Wandering while lying down

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Life's symphonies

When does a place turn from being foreboding and strange to someone which you can connect with and blend right in?in my case-when it plays a song which you think existed only on your life's soundtrack.a few instances--2 years back a little pizzeria off Charing Cross Rd suddenly plays Dreams by the Cranberries.And,I am home.

Closer home:
A dive at Dadar TT by the name of Ashok.Playing the usual mish mash of Himesh R etc but suddenly the Speakers pour out Mozart's symphony no.39 and me and Miggy look at each other with raised eyebrows.And smile.

Hard Rock Cafe last week.It's my first time there.Nice place ,like the ones abroad etc.Good music,but the K-Factor is still missing.And suddenly Collective Soul's December is the next track.
'Why follow me to higher ground,Lost that you swear I am'

And a decade vanishes.

And a new gym.You know how they are.
And yet,in the middle of the crowd,Bob Sinclair's 'World,Hold On' club mix featuring Steve Edwards finds its way into the playlist and gets me tapping again.

Rewind-1

90 days over already so far in 2007.It has been the best of times,and it has been the worst of times.Though I am glad to say it has been more of the former and sufficiently Dickensian as well.
I have managed to sail on board a fine ship,fly on a superb private jet,get upgraded to the front of the aircraft amongst other things.Not very significant achievemnts,I agree.However,if someone had told me I'll be doing all this and more ,back in 1997-1998,I would have laughed them off.And yet,this is exactly what has happened.My takeaway from this is that if one does what one likes very much,solely as an interest and without expecting any little benefit as an outcome,then there is a probability to be pleasantly surprised by it all.
It can be overwhelming at times,but stay the course.
I also managed to get around a bit;made some new friends with that surprising collision of different worlds which leaves the core values and mindsets intact.I got to discover and explore new bookshops in different places courtesy friends who have been there before and thought that they were the best places in bustling metropolises for me.
I managed to be out in the Karnataka sun for a week at a stretch;was dehydrated most fo the time,was sunburnt,dusty and still had a smile which makes me smile when I look at my pictures from there.
I met a few heroes as well while doing all of the above.
Workwise too,it has been a learning phase.I am not where I would have liked to be but I am a firm believer of a patient approach.I had a superb trip to DXB (where I also took part in the 10-K)

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Le Blog est Mort;Vive le Blog1

Yep.

200 million dead blogs out there.Time to this one rolling again.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

The Inner Jester Prompts....

- Come on, kid. Get in there. Engage.- You've got a bogey at two o'clock.
Take the shot, kid.

You can engage any time, Maverick.

- Where the hell are you going?- It doesn't look good.

What do you mean? It doesn't getto look any better than that.

Hey, man. We could have had him...

I'll fire when I'm goddamngood and ready. You got that?

- He won't engage.- It's only been a few days.

- He just might not make it back.- Keep sending him up.

Fruits of a Classical Education,My Dear

A pertinent look at the state of Classical Education in the UK today.
I shudder to take a similar look at whats happening in India today.

Kim Karomi?


The decline of declension
Harry Mount
January 3, 2007 4:35 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/harry_mount/2007/01/post_860.html

The news that the teaching of classics in state schools is facing extinction is bloody sad news. But it's not new news.

Latin and Greek have been in decline in state schools for the last four decades, ever since successive Labour and Conservative governments began destroying grammar schools. In 1960, 60,000 children did Latin O-level. Now, 10,000 do the much more basic replacement, GCSE (and, of these, in 2003, only 1,707 came from state schools).

When it comes to A-levels, it's time to drag in the life-support machine: only 5,000 children a year take a classical A-level of any sort; that's less than 0.8% of all A-levels taken. And, if the future looks less than rosy for Latin, it's wine-dark for Greek. Fewer than a thousand children a year do GCSE Greek, squeezed out by its declining stablemate, Latin.

What is new, though, is the terribly defeatist attitude taken to propping up classics as it enters its death throes. Classics is wonderful, goes the thinking. But people are finding it too difficult, so fewer of them are doing it. The answer? Aha! Make it easier.

That's the opinion of Bob Lister, one of the last two lecturers in England to train classics teachers and the man who has carried out the latest research into the decline. Mr Lister thinks that Latin GCSEs should be made easier, with less translation from the original.

