A courageous face

Read the article. While this young girl was tortured in public view many adults were busy filming the scene in their cameras, instead of doing something to save her.

Read more about union carbides compensation

What union carbides compensation is worth.

Dead man is always good

I started by reading this interesting headline
The Judge who got union carbide pay up was respected internationally.
WTF is that, i have never heard the word justice used in any of the articles speaking about the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. And now the justice who presided over the main case against Union Carbide is called the Just Justice. Just because he is dead? Read this article by IE.
A man who holds the distinction of being the youngest person to be appointed as a judge, will also be remembered for his landmark ruling in on one of the worst ‘manmade’ disasters — the Bhopal gas tragedy. As the CJI, he headed the bench that directed the US multinational Union Carbide to enter a settlement with the Indian Government, underlining that interest and welfare of lakhs of people affected by the gas leakage was paramount.
Although Justice Pathak in February 1989 refrained from issuing any directions for launching criminal proceedings against top officials of the US firm responsible for the tragedy, he did his bit in offering relief and rehabilitation to the victims by expeditiously settling the case. It was his landmark ruling wherein the Union Carbide was asked to pay $470 million as a full and final settlement to the Indian Government for payment to the victims.
Now that is some reporting(and i read a few more obituaries all describing this judgement as a success). This settlement(the landmark judgement as per IE) was considered a treason by the victims and if i may say the general indian conscience then, as the damages agreed in the settlement was 15% for the original damage claim($750 million as to $3 billion as per this article) and it gave Union Carbide full immunity from criminal proceedings. It was an out of court settlement, it let the company pay just a fraction of the damages they caused and gave them immunity from prosecution for one of the most deadly industrial crimes that was ever committed. And there were very clear evidence that the tragedy was a result of systematic negligence from the company's side.
I heard about this judge for the first time when my history teacher, Stephen Sir mentioned this judgement in our 10th standard class. I remember him, emotionally charged, explaining how this judge has betrayed the victims of the Gas Tragedy and his country by siding up with Union Carbide. He went on to tell us that he later on applied for post in international court of justice and when he asked the support from indian government for this posting, another international agency(i forgot the name) adviced the government to not support him based on his controversial verdict on Bhopal Gas Tragedy. I don't know whether indian government supported him, but he did become a judge in International Court Of Justice.
This judge relinquished his post as a CJI(Chief Justice Of India) soon after delivering this judgement(without completing his tenure) to leave the country and take up the post at International Court Of Justice. To me all these are just indications as to what happened in that case.

drunk

I am drunk on mild fever, laughing uncontrollably reading up this blog. Laughing does't always mean you are happy, mind is in a bit of pain for a friend.

giggles

Receptionist to young hot couple : What were you guys doing between 2Am and 4Am today.
Couple(giggling): We were wrestling.
Receptionist : The person next door, he didn't quite like that noise you were making(giggle), can you wrestle at some other time please.
Couple : Giggles
Receptionist : That must have been quite a long wrestle(giggles).

And I felt so happy for the couple, and was surprised that I was not even a bit envious.

Doris Lessing Gets Nobel, Yeah

A year back, i exclaimed to my friend, Orhan Pamuk won Nobel.
Today its more emotional, Doris Lessing won the next. I am going back home to read "The Good Terrorist" again. That one book was enough for me to become the biggest fan of hers.
Am so happy.

when life kills death preserves

So i was saying i was lonely. Was alone in this place and i had to study. Enjoying it at times but not always and afraid of impending failure. There were people around me who were not alone and enjoying this more than me. I didn't envy them. I just tried to steal a bit of happiness from their moods and kept hiding when they were about to find out.

I took long walks in between. At the end of the two days i looked back and saw this dark figure always with me. It was like a zombie. It had a stony expression on its face. It always walked at a regular pace and was always looking ahead. Its been with me for so long but i never saw him so clearly.

lets not make doctors out of rich idiots

I am sitting in a cafe having my evening tea with my friends, watching the pretty girls passing by the window and all of a sudden there is an alarm in the atmosphere. A bunch of people dashed across the view pushing a wheel chair with an unconscious girl lying with her head slumped in it. Next to the cafe there is this small health center to which they are obviously heading.

Isn't it miraculous work that a doctor does? This girl who is looking totally healthy, who cannot explain to him anything is brought to him and he has to diagnose the problem that's hurting her, may be immediately or after a bunch of tests. Many doctors have the skills to diagnose complex diseases or problems of their patients, which are not obvious from the symptoms.

