India’s future

Here’s an excerpt from an article, India’s future, from the Economist Intelligence Unit ViewsWire dated 29 September 2008, which ought to give us, every Indian, something to think about (that is, if we aren’t thinking about it already):

“How will the rest of the world react? As India acquires the means to shape the global economic and geopolitical landscape, its leaders will face a familiar dilemma. Like rising powers in the past, India is keen to expand its influence in line with its increasingly global interests — but it needs to do this without provoking a backlash from currently dominant countries or being caught up in rivalry with other emerging powers.

How India manages its rise — and how the rest of the world responds — will have huge implications for the country’s stability and growth prospects. One potential obstacle is geopolitical: India needs to promote regional peace and stability in order to have a strong claim to be a major world player. But South Asia is an especially tough neighbourhood. India shares borders with countries that are embroiled in civil war (Sri Lanka), have just emerged from civil war (Nepal), or are under military or military-backed rule (Myanmar and Bangladesh). Civilian rule has recently been restored in Pakistan, but the political scene there remains fragile and a destabilising Islamist insurgency is gathering steam. This leaves China as India’s least volatile neighbour — but China, which is helping to build ports and quasi-military facilities in Pakistan, Myanmar and Bangladesh, is also India’s chief geopolitical rival.”

The entire EIU ViewsWire article, India’s future, can be found here.

Nothing Twice

Exactly two months ago today, a friend and colleague of mine made one of my wishes come true.

I had been pining for Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry for a long time now when this friend announced his trip to Poland with his Polish girlfriend. I jumped at the opportunity and requested him to obtain an anthology of Wislawa Szymborska – with dire consequences to his life upon his return, should he fail to fulfill this request.

Of course, he had no idea who Wislawa Szymborska was. So, he couldn’t see the meaning in my threat, until his girlfriend enlightened him on Polish literature – and my sincerity. After all, Wislawa Szymborska is something of a Polish national treasure, apart from being a humanist and a renowned writer.

Happily for me, on 25 July 2008, this colleague and friend of mine handed over a brand new hardcover copy of Nothing Twice (Selected Poems) – an anthology of 120 Wislawa Szymborska’s poems, both in Polish and in English (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh), published soon after she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.

This means, although Wislawa Szymborska has written only 250 or so poems so far in her life, not only are they magnificent enough to lead her to her Nobel Prize, but also most of them are contained in this collection. For all those interested, here’s the poem from the title of the anthology:

Nothing Twice

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to say
Today is always gone tomorrow

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

[Nothing Twice, a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh - from the anthology Nothing Twice (Selected Poems) by Wislawa Szymborska, published by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Poland, 1997.]

I thought today would be a good day to post something on Wislawa Szymborska as this friend and colleague of mine is leaving today to join another agency.

Lost formats

Dimensions: 4 x 2.5 x 0.4 inch
Storage Capacity: 60, 90 and 120 min.
Manufacturer: Norelco (Philips)


Know what this is? It’s a 2-dimensional image of a compact cassette which was (and, in some places, still is) used to store music. Once, this type of media for recording and storing music was popular, but now, with the digital revolution in full swing, the compact cassette is (almost) dead.

According to Experimental Jetset’s website, the compact cassette was “introduced in 1966 as a convenient way of recording and playing music in home and car. In 1982 it overtook the LP’s dominance after Sony’s popular Walkman was introduced, but was surpassed by Philips’ CD (compact disc) in 1993.” Of course, a great deal has changed since then and, as things are, even the CD will soon disappear into oblivion.

You don’t need great brains to know this, and may even find this information redundant and irritating, but you may be (at least, I was) surprised to learn that an Amsterdam-based graphics studio, called Experimental Jetset, is doing all it can to preserve for posterity what it calls ‘lost formats’ such the compact cassette.

Experimental Jetset seems to have 64 such ‘lost formats’ in their archive at present. These 'lost formats' can be found on their website.

The panda’s preference

“…according to Megan Owen, a conservation specialist at the San Diego Zoo, there is a possible evolutionary explanation for the panda’s seemingly foolish preference for bamboo: lack of competition. When pandas split off from the bear lineage about 3 million years ago, tasty and nutritious cuisine like meat, fruit, and nuts may have been difficult to obtain while bamboo was ubiquitous — a wide-open ecological niche. So there were two choices: Exert some serious effort to get the good stuff, or munch away on a seemingly inexhaustible supply of woody grasses.

