The Experiment that proves nothing !

I was going through this article which was arguing that the less you know the less confused you are while making decisions and that an overexposure to choice is what hinders decision making.
Some excerpts....
The less you know, the more wisely you seem to choose. HELEN JOYCE rummages through the mental toolbox you use when the facts are scarce
We also have rules of thumb for taking decisions, and Gigerenzer's paradox is that knowing a bit is sometimes better than knowing a lot. He describes an experiment in which American and German students had to pick the larger of pairs of American cities: San Diego or San Antonio? Detroit or Milwaukee? Many Americans got the answers wrong, but almost none of the Germans did. They correctly named the first of each pair, even though many of them had never even heard of Milwaukee or San Antonio. That ignorance was informative: the city they had heard of was probably the bigger one

I don't think this experiment proves anything !!!
It is a well known fact that there is nothing average/good about an average American Geography IQ. Even a Martian would score better at the test !

Study: Geography Greek to young Americans
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- After more than three years of combat and nearly 2,400 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map, a study released Tuesday showed.
The study found that less than six months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 33 percent could not point out Louisiana on a U.S. map.

Astrology Forwards !

Well, I keep getting things related to astrology in my mail ...I usually ignore them for the want of a belief in the concept, yet sometimes the stuff is short and to the point and hence demanding my attention (especially when it says something interesting and positive about my sun sign).

So here goes a forward which meets the specifications...

Aries - past life as a soldier, warrior or surgeon - death by fire, blade, war or accident

Taurus - past life working the land or collecting money - death by hanging or connected with the neck
( I knew it ! All Taureans are savers...take for example , my sis, who somehow always had more money in her purse than me till the day I got a job ! :)) And also H, who manages to sponsor his trips around the world from God knows which purse of his !)

Gemini - past life as a journalist, speaker or a pickpocket - death by suffocation, consumption/lung problems or as a child

Cancer - past life as the head of a big family, a mother of many children or a sailor - death by drowning or in childbirth

Leo - past life as royalty, an actor or someone famous - death through heart or back problems
Virgo - past life as a nurse, caring for others or as a nun - death by starvation, famine or illness

Libra - past life as a diplomat, judge or courtesan - death through the legal system, due to overindulgence or alcohol

Scorpio - past life as a dark healer (witch), working using secret means or sex - death through crime, vengeance or violence

Sagittarius - past life as a teacher, philosopher or traveller - death for speaking the truth, in foreign lands, or for a cause

Capricorn - past life working to gain self-made riches, as a monk or a cripple - death by over work, a hard life, or old age
( This goes for you Cappie !Stop going to the office and following orders even on sundays and..... RELAX ....your seniors can do without you for a day !)

Aquarius - past life as a scientist, revolutionary or working for the good of humanity - death in a group, by electricity or explosion
( Yeaaaahhhh this is definitely my life this time also ...Thanks for the applause !Ohh you guys are too much :P )

Pisces - past life as an artist, psychic, healer or dedicated to religion - death for beliefs, through an overdose, or alcohol


ANOTHER Forward ...
Horoscope Compatibility
Some of it seems amazingly true ! I had a great time reading this with my friends :)
Enjoy !

abundans cautela non nocet

24 more bombs diffused !
Breaking news flashing ...
Every moment the number of diffused bombs keep on rising!
India on High Alert !

A nearly neat-freak that I am, I do inspect the public spaces before deciding on a place to occupy, but now I have to scan the area for possible security threats too !
I have lived through three bomb scares on the Mumbai Local apart from the innumerable bomb scares and evacuations I lived through in Kashmir.
The first one being the fateful evening of 11 July 2006, where the train I was in, left the Khar Road station in the direction of Churchgate minutes before the train travelling in the opposite direction met with the disaster.
I was totally oblivious to what happened, until I reached home and my mother hugged me refusing to let go off me !
Next day, I was on Sahara News for being one of the few souls leaving for work from Churchgate Station. The reporter asked me if I wasn't scared to take the train that day. I replied in negative.
The second time, it was a false alarm when our compartment was emptied to take out a suspicious looking polythene bag with no claimants.

The third time , I was partially dozing off with the help of an I Pod, when I was jolted out of my reverie with a weird dream where everyone in my compartment was screaming and running out. I woke up and looked around to find the situation normal and went back to snooze and then woke up again to find everyone ACTUALLY running out screaming "BOMB ! BOMB ! BOMB !"
I turned around to where everyone was pointing at and found an elderly lady staring at a bag paralyzed with fear and her daughter trying to pull her away.
I tried to have a look at the bag but the crowd pushed me out of the compartment !
Again the police came and well...it was another false alarm... Thanks Lady Luck !

