Picture Courtesy Wikipedia

Golden dragons sit atop the striking green fa�ade, flanked by golden arches on the left and (overpriced) gold topped taxis beneath. A unsightly blue roof stretches along the entire street, designed to keep out the elements and whatever little charm the facade has to offer. “Jalan Petaling,” the multilingual signboard suspended from the lowest tier says. Petaling Street.

Petaling Street, a narrow stretch of road in downtown Kuala Lumpur is the green dragon facaded, blue roofed home to a gigantic flea market selling bootleg merchandise. Fittingly, the market operates from dawn to midnight, drawing an enormous throng of bargain hunters looking for Rolexes and Patek Philippes; Guesses, Guccis, Givenchys and Louis Vittons; Star Wars and Flight Plan and Sims and Civilization and food.

A row of stores on each side of the street, and down the middle of the street a double row of stores with their backs to each other, splitting the narrow alley into two narrower alleys. Enter through the left, bargain your way up the street till the end, gawk at the vendors selling fried fish, and kabab rolls and ice kacang, and a Rolex or two; turn around and haggle back down the other way. Along the way, a sensual treat: the bright flouroscent lighting, the smell of sweaty bodies laden with faux Italian fashion goods mixed in with the the smell of barbecued fish, the sounds of hagglers haggling and touts touting.

To the shopper, the bustle is endearing, an alluring setting for an exotic shopping experience. To the non-shopper, the bustle sucks. It overwhelms, intimidates, drains.

And hence, I choose to stand guard at the dragons while the wife enters the market.

“Be back soon,” she says.

“Ok.” And I start waiting…

A young man wearing a shirt that requests people to consume him walks up real close to me, and smiles. I smileback. “DVD, boss?” he asks. “I got all good movies.”

What followed was chaos. Before I could answer, he walks up sneakily behind another person who is not wearing a shirt – his friend, I would learn later. Eat Me then loudly screams into the shirtless guy’s ear, scaring shirtless out of his wits. Shirtless turns around and angrily shoves Eat-Me, who staggers back into the waiting arms of an old Englishman who lets out a startled scream himself and then recovers enough to say “Wot?”

Eat-Me grins insolently, puts his arm around Englishman and asks him, “You want DVDs?”

“No, and don’t touch me. I don’t want to be touched.”

EatMe finds this hilarious, so he laughs very loudly and punches me on the stomach.

“Don’t touch me, ha-ha-ha, Don’t touch me. You want DVD boss?”

“I would love to, but that Rolex burnt a big hole in my pocket.” Proud grin accompanies bad joke. Eat-me looks bemused and then leaves.

Cue the next person in. Thin. Male. Dirty white shirt. Button-down, adding to the incongruity. Rings on his ear, a ring on his nose, and one around the lower lip. Several rings on his fingers, a box in his hand. Incredibly, Ring walks to me.

“Here boss, you wanted Rolex?”

“No.”

“He said you want to buy Rolex,” he says, pointing to Eat-Me.

“No, I was joking.”

“Don’t joke boss, this is our business.”

***

Ring moves away. Eat-me comes back. I duck into McDonalds and buy a tea and sit down at a table. I must’ve been halfway through the tea when a young man in a yellow shirt approaches me.

“Sir, when are you leaving?”

“Excuse me?”

“When are you leaving the table?”

“After I finish my tea. Why do you ask?”

“People are waiting.”

So I set this tea aside, and order another one. This one tides me over for a minute more. Yellow shirt approaches, and I beat a hasty retreat in anticipation of conversation.

Back outdoors. Ring spots me first.

“I got Tag also. See this watch, runs only on body heat. Also Bentley. Buy one boss.”

“I don’t want anything.”

Ring leaves, only to reappear in a minute.

“Watch?”

“No. One minute ago, I said said no watch. Does that RING a bell?” Prouder grin, poorer joke.

“Why you laugh boss, this is my business.”

“Sorry, but no thanks.”

