Did you know that Carbon Dioxide has been unfairly maligned? well, it was, till something called the Competitive Enterprise Institute came to the rescue. The CEI is a think-tank funded by the energy industry. In its attempt to help the deluded public regarding global warming, it has produced two television spots. Without so much as batting an eyelid, the ad declares, “They call it pollution, we call it life.” And there is no irony here people.

Watch the ads here. They also have some anti-An Inconvenient Truth ads, whose success (it is the top grossing independent film this week) must not be giving them too much comfort. The Intersection has a list of “We Call It Life” tag lines. Also see a script (via Cup of Java) for an alternative ad on Global Warming Watch.

Today we went to the Dragon Boat festival at a lake near our house. There were boat races and things to eat, including these lollipop like hot dogs, kind of like Taiwanese versions of a corn dog. I made Kerim take a picture.

In my wanderings, I came across a delightful blog called Rikshaw which is dedicated to phrases written on the back of rikshaws in the sub-continent. Here are some of my favorites:

Main bare hokar truck bannun ga
When I grow up, I will be a truck.

Jinnay apni maa noo sataya, Onay saree umar ricksha hee chalaya
He who is troublesome to his mother, spends his life driving a rikshaw. (How is that for a desi Oedipus?)

Kabhee side say aatee ho kabhee peechay say aatee ho,
meree jaan horn day day kar mujhay tum kyon satateey ho
Sometimes you come from the side, sometimes from the back,
my love why do you torment me with blowing your horn?

Sometimes these gems can just be a phrase, like Khatarnak Rambo (dangerous Rambo), or even one word, which as my sister reports, could be Monica! which was emblazoned across rikshaws at the height of the Lewinsky scandal. It caused my mother to change the spelling of her name from Monica to Monika.

The writer for a musical I edited has written a young adult novel, Sex Kittens and Hawn Dawgs Fall in Love, and is in trouble for it, and no, this is not a Kaavya Vishwanathan story. Rosemary Wood’s book is one of the ten books banned by the Hernando County School Board in Florida. As Rosemary puts it:

People sometimes assume that these sorts of ban attempts arise “naturally” from conservative parents, but this incident is a great example of how that’s not always the case: a conservative radio station instigated this by calling a school board member to complain about the school’s book order. She then went to some of the fundamentalist websites that list “books that should be banned” and used that to make a list. No one read the books, no one researched the books, the head of the school board, the school principal and librarian all opposed it, but with TV cameras running this school board got manipulated by fundamentalist media forces outside their own community into striking these ten books from the high school library’s purchase order until they could be reviewed by “a committee.”

You can find links to stories in the press on her blog.

Banning a book, or film which they haven’t read or seen is so obviously absurd, one wonders at the regularity with which these things seem to happen.

While the Hindu screams, “Biggest crash in stock market,” the Indian Express tells us that the police is on alert near canals and lakes, why? because of the potential for suicides after the stock slide. The senseless tragedy of it all.

After the enormous amount of tripe in the papers and blogosphere, the best thing I saw about the reservation brouhaha comes fromDilip D’Souza. Also see, How The Other Half Lives for “merit,” that thing that is supposed to be the arbiter of access to educational privileges. If you have been through the Indian educational system, with its requisite need for cram schools and extra coaching, “merit” seems like a bad joke that everyone agrees to go along with, well, only if they can pay the requisite tuition fees of course.

Reservation may or may not be the best policy to achieve social justice, but the debate around it is striking for its degraded tone.

Big news out of Nepal. After massive protests, the king was forced to reconvene parliament (the BBC has a summary analysis) in April. And yesterday, The Hindu reports:

The Nepal House of Representatives on Thursday passed a proclamation declaring itself the sovereign and supreme body of the country and massively cutting the king’s powers and privileges. It also declared the country a secular state and put the army under its control.

Hopefully this is a turning point for Nepal, which has bearing the brunt of poor governance for decades and a bloody rebellion in the last decade. However, the Asian Center for Human Rights points out that there are things to be concerned about, like, will the army be held responsible for human rights abuses.