Seriously times are changing, Earlier we used to smile lovingly at our mothers who used to caution us incessantly regarding the dangers we could possibly NOT come across unless Fortuna Redux decided to pull one on us !

Now people are actually paying attention to their mother's warnings!
Even a long lost friend of mine ( I lost him for a very good reason. He lived by the motto, Bibo ergo sum "I drink, therefore I am") decided to mend his ways and be more careful.

The Movie Marathon continues

Watched The Great Debaters, Brokeback Mountain, A Lot Like Love ,and Be Kind Rewind yesterday (thanks to The Rainman who brought a 500 GB external HDD loaded with movies, software, sitcoms, and songs ).
The Great Debaters , surely counts in one of the most inspirational movies ever churned out in Hollywood. Well, Denzel Washington does spell "good cinema" !

My favourite quotes from the movie.....

James Farmer Jr.: In Texas they lynch Negroes. My teammates and I saw a man strung up by his neck and set on fire. We drove through a lynch mob, pressed our faces against the floorboard. I looked at my teammates. I saw the fear in their eyes and, worse, the shame. What was this Negro's crime that he should be hung without trial in a dark forest filled with fog. Was he a thief? Was he a killer? Or just a Negro? Was he a sharecropper? A preacher? Were his children waiting up for him? And who are we to just lie there and do nothing. No matter what he did, the mob was the criminal. But the law did nothing. Just left us wondering, "Why?" My opponent says nothing that erodes the rule of law can be moral. But there is no rule of law in the Jim Crow south. Not when Negroes are denied housing. Turned away from schools, hospitals. And not when we are lynched. St Augustine said, "An unjust law in no law at all.' Which means I have a right, even a duty to resist. With violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter.

Samantha: ... the time for justice, the time for freedom, and the time for equality is always, is always right now!

P.S. My previous venture to watch Brokeback Mountain had to be aborted at the INOX Ticket Counter because of a totally freaked out neighbour and childhood buddy ( a captain in the army )who after having read the description of the movie nudged me out of the area and then screamed his lung out saying " OHHH NOOOO !!! Under no circumstances am I going in there with you girls( me and my sis ) to watch THIS movie "...and then later, as a reaction to the wide grin on my face, added , " Neither am I going to watch this movie with my male friends or alone "
LOL
so we watched something else !

If all goes well ..I go here !

Gulmarg this August http://www.gulmarg.org/
A highly doubtful excursion in the light of recent security scares and the resulting restricted-movement orders ...
Yet , the yearning's too strong and hence I shall push my case every single day :)
and
Then the chocolate capital of the world - Belgium this fall ....
Highly probable one since the dates are out already !!!
Sooooooo excited !!!

Playlist II

When you are a little annoyed with the fast-paced city life...and having trouble going to sleep ...
here's something to slow the tempo down !

• Ben Harper - Forever
• Ben Harper - I love her
• Ben Harper - waiting for you
• Our Lady Peace - 4 am
• Enya - Silent Night (in Irish) My favourite Christmas song :)

gnite... :)

Crooner updates

Julia Nunes - August
nice song ! enjoy !

Sweet night and our chemistry
Make my rapid heart
beat naturally
And our organic minds,
while the others climb we contemplate,
What is time
The night is dark and the lights are low but the laughter rises,
and continues so
Time flies by
Sweet night and our chemistry
Make my rapid heart beat naturally
And our organic minds,
while the others climb we contemplate,
What is time
Time flies by
lie on the porch with my head in your lap,
this is a simple combination that makes me so happy.
and these could be the happiest days of my life.
YEAH, lie on the porch with my head in your lap,
this is a simple combination that makes me so happy.
yeah.
these could be the happiest days of my life. ((The night is dark and the lights are low but the laughter rises, and continues so Time flies by))
Sweet night and our chemistry
Make my rapid heart beat naturally
And our organic minds,
while the others climb we contemplate,
What is time Time flies by ((time flies by)) Sweet night

Walking wonders

So I walked almost all over south Mumbai again :)...yes for the umpteenth time..
Well I LOVE walking !!!!
One of my recurring nightmares is about spending the rest of my life with a person who doesn't like walking and swears by all other means of transport :(
( well I don't mind a cool bike or a Bugatti Veyron..Huh! I wouldn't say no to them ! :PP)

I know Mumbai is not exactly the kind of place walking enthusiasts would recommend. But it was eleven in the night and I and my friends were coming back after watching Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na ( cute movie btw ...absofunkinglutely recommend it if you need some cheering or otherwise ).
It was cool and windy. Footpaths were not hawker-jammed and so we walked all the way from Sterling to the US Club and then slumped down to catch the warm sea breeze . :)
(NOTE: To best experience the moonlit sea walk check out the mile long section of highway NH 17 near Kundapuram, next to Maravanthe Beach to be precise . Breathtaking, out of this world experience!!!! )

