Givvup Only Are There

Nilu claims that being boring is a virtue. And then goes on to write some other nonsense which is completely unrelated.¹ But that is irrelevant – the larger point is that it took Nilu two years to come up with a justification for being boring.

Unfortunately, The Mad Momma has pretty much cornered the market on passing off one’s lack of talent or accomplishment as a virtue. And perhaps that only works if your audience is other mommybloggers. And when the puker adopts the method of the pukee, there’s no hope.

In other words – come back theothernilu. All is forgiven.

¹: See, I can be condescending without using Latin words.

written by Aadisht \\ tags: boredom, nilu, smugness, the mad momma, theothernilu, vice, virtue

It looks like my run of no posts will continue for a while. So for the next few weeks, there will be a guest blogger at Givvup Only Are There. Please welcome Samtaben.

Samtaben is currently in China. Since the government there has blocked wordpress.com and blogger.com; I offered her a guestblogging stint rather than having to deal with anonymizers or Chinese blogging platforms. She will be writing about traveling in China, learning Mandarin, and living like an expat. She is also more Goregaon-types than Gujew, so please don’t make fun of her.

written by Aadisht

It is fascinating to read Seriously Sandeep these days. Sandeep’s use – or rather abuse – of metaphors is fast approaching Thomas Friedman levels.

Like this:

You need to really think from another bodily orifice to impute symmetry between the two.

Another bodily orifice? Which bodily orifice do people usually think with? Is this morbid obsession with orifices due to the influence of Es Y’golonac?

And then there’s this:

The news fresh from the oven is how the mass of concocted turd that Teesta Setalvad threw against Modi came back and landed on her own face after seven years.

WTF? Seriously, WTF? How do you concoct a turd? Does it involve carefully monitoring how many beans and pulses you eat? And even if you did concoct a turd, who in their right minds would preserve a turd for seven years?

Let’s not forget the man’s Pioneer op-ed:

The frenzied shindigs surrounding the battle fortifications bring both amusement and concern at the eve of every election especially after the demise of single-party dominance in Indian politics.

I can imagine a situation where you have shindigs inside battle fortifications, when the fortified army has enough resources to last out a siege and decides to party. But if you’re talking about the stuff surrounding fortifications, it’s usually siege weapons and infantry companies. Rarely shindigs. And forget the shindig. What the hell does that sentence mean? How do you parse it? I fed it to the Stanford Parser (thanks, Arnab!) and it took almost 1.75 seconds to come up with this. It still doesn’t make sense. This, by the way, is the man who wrote:

It also, further, suffers from the same potomania that characterizes Marxist writings: a glaring paucity of clear thought and a tendency to use a thousand words instead of one.

What can explain this outpouring of mixed metaphors? My theory is that at any given point of time, there must be one ranting desi blog that is obsessed with shit. Last year, it was Jagadguru and poopi. And now it is Sandeep with his turds. When He stopped blogging in January, it was not to abandon us. Rather, He has returned as Seriously Sandeep. Blessed is the Jagadguru!

written by Aadisht \\ tags: es y'golonac, jagadguru, matt taibbi, nlp, orifice, pioneer, poopi, seriously sandeep, shindig, stanford parser, Thomas Friedman

Ashish Jaiswal, the author of True Dummy – a Fable of Existence, has asked me to review the book (psst: it launched two days ago). He’s also asked me to be honest about the book in the review, and not asked for special treatment.

I’m reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao right now. Once I’ve finished that, I’ll start True Dummy and review it. Normal blogging will happen in the interim (if it happens at all).

written by Aadisht

The absence of regular posts has been because I was busy getting a quiz ready. In the time since my last bout of regular posting, armed motherfuckers shot up my city, I quit my job, multiple people I know got married, had babies, or celebrated their birthdays; and I upgraded WordPress to 2.7. So it goes.

As for the quiz – it’s been done by me, Skimpy and Kodhi; and Aishwarya, Beatzo, Gaurav and Kunal have helped with vetting the questions. To make things more joyous, it’s being conducted in both Bombay (by me) and in Bangalore (by Baada). Both quizzes will take place on Sunday afternoon.

For details on where and when in Bangalore, head here. For Bombay details, head here. The short directions for Bombay are – 2.45 pm, Pinstorm Office, next to the Kotak Mahindra Bank branch on Linking Road in Santa Cruz. Do show up, the quiz will be fun.

written by Aadisht

My incoming links reveal that Chetan is asking why free market fundamentalists are not clamouring about the evil governments of the world looting the maid’s money.

Chetan, I cannot speak for anybody else, but I haven’t written about it yet because the details of the bailouts are unbelievably complex, and it’ll take me intense reading to understand them. I don’t want to write about things which I don’t understand yet. (This is why I have vowed to never write about US Healthcare.)

If you really want uninformed commentary by people who don’t know anything about what they’re talking about, I suggest you watch Indian news channels. Or read Shivam Vij who excels at that sort of thing.

