Steve was building up a portfolio, the photographer did not pay much attention to the others.

Joe Perry sang a song but before he did he thanked India for the Kamasutra. Later, he spanked his guitar with his shirt and boy did the guitar wail in pleasure. It was quite a performance by the group.

Steve even learned a few words of Hindi – I think I recognised ‘dil’ (heart) a few times.

An interesting way to spend an evening.

Sunday, June 3, 2007

Staircase


I was walking back from lunch when I looked back and saw this building construction where this staircase was framed.

Loneliness is - - - - - -



Loneliness is a full moon in an empty sky.