Brooks and the Bank

Tom DeLay is hopefuly going to be in prison! Good! The Times editorial today featured David Brooks kind of justifying Tom DeLay... nay glorifying him for having made mistakes for the sake of the party! He talks about politics being a team game and everything TD did was for the team!!! Typical David Brooksian balderdash!!! Somebody remind him the "politics" happens to be part of public service... and the only team politicians need to be playing for is the public good. Goodness gracious me!!! Now thats an idea!!!! Oh, David Brooks!!!

Now it is interesting that his Times editorial page has a link to Andrew Sullivan. I don't quite know how to react to that.

Anyways, the other piece of news that I am cautiously optimistic about is that the World Bank and IMF have finalized plans to provide debt relief to a bunch of African countries. Why am I cautiously optimistic... because they have been doing this with debts or providing aid to poor developing countries for ages in turn for making fledgling markets that provide cheap labor and resources completely open for corporate exploitation. Lots of examples in Latin America. Lets see what happens. Meanwhile read this.

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Turning over a new leaf

Enough... all my posts are boring, way too serious, about 10 miles long and completely devoid of humor. Its not surprising, given my profession (or should I say vocation). This blog is getting more and more didactic and entirely ridiculous.

So I shall turn over a new leaf and try to be funny, very short, to the point, indulge in idle banter and not talk about serious matters!

Hmmm!!! Now I don't know what to say.

UU

I have had quite a nice weekend. Starting with a nice evening with my colleagues on Friday. I guzzled down quite a few beers followed by a couple of gin 'n tonics and after a few good arguments with one of my colleagues came back home feeling rather happy!!! Its been a while since I had a hearty argument and I was thrilled :)

Had breakfast at V's on Saturday morning and then spent the rest of the day catching up with some reading that I had been putting away for one reason or another. In the evening I went for a play. It was an original production the theme focusing on different variations of characters out of the wild west. I enjoyed it. At the theater I also met a rather nice girl, N', who has also recently moved here from somewhere in the east coast. It was nice talking with her. I hope to see her again soon. She looked like the kind of person who'd be fun knowing. Lets see.

This morning, I at last got myself to go to the local Unitarian Universalist service. Its been a long time (more than 2 years) since I have been wanting to join the congregation and for one reason or another I kept putting it off. The final push I guess came this summer when I was visiting Oak Park, IL studying Frank Loyd Wright's architecture, and I found myself in an Unitarian Church that he had designed. I liked the atmosphere and that was the final push. In any case, this morning I finally managed to land up at their door.

This calls for a brief explanation about my faiths/beliefs. I am for all intents and purposes an Agnostic who comes from the Hindu tradition. Having gone to a Catholic school (and everybody else in the family having done so too) the Bible was not foreign to us while growing up. At home we were never instructed in any religion per se, the emphasis having always been on humanistic principles of truth and honesty. Ramkrishna and Swami Vivekanada were always there as guiding lights: good practical humans who exemplified the humanistic principals. Vivekananda with his inspiring practical speeches, Ramkrishna with his record of having practiced every religion and Sister Nivedita balanced the equation with her devoted service. All in all you have the foundations for a faith that puts humanity ahead of everything else. It also compounded the understanding that all religions are worthy of respect, and each had something wonderful to offer.

At home we primarily celebrated Durga Pujo, Kali Pujo and Saraswati Pujo (staples of Bengali socio-cultural life) and the other staple for a lot of people, Christmas (Borodin!) and New Years. For Id, it was a custom to eat a good biryani from Shiraz or Amina (oooooh!), and of course how can you ever forget that the best confectionary in the city: Nahoum's in New Market (Inspite of all the new fangled stuff these days, I still swear there is nothing as good as a rum-ball from Nahoum's) is the oldest Jewish business in the country. So all in all, I grew up with a strong belief in goodness and also the understanding that religions were essentially about celebrations... which automatically translated to good food, new clothes and always lots of fun. In Bengal there is a saying, "Bangali'r baro mash-ey tero parbon" - translated: Bengalis have 13 festivals in 12 months. So we grew up enjoying each of these festivals: the pearls that intersperced the colored beads in the necklace of our lives.

After I left Calcutta, I have never been able to find that same joy again. Bengalis the world over get together for Pujo and try their best to recreate that wonderful feeling of joy, that so closely defines the community in Bengal. But the further we get in time the more ritualistic such practices become, disconnected from the context to which they belong, till they lose their meaning. In the last few years, I have often found myself disappointed or even opting out of such occasions because of ridiculous reasons like "I'm tired." The spiritual nourishment is missing.

In the meantime I also came out, and be it enough to say that in the midst of such ritualistic practices, where the focus is on holding on to that which is lost, growth is limited and I don't expect any acceptance either. In fact the strong ritualistic edge scares me at times.

So here I am, almost thirty, a single professional, gay man who is still in touch with his humanistic spiritual background but without any opening to express or practice. The UU kind of fills in the space. Here are the main reasons why I chose the UU:
* They are the only liberal religion in the country with principals that are deeply seated in humanistic and spiritual approaches to equality and social justice. Read their principals.
* They emphasize on the plurality of religion, which is in itself a step ahead of the polytheistic approach and miles ahead of the narrow confines of monotheism.
* Its a congregation that is affirming to the BGLT community.