Zero out of ten, Mr Lister. To paraphrase Kingsley Amis, easier will mean worse. No one points to, say, maths, and thinks - ooh, calculus is a little difficult; let's not inflict it on the poor lambs; adding and subtracting is enough to be going with.

And the same should go for Latin. The reason why people who have done classics are often bright, with a command of grammar and an understanding of the roots of classical and English literature, is because it's actually quite hard to learn all those things. Hard, but highly worthwhile.

Learn Latin and not only will you understand English better, but you will also, more importantly, understand Latin better - the language in which some of the most stirring prose and poetry ever was written. Know Latin, and you will know world literature from the third century BC, when writers got going in Rome, through the so-called Golden Age of Latin: Lucretius, Catullus, Sallust, Cicero and Caesar; the Augustan Age: Ovid, Horace, Virgil and Livy; down to the end of the Silver Age in 120 AD: Martial, Juvenal, Lucan, Seneca, Pliny and Tacitus.

Wonderful books to know. But, like a lot of wonderful things, they need a bit of effort to be appreciated.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

A College Education Without Job Prospects

A thought-provoking article from Yenn Why Tea

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/business/worldbusiness/30college.html?ei=5088partner=rssnyt&en=23907b6b6f9b384e&ex=1322542800&emc=rss&pagewanted=all


November 30, 2006
A College Education Without Job Prospects
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