OK, snark done. Serious answer now. Yes, I honestly do not understand the details of the bailout. Yes, I may read up on it more and then write about it seriously. But sleisha job crisis is happening on the personal front, so I may take time.

The only thing I have to say at this time concerns Tyler Cowen’s repeated statements that recapitalisation is a public good. They tie in with my repeated statements that the financial system is infrastructure as much as highways and power distribution are. So the statement is true, but public goods don’t necessarily have to be produced by the public sector.

written by Aadisht \\ tags: bailout, financial crisis, free market fundamentalist, healthcare, paulson, socialised losses

In the name of Amibah, the most powerful, the most vengeful, I welcome you to www.wokay.in, the new home of Givvup Only Are There.

The shift over from aadisht.net has happened because:

1. aadisht.net seems to be one a spam database and has been getting rogered by spambots the past few months. I kept going over my bandwidth quota, and the site would be down for half the month. Not fun. This domain name will hopefully remain off spamlists for a while. Even if it doesn’t, I now have eight times as much monthly bandwidth.
2. I want to put sober and professional image at aadisht.net in case recruiters or admissions committees come looking. So after a month or so it’ll only have a resume and a writing portfolio.
3. wokay.in sounds cooler. Ethnic chic are there.

Thus, please update your bookmarks, your blogrolls and your feed readers. Please note that:

1. I am on a new server as well as having a new domain name. I have much more server space as well as much more bandwidth. I may use this for cool stuff, therefore. If I have the time.
2. The feed for wokay.in runs off feedburner, and so my flickr photos and del.icio.us links are included automagically.
3. I have finally updated my blogroll after years of masterful inactivity, and it’s now trimmer and lighter, and with fewer blogs that haven’t updated in months.
4. The new server and domain do not automatically imply that I’ll post more. That will remain correlated to my level of NED.

written by Aadisht \\ tags: Amibah the Formless, bandwidth, Blogroll, feedburner, NED, resume, spam, spambot

There has recently been a controversy in the Indian blogosphere about what the projection of power means. In the interests of enlightening lay readers, I asked my good friend and international relations expert Dr. Boris Bhartriraj Pandey to prepare a guide to power projection. Boris is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Parma, and his family background is even more impressive – his parents are the distinguished academics Dr. Acharya Somuchidononanda Pandey and Dr. Valentina Dimitrieva Pandey. He has written a short monograph on the subject at the Pandey family blog. It is also reproduced in it’s entirety here, with his permission:

Continue reading »

written by Aadisht \\ tags: abbas tyrewala, aditi, bombs, boris bhartriraj pandey, chalukya, cowboy, dilip d'souza, expansionism, foreign affairs, foreign policy, genelia, imran khan, international relations, jaane tu... ya jaane na, jai singh rathore, jignesh, JTYJN, konfrontasi, limitless goddess, mutually assured destruction, nation state, national greatness, nazi, nitin pai, operation parakram, paresh rawal, permanent interest, politics, popular culture, power, projection of power, pulakesin ii, rajamandala, semiotics, soft power, spanish armada, waghmare, राज मंडल

I have a daughter. I will not be allowing her anywhere where restrictions are placed on her during her periods.

(The Brat, the Bean and Bedlam)

Indeed! Why let society, sisters-in-law, or mothers-in-law restrict where you go or don’t go when it’s so much more efficient to let your mother do it for you?

written by Aadisht \\ tags: choice, freedom of movement, impurity, menstruation, mommyblog, mommyblogger, mommyblogging, ovulation, period, purity, restriction, themadmomma

For the past few months, I’ve been using the Books application on Facebook. As soon as I finish a book, I search for it, add it to my list of completed books within the application with a two or three line review, and a rating (on five stars). This is then broadcast to all my Facebook friends.

The obvious disadvantage with this is that it is broadcasted to only my Facebook friends. And only within Facebook. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get an RSS feed of completed books. Which is sad, because I’d like to have one, and push it onto the blog for permanent archival and suchlike.

Other Facebook apps like iRead which do the same thing also don’t offer RSS feeds.

Shelfari does let you keep a list of books on your blog, but this seems to be in the form of a Shelfari widget, and poking around their FAQ didn’t seem to reveal any way to get a pure feed. Besides, Shelfari spammed me at unmitigated levels back in August or September, earning my hatred (and the dubious honour of being added to my GMail spam filter).

But there is something which seems to meet all my requirements, and it’s a little-known Google service: Google MyLibrary.

This is an add-on feature to Google Book Search. And besides ratings and reviews, there are three extremely cool things which MyLibrary has:

1. an RSS feed. So now, as soon as I finish a book, I can add it in MyLibrary, and display it in a Wordpress widget or in the GOAT feed.
2. labels. Which allows great scope for taxonomisation and categorisation. Such joy. Such joy.
3. searching within the book, and reading the whole book, copyright permitting. Yay!

This weekend, I’ll probably be tinkering with feeds and widgets and whatnot.

written by Aadisht \\ tags: archival, books, cataloguing, facebook, google, iRead, mylibrary, rss feed, shelfari, taxonomy