My thoughts are going to one place. The way medical education works in my country. I find it hard to digest that a lot of opportunities to study medicine are granted to students who has money rather than the students who has any aptitude or the brains to do it. I am pretty sure that a person needs to be a bit intelligent to be a doctor and the whole possibility of many idiots becoming doctors just because they have wealthy parents creeps me out.

dark day

You feel the dark emotions oozing from your heart. The urge to sin is at the breaking point. I know i have the blockers for this. But look whats happening, they are conveniently blocked. Blockers blocked, is it funny. And may be its not that bad if they were gone for ever, no, just for some time until the bloody emotions take over and you sin. After that they are back in place. I was sitting next to an angel, feeling her aura. My heart cried for the people i am sinning against in silence. The aura of the angel, i thought it will purify me. How wrong am i, and how false are those tears.
I sinned. The blood of the victims were not warm, but the sight warmed me for a short amount of time.

salaam bombay

I was watching Salaam Bombay and there is this scene where Rekha, the lead female charactor, is walking down a long crowded street. Camera moves back and we see Rekha as part of the crowd, and we are also shown a guy with a transistor radio listening to a cricket match. I suddenly remembered the time when a friend of mine has told me about this scene. Rekha is in a lot of pain in that scene as she is asked by the warden of the childrens prison to let go of her child who is imprisoned there. She suggests that Rekha should let her girl be in the prison rather than around her, as she's a prostitute living in the red light area. Or she should think of giving away her to an orphanage. My friend has told me that the scene shows, a mother in deepest pain of being asked to stay away from her kid with nobody to console her while a whole nation listens eagerly to the live commentry of a cricket match. It conveyed it well i think, i dont remember sad music or tears, but it will force you to think.

happy places

Boredom is lurking around. Nothing new about it. But what makes the days special is how many times mind digress into good things. How often you get those subtle triggers which takes you to beautiful places. Most of these places i have never been to, but i stole them from movies or books. Some of those stolen ones are so much accepted that mind argues about its reality for a bit before giving up. Sometimes those triggers are obvious and easy to notice and sometimes they are so tiny and mysterious that you will never see them. The cutest one is the smell trigger. The smell of sharpened pencil which takes me to my nursery days, a particular perfume which takes me to the place where I smelled it before or the smell of a rare food item which takes me to the scenario where I had it last time.

on the way to the asylum

Strange noises, I like to make them. I used to without any stimuli in the past, but nowadays its the morning bath. The cold water touching your skull, and what's inside, a slightly crazy mind. The wayward nerves go beserk, I used to dance before, these days, I shudder. The amount of different thoughts coming in is too much to handle. I imagine what might have gone through the minds of the crazy people who were tied in a sack and submerged in cold water in mental asylums of medieval times, a way of giving shock.

jat men and mallu women

"In Kerala you will not find a single woman who has not passed high school. Now more and more Jats are scouting for a partner here because they feel Kerala women can make the future of their kids safe," This is about the an interesting South - North connection. Apparently guys from Haryana are trying to get brides from kerala. And this is what one guy told as the reason for this long distance alliance. Wow. What a smart plan.
My plea to men of Haryana. Stop killing your women and start educating them. And even if you are not planning to do that stop importing women to normalize the skewed sex ratio in your state.

eugenics in america

Elaine Riddick's form refers to "community reports that she was 'running around' late at night" and her "promisicuity" and her "inability to control herself" constituted grounds for sterilisation.
So she was sterilized when she delivered a baby at the age of 13 without her knowledge.
"I didn't know anything about it until I was 19. I got married and tried to have a child. The doctor told me I had been butchered."
Policies were drawn up in over 30 states in the US to sterilise women, men and children who were considered to be physically, mentally or morally 'defective'.
And they have a nice name for this, eugenics.
State records conservatively estimate that between 1943 and 1963, over 63,000 people were sterilised under the eugenics laws in America.
and
Whilst five states, including North Carolina, have issued apologies for the sterilisations carried out under eugenics laws, the federal government has never acknowledged that any sterilisation abuses have ever taken place.
Remembering a readers digest article about physically and mentally challenged kids being taken away from their homes to live in a facillity, the whole idea being driven by eugenics policy in USA.
All text in green from this bbc article.

a new bed place

The small bed lies on the floor alongside a lot of rubbish and another bed. I have a small night lamp beside it which was made from pieces of a toy bullock cart. Then there is the bunch of doris lessing books, a pen stand which doubles as mobile phone stand. Its quite away from the world as tv is in next room, but quite close due to those books. My other companions are a bunch of mosquitoes.

I think the new bed place is giving me back some good dreams, though finding it hard to remember them clearly.

haze and the gaze

Lying back on the second row of kairali theatre, gazing at the immaculately beautiful shots of "The Gaze" feeling the giddiness, the haze of alcohol and the full bladder, it was definitely a nice evening at the film fest last December.

I wanted to say "I love you " to two people. I wanted to say "Sorry, i am not as bad as you think" to somebody else. "I am just neutral, don't despise me for that". I was not too drunk but lazing in a very mellow mood.

They say the movie was a fusion of iranian and french styles of movie making. I loved the low light in which most of the scenes were taken, it was neat and a little strange. The characters were nice. But i failed to grasp all the nuances of the story.