As for some more walking wonders of the world , check out WILLIAM MACKESY pick ten of his favourite treks

1. Mount Kailash, Tibet
2. Torajaland, Sulawesi, Indonesia
3. Jomolhari Trek, Bhutan
4. Jiuzhaigou, Sichuan, China
5. Umfolozi Walking Safari, South Africa
6. Federal Pass, Blue Mountains, Australia
7. Lochnagar, Scotland
8. The Lofoten Islands, Norway
9. Route of the Volcanoes, La Palma, Canary Islands
10. Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, America

Fully Faltoo Updates -Mush Factor Puff

Watching Beverly Hills 90210 and The Big Bang Theory simultaneously on Youtube to keep the mush factor in control ... and what do you know !
Sheldon throws in the Schrödinger's Cat and Leonard goes and kisses Penny !
Meh !

Best of Bookers

Excerpts from my speech at the event "Your Favourite British Author", The British Council Library.
Mumbai 2005

I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more… On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world…. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate - at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time.”


This was just a sneak-peek or to be more precise the beginning of a monumental novel by a prodigious novelist called Salman Rushdie. A name, which hardly needs any introduction, the recipient of the Booker Prize and now the Best of the Bookers for his brilliant second novel Midnights Children, Rushdie, stepped into the literary world with his first published novel Grimus, which Mel Tilden recognized as “one of the those novels too good to be science fiction, even though it contains other universes, dimensional doorways, alien creatures and more than one madman”.

The novel was assessed as “an ambitious, strikingly confident first novel”. But the novel that shot him to instant and everlasting fame and handed him the key to the hearts and minds of millions of readers across the world was Midnight’s Children(MC). The success of the novel can be measured by the fact that it alone assured Rushdie, a permanent place among the favourite British authors.

In MC, Rushdie construes the history of the nation (India) from his childhood memories and intertwines it with the history of his narrator and protagonist Saleem Sinai. As “time and migration placed a double filter” between the writer and his subject, when he tries to narrate the past he ends up creating a ‘story’, a piece of fiction, or a version of India for he connects his broken memories with a cache of colourful stories and fantasy.

Rushdie’s universal appeal ( except in US perhaps) lies in his sensibility as a writer to confront reality of exposing shams and more importantly by making the readers think about and not just take his words for granted. He flips back and forth from past to present ,from ‘real’ to ‘unreal’, from ‘fact’ to ‘fiction’ at such a lightning speed that the reader is completely boggled trying to make head or tail of the entire situation. Then slowly the purpose of the whole exercise dawns upon us. The dominant discourse of history has been hammered into us through the popular media in such a way that we have started believing it to be the “truth”. Anything else makes no sense, sounds gibberish, absurd and an insult to our “historical correctness”.

A postmodern text like Rushdie’s makes the reader recognize the stories as stories - history as his story. He champions the cause of counterrealism through his character Vasco in The Moors Last Sigh who says “Forget those damnful realists! The real is always hidden – isn’t it? – inside a miraculously burning bush! Life is fantastic! Paint that”. Rushdie refuses to separate the individual (Saleem) from the context. As Saleem Sinai in MC declares “I am a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you will have to swallow the lot as well”.

The narration is at times highly cinematic but when a movie lasts for just some hours, Rushdie’s narration stays with us well beyond the last page of his novel. It keeps us tuned into the things happening around us. There is no “happily ever after”. His fairytale has no ending, no victory, no peace “because it is the privilege and curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their own times, to forsake privacy and to be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes and to be unable to live or die in peace” Bleak and apocalyptic as it sounds , it is a call for awakening , a yearning for the multitudes to confront the reality that they live in, on ‘real” terms, not to dream in a myth called ‘India’ but to live in a reality that is India. He represents the voice that Anita Desai describes as the “voice that everyone present recognized instantly as being the voice of the new age; strong, original, and demanding of attention”.

It is because of this subjectivity and the proximity of his subject to our subcontinent that Rushdie stands apart from great writers like Marquez, Milan Kundera & Gunter Grass. His hybrid sensibility best brought forward in the song sung by Gibreel Farishta as he tumbles from the heaven at the beginning of his earlier creation The Satanic Verses,

“Oh, my shoes are Japanese
These trousers English, if you please
On my head, red Russian hat –
My heart’s Indian for all that.”

