What I did in the first week of my vacation..

1). Watched more bad Hindi movies in a week than I have in a year. Examples include: Pyar Kiya nahin jaata, Hamara dil aapke paas hai, Dil maange more, Shikhar...you get my drift.

2). Watched more Varun Gandhi on NDTV than I bargained for. He's become the Sarah Palin of this election. Lots of attention. No substance. Divisive. Expert BS-er.

3). Ate more mango ice-cream and gajar ka halwa than is good for me.

4). Ate more everything than I should have.

5). Visited more malls in 1 week than I have in 2 years. And they're all shiny and new. They put the malls in the US to shame. You could eat off the floors. Seriously.

6). Saw more Mercedes' and BMWs on the road than I've ever seen before. And a Ferarri and Maserati showroom besides.

7). Tried to watch Hindi soaps. (I don't know why. I guess I had the time!) Man..they suck just as bad now as they did last year. Except there seem to be less K serials. Or maybe I didn't look hard enough.

8). Saw the Burj-al-Arab...and was sadly disappointed. Firstly, its not in the middle of the ocean. Secondly, it has a faintly phallic look about it. Thirdly, I'm not rich enough to go in and have a drink at their bar.

9). Went on a desert safari..dune-bashing, belly dancing, camel rides..the works. It was the mostest fun. Except for: 1). I got a little queasy during the bashing.

2). The queasiness was increased by the excessively cuddly couple who were riding in the same car as us. Like she was sitting in his lap queasy. And she had a loud, screechy voice queasy. And they smoked like engines queasy.

3). The belly dancer just did some Bollywood style jhatkas and matkas. She didn't like flip a coin on her belly or anything.

10). Stayed home and chilled out with the folks. That was the funnest. I haven't thought about work in a week. I check my email only once every day. And I do nothing. Awesome.

On to India now! Yay...best friends and pani-puri and adoring grandparents and new babies and Vaishali and FC Road and Fab India and Shoppers Stop and fun, fun, fun awaits...

Home.

There are no worries just now. No need to try. No need to pretend. Now I'm relaxed and happy. And eating mango ice-cream. And watching silly reality TV. And reading Neruda, and feeling him too. For now, I am home.

Latest read: The Forever war

I just finished reading "The Forever War" by Dexter Filkins. It was an interesting read. I liked it..for most part. I picked it up because it was on the Nytimes list of must-reads for 2008. I didn't know at the time that Filkins worked for the Times! That doesn't make the book any less readable, thankfully! Its pretty well written. No need to embellish the story to make a point here. He's been there, done that and seen it all. Its hard to not to admire his guts...and his stomach! Initially, the lack of commentary bothered me. I felt like I wasn't getting his perspective on things..just a bald description of facts. But then, he let his thoughts slip in once every couple of chapters. And that was enough. His style of writing is...spartan..for want of a better word. A little jarring at times. Lots of to-ing and fro-ing between times and countries. But it worked for me.

There's a lot of Crash, boom, bang and a healthy amount of Eww! Gross moments. Descriptions of where Marines crap in the middle of war and suchlike. But then there are the little stories of people he met. Like the 9 year old orphan Fatima who ran with him one day. The story of the cool discussion of his kidnapping between a sheik he was interviewing and his translator. The story of how the warring factions in Afghanistan seemed uninterested in the war...they even fought lazily! Those little stories had me hooked.

I felt like he'd lost some part of himself in Iraq. I honestly have to wonder why he kept going back. That hellhole...why would anyone go back...unless they had to? I guess he had to. If I see him around in Cambridge someday, I'd like to tell him I thought it was a brave book.

I've decided to read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City next. I liked the guy when he came on "The Daily Show" and I feel like I want to understand this war better. My benchmark for liking people is now linked to their performance on the Daily Show. Hmm.

Next in line: I've got 2666 by Robert Bolano on the way, and Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra at home. Also, an anthology of Pablo Neruda's poems and a collection of essays by David McCullough. If only I didn't have a PhD to get through!

Dilli-6

A few questions about Dilli-6:

1). Why does Abhishek Bachchan not speak Hindi in the first half hour of the movie, and later in the movie (2 weeks later timewise!) sound like a born and bred Delhi-ite? He even speaks chaste Urdu at some point. How? When?

2). AB can't rant about the futility of blind faith in one scene and deliver a heartfelt "God is in everyone" speech in the next. It doesn't make sense. Either he likes God, or he doesn't. He needs to make up his mind and pick a side. Or he can be ambivalent, but he still needs to make sense. This way, he sounds like a blithering idiot.

3). What kind of a name is Masakalli? Even for a pigeon. I ask you.

4). Does the symbolism have to be so completely overdone? We get stuff, you know. We're not complete nincompoops. I enjoyed the Ram Leela analogies in the beginning. Later, I just sighed wearily. I think I threw up a little when Masakalli was set free, and Bittu was running away. An unfettering of hearts, so to speak. Why so corny?

5). If I live to be a 100, I will never understand why a cow picked the middle of a crowded Delhi street to give birth. Cows don't do that. They find a nice quiet place to calve. I think.

6). Why wasn't this movie named Kale Bandar ki anhoni kanhaani? It might as well have been.

7). Rahman rocks. Rehna Tu and Genda Phool have been humming in my brain for the last 10 days. No questions here. Also, Waheeda Rehman is gorgeous as ever. She still looks radiant.

NB: I was just watching Pres.Obama's address..how much these people clap! Baap re. He cleared his throat and they clapped for 10 minutes. He said hello..there they went. He addressed his wife...that set them off again. I think they canned the sound of the clapping. To drown out whatever platitudes he was mouthing. All I know is, they gave 7 billion in research funding to the NIH..which has to be spent in 2 years. In other words, they just created another problem. People are going to be employed now, and then 2 years later, when their project is probably just taking off, and the funding dries up, they'll be kicked out. Fools!

In the news

So, Andrew Wakefield falsified data. The whole vaccine-autism thing has stunk royally since the very beginning. Nobody could ever replicate his data. Good reason why. He made it up. He made it up, and did such a good job of it that people decided against vaccinating their kids, leading to Measles becoming endemic in the UK again, and the UK losing herd immunity against the disease.

Another interesting article this week comes from Stanley Fish at the New York Times. He cites the case of one Prof.Rancourt, a physicist at the U of Ottawa who is clearly loony. And then proceeds to use this as an example of the misuse of academic freedom by tenured faculty in North America.

I really, really dislike straw man arguments. Pick a certified nutjob who is disliked by faculty and students alike, and make an example out of him. And then say academic freedom is misused to a great degree by tenured professors. So, the question is, can you run a university like you run a business? If so, then I think if you make a 55 billion dollar loss for your university, you should be handed out several hundred billion more to save it. That seems to be the current policy anyway. And judging from the NIH funding crisis..that is not the case. It is only the corporate fatcats who get rescued for screwing up bigtime.