RIP, Arthur C Clarke

The self-proclaimedly second-greatest science writer and greatest science-fiction writer of his time is dead. Several obits on the net, of which the NYT's is one of the longest and best.

The language barrier

From BBC:

A man who planned to walk from Bristol to India without any money has quit, after getting as far as Calais, France.

... because he could not speak French, people thought he was free-loading or an asylum seeker.

He now plans to walk around the coast of Britain instead, learning French as he goes, so he can try again next year.

Perhaps someone should warn him that he will also need to learn German, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, Gujarati...?

100% sounds better than 16%, doesn't it?

"Assured 100% money back!" screamed the e-mail I got, claiming that if I shop at IndiaPlaza.in for any amount, I would receive a voucher for the same amount. So I read the fine print.

The fine print is that the voucher is only redeemable against a purchase at least five times its value.

So suppose I spend Rs X. I get a voucher for Rs X, but can redeem it only on a purchase of Rs 5X. So I spend a total of 6X, and get X back: a discount of about 16%. (And that's in the best case that I find something worth buying that costs precisely 5X.)

Wonderful what these marketing minds can do with mundane things like a 16% discount.

Incredible India

Three links from Tehelka:

The incarceration of Binayak Sen, a doctor with Gandhian ideals who's worked for the poor all his life. (More links at km's.)

The cleanliness of Guruvayur temple. We may debate their habit of doing purifying rituals when non-Hindus enter, but the visitors -- Hindus or not -- had better disinfect themselves thoroughly after they leave.

Why is Taslima Nasreen a prisoner? (Others have been asking, too.)

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And, via Abi, the latest in a long list of plagiarism scandals in Indian academia. Apparently the university is sufficiently concerned to slap the professor concerned severely on the wrist. But they won't fire him (they say they can't).

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Why am I supposed to be proud to be Indian? Maybe because we have a free press. For now. When it's not self-censoring.

I picked a winner

When I was not yet a teenager and my parents didn't know enough about such things to discourage me, they allowed me to pick up a tape (pirated, like most music in India at the time) titled "GRAMY 1985 TOP OF THE POPS", containing songs by "Lineol Richie", "Bruce Springstee" and I forget who else. Between then and now, my interaction with Grammy-winning music has been minimal.

So it was something of a surprise to find that a CD I purchased last year has just been awarded "Album of the year" at the Grammys. The only other time a CD that I owned was so honoured, it was Bob Dylan's "Time out of mind" in 1998. This time it was Herbie Hancock's tribute to Joni Mitchell, "River: The Joni Letters".

On this occasion, as with Dylan, one can't help thinking that the award was really meant to compensate for decades of ignoring one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Dylan's first Grammy, in any category, was not for any of the masterpieces on "Blonde on Blonde" or "Blood on the Tracks" or "Highway 61 revisited", but for the shabby evangelical song "Gotta serve somebody" in 1979. Joni fared a bit better, with a smattering of Grammies through the years, but much of her best work missed out. (Her latest Grammy, coincidentally, was this year, for -- of all things -- the "best pop instrumental".)

Be that as it may, Herbie Hancock's tribute to her is superb, and grows on repeated listening. Whether it deserved a Grammy may be debatable -- I don't see how he can be compared with Kanye West or Amy Winehouse -- but it's worth a listen and the Grammy will cause more people to listen to it.

The musicians include Hancock himself, Wayne Shorter and Dave Holland; the guest singers include Joni herself, fellow Canadian poet-singer Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones, Corinne Bailey Rae, Tina Turner, Luciana Souza. There are four instrumentals -- Joni's "Both Sides Now" and "Sweet Bird", Duke Ellington's "Solitude" and Shorter's "Nefertiti" (the latter two are the only non-Joni pieces on the album). The album begins with the much-Grammy-decorated Norah Jones (Court and Spark) and Tina Turner (Edith and the Kingpin), and officially ends with Cohen, who -- unlike Dylan and Joni -- has never won a Grammy. The Amazon edition of the CD, which I have, has two bonus tracks: an instrumental "A case of you" and Sonya Kitchell's performance of "All I want".

All of it is very, very good. The vocalists for the most part follow Joni's original recordings rather faithfully, while the jazz accompaniment is perfect for Joni's tunes (as we already know from her own recordings). Corinne Bailey Rae's "River" is outstanding. Tina Turner's "Edith" is not terribly jazzy, but very enjoyable. The Burundi drums of Joni's "The Jungle Line" are substituted here by Leonard Cohen's low spoken rumble of words (he seems to have given up singing while recording 2004's "Dear Heather"), while Herbie solos below him. And the Hancock/Shorter take on "Both Sides Now" is one of the best jazz recordings I've ever heard -- every line they play hints at and evokes the song, without ever quite stating the theme outright. (The bonus "A case of you" is more a straight cover of Joni, with Herbie doing both the melody and a fair imitation of Joni's original dulcimer accompaniment).

Grammy or not, go get it.

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In other Grammy news: Obama beats Clinton (Bill, that is). And a mathematician wins.

On the bright side

"What is wrong with George Bush? That would take a really long time. Let's talk about what is right with him, it is a much shorter answer.

"He is a very good physical specimen. He shows that a man his age can stay in physical condition."