MUMBAI, India, Nov. 29 — The job market for Indian college graduates is split sharply in two. With a robust handshake, a placeless accent and a confident walk, you can get a $300-a-month job with Citibank or Microsoft. With a limp handshake and a thick accent, you might peddle credit cards door to door for $2 a day.
India was once divided chiefly by caste. Today, new criteria are creating a different divide: skills. Those with marketable skills are sought by a new economy of call centers and software houses; those without are ensnared in old, drudgelike jobs.
Unlike birthright, which determines caste, the skills in question are teachable: the ability to communicate crisply in clear English, to work with teams and deliver presentations, to use search engines like Google, to tear apart theories rather than memorize them.
But the chance to learn such skills is still a prerogative reserved, for the most part, for the modern equivalent of India’s upper castes — the few thousand students who graduate each year from academies like the Indian Institutes of Management and the Indian Institutes of Technology. Their alumni, mostly engineers, walk the hallways of Wall Street and Silicon Valley and are stewards for some of the largest companies.
In the shadow of those marquee institutions, most of the 11 million students in India’s 18,000 colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training, heavy on obedience and light on useful job skills.
Students, executives and educators say this two-tier education system is locking millions of people into the bottom berths of the economy, depriving the country of talent and students of the chance to improve their lot. For those who succeed, what counts is the right skills.
“It’s almost literally a matter of life and death for them,” said Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade body that represents many leading employers. “The same person from the same institution with the same grades, but not having these skills, will either not get employed at all or will probably get a job in a shop or something.”
India is that rare country where it seems to get harder to find a job the more educated you are. In the 2001 census, college graduates had higher unemployment — 17 percent — than middle or high school graduates.
But as graduates complain about a lack of jobs, companies across India see a lack of skilled applicants. The contradiction is explained, experts say, by the poor quality of undergraduate education. India’s thousands of colleges are swallowing millions of new students every year, only to turn out degree holders whom no one wants to hire.
A study published by the software trade group last year concluded that only 10 percent of graduates with nonspecialized degrees were considered employable by leading companies, compared with 25 percent of engineers.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a former Harvard professor who recently resigned in frustration from the National Knowledge Commission, which advises the Indian government on overhauling the education system, said, “The real crisis for me is the place where 70 percent of your graduates are students who do basic science, bachelor of arts and bachelor of commerce.”
Bijal Vora, a commerce student at Hinduja College here in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, would welcome a redesign of the system. “We have not done this to become salespeople,” she said.
Hinduja is in one of India’s richest enclaves, but it is a second-tier, little-known school, and so it exemplifies a middling college experience — neither the best nor the worst.
Between lectures there, dozens of students swarmed around a reporter to complain about their education.
“What the market wants and what the school provides are totally different,” a commerce student, Sohail Kutchi, said.
Kinjal Bhuptani, a final-year student who expects next year to make $2 to $4 a day hawking credit cards, was dejected. “The opportunities we get at this stage are sad,” she said. “We might as well not have studied.”
The students said they were not learning to communicate effectively, even as the essential job skills evolve from pushing papers to answering phones to making presentations. They said their courses offered few chances to work in groups or hold discussions. And in this supposedly English-language college, the professors often used bad grammar and spoke in thick accents.
Across India, half of graduates are not taught in English, effectively barring them from the high-end labor market, said Mohandas Pai, director of human resources at Infosys, a leading outsourcing company. And where English is taught, it is not necessarily the kind employers need.
“Depreciation nikal diya, assets ko less ho gaya.” So went a lesson being given by the accounting professor at Dahanukar College in suburban Mumbai — removing depreciation reduces assets — an example of the widespread use in supposedly English-language colleges of Hinglish, an amalgam of Hindi and English.
A lack of communications skills may be the most obvious shortcoming, but it is not the only one. A deeper problem, specialists say, is a classroom environment that treats students like children even if they are in their mid-20’s. Teaching emphasizes silent note-taking and discipline at the expense of analysis and debate.
“Out! Out! Close the door! Close the door!” a management professor barked at a student who entered his classroom at Hinduja two minutes late. Soon after his departure, the door cracked open again, and the student asked if he could at least take his bag.
The reply: “Out! Out! Who said you could stand here?” A second student, caught whispering, was asked to stand up and cease taking notes.
Then there is the matter of teaching style. At Hinduja and Dahanukar, the mode of instruction at times evokes a re-education camp of some sort. In a marketing class at Hinduja, the professor paced in front, then pressed her chalk to the board.
She drew a tree diagram dividing it into indirect and direct marketing, then divided those into components, and those further into subcomponents. As students frantically took notes, she kept going, and before long she was teaching them that each region of Mumbai would have its own marketing representative: eastern Mumbai, western Mumbai, central Mumbai. There was no discussion, and there was little to discuss.
The professor then led the students in a chant: “What is span of management?”
“Span of management is the number of subordinates a supervisor will manage.” She chanted the refrain four times.
Rote memorization is rife at Indian colleges because students continue to be judged almost solely by exam results. There is scant incentive to widen their horizons — to read books, found clubs or stage plays.
That is not good news for Indian companies, which are hiring these days. Infosys will take on 25,000 people this year from a pool of 1.5 million applicants. The ranks of the rejected are likely to include smart graduates who lack qualities like poise, articulateness and global exposure, Mr. Pai of Infosys said.
And even if rigid teaching ways are changed, experts say the rigidity of Indian households will continue.
“When we are raising our children,” said Sam Pitroda, a Chicago-based entrepreneur who is chairman of the Knowledge Commission and was an adviser to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s, “we constantly tell them: ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that. Stand here, stand there.’ It creates a feeling that if there is a boundary, you don’t cross it. You create boxes around people when we need people thinking outside the box.”

Flying-1

New changes to blogspot and all..
And me not even writing anything!!!

My sis described me in an interesting way the other day--
'You are the one who stays awake on airplanes and goes off to sleep in movie halls'

:-)

What do you reckon folks?

Friday, January 05, 2007

Day 1

PS-- I wrote this on the 2nd,havent been able to upload it till now .Servers seem slow?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I had a wonderful start to 2007.So did everyone ,I hope.

I went to sleep at 0230 hrs after catching up with Herr M and MP at a 'family restaurant ' at Chembur.A bottle of Sula White was duly opened at 2 minutes past midnight and the assemblage raised a toast to each other secretly hoping they would be with leggy lasses the next new year's eve.
Anyways,more of what was discussed later.But,it was a rock solid evening with two rock solid chaps and that means a lot.
So anyways,I was up at 0600-went for a 6 km run at 0630 which ,much to my surprise,finished in an hour.Then came home,had breakfast,chatted with the folks,went to work.Sent and recd messages and calls through the day.

And so on and so forth...yawn..feeling sleepy..more later....

But,tell you what--2007 promises to be as interesting as 2006 with the added fun of it being the latest model/version/iteration.

