Thank god u didn't get this in one of those chain mails

Stuff that struck me over the past few days:
* Barrack Obama will have to beat Sarah Palin not McCain to be President.
* Pune may be the safest metro in India right now. Especially if your Christian.
* The human capacity for forgiveness is vast. Only outdone by human capacity for meanness.
* Ray Charles and Willie Nelson singing Seven Spanish Angels can make me cry (not because they are bad, of course).
* If I am truly free, it also means that I am truly dead.
* It’s good to get drunk after a long dry spell.

Moral of the deal

Tony Blair, former Brit PM begins teaching a course on ‘Faith and Globalisation’ at Yale this week. The need for that course came in the wake of 9/11 and the realization that what people believe cannot be separated from the way they will react to even the smallest ripple effect of globalisation.
I wonder why, in the wake of the economic crisis, no one is speaking about Morality and Economics, or Value-based Business Practice? It is clear that greed and an unhealthy focus on bottomline has caused the present financial catastrophe. Now, who is going to bell this cat?

A WTF moment

I just had a WTF moment. A colleague, who I have the greatest respect for in terms of domain knowledge, but who, frankly cannot speak or write English better than me, pointed out a grammatical mistake involving a ‘transient verb.’ Right enough, I went WTF! Mind you, this guy cannot speak better than me, or write, but ‘knows’ the English language more than I will ever care to.
I promptly went to Google and have since added to my repertoire the understanding of the transient verb. Whether I will be able to recognize one now remains to be seen.

Butterfly effect

I’ve always been fascinated by the adage - ‘When a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa there is an earthquake in Japan’. The cosmic unity of all things living is something that resounds deep within my being. However, I now notice the same phenomenon in the financial markets of the world. If Chuck in Texas defaults on his mortgage payment, stock markets in the Gulf lose $39 billion, and 5,000 people in India lose their jobs and so on and so forth. With amazement I have watched the world economy unravel to the butterfly effect of the subprime crisis.

Bumbling and overzealous

The standard of TV journalism in India continues to appall me. Rajdeep is too loud, Barkha too opinionated, but even the second rung sucks. Nidhi Razdan reporting from Vienna on the nuke deal says, on air: ‘Countries (represented there) are frantically communicating with their leaders back home. They are communicating via email and phone… and even fax.”
What kind of journo thinks modes of communication are information. Thank-god homing pigeons are outdated and telepathy is not yet proven. TV journalism and viewers in India are like adoloscents on their first date. Bumbling and overzealous. I hope both grow fast.

What's good for the goose....

I’m still undecided on whether it’s a good or bad thing for Premiership clubs to be sold like cattle to the highest bidders. No, not high-class hookers (or gigolos), that’s the players. Most UK commentators are incensed by the presence of Russians, Icelanders, Americans and now Arabs, as owners of very old traditional English clubs. ‘It’s like watching fantasy football being played with real players and real money’, fumed one Brit hack. Why take your sport to a global audience if you did not want real interest in it? Where is the fine line between nationalism and globalization?

Literary exercise

Indulge me in a little literary exercise. It involves a four-letter word that starts with ‘f’, ends with ‘k’, and is not ‘fork’.
The idea is to insert the word in every three-syllable word you use, for a day. Of course, you can, and will probably have to use the word in its verb or adverbial form. So, for ex-f***ing-ample, you need to be in-f***ing-volved with the language to know enough words with three syl-a-f***ing-bbles for this to work. After about half a day you almost expect Guy Ritchie to come out from somewhere and shout cut!