Another striking aspect of his writing is that we should not expect a ‘story’ from him. It is not the ‘story’ which keeps the readers glued to the novel’s progression, but the style in which they are written. The narrative technique he uses is similar to that of the “traditional clown –narrator ‘Vidhushka’ in the ancient Indian performance art of Kuttiyatam” (The Empire Writes Back). The oral narrative maintains the illusion of story-telling and takes us forward but the language, wordplay and other linguistics and stylistic calisthenics offers a deeper insight into things being said and implied.

Salman Rushdie is definitely not a novelist to be taken at the face value, his writings are meant to be chewed upon, something to be dissected, inviting the readers to an extravaganza of facts, fictions, histories, stories, fantasies, movie stars, snake charmers, soothsayers, sadhus, pop-singers, magicians, millionaire playboys, war heroes with knocking knees, silver spittoons, and a narrator with a “huge cucumber of a nose”.

Anu

Playlist for the Day

Enjoy ...

1. Times Like These-Foo Fighters
2. Viva La Vida-Coldplay
3. Traveller- Talvin Singh
4. We Are-Ann Johnsson
5. Hold on-Jet
6. Like a stone- Audioslave
7. Run-Snow Patrol

TYPO THREAT !

I know I type fast and occasionally make lot of typos...
But today I made such WILD meaning-intention distorting typos that TYPO refused to let the errants be grouped under his category and threatened to commit suicide if I didn't stop the onslaught immediately ... :(

Well everybody has an off-day someday ... :P

Urban Caving

It happened on a busy sunday evening [:) ... Busy as in people here and there and everywhere choking the streets of Mumbai running from pillar to post in search of all kinds of sales / discounts and metrosexual, retrosexual men and the toxic bachelors cramming the restricted-entry public space ( Barrista, CCD, etc ) along with crackberry or laptop lifestreamers in the hope of a miracle! ( custom-made)] .

While walking in Mumbai, I have developed a rather annoying(to myself) habit of looking down and walking in perpetual fear of encountering some miscellaneous crap on the street :/ ...
On this particular monsoon soaked day, I got out of the H & N store and was moving towards Flora Fountain when I had scanned the road ahead as safe to step on ....and splash !!!
How on earth did that happen? How did I managed to step into a puddle???
The puddle had camouflaged itself so well that I couldn't distinguish it from the concrete !

It wasn't exactly a puddle .... a section of the road had just caved in ...maybe due to one of the inexplicable urban caving expeditions of the Mumbai Metropolitan Road Diggers Association(MMRDA)....:P

Anyway I disappeared from the area without pondering over the size and shape of the puddle and the damage to my shoes in the hope of losing all the strangers who could have witnessed the splash...

HUG ME ?????

PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE WITH MY TROUSERS

CuteCircuit, an "interaction design" company, offers T-shirts that can massage you by telephone, and a skirt that knows when you're excited. A report from Evgeny Morozov at the MobileCamp technology conference in London ...

Now for CuteCircuit’s product of the moment: the "Hug Shirt", which transmits and receives hugs. When you give your Hug Shirt a hug, sensors embedded in the cloth measure the strength of your touch, your skin temperature, your heartbeat rate and the duration of the squeeze. They send this data to your phone via Bluetooth; your phone sends this data to your friend’s mobile phone; it travels via Bluetooth to his or her shirt, and your friend feels a hug based on your “inputs”. You can even send a hug if your friend has a Hug Shirt but you don’t, using “Hug-me” software.
The shirt is washable and rechargeable. If somebody sends you a hug when you aren't wearing it. you get a message: “You’ve got one hug waiting. do you want to feel it?”
Francesca talks about some interesting uses for Hug Shirt: during rock concerts, or for kids to cheat in class by using a special “hug language”. Plus, the feeling you get after being “hugged” is so relaxing as to feel almost like a massage.

Palookaville

And the Sign Said, "long haired freaky people need not apply"

From Fatboy Slim's album Palookaville.
This one goes as a warning to all the racists/bigots/MCPs/ out there !

The music video is done as a black and white public service announcement. It starts off with the title 'A film by Neighborhood Watch (The End is Near)' then it switches to a white man named Don, and it states that Don likes to fish and Don is a racist. Throughout the video, it shows Don living a day in his life showing hatred, disdain and distrust of non-whites. A figure in black, thought to be the figure on the 'This is a Neighborhood Watch Community' sign, is seen stalking Don in the background during the scenes in the parking lot, water fountain and Mexican restaurant scenes. After shooing some dark-skinned kids off of his boat, he furiously marches across the street and gets hit by a car, dropping his prized fishing trophy. As an Asian man sees him and calls 911. It can also be argued that the Asian man hangs up when he realizes it is Don, as there is no subtitles of the Asian man talking to the 911 services, white lettering states Look both ways before crossing the street, And don't be a racist and or else