VINDICA

An author looks back at his emotions when reading the Alexandria Quartet for the first time in the 60s and how those opinions have changed. (At the time) I barely noticed that half the characters were novelists or artistic illusionists of some kind, that their preoccupations toggled between the pleasures of the senses and the meaning of life, and that they never paused to earn a living, change a diaper, or wait for the bus.

An extremely interesting article that seeks to provide an evolutionary explanation for everything from preference for Big Breasts and presence of Suicide Bombers.

In the recent elections in the North East, one election official dejectedly told the media how the politicians undermine the people's faith in democracy for 5 years and the Election Commission does its best to restore it, if only for the one day on which polling happens. This detailed and interesting article by Mr. Gopalaswami, Chief Election Commissioner of India about the recent election in UP is inspiring in that it restored my faith in the ability of our Government organisations to do their job exceptionally well. Since bogus voting can be largely prevented only if the identity of the voters is correctly established, a massive attempt was made to issue Electoral Photo Identity Cards (EPIC). Between December 2006 and the second week of April, 2007, a total of 2.69 crore EPICs were issued covering 22% of the electorate throughout the state, raising the coverage to an average of 80% in the state. As many as 85% voters who turned up to vote produced the EPIC as identity while the...

A funny and relaxed Christopher Hitchens talks about his new book "God Is Not Great" and how it differs from other books on Atheism that have come out in recent months. What’s your favorite Bible story? “Casting the first stone” is a lovely story, even though we’ve found out how much it wasn’t in the Bible to begin with. And the first of the miracles. Jesus changes water into wine. You can’t object to that. If the Jews had not made the crucial mistake of rejecting Hellenism and philosophy and submitting themselves, or being reconquered, by the Maccabean ultra-Orthodox, everything would have been better and we’d never have had to endure Christianity and Islam.

Excerpts from what promises to be a brilliant book by Ramachandran Guha. The great 19th-century poet Ghalib thought that God was indeed on the side of India. All around him there was conflict and privation, but doomsday had not yet come. "Why does not the Last Trumpet sound?", asked Ghalib of a sage in the holy city of Benares. "Who holds the reins of the Final Catastrophe?" he continued. This was the answer he got: The hoary old man of lucent ken Pointed towards Kashi and gently smiled. 'The Architect,' he said, 'is fond of this edifice Because of which there is colour in life; He Would not like it to perish and fall.'

Narayana Murthy has landed in the soup for saying at a Infosys funtion that singing the National Anthem would "embarass employees who were of foreign origin". Kannada Chaluvali Vatal Paksha MLA Vatal Nagaraj even went on to termed Mr Murthy a 'traitor' during a discussion on the issue in Karnataka Assembly on Tuesday. Raising the issue, Kannada Chaluvali leader Vatal Nagaraj demanded that an inquiry be held and Murthy "arrested" for "insulting" the National Anthem. "Murthy is anti-Kannada and anti-national," he alleged. Madhuswamy (JDU) said "nothing can be more insulting" than what Murthy had said and done and asked the Government to withdraw the facilities granted to Infosys. "Infosys has grown because of Bangalore," he said. So, firstly, how do we measure patriotism? If it means contribution to the well being of India and its citizens, then obviously Mr. Nagaraj is in solid ground and leagues ahead Murthy. After a...

The movie started with a voice-over and I took that to be a bad sign. Voice overs are usually signs lazy storytelling, tying up disjointed plot elements with narration? As it turned out, there was no story telling at all. This movie is nothing more than a collection of pretty pictures. When someone, someday tells the story of how an over dependence on technology killed the soul of movies, 300 would be used as the case study.

Here is a collection of three articles, that have no connection with each other other than having been written on the same day. Gold Till the early 1970's, the US Dollar was backed by Gold. That is, the Government guaranteed that they would give you a certain amount of Gold in exchange for your dollar bill any time you asked for it. If the Government wanted to print money, they had to buy and store more gold. An echo of this much loved system survives in the use of the phrase "Gold Standard", for that was exactly what it was called. Nixon broke the US dollar from the Gold Standard, in order to be able to print more money more quickly to finance an expanding war and shrinking economy. Printing more money neither won the war, nor did it fix the economy. However, it did lay down the template for future abuse of governmental power. Harry D. Schultz, a popular investment consultant has this to say about Gold. ...but in my view we should fight for a pure gold standard, th...

A cutting and insightful essay on the current conflict in Iraq that looks at it from the point of view of a Sunni-Shia fight. The Shia, too, may have to come to a time of reckoning. Their old tormentor was sent to the gallows, and a kinsman of theirs did the deed with the seal of the state. From the poor Shia slums of Baghdad, young avengers answered the Sunni campaign of terror with brutal terror of their own. The old notion--once dear to the Sunnis, and to the Shia a nagging source of fear and shame--that the Sunnis of Iraq were a martial race while the Shia were marked for lamentations and political quiescence has been broken for good.

I have felt that one of the reasons organized religions have their vast appeal is because they present a monopolistic vision of morality that is sadly emaciated in secular thought. I have always thought why there is no scientific research on the underpinning of morality? While there are professional Ethicists, it seemed like there was not much scientific funding for their activities. After all, Ethics is taught as a Philosophical, not as a Scientific subject in schools. However, new research in Neuro science and consiousness may finally be changing that. It can finally fight back against "out of body" and "near death" experiences that are held as "proof" of an afterlife. And when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence. Attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks, and near death experien...