-- Neil Young (who also says that music can no longer change the world)

PS - Stephen Colbert interviewing Neil Young during the CSNY freedom tour: part 1

and part 2

Hold on, that's not on

Andrew Symonds on January 7:

"This is what happened before our confrontation," Symonds said in the Herald Sun. "Brett Lee had just sent down a delivery and Harbhajan took off down the wicket. When he was returning to his crease, he decided to hit Brett on the backside. I have no idea why he did it. I was standing nearby and when I saw what happened, I thought, 'Hold on, that's not on'. I'm a firm believer in sticking up for your team-mate..."

From Justice Hansen's judgment on January 29:

Anyone observing this incident would take it to be a clear acknowledgement of "well bowled". However Mr Symonds took objection to this...

Mr Symonds appears to be saying that he finds it unacceptable that an opponent makes a gesture that recognises the skill of one of his own team mates. In the transcript he stated:

"MR MANOHAR: You had any objection to that patting on the back?

MR SYMONDS: Did I have an objection to it -- my objection was that a test match is no place to be friendly with an opposition player, is my objection."

If that is his view I hope it is not one shared by all international cricketers. It would be a sad day for cricket if it is.

Crash?

The news is full of people holding their heads in despair as they stand outside the Bombay Stock Exchange gazing at the plummetting Sensex; of Rs 18 lakh crore being wiped out in two days; of Gujaratis going bankrupt; of angry investors demanding the Finance Minister's resignation.

All because the markets all over the world reacted to jitters about the health of the US economy, and Indian investors followed suit. The huge selloff that resulted sent the sensex down to levels it hadn't seen since, well, four months ago. If you invested before September 2007, and have a reasonably diversified portfolio, you're probably ahead of the game.

Or suppose you did lose some money. Suppose you invested when the market peaked, earlier in January, and lost about 20% of your investment. How long would it take before you got it back? Nobody can predict, but we can look at the past. If your portfolio performed similarly to the Sensex, and you had invested at the peak in May 2007 and rapidly lost about 25%, you'd have gained it back by about October 2007; and today your investments would have appreciated another 40% or so, after the crash. If you had invested at an earlier peak, in January 2004, you'd have lost about 20% when the UPA took office in May 2004; you'd have gained it back by November 2004, and gained about 200% in a little over 3 years since then (again, after the present "meltdown").

So even if you put your life savings in a reasonably diversified portfolio, you probably haven't lost more than about 20%, and can reasonably hope to gain it back in months. Yet rediff reports that many "small investors" (not day traders) have "gone bankrupt". Who are these people and how did they manage to go bankrupt? The article quotes an investor who bought Reliance Petroleum at Rs 270 and is lamenting the sight of people selling it at Rs 130. (It's silly to put all your eggs in one basket, but this particular basket is likely to be around for the long term.) But why would he want to sell, and even if he wants to and gets half the price he paid, why does that make him bankrupt? I can only imagine one scenario: he (and the other small investors) borrowed heavily to invest in the stock market, at exorbitant interest rates that they hoped the Sensex would outstrip, and now their creditors are calling.

But of course the past doesn't predict the future. How do we know the markets will recover? I think there are two points of view: if you think the fundamentals of the Indian economy are sound and growth will continue regardless of what happens in other countries, and most importantly if you believe that stock valuations today reflect the actual market worth of companies, you should stay invested. If you think the US economy will imminently go down the toilet and take the rest of the world with it, or if you think Indian stocks are overvalued, you should dump your stock now and invest in safer vehicles. But in that case why did you wait for the crash? People have been talking about the shaky US economy for a year or more, about overvalued Indian stocks for even longer, and the US subprime crisis hit many months ago. (Of course, if you had dumped the day the subprime crisis hit, you'd regret not having stayed invested until today.)

One last thing. Suppose you really believe that there are serious concerns about the health of the US economy, and that it will affect the rest of us. Why would Mr Bernanke's interest rate cut reassure you? Is there anyone in the world who thinks it will actually prevent a crash, as opposed to delaying it (and making it bigger when it comes)? Who are all these people who sent the markets rebounding today (and is it a safe prediction that they will panic again tomorrow, on seeing the jitters today in Europe and the US?

Candidates for the Bharat Ratna

The BJP has been demanding our highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, for former PM Vajpayee. Now, to stress the point that age should not be a limiting factor for the Bharat Ratna (or maybe to stress some other point that eludes me), the BJP's parent organisation, the RSS, is demanding one for Bhagat Singh, who was born 100 years ago and died over 75 years ago.

So we don't need to confine ourselves to individuals of contemporary importance. Good. Now that we're clear on that, here's a list of Indian individuals that have regrettably not been awarded our highest civilian honour; I think the omissions should urgently be rectified.

• Mahatma Gandhi
  
• Rabindranath Tagore
  
• Thyagaraja
  
• Tansen
  
• Akbar
  
• Adi Sankara
  
• Ashoka
  
• The Buddha
  
• Lord Rama
  

I'm sure I've left out a few deserving names above. But no doubt our government will speedily attend to the matter.

From Lennon to Ponting

I've been seeing variations on this all over the place. Though not original, it's too good to pass up...

Ishant Sharma's gonna get you,
Gonna knock you right on the head,
You better keep your stumps together,
Pretty soon you gonna be dead.
How in the world you gonna see,
Laughing at balls from me,
Who on earth do you think you are?
A superstar? Well, right you are...

(The reference, of course, is to this song.)