Ring now walks up to EatMe. Without any obvious provocation, EatMe kicks Ring hard on the shins. Ring yelps. Shirtless enters the fray and shoves EatMe.

EatMe falls hard on the ground, and does a backwards somersault, landing right in front of me.

“This guy must be nuts”, I think to myself.

“You will think I am mad boss,” he says, with the now obligatory punch on my stomach.

“Why?” I respond, stunned. “I don’t think that.”

“No, you will think now boss if I say I will sell you DVD for only 5 Ringgits. You are my friend.”

This here was a mind reading moron.

“Sorry.” I rush back into the McDonalds, back into the hands of my yellow shirted friend who can’t stay away from me for more than a minute.

More tea later, the wife shows up. Looking cheery and refreshed. I whisk her away in a hurry, before my new friends spot her and insist on being introduced.

“You look grumpy?”

“Not grumpy, just sad. I wish I’d said goodbye to him.”

“Who?”

“Don’t worry about it…”

Mr. Thief: “Heh.”

Judge: “Heh? That’s all you have to say about it?”

Mr. Thief: “Heh is the sound of me laughing self-righteously. I would like to let you know that I didn’t do it. It was an invisible man that killed the manager and stole all the gold.”

Judge: “That’s bullsh.., I mean, impossible.”

Mr. Thief: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Judge: “You lost me there, what are you talking about?”

Mr. Thief: “Never mind, but I am sticking to my story. It was an invisible man that killed the manager and stole all the gold.”

Judge: “Invisible man? That is scientifically impossible. Do you have any witnesses?”

Mr. Thief: “As a matter of fact, I do. I would like to call H.G Wells to the stand.”

Judge: “But he is dead, I thought. Or maybe that’s Orson Wells.” Checks with someone. “Yeah, they are both dead.”

Mr. Thief: “Too bad, I will call Ram Gopal Verma instead. He made a movie called Gayab, and can use the scientific expertise he gained during the making of the movie to prove that invisible men are not impossible.”

Judge: “I think you might have a point there. Even if I buy that for a minute, how do you explain all the gold in your house?”

Mr. Thief: “Oh, that was stuff I produced using alchemy.”

Judge: “Huh? Ok, this is becoming a farce. Alchemy is a ridiculous explanation.”

Mr. Thief: “Oh yeah? I will call Neal Stephenson to the stand prove it is not that ridiculous.”

Judge: “Dude, this is tiring. What are you smoking?”

Mr. Thief: “If you must know, I read this on my way to court this morning.“

Someone who finds a rock can easily imagine how wind and rain shaped it. But someone who finds a pocket watch lying on the ground instantly knows that it was not formed by natural processes.

With living organisms so much more complicated than watches, [...] “The marks of design are too strong to be got over.”

a small (but very vocal) minority of scientists is arguing for the inclusion of Intelligent Design in school curriculums across the US. The New York Times is running a series of articles on this, and if you read the first two, you realize how hollow the arguments favoring Intelligent Design are. Carefully placed could-not-haves and usually-ares might sway public opinion, but innuendo can’t be a substitute for scientific rigor. If human imagination is the yardstick, any counter intuitive scientific discovery can be disputed – Geocentrism anyone?

In one often-cited argument, Michael J. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and a leading design theorist, compares complex biological phenomena like blood clotting to a mousetrap: Take away any one piece – the spring, the baseboard, the metal piece that snags the mouse – and the mousetrap stops being able to catch mice.

Similarly, Dr. Behe argues, if any one of the more than 20 proteins involved in blood clotting is missing or deficient, as happens in hemophilia, for instance, clots will not form properly.

Such all-or-none systems, Dr. Behe and other design proponents say, could not have arisen through the incremental changes that evolution says allowed life to progress to the big brains and the sophisticated abilities of humans from primitive bacteria.

These complex systems are “always associated with design,” Dr. Behe, the author of the 1996 book “Darwin’s Black Box,” said in an interview. “We find such systems in biology, and since we know of no other way that these things can be produced, Darwinian claims notwithstanding, then we are rational to conclude they were indeed designed.”

