Ripples on the brain

I just happened to visit this blog : http://www.adityamohan.com/. The father of the child is a contributor to the Corporate blog of Infosys. The baby, 4.5 months old, lost its life in a Jet Airways flight from Toronto to Delhi. I cannot think of what the parents will be going through. Is there a way legally, through consumer court or something, to force Jet Airways answer his questions and actually identify the reason behind this mishap? I don’t know if this incident was covered well in the media.

During these international flights, especially the India-US ones, my heart really goes out for the infants, their parents and the aged people who go through the ordeal. More terrible would be to see mothers travelling alone with infants, or worse, with an infant and another kid. In my opinion, if a husband cannot accompany his wife and kids in an international travel, he should have either not gone abroad or not married.

If the above incident affected you, you can sign the online petition here. I’m not sure how it will help though.

Pakistan and Musharraf

While the news channels tries to make some news out of Musharraf’s resignation, I was disappointed that none of the so called news analysis programmes pointed out that this is dejavu if you turn the pages of even the recent history of Pakistan. A ruler - democratically elected, or otherwise - is always hailed by the citizens when he ascends the throne and (s)he almost always goes out of favour within a few years and is cursed unanimously before (s)he is ejected from the throne. Irrespective of the nature of his wrong doing, more often than not, he is never tried without prejudice and (s)he always has a safe passage either out of the country or out of the world. The new ruler invariably comes with a lot of promise, irrespective of his past records, and cycle just repeats. As far as their stance towards India is concerned, the ruler travels the journey from being almost hawkish when he takes over to being a friend when he steps down (or is thrown out). I don’t expect the current coalition, born out of public sympathy to last very long.

The situation in Pakistan is such that, because of the precedent set, every General will now fancy his chances as the leader of the country. It is so amazing that “leaders” just need to spend some time outside the country to absolve themselves of any wrongdoing and to destroy their past records from the public memory. While the celebrations of Musharraf’s ouster are shown in media, it will also be prudent to show how he was welcomed 9 years ago, even though it was coup.

Times of India Page 3

Seriously, what is it with the page 3 of Chennai Times - a supplement to the Times of India Chennai edition. Everyday it has the same set of photos of “party animals” cuddling and posing in groups almost always with the same attire. Though I agree that the other pages are equally useless, this page just disgusts me. What a waste of newsprint!

A couple of years ago, I used to routinely attend Lecture sessions on Carnatic music. Musicians and musicologists, while explaining the raaga concept, used to demonstrate the right and wrong ways of singing a raaga. After attempting to sing the raaga the wrong way (for e.g. just touching the swara notes and not bringing out the raaga bhavam or not singing the traditional swara phrases a raaga is famous for), they would claim (sometimes genuinely) that it was difficult for them to sing them in the wrong way even if they tried. The crowd will then laugh and applaud.

I was reminded of those incidents when I read this article of Hasan Suroor in the Hindu today. Writing about an article of a British academic (which is the second piece in that link) where he wants pundits to agree on a set of variant spellings, Hasan Suroor provides some examples which are funny:

if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Ken Smith of Buckinghamshire New University wants pundits to agree on a set of “variant spellings” of some of the more commonly misspelt words such as “their” for “their,” “argument” for “argument,” “twelth” for “twelfth,”, “truly” for truly and — horror of horrors — “speech” for speech!

I read and re-read this sentence umpteen times, but couldn’t differentiate between the wrong spellings and correct spellings for all the example words, except “twelfth”. Is it the case of Hasan Suroor or the British academic unable to spell the words the wrong way even if they tried to like our musicologists in the first example?

I think the reason for the wrong wrong spellings is because the reporter typed his article in MS Word or some such editor that automatically corrected his wrong spellings without alerting him. Or some editor diligently ran the article through a spell check utility and corrected his wrong spellings . That reminds me (again) of a proposal we did for the US retail chain Lowe’s. MS Powerpoint automatically “corrected” all Lowe’s into Lower without alerting the author. Normally spelling mistakes and grammatical errors are not very uncommon in these presentations, but this was one in which we even got the client name wrong! Thanks to Microsoft products’ assumption that they are smarter than the user.

Coming to think of it, MS editors may be a major culprit for people fogetting (or not learning) their spellings. They don’t even allow them to realize they are entering the wrong spelling.

You need to just watch the first few minutes of the video to understand why Santhanam is not doing well in films. There’s no timing in his dialogue delivery. He seems to be very keen on speaking his lines without caring what the other person is doing.