I don't want to sleep alone

The first few sequences of the movie and the two pegs i downed was gone. Tsai Ming-liang was testing us to the max with his real time shots. One shot reminded me of the horrors of the climax of Wayward cloud, when Chua made Chyi give the comatose Lee an oiled hand job. Chyi and Chua work and live together and take care of comatose Lee. Its Kuala Lampur(KL) and the movie takes us through the poorest quarters there, but holy, the imagery in some of the scenes are too good. There is an other Lee who was beaten up by thugs and who will be saved by a bunch of Indians working in KL. If you watch carefully there is an abandoned mattress. The abandoned mattress as well as beaten up Lee gets new life thanks to the assiduous care of one of those Indian guys. The scene where all the guys carry the mattress from the street to the home is nice.

Chyi has the sweetest bedplace, its a tiny attic like thing, made of wood and she we can see all the other things happening in the house through the gaps in the wood. Absolutely loved it.
Another wonderful thing was the smoke that covered up the city at one time, Chyi and non comatose Lee making out with ridiculous gas masks made from plastic cups. In wayward cloud also there was one thing affecting the whole city, water scarcity.

I don't want to sleep alone, ya thats the name and the theme.

By the way DO NOT SEE THE MOVIE :), unless you are a Tsai fan. My poor ex-manager who came to the movie just on my insistence was nice enough not to beat me up after the movie.

sari

Shashi tharoor's article about saving sari got him a lot of critical retorts from blogoshpere. I found some parts of the article confusing but liked the part which says that todays younger generation is less willing to drape themselves in a sari as they associate it with an older era. I think while many women find it easy to criticize tharoor saying that he ignore the need for men to wear traditional garbs and find the reason for not wearing sari in the inconvenience factor alone, none will be ready to accept that part of the reason could be exactly what tharoor says. Its not just women, i and most of my friends have no experience in wearing a mundu outdoors. Its not just due to the convenience factor of a pant but also in part due to our eagerness to adopt fashion of the times, to not look out of place.
Lots of women say sari is inconvenient. Similar with us about mundu. One interesting point is how much does one want to see the opposite sex in these (controversial :)) traditional garments. How does a woman rate a man in pants versus the one in his mundu(for southies) and how much does a man rate a woman in sari versus one in churidar. I would like to make my side clear, sari is hot, body parts which are exposed by it doesn't make a woman look indiscreet. If many men are with me, i am sure sari wont die. If many women prefer men in traditional clothes then those wont die too. Or rather mustn't die, for i trust we will and we should try a bit to attract the opposite sex :).

british sailors released

I felt that it was awfully sweet of iran to release the sailors as a gift to british people. Don't know whether diplomacy is behind it, but i would like to think that iran used it as an image building opportunity. Read the news of bbc. Whatever is behind this all, when i read about the incidents(from british press), i feel the warmth shown by the iranian president is heartening but the fact that british prime minister was not even ready to thank the Iranians once, looks like a stupid extension of his idiotic comments which blew this issue out of proportion.

I have heard that the women in Iran are very pretty. That definitely makes me love Iran :). Other than that i remember the movie Offside, which really showed the spirit of people there, specially women in the highly oppressive society. There are lots of things to hate about Iran, but looks like there will be always some things to love it.

loony

Please let me be sad
I cried, with real tears,
But the mind is so heart less

He waved it down, with a single motion
You ain't gonna die today, why cry
Laugh you lonely fellow,
you ain't gonna die today

I took out my case, with all the args and angsts
i spread them out, i reasoned
i pleaded, how do you know, how can you be so cruel
they don't even laugh at me now
they ignore me or call me trivial

Laugh you loony, look at yourself
and laugh your guts out
You ain't gonna die today

I feel a steel flask in the back of my neck
I feel that what fills it is happiness
Its been leaking these days and vacuum is pushing it in
I cant take the pain you asshole, let me be sad
What if it breaks and kills my brain, what about that

I smiled at first, then i laughed
I was roaring in minutes, my body was shivering
I knew i was not gonna die today, why cry

sideways

Maya: You know, can I ask you a personal question, Miles?
Miles Raymond: Sure.
Maya: Why are you so in to Pinot?
Miles Raymond: [laughs softly]
Maya: I mean, it's like a thing with you.
Miles Raymond: [continues laughing softly]
Miles Raymond: Uh, I don't know, I don't know. Um, it's a hard grape to grow, as you know. Right? It's uh, it's thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It's, you know, it's not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and uh, thrive even when it's neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. You know? And in fact it can only grow in these really specific, little, tucked away corners of the world. And, and only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot's potential can then coax it into its fullest expression. Then, I mean, oh its flavors, they're just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and... ancient on the planet.
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Its such a nice movie. And this one above is my favorite dialogue in that. When Miles explains to Maya why he loves Pinot, the beauty is that we see Miles as Pinot. Someone who is really special but who could use a companion who would care for him, as Maya :), and who could help bring out the best in him. Thats the most elaborate but unintentional pickup dialogue ever. And see why Maya loves wine.
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Maya: How it's a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing; how the sun was shining; if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I'd opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it's constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is, until it peaks, like your '61. And then it begins its steady, inevitable decline.
Miles Raymond: Hmm.
Maya: And it tastes so fucking good.
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Bloody romantics :).