A very long and detailed article by Jeff Sharlet includes many first hand references. The old theories have failed. The new Christ, fifty years ago no more than a corollary to American power, twenty-five years ago at its vanguard, is now at the very center. His followers are not anxiously awaiting his return at the Rapture; he’s here right now. They’re not envious of the middle class; they are the middle class. They’re not looking for a hero to lead them; they’re building biblical households, every man endowed with “headship” over his own family. They don’t silence sex; they promise sacred sex to those who couple properly—orgasms more intense for young Christians who wait than those experienced by secular lovers.

A hilarious piece that bemoans the boringness of sex scandals among American political class compared to those of their cousins in London. From Bill Clinton seeking body warmth in Lewinsky's pillowy embrace to Foley batting his eyelashes online, ... the high-profile Washington sex scandal is marked by desperate lunging, not lusty abandon. The piece ends with a pillorying of the American prudishness: It's just that a dreadful piety has taken hold in American life, predicated on the notion that no one misbehaves out of choice or inclination or a simple warm itch, but because they were driven to it by drink, drugs, or childhood dysfunction and finally thanks those Fundamentalist preachers who are keeping American hypocrisy alive! Well, at least we can go to bed happy and content in the knowledge that somewhere out there are Fundamentalist preachers up to no filthy good. They, bless them, are keeping the sacred flame of American hypocrisy brightly lit.

Not much of a surprise that the RSS is against discrimination against the Dalits. The indiscriminate vilification of the organization smooths over the subtle point that the RSS believes in Hindus as a unitary community. Because of this reason, it has consistently opposed such things as the Aryan invasion theory, untouchability and other forms of brutality that the Dalits are subjected to. The RSS has castigated what it repeatedly calls the “so-called uppers castes” for their discriminatory ways saying they are in fact of the “lowest levels” for doing so. It is heartening that they did not feel any compulsion to mince words.

An intriguing article about the collapse of Enron. The commonly held perception is that Enron executives hid information about the financial state of the company. However, it is argued here is that everything that was needed to correctly diagnose the state of the corporation was in public documents revealed by the company. Analysts were unable to get to the truth because there was just too much documentation out there. all Enron proves is that in an age of increasing financial complexity the “disclosure paradigm”—the idea that the more a company tells us about its business, the better off we are—has become an anachronism. So what is the answer? The article looks back at World War II and at individuals who analyzed Nazi propaganda as a way of figuring out what the Nazi leadership was really thinking. It argues that there is a dispenser and a consumer for information. Both have to be sufficiently sophisticated in order for the information exchange to be successful. as Enron’s busin...

An insightful and sometime exhaustive look at dissidence in Iran. Many parallels are drawn with the Czech dissident movement and India's own independence movement. The anti-Shah revolution was not hijacked by the clerics, he said, just as the Bolshevik revolution was not stolen by Stalin, as Trotsky had claimed. “We began revolution, in order to create a paradise, but we created hell.” An unjust regime can be changed only by civil disobedience, nonviolently, he holds. Invasion cannot export or impose democracy either. The basic thrust of the article is the claim that the fight in this world is not between civilizations, but between open secular societies and religious worlds. This fight happens, according to the author, in all societies including the western ones.

Welcome to the Ninth : The young Beethoven burst into his dad's workplace and demanded half the pay to feed his siblings. Daddy was welcome to drink away the rest. He did not know then, but this was to be the story of his life. Triumph over the disadvantages of life, through determination and a sheer force of personality. A mother who died when he was young. A drunk father. An upbringing in provincial Bonn [10], away from the nerve center that was Vienna. And deafness. Creeping, terrifying, isolating, lonely deafness. It is said that music moves the soul. Sometimes, it also grabs it by both hands, shakes it up like a rag doll and take it for a wild ride. [1] Beethoven's Ninth symphony is officially called The Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125. It is also sometimes referred to as "Choral", because of its use of the human voice on par with instruments in the fourth movement [2]. However, it is most often referred to simply as "The Ninth". Compose...

The tenuous peace in Sri Lanka that has held for the last few years has broken down and a full fledged civil war is again underway. India is once again under pressure from all sides to come out of its shell and put behind its hands off policy. While this may or may not happen, the question does arise as to what India's policy should be in case it does decide to play a more active role in Sri Lanka. It is my opinion that India's policy should be work towards a single, consistent goal - that of preventing the emergence of an independent Tamil state on the island, or popular support thereof for a similar idea. The emergence of such a homeland will lead to strategic irritants for India in the long term. In consonance with such a goal, it makes complete sense for India to call for and actively support the destruction of the LTTE. Prabakaran has made it clear by his actions in the recent past that nothing but a completely independent homeland with him as the permanent dictator wou...

Lifelong conservative John Derbyshire talks about this loss of faith, and the lessons of his life, as seen 61 years into it.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. - Former New York Senator Danial Patrick Moynihan

There is a movie comming soon to a theater near you named 300. For those who liked Lord of The Rings, Sin City, V for Vendetta and other movies with innovative screen imagery, this movie is going to be the golden grail. From what I have seen, it is going to be breathtaking. There is a commemorative stone in Thermopylae in Greece that reads "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie". The event it commemorates is the battle of Thermopylae where a mere 300 Greek soldiers fighting under Leonidas (who was one of the Spartan Kings. Sparta, strangely and almost uniquely in history was a kindom that had two Kings). Most western historians have latched on to this battle as the defining moment in the history of western civilization, when Greece and western civilization itself stood on the precipice, facing a massive Persian army under Xerxes. What glory of glories, it is saved by the individual valour of 300 men fighting for freedom and...