The panda accommodated its vegetarianism with a few physical adaptations — enlarged chewing muscles (those adorable jowls), their famous ‘thumbs’, and a slightly modified digestive system (though still far more similar to a carnivore’s than to an herbivore’s). But the most notable adaptations were behavioral. Pandas must minimize energy expenditure in every aspect of their lives: limiting locomotion and mating periods, having a low surface area-to-volume ratio (i.e., being fat) to conserve heat, and sleeping as much as possible.”

[Citation: Reproduced from Could Pandas Be an Evolutionary Mistake — or Proof of an Intelligent Designer?, an article by Lizzie Buchen in Discover magazine, published online on 5 August 2008.]

Alexander McCall Smith goes online

One of my favourite authors is Alexander McCall Smith. Almost all his books are light and delightful reads. He is, of course, most famous for his series of novels which began with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in 1998 and continued with nine more stories. He has written several other novels, many of which are popular across the world.

What is of recent – and greater – news is that Alexander McCall Smith has decided to collaborate with the Telegraph in the UK to publish his next novel, Corduroy Mansions, as a serialised novel on the Telegraph website.

Starting from Monday, 15 September 2008, Corduroy Mansions will be published through the Telegraph website – with simultaneous podcast editions available to download through iTunes.

Furthermore, readers will be invited to get involved in the creative process by writing their comments and suggestions for Alexander McCall Smith on the Telegraph’s website via www.telegraph.co.uk/alexandermccallsmith.

You can find all the information you need on Alexander McCall Smith going online with his new novel right here. You can even get the serialised novel emailed to you by registering on the Telegraph website.

The printed book, Corduroy Mansions, won’t be released in the UK market till July 2009.

Upside down

'The World Stands on its Head'



Foreign Policy’s Passport blog reports that “in the town of Trassenheide on Germany’s Baltic Sea island of Usedom,” a man has built a house upside down. The house is called ‘The World Stands on its Head’ and is open to visitors.

South Africa’s IOL website, in an article titled Man turns house on its roof, identifies the builder of the upside-down house as Polish-born German Klaudiusz Golos. It states that, “Visitors enter the 120-square-metre home through the attic and ascend to the ‘ground’ floor. All the furnishings including chairs, the fitted kitchen and the toilets are also upside down, but the stairs are right-side up because visitors have to use them.”

Some very interesting images of this upside-down house can be found here.

[Citation: Photos: Germany’s upside-down house, Foreign Policy’s Passport blog, 4 September 2008; Man turns house on its roof, in South Africa’s IOL news, 4 September 2008. Image reproduced from Foreign Policy’s Passport blog, Photos: Germany’s upside-down house, 4 September 2008.]

Banana

“Behold, the atheist’s nightmare,” declares Ray Comfort, an Australian evangelist, as he holds up a banana in a hugely popular video on YouTube. The fruit, he says, testifies to God’s creative genius. It comes with a colour-coding system that shows when it is ready to eat (green is too early, black too late); an easily gripped, biodegradable wrapper; and a ‘tab at the top’ which, unlike that on a can of soda, works so well that when you pull it ‘the contents don’t squirt in your face’.

Not everyone is convinced. One video response points out that the banana only achieved its user-friendly qualities through evolution over many centuries of farming.

[Citation: Text reproduced from Viva Vivanno – Innovative things to do with a banana, article in Economist.com, 2 September 2008.]

[Correction: Ray Comfort is not Australian (as the Economist.com article states). He was born in New Zealand and now lives in California, USA.]

On Reading

Most of us have a personal relationship with books. But, if asked, I wonder if we’d be able to define or describe this relationship… or the characteristics of it. Perhaps, if someone were to watch us reading books, he or she may be able to capture the moment from a distance and define the relationship for us.

While surfing the internet, I found that photographer André Kertész has done exactly that. In his book On Reading, which was published in 1971 and released again this year, photographer Kertész has captured various black and white images of people reading books in their quiet moments.

According to a review of the book by Conor Risch, on PDNonline, “Made between 1915 and 1970, the images in On Reading study the complex and varied relationship we have with the printed word, a relationship Kertész no doubt personally developed at a young age as the son of a bookstore owner.”

Without much ado, read Conor Risch’s review of André Kertész’s On Reading here.

[Citation: Conor Risch’s review of André Kertész’s On Reading on PDNonline, 25 August 2008.]