….the SPA (Seven Party Alliance) government must not use the draconian preventive detention laws such as Public Offences Act and Public Safety Act, which have been consistently misused by the monarchy to suppress pro-democracy movements. One of the major failures of the 1990 pro-democracy movement was the failure of the democratic governments in Kathmandu to repeal these draconian laws. Before King Gyanendra took over absolute power, all the governments misused the Public Safety Act and Public Offences Act.

Other than the abysmal record of the government before the King dismissed the parliament, there is also the matter of the Maoists, and their human rights record, and whether it will be possible for them to enter the political mainstream, not only because of the difficulties of holding a fair election, but also will the world be willing to accept former rebels as the legitimate Government.

After reading Amardeep’s post on the subject last year, Kurban Said has been at the back of my mind. So when I found a copy of The Orientalist at the Strand on my last visit, I picked it up. The author, Tom Reiss, spent five years on the trail of Kurban Said, the author of Azerbaijan’s national novel, Ali and Nino, it turns out that Kurban Said was Lev Nussimbaum, an Azeri Jew, who also called himself Essad Bey, converted to Islam, wrote several popular books and article on Islam, the Middle East, the scourge of Bolshevism, and a well respected biography of Stalin.

I enjoyed the book enormously, despite the author getting carried away, at times, with his subject’s enthusiasms. I mean, what in the world is a “Muslim” garb? I thought Turks dressed differently from Indians, who dressed differently from Egyptians, and so on, unless the author was using the term ironically, and I don’t think he was. Regardless of these slippages (after all, Orientalism is entertaining), the book itself reveals a complicated and contradictory person, who is never-the-less a product of his time.

Its been interesting to read the book reviews. Most of the reviews insist on the alluring mysteries of changing identities, and then some go on to complain how the historical notes in Reiss’s book are too long. I found the juxtaposition of the praise and the complaint quite interesting. First of all, from the presumably fixed vantage point (which I suppose remains fixed) of the reviewers, the poor souls crossing cultures and changing identities below are very dazzling in their mystery. The book itself takes pains to clarify that it is not so mysterious after all, which it does through its discussions of history, the particulars of which one might quibble with, but it is an interesting place to get to, never the less. So when a reviewer complains that these discussions are keeping them away from the business of being entertained, it begins to smell of, “I don’t really want to know, just keep your guy performing for us.” One begins to wonder on Lev’s choice to call himself Kurban (sacrifice).

A rather sad story from the BBC about Verrier Elwin’s widow, who is living in extreme poverty in a village in Madhya Pradesh.

After he arrived in 1927, Verrier Elwin was one of the first anthropologists to write with great sympathy and understanding about India’s tribal communities. In 1940, the 37 year old Elwin married Kosi, a 13 year old Gond girl. They were divorced after ten years. For a few years Elwin sent Rs. 25 per month, and when he stopped, Kosi took jobs doing farm work to support herself and her two children.

Perhaps one should not be too surprised that a man who showed great sensitivity towards marginalized communities, should have shown such callousness towards the girl (an underage one at that) he married. Somehow those with ambitiously compassionate projects, seem to have none to spare for those who are around them.

The Catholic Secular Forum in India has sent the call out for a fast-unto-death to protest the the movie, The Da Vinci Code. The group sees the protest as:

“It’s a more Christian way of doing things rather than pulling down things and tearing them up,” he ( the general secretary) said.

I suppose its laudable that they would espouse such a Gandhian gesture, as opposed to what the Shiv Sena has been prone to do. However, from what I understand the Da Vinci code doesn’t pretend to be gospel, its a work of fiction. I wonder where all their hurt feelings were when The Passion of the Christ came out, which was the gospel according to Mel and anti-semitic to boot, and uncomfortably prurient in its depictions of a body in pain.

In any case, protesting a film seems like a senseless exercise.