A: Easy. Start calling it Climate Change instead.

[...]at the Brookings Institution, its environmental boss detects a whiff of terminological politics. “Polling data suggest that much of the public considers the term climate change less threatening than global warming,” says David Sandalow. “As a result, politicians eager to downplay risks tend to use the term climate change.

A new regime takes over your country and soon after, goes to war against a vastly superior force. A number of young men, poorly equipped in every way, are sent to fight the war.

The war kills a lot of young people, but you survive, and are taken prisoner of war, lodged in a camp on a remote island. The camp is split into two groups – a majority of them loyal to the old regime in the country (lets call them the nationalists) and the rest loyal to the new Government (the loyalists). The former group wants to go back to a country near yours that’s still controlled by the old regime, but you left an ageing mom and a pretty girlfriend behind when you went to war, so you choose to join the loyalists.

Your captors favor the other group – and for the loyalists, the hard grind of the camp is made harder still by the increased hostility of their captors, and the physical abuse they’ve to endure from the nationalists. Yet, somehow, you survive.

Finally, the war ends, and the captors hold a giant court of sorts, where you endure a tremendous amount of persuasion to the contrary and choose to go back to your country. A choice that only a few people made. A choice that saved a little bit of face for a nation already reeling from a humiliating defeat. You are all patriotic heroes.

You go back home, with the few others that wanted to. A few weeks into your stay, the Government labels all of you “shameless cowards” for not dying in the war, and inflicts varying degrees of punishment on the group. Death for some, job losses for some, slaps on the wrists for the lucky few.

End Spoiler

Makes no sense, you think? Well, it probably won’t, until I tell you that the new regime was Communist. Then it all adds up just fine.

Narrated in the spare language of a soldier who taught himself English by reading bootlegged copies of the Bible, Ha Jin’s War Trash is an outstanding work of fiction. Lacing together historical detail with a vivid imagination for what might have been, Jin constructs an evocative picture of life in a Chinese POW camp during the Korean War. Yu Yuan, the narrator is an educated young man, a junior officer who spends his time in the camp torn between an ideology he doesn’t quite like and a family he loves a lot. His rudimentary knowledge of English gives him a window far beyond his grade into the events that unfold at the camp.

The camp splits into two groups: one loyal to the Communists, and the Nationalists that want to go to Taiwan. Hierarchies are established in both the groups – and it is sadly funny to watch the powerless “leaders” take themselves too seriously, as they make daily plans about nothing and argue endlessly about worthless transgressions. Riots are staged and quelled, and most of the time the planning of protests is an end in itself – a way for bored soldiers to feel purposeful.

Ha Jin’s brilliant writing brings even the most mundane things to life: the unfolding of the friendship between a doctor treating him and Yuan is a great example of how his simple, ‘I’ll-just-tell-you-what-happened’ style works astonishingly well. It could’ve so easily become maudlin with a few extra words. Without any overt sentimentality, you go through virtually every emotion the characters feel. The simple joy of concocting a song from home-made instruments, or the incredible boredom of doing nothing day after day after day.

Through it all Yuan is always on the wall – trying to decide between the groups. The events in the camp are but a backdrop to the real drama in his mind as he agonizes over choices he should’nt have to make: His well-being or his family’s survival? A secure financial future in a free country or a life with his mother and his fiancee?

This is one of those books that you don’t want to end. Chandrahas Choudhury puts it so well, when he says,

[...]a wrenching experience associated with powerful novels: that of coming towards the close, the last few pages, after which our fortnight- or month-long involvement with a set of characters and an imagined world (no less real for being imagined) will abruptly come to an end. Surely this feeling is more painful than, say, the news of the death of a distant relative or acquaintance. To postpone closure, we try to read more slowly, linger over every sentence, close the book for a while and drift into our own thoughts.

If Professor Strunk ever wanted an example to illustrate what he meant when he wrote,

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

there is no better example than this book.

Here’s my addition to the growing list of superlatives that critics have used to describe War Trash. Wow.

