mounds of shit, exit polls, staff 2001

if the world is a freak show and we all are patrons, americans and those living here have the front seat. here is a chronicle of what american newspapers carried today morning

1. there is a 2000 ton pile of cowdung that is smoldering somewhere in the great middle of this country. its been smoking for a month or two and lots of fire stations have given up trying to tame this beast (or beast poop if you might). how does so much get in 1 place? there are these large feeding farms where cattlemen send their animals to fatten before you know what. so each of these farms produces 54 tons of shit each day. do the math. these guys need gobar gas plants big time.

2. here's a witty line carried by some offbeat newspaper. "Exit polls in Iraq are most likely to be invalid because the voters will be running too fast"

3. Cheney. Ya the one with a lesbian daughter. He attended the Auschwitz-Birkenau liberation anniversary. He managed to get controversial even there. He turned up dressed in something even a grad student wont wear on a date. He wears a parka (with his name embroidered on it of course) , hiking boots and a monkey cap with Staff 2001 printed on it. Everyone else was in formal suits and boots. I dont blame the bastard (-:

And finally, go to ifilm.com. The top rated video now is a clip from inaugration day Fox News. Some newscaster flips when here guest questions the correctness of having a lavish inaugration.

NY times article by William Safire

William Safire is one of the most celebrated op-ed columnist from New York Times. He wrote his last op-ed column(s) today. He will still continue writing his other column on language. I personally couldnt agree with most of his columns, but found his writing style tough to ignore. Anyways i am reproducing one article from January 11 of this year. According to NY Times, it drew more response than any other article ever written by a nytimes columnist. In case this is a copyright violation.......go f@&* yourself.

In the aftermath of a cataclysm, with pictures of parents sobbing over dead infants driven into human consciousness around the globe, faith-shaking questions arise: Where was God? What did these people do to deserve such suffering?

After a similar natural disaster wiped out tens of thousands of lives in Lisbon, Portugal, in the 18th century, the philosopher Voltaire wrote "Candide," savagely satirizing optimists who still found comfort and hope in God.

After last month's Indian Ocean tsunami, the same anguished questioning is in the minds of millions of religious believers. Turn to the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. It was written by a poet-priest some 2,500 years ago during what must have been a crisis of faith.

The covenant with Abraham - worship the one God, and his people would be protected - didn't seem to be working. The good died young, the wicked prospered; where was the promised justice?

The first point the Book of Job made was that suffering is not evidence of sin. When Job's friends said he must have done something awful to deserve such misery, the reader knows that is false.

Job's suffering was a test of his faith: Even as he grew angry with God for being unjust, he never abandoned his belief.

And did this righteous Gentile get furious: "Damn the day I was born!" Forget the so-called patience of Job; that legend is blown away by the shockingly irreverent biblical narrative.

Job's famous expression of meek acceptance in the 1611 King James Version - "though he slay me, yet will I trust in him" - was a blatant misreading by nervous translators.

Modern scholarship offers a much different translation: "He may slay me, I'll not quaver."

The point of Job's gutsy defiance of God's injustice - right there in the Bible - is that it is not blasphemous to challenge the highest authority when it inflicts a moral wrong. (I titled a book on this "The First Dissident.") Indeed, Job's demand that his unseen adversary show up at a trial with a written indictment gets an unexpected reaction: In a thunderous theophany, God appears before the startled man with the longest and most beautifully poetic speech attributed directly to him in Scripture.

Frankly, God's voice "out of the whirlwind" carries a message not all that satisfying to those wondering about moral mismanagement. Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, "I read the Book of Job last night - I don't think God comes well out of it."

The powerful voice demands of puny Man: "Where were you when I laid the Earth's foundations?" Summoning an image of the mythic sea-monster symbolizing Chaos, God asks, "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?"

The poet-priest's point, I think, is that God is occupied bringing light to darkness and imposing physical order on chaos, and he leaves his human creations free to work out moral justice on their own.

Job's moral outrage caused God to appear, thereby demonstrating that the sufferer who believes is never alone. Job abruptly stops complaining, and - in a prosaic happy ending that strikes me as tacked on by other sages so as to get the troublesome book accepted in the Hebrew canon - he is rewarded. (Christianity promises to rectify earthly injustice in an afterlife.)

Job's lessons for today:

(1) Victims of this cataclysm in no way "deserved" a fate inflicted by the Leviathanic force of nature.

(2) Questioning God's inscrutable ways has its exemplar in the Bible and need not undermine faith.

(3) Humanity's obligation to ameliorate injustice on Earth is being expressed in a surge of generosity that refutes Voltaire's cynicism.

india chronicles

spent the best part of the last 3 weeks at home in india. short but nice trip. i promised myself a few things. achieved them
1. kept away from the pc and internet for a whole week and better part of the other two.
2. shied away from arguing with my parents who think me visiting temples is the most important thing to save my soul (-: visited as many as 7 to 8 temples. liked most of them. temples in the south are much more beautiful and larger than the ones in maharashtra.
3. jogged in the morning quite a few times. found some nice spots around my parents home in chennai. RA puram area. did not go to the boat club area. maybe next time.
4. bought a few books from there. Edgar Poe and Terry Pratchet. Terry Pratchet is Douglas Adam reborn. some really witty jokes.

i reached 4 days after the tsunami struck. was apprehensive of what things looked like on the ground. the city of chennai hadnt been terribly struck. the destruction along the ECR (east coast road) which links chennai with cuddalore and beyond is more easily visible. by the time i reached, marina beach in chennai had been cleared, the sand almost relaid. one could see people on the beach. though not as many as before the disaster struck.

If you are like me, this event just reminded me of the inconsequence of humanity and also of its continued vanity. false pride in itself and in its beliefs. the only thing most grown men and women could do was to question how religion and our idea of god could have failed. or state how they have not failed and how the bible (replace with gita koran torah or whatever you fancy) provide answers to why suffering exists. i personally think that rationalizing the destruction caused by any disaster is the worst disservice that we can do to those departed. the best we can do is to listen to the earth and the waves. so that the next time we run and live to run another day.

long time no post. i am in india right now. chennai to be precise. enjoying the southern sun. did some traveling down south in Tamil Nadu. Saw some really awesome temples including some around Trichy. Liked the one at Srirangam the best. Beautiful architecture and a really cool looking idol. The idol depicts Vishnu resting. Pretty similar to the Buddhas in Thailand.
dont feel like blogging much. if you like metal, check out today's article in newyork times about rammstein. nice article about what i think to be europe's nuttiest and hardest band. part of what is called the "new german hardness" (-: the german equivalent of the "new wave of british heavy metal". must accept the german version is much better sounding. if you are a metalhead that is.