Dus Bahane.......

Monday, January 01, 2007

A resolution for 2007

No more procrastination from tomorow.

Why I am an Historian (Amateur of course)

This is from today's NYT.A piece which makes you go:I wish I had written this!

Well,anyways,this is from one of the finest Liberal practioners of his art:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/opinion/01schlesinger.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

January 1, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Folly’s Antidote
By ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER Jr.
MANY signs point to a growing historical consciousness among the American people. I trust that this is so. It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future. “The longer you look back,” said Winston Churchill, “the farther you can look forward.”

But all historians are prisoners of their own experience. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personalities and of our age. We cannot seize on ultimate and absolute truths. So the historian is committed to a doomed enterprise — the quest for an unattainable objectivity.
Conceptions of the past are far from stable. They are perennially revised by the urgencies of the present. When new urgencies arise in our own times and lives, the historian’s spotlight shifts, probing at last into the darkness, throwing into sharp relief things that were always there but that earlier historians had carelessly excised from the collective memory. New voices ring out of the historical dark and demand to be heard.

One has only to note how in the last half-century the movements for women’s rights and civil rights have reformulated and renewed American history. Thus the present incessantly reinvents the past. In this sense, all history, as Benedetto Croce said, is contemporary history. It is these permutations of consciousness that make history so endlessly fascinating an intellectual adventure. “The one duty we owe to history,” said Oscar Wilde, “is to rewrite it.”


We are the world’s dominant military power, and I believe a consciousness of history is a moral necessity for a nation possessed of overweening power. History verifies John F. Kennedy’s proposition, stated in the first year of his thousand days: “We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient — that we are only 6 percent of the world’s population; that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind; that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity; and therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”


History is the best antidote to delusions of omnipotence and omniscience. Self-knowledge is the indispensable prelude to self-control, for the nation as well as for the individual, and history should forever remind us of the limits of our passing perspectives. It should strengthen us to resist the pressure to convert momentary impulses into moral absolutes. It should lead us to acknowledge our profound and chastening frailty as human beings — to a recognition of the fact, so often and so sadly displayed, that the future outwits all our certitudes and that the possibilities of the future are more various than the human intellect is designed to conceive.
Sometimes, when I am particularly depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity — the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture. Three decades ago, we suffered defeat in an unwinnable war against tribalism, the most fanatic of political emotions, fighting against a country about which we knew nothing and in which we had no vital interests. Vietnam was hopeless enough, but to repeat the same arrogant folly 30 years later in Iraq is unforgivable. The Swedish statesman Axel Oxenstierna famously said, “Behold, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.”


A nation informed by a vivid understanding of the ironies of history is, I believe, best equipped to manage the tragic temptations of military power. Let us not bully our way through life, but let a growing sensitivity to history temper and civilize our use of power. In the meantime, let a thousand historical flowers bloom. History is never a closed book or a final verdict. It is forever in the making. Let historians never forsake the quest for knowledge in the interests of an ideology, a religion, a race, a nation.


The great strength of history in a free society is its capacity for self-correction. This is the endless excitement of historical writing — the search to reconstruct what went before, a quest illuminated by those ever-changing prisms that continually place old questions in a new light.
History is a doomed enterprise that we happily pursue because of the thrill of the hunt, because exploring the past is such fun, because of the intellectual challenges involved, because a nation needs to know its own history. Or so we historians insist. Because in the end, a nation’s history must be both the guide and the domain not so much of its historians as its citizens.


Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who has won Pulitzer Prizes for history and biography, is the author, most recently, of “War and the American Presidency.”

Happy 2007

Ok,

So my previous post was titled Happy New Year as well...which means I havent been here in quite some time.

Anyways,

A Happy New 2007 to you all.

Here we are now,entertain us.

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Happy New Year

Now bid me run,And I will strive with things impossible.


Another year begins.
Its been such a fantastic year,this last year.
New places visited,old ones refamiliarised.
New friends hopped on board.Some have gone on to new destinations,new lives.But they'll always be a part.

The mind is restless,constantly traisping through an enchanted wood of thoughts.
Time to wear the g-suit and begin the sortie....

Hail