Here’s an excerpt.

This would be ironic if it weren’t sad: The Economist says Lay is on a “charm offensive” telling anyone who’d listen that he is in fact pretty dumb, and that he was not paying much attention to his company. The Times’s review of Eichenwald’s book explains why that is hard to believe.

Kenneth Lay, the company’s longtime chief executive, who hired Mr. Skilling and mostly turned over the management reins, emerges in Mr. Eichenwald’s telling as a kind of amiable simpleton, glad-handing his way through Houston’s moneyed upper crust. But unlike, say, Bernard Ebbers, the recently convicted former bouncer and high school coach who ran WorldCom onto the rocks, Mr. Lay is a Ph.D. economist and a former deputy under secretary of the interior, who had transformed the natural gas industry. Does Mr. Eichenwald believe that he really had no clue? That he never noticed the mad scramble to manufacture profits at the end of each reporting period? That he never wondered about the plausibility of a tenfold jump in revenues in just five years?

In case you’ve forgotten what Lay presided over: (from the Times’s review again)

In early 2000 Fortune magazine selected Enron as America’s best-managed and most innovative company, and Enron’s stock market valuation peaked at $73 billion that August. The following March the company announced that 2000 revenues had more than doubled, to $100 billion. The company paid its normal quarterly dividend in October 2001, announcing that regular earnings were up 26 percent and that it was “on track” to meet its full-year profit targets.

Six weeks later, Enron filed for bankruptcy.

Mahatma Gandhi, the Missing Laureate

There is no hint in the archives that the Norwegian Nobel Committee ever took into consideration the possibility of an adverse British reaction to an award to Gandhi. Thus it seems that the hypothesis that the Committee’s omission of Gandhi was due to its members’ not wanting to provoke British authorities, may be rejected.

During the last months of his life, Gandhi worked hard to end the violence between Hindus and Moslems which followed the partition of India. We know little about the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s discussions on Gandhi’s candidature in 1948 – other than the above quoted entry of November 18 in Gunnar Jahn’s diary – but it seems clear that they seriously considered a posthumous award. When the committee, for formal reasons, ended up not making such an award, they decided to reserve the prize, and then, one year later, not to spend the prize money for 1948 at all. What many thought should have been Mahatma Gandhi’s place on the list of Laureates was silently but respectfully left open.

Excuses.

It is a familiar story – just replace Enron/Tyco with Infospace, and Dennis Kozlowski with Naveen Jain and you get the picture. High profile CEO hyping his company’s (non-existent) prospects to the sky, usual suspect Henry Blodget hoodwinking unsuspecting investors into buying the stock, everyone that knew selling their stock before it tanks, and finally the average Joe that bought into the company left wondering where his $50000 dollar investment went.

I hope Jain goes to jail and stays there for a long time.

Somewhat jarringly, the article has this gratuitous reference to India. “Naveen Jain grew up in a culture mired in bribery and corruption, yet in a religion that deplores dishonesty.” What does that have to do with this story? I haven’t seen stories about Polish culture in stories about Martha.

Anyways, here’s a sample exhibit from the hall of shame:

… The Jains preferred something different and latched onto a 1.3-acre Medina estate called Diamanti — Greek for diamond — buying it for $13 million. The mansion boasted 16,500 square feet of space and a two-story garage. The garage shared a glass wall with the house so the owner could display an auto collection.

The house had a professional recording studio, steam room, sauna, exercise room, elevator and a two-bedroom wing for a housekeeper. The pool was covered with a two-story glass atrium so the Jains could swim year-round.

Link through Sepia Mutiny.

That India is an open society and China is not is one of the most glaring differences between the two. Some people in both countries are tempted to use it to explain another: that China’s economy has grown much faster. This survey will argue that this view is simplistic and misleading.

Some of the main reasons for China’s better performance have nothing to do with the political system. When China started its reforms, in 1978, it was poorer than India. Part of the gap now is due simply to that earlier start. But also, unreformed China seems to have done a more impressive job than India did in educating and providing health care for its poor. Reforms benefited from what economists call “good human capital”, and from a bulge in the working-age population that India itself is now experiencing.

