Much like its American counterpart, the unraveling of the Indian equivalent of the Republican Party continues apace. Jaswant Singh was expelled on August 19, because he wrote a book in which he allegedly says that Jinnah was demonized by India, while it was Nehru, Patel et al who were actually responsible for partition. Read more…

That was going to be our team name for the Landmark Quiz that happened yesterday evening at the Music Academy in Chennai, until we changed it for highly obscure strategic reasons. We were quite lucky to scrape through to the Chennai finals, and then even luckier to sneak into the national finals by finishing second in the Chennai round. In the finals, order, balance and sanity were restored to the Universe and we came 6th or 7th per usual. Certain unmentionable person (who ceaselessly berates me about channeling quiz questions in this blog while concurrently writing a “blog” that consists entirely of quizzes) did very well indeed and won the whole thing. Expect to see highly annoying posts on how Rs. x0,000 in Landmark vouchers can be spent on that “blog”. Read more…

Which is finally a post about science, (tangentially)!

This blog started trying to be a “science” blog. Various lumpen elements like Simbu and Subbu came and hijacked the whole enterprise, and the science train more or less derailed. Until now. By some miracle (i.e. the Google RSS feed Reader), I am finally able to churn out a post that is on science, India, and music at one fell swoop. Read more…

Hallelujah, the Lord be praised! The 17.63th Harry Potter movie is out. It is a tour de force of the cinematic oeuvre and delivers a coup de grace that is je ne sais quoi; the modus operandi of the cast and crew make it the sine qua non of the canon; its ersatz special effects alter your Weltanschauung and cinematify the zeitgeist; it will.  In summary, it is hasta la vista to all your preconceptions about literature and film, and y tu mamá también.

In other words, I have not seen the movie or read the book, and so am supremely qualified to comment on the phenomena. Here is one of the random scenes from the franchise that has joined others in my craw. Read more…

It’s been a remarkable couple of weeks for the country. On July 2nd, the Delhi High Court struck down sections of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which criminalised certain consensual sexual acts between adults by stating that they were “against the order of nature”. This must be a truly remarkable event in the history of Indian jurisprudence. On the personal front, I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts when the state legalized same-sex marriages and can remember May 17, 2004 when there was a crowd (by US standards!) outside City Hall. Some of them were people applying for licenses, some were from the press, and some were merely there to celebrate a rare and precious civil liberties victory. July 2nd, 2009 in Chennai felt very similar, inside my head, even if there wasn’t a crowd dancing on the streets. Read more…