I liked what I heard and saw this morning. It was very welcoming and I was glad to see a couple of Indian families there. I look forward to getting involved with the community.

After the service, I went shopping and came back with a carved pumkin lamp (that sits on my picture window now, grimacing at passers by), holiday lights that I like to decorate my living room with, a bunch of candles (that I can't light because I forgot to get matches!!) and a wreath of dried maple leaves and berries that I have put up on my front door.

a touch of e.e.c.

Katarina... now Rita. what can we do? is this how every hurricane season is going to be. only the Gods (the secular variety) know!

a few interesting epithets i recently came across

"sooner or later everybody has to meet the great silence alone"

the other was:

"the goal of life is not to make it to the grave gracefuly with the body intact and in great shape, but instead to just about make it and fall in sideways all tattered and worn out" ... of course there is the option of not making it to the grave at all but to instead burn out ...

i am looking forward to watching the movie 'proof.' (ebert's review is interesting, imdb review... rife with stereotypes: "mostly this is a story of a family and the deep ties between a father and his daughter.") anyway, my opinion is bound to be biased, having grown up amidst physicists and mathematicians i can easily think of a proof as "hip" (damn! the only courses i did well in college were in math and physics ... which weren't too many... resulting in college being pretty dismal!) and feel terribly out of place in a world where the general opinion is that math is uncool and the stupid media ("we are stupid and not only do we love it, we also wear it as a badge of honor") is busy dumbing down things out of shape! anyway, i am looking forward to watching this movie. i have heard the clip about the crazy mathematician commenting on how crazy mathematicians never admit that they are crazy in a context where he agrees he is crazy... one too many times now. the media is tagging this age old contradiction as the "genius" in a movie which deals with "genius" and "schizophrenia." yeah its an important contradiction... but still!!

anyway, i'm feeling too bitter to be particularly talkative or figure out why I am feeling so bitter. also, i have run out of beer and as i'm already in my pjs and flipflops, its not worth going out to get a drink. (proves, i'm not an alcoholic yet!) so i'm feeling ridiculously sober! anyway, tomorrow is friday and thats good. plan to go and get a few beers after work with some colleagues. meanwhile i'm drinking orange juice!!

actually something just struck me... i can either be bitter or figure out why i am feeling bitter... i cant possibly feel bitter and also figure out why i am feeling that way at the same time.

watered down, pop application of the uncertainity principal i guess... let me try to say it:

in every living moment there is joy, we can't always find it... the reason why we feel joy so seldom is because we can either look for joy in a moment or actually enjoy it having unknowingly hit the joy button.

hmm. i wonder if it'll also work if we substitute joy for misery... but then we seldom knowingly go looking for misery ... but then if we could substitute with misery or any other emotion, then it maybe that we hit joy, misery, bitterness and what-have-you with roughly the same frequency... normally distributed over a life time. the more active quest for smething (like joy) the more we miss it and lesse active the quest for something (like misery) the more we dread it.

how horrid, one might as well sit back and let life pass by and have as rich an experience... arguably a richer one because the only thing that is self-inflicted is disappointment - directly proportional to how hard you look for a particular emotion.

of course you could argue that even disappointment is but one in the range of all emotions and is also similarly normally distributed over a life time... in which case the relationship between quest and disappointment is wrong... or on the other hand, if the relationship between quest and disappointment holds and it is an exception and not really an emotion, then one could game the system by querying each moment actively for misery and thus noticing joy more often ... not only because they are not looking for joy, but also because the disappointment from not being miserable is really not such a bad feeling ...

i'm getting a headache. good night!

Katarina and global warming!

I have ranted about how global warming has a serious role to play in some of the recent natural disasters (all the way from Katarina to the very severe monsoons in the sub-continent) and if you look at how much more severe and frequent weather events are becoming the world over, and link that witht the predictions of global warming (gw), clearly it would not be fair to meet out the treatment that was given to Trittin, the German environmental minister for his statements. I am very glad that he was brave enough to make his point and that the New Yorker has backed him up.

I don't even see how the statements are insensitive. He did not blame the poor people who are suffering and are indeed the people who are paying for years of bad energy policies and an irresponsible approach to the Kyoto protocol. He is simply blaming an administration that has even acknowledged its incompetence in dealing with Katarina and has an ambiguous and contradictory stance on global warming (all the way fron "don't believe in gw" (no puns here!) to the Kyoto protocol being "unsuitable")... and rightly so.

Environmentalists have been screaming themselves hoarse for a while and have gotten a reputation for being doomsday soothsayers. Now when doomsday strikes and world weather patterns are increasingly going the way the predictions of global warming are, they are made to look "insensitive" if they merely point out that they had warned before. But then all those warnings only showed world maps with Bangladesh drowned... not New Orleans!!!

You might also be interested in reading this article about the ruining of the wetlands in Mississippi. Horrid!