Digging for Meaning

Earth is annoyed with its children. She wants to take a break. Go travel to some other solar system for a change. Perhaps check out that Andromeda Galaxy. She has heard great things about it for ages. She never gets to travel anywhere. What with all the suckling fumbling good-for-nothing children of hers. Arrogant and up-to-no good. She sighs. She shudders. She melts. She thunders. No matter how hard she tries, nothing seems to get across to her children. She thinks, its a phase. The children will grow out of their teenage angst. The shut doors of perception will open some day. hopefully. For now, it is getting too much to handle for her. She is taking a break. Mars agrees to babysit. People wake up to find they can't breath on mars. the end.

Marketer's assault on our Language = MAOL What do you do to wash your behind in the washroom? Do you trust your hands to do the job with water, or do you use paper? One day in college, a Chinese professor talked about this pertinent question when talking about cultural differences. She talked about how people see tissue paper as an essential solution, while there is an ecologically better solution 'at hand!'. The students were surprised with her point of view. Most of the students hailing from Indian metros, saw the tissue as a better alternative, a logical next step to the 'primitive' practice of washing with hands. That was one of the easy ways to differentiate oneself from the lower classes. The upper class is the one that has access to western lifestyle, which in Indian imagination is a 'step up', a logical next step . But this was different. This was a Chinese lifestyle too. (which is fairly absent from Indian imagination and hence exotic). ...

Its Holi time. :) The best time (for some) to be in India. It is a global party to prepare ourselves of the terrible weather that will soon turn us into homebodies - scared of stepping out in the day time 45 degree dust bowls. One last day of being out and enjoying it - beat the heat with style. Social media, the zeitgeist barometer, though indicates a different Holi to me this year. On the one hand, there are people talking about the HoliCow party - stripping holi to its most basic ritual, and turning it into a modern dance banality. And on the other, there's concerned city folks who are advocating abstention from the whole thing - save water/ "Think of the poor" - droughts across India/ natural herbal colors as replacement for the more energetic color+water combination. (Should we blame this on ACs? I have a hypothesis - Holi will be played more vigorously in towns where there is low penetration of Air-Condition machines. There is a correlation between 'for...