India is often portrayed as an elephant: big, lumbering and slow off the mark. Now investment-bank reports are beginning to talk of it as a new Asian “tiger”. If that is what it wants to be, it makes sense for it to study China: the tiger in front is Chinese.

Update: Prashant Kothari blogs about a similar survey, from Standard and Poors. I am glad both these surveys try to address the myth that India is behind because it is a democracy.

Since water retains heat better than the air, Tim Barnett and his team figured they would be better off looking for evidence of global warming in the oceans. They found a significant increase in temperatures on the surface of all the oceans of the world. And when they used a computer model to track ocean temperatures over the past 65 years or so, they found out that natural climatic variations alone could not explain them. But when the effects of human contributions (greenhouse gases etc.) were taken into account in the model, the model tracked temperature changes accurately in all the 6 oceans. The Economist has a picture and an article.

As for this, it is what it is: a good read.

Fact :The Maharashtra Government is destroying homes that encroach on public property.

Conclusion : Tsunami = Maharashtra Government.

Saw this first on Dilip D’Souza’s blog. Now the Hindu carries the same logic. And some people seem to buy into this – caring enough to write back.

Now without going into whether I think the demolitions are right or wrong, all I can say is these folks may have some trouble with the analytical skills portion of the GRE.

Excuse the hypocrisy, for it is all part of an effort to increase the Gross National Happiness of the country, which is a quaint way of saying people should learn to be happy – grinding poverty be damned.

“One of Bush’s strongest election planks was immigration, where he scored over challenger John Kerry particularly on the outsourcing issue.”

“Strongest plank?” Really? So the 43 total seconds that the candidates spent on immigration reform was actually responsible for Bush’s win. How could I have missed that?

So now, Wendy decides to write a book and the New York Times reviews it. From the review, I could gather three important things:

1) The book seems to have a lot of sex in it.

2) The book was written by Wendy Doniger, who was (gasp) criticized for her views on Hinduism.

3) Wendy’s photo on the jacket is cool. Very sensuous. And because she used an old photo of her on the jacket, Wendy is incurably playful. There was so much wry humor in that photo.

How could I not go out and buy the book?

Manish Vij writes wonderfully about this at Sepia Mutiny.

Over the last couple of years or so, state governements have started banning lotteries. It started off in Tamil Nadu, and seems to have spread to neighbouring Kerala now. Why the ban? Because lottery tickets are gambling, and gambling is a vice. And Indian Governments love to legislate vice. True, gambling is a problem. But it is a personal problem, not one that society should try and legislate. We know a priest that lives next door to my grandmother’s house. Every single day, he spends at least half of what he earns on buying lottery tickets. Once in a while, he would win a few hundred thousand, and promptly buy expensive “jackpot” tickets with his winnings. Now that lotteries are “banned” in Tamil Nadu, you think he has been mysteriously reformed?

Seedy places where you can play “scratch” lottery have mushroomed throughout the state. With legitimate lotteries, the government at least got a piece of the pie. Meanwhile, I wonder what happened to the old woman that peddled tickets in her shaky voice at Gandhipuram. I took pity on her and tried to buy a ticket once, and she told me “Chinna payanukku idhellam vendam thambi” (A young boy like you shouldn’t be buying this stuff).

Look here. Yeah, you’re right, a picture, like in one of them comics. Isnt that hilarious? Why, there are so many such funny pictures like this, it’ like an entire collection of comics.

After you are done, you should go to this blog and write to the advertisers, so that they can sponsor more such hilariously funny clips. And while you are at it, condemn the radio station for being such spoilsports and suspending Miss Jones.

And then rot in hell.

PS : Music For America has some excerpts.

Update : They just suspended the radio show indefinitely.

Sprint and McDonalds suspend their ads, from hiphopmusic.com , which I found through Navin’s blog. Nice.