On Yogis and Yoginis

The art of giving up stuff

Nice to see that the spirit of Hiranyakashyap (except for the world domination part) lives on.

On a side note, it always pains me to see the yogic lifestyle equated with a retreat to the Himalayas in nothing but loin cloth. Self abnegation is only half the story (the glamorous half). As a famous modern day yogi said - "Live like a hermit, work like a horse".

Music and Technology

... and Psychological Warfare (gimme a break, fool)

Here's an article I found on a music board. Funny stories, arcane facts and quotable quotes strung together with non sequiturs - pretty much sums up opinion pieces nowadays, I think. One more ingredient that makes this my favorite type of article - wild theories (his views on Schoenberg and ethnic music are rib-tickling among other things). But men, I've discovered what I really want to be in life, men - a social engineer.

Mother of God !

The Pics

The Story

Here's a funny story. Up in the north side of Chicago, on a Kennedy Expressway underpass, there happens to be a water stain that's supposed to look like Virgin Mary (see the pics). This has become a major place of pilgrimage for the local faithful (I think there even was a news story on this on national TV). Of course, it was only a matter of time before this became a prime target for graffiteers ("Satan Loves") - one of them defaced the water stain. I am glad he's been arrested and recommend immediate execution without trial.

Quantity Over Quality

Dosa Plaza

One way to get your point across in this post-modern world is to go for quantity over quality. Raymond Queneau brilliantly showcased the predominance of style over content by repeating the same banal story in 99 different styles in Exercises in Style.

Now, this Dosa-Palooza has launched a similar assault to bring the dosa back onto every desi's breakfast table. Apart from the usual plain dosa, masala dosa, onion dosa and rava dosa, this plaza offers 100 other varieties of dosas (a total of 104!). However, unlike other post-modern movements, the difference, as one might surely hope, is that the variety is in the content and not the style.

Down with Vernacular Chauvinism

Inglish As She's Spoke

I tend to agree with most of what Gurcharan Das says. He is someone who fulfils an important role: keen critic of a society in transition, neither sanguine nor overly anxious about progress, never carried away by his own rhetoric. To think that to the West, it is the abominable Arundhati Roy who represents "Indian Intellectual"...