Ever tried doing nothing?
I am back after a week-long sabbatical. That reminds me, ever tried doing absolutely nothing? I have. And trust me, it’s not at all easy. I have been jobless over the last week and I am absolutely looking forward to having something to do once again. It is so goddamned difficult to vegetate. I feel like I have lost a couple of IQ points over the last week. The only thing that kept me sane was the news. I know that sounds pathetic, but it’s absolutely true.
Anyway, my last post was on Pottermania, something that I had written during my 9-hour long flight to Bombay. However, I spoke very little about the flight in itself. I would like to register my disappointment in, and utter lack of professionalism on India’s celebrated national carrier, Air India. Agreed, my experience with international airlines is rather limited. But, even in comparison with the not-so-good Delta Airlines, and the slightly better Air France, I can say that travelling by Air India is the worst experience one can ever have. Where do I start? Right! The baggage check-in. Air India must be the only blasted airline in the whole wide world that actually weighs your hand baggage. After a ten minute-long argument with the in-charge at CDG on my baggage, I was forced to chuck some clothes to bring my baggage weight down from an alleged 26 kilograms to 23 kilograms. First of all, I had serious doubts about the accuracy of the scales. It is difficult to lift a suitcase that weighs 26 kilograms. I could lift mine quite easily. I am pretty sure it was only about 22. Then came her problem with the tiny silver Ganesha idol I was carrying in my suitcase. She refused to let me check it in on the grounds that it was considered a cultural artefact and that I would have to declare its value at the customs counter at Bombay Airport. After much argument, which involved me telling her I would handle Indian Customs if the need arose, she allowed me to check it in. By the time I was done with that woman, I was so pissed off with the Airline that only excellent service could salvage their reputation in my eyes.
Then came the flight itself. What can I say about it? It was a Boeing 767 bought by Air India sometime in the 1970s. And, it has never seen the inside of a mainenance shed since then. The window edges were blackened and rusted and the wallpaper (or whatever you call it) was peeling off from everywhere. To top it all, the aircraft smelled of ginger, garlic, onions and fish, mixed with sweat and cheap perfume worn by its illustrious passengers from Newark, its original airport of departure. As for the pillow and bedsheet provided, the less said, the better. It smelled like my grandmother’s old saree that had been abandoned at the bottom of the attic for several years. In short, the flight was the dirtiest and worst-kept I have ever seen.
Now, all this brings me to my overarching concern. What image does the illustrious national carrier present to the rest of the world? I do not know if India is shining, but after that flight, I can say with conviction that Air India definitely is not shining.
The Harry Potter Phenomenon
While on a smelly 7-hour long Air India flight from Paris to Mumbai, one tends to try and distract oneself by reading. And that is precisely what I did. Before I proceed, let me register my disappointment with the state of India’s shining national carrier. After a highly annoying conversation with the Air India Paris representative about baggage allowances and laptop computers, I boarded the flight with an armload of magazines and newspapers. The flight’s condition gave me serious doubts about its air-worthiness and made me wonder if Air India had at all bothered to maintain its fleet since it first acquired the aircraft in the 1970s. Trust me, it was that bad.
Anyway, back to the point. Once I got over the shock of seeing the state of “Air India shining”, I began to read the highly interesting, but atrociously expensive Time Magazine. The article in question was about the efforts of the “Harry Potter Brain Trust” to keep up the net of secrecy surrounding the much-hyped release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. While the process in itself was extremely interesting, what spurred me on to writing this post was the conclusion of the authors, Lev Grossman and Andrea Sachs. They ask whether the publishers of the Harry Potter books are not under-estimating the power of the same series they are working so energetically to promote.
This was a particularly interesting question. If people only read books to find out the story and the ending, nobody would read the same books more than once. Such is not the case, as we all know. Dickens, published many decades ago still holds a sway over lovers of books. Some books are classics and we never tire of reading them. I have read David Copperfield and many times over and the books hold the same appeal today as they did all those years ago, during the first reading. To cite more examples, the story of Iliad and Odyssey are so famous that they must have become boring by now. But no, they continue to inspire the production of such blockbusters as Troy and Gladiator. The same goes for the Potter books. Why then, are we obsessing with secrecy? Why are we so paranoid about spoilers on the Internet affecting our enjoyment of the books? So what if we do find out the ending? Do we not read a book simply because we want to read it irrespective of who killed whom and who defeated whom?
As a student of literature (ex-student, but that’s beside the point), I find that it only makes sense if Harry finally defeated the evil Voldemort. Why would Jo create the character only to have him defeated at the hands of the most powerful and evil sorcerer ever? From a purely literary perspective, that is the only thing that would make sense. The good must always triumph over the bad. That is poetic justice. And not even J K Rowling would throw us a googly on that. That brings us back to the original question. What is the point of reading. The point is to spend time with the book and enjoy the time thus spent. It is appreciate and even experience a good book. And Harry Potter, is a good book.
USS Nimitz visiting? What’s the fuss?
The USS Nimitz, a nuclear-powered US aircraft-carrier has come to India. So, what’s the problem? Leftist and centrist political parties seem to think there is. Left parties claim that the visit is a move by Washington to bring New Delhi under its strategic umbrella. More here. To make this look even sillier than they already are, protesters are holding noisy demonstrations with slogans such as “Down with US Imperialism” and there is talk of US “Gunboat Diplomacy.” To me, it looks like the protesters are barking down the wrong well. If they must protest, there are plenty of other things to protest about. Like the war in Iraq, for example. Or the fact that 40% of Indians are illiterate. But no, the Communist Party of India and its Marxist counterpart are still citing Cold War-era actions in the protest against the USS Nimitz. The involvement of famous writers such as Arundhati Roy and Mahashweta Devi, far from lending credibility to the protests has served to make the whole thing look rather ridiculous. Talk on India’s foreign policy objectives from someone like Arundhati Roy seems just very out-of-place. With all due respect, Roy is a brilliant writer of fiction but know absolutely zilch about politics and international relations.
One of the most virulent objections to the arrival of the USS Nimitz is that it is a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and is capable of carrying nuclear warheads. The United States Navy had refused to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear warheads on the vessel, in accordance with their long-standing “say nothing” policy. The Indian Ministry of Defence has issued a statement saying that there is no known presence of nuclear warheads on the vessel. NGOs, forever ready to jump on to the bandwagon, have expressed concerns of leakage of nuclear waste in the Bay of Bengal. Now, that sounds hypocritical. On the one hand, India has nuclear ambitions and on the other, it pretends that all things nuclear are bad. The same people rejoiced and celebrated after nuclear tests at Pokhran in 1998. Where did concerns for the environment go then? All this protest about India abandoning its policy of non-alignment is redundant too. Communists still cite the ancient Panchasheel doctrine of the 1950s to criticise the government on its shifting foreign policy stance. Of course, they conveniently forget that the Panchasheel resulted in the 1962 war with China and in one of the worst defeats the Indian Army has ever suffered.
To me, these objections hold absolutely no water. Even if India is increasing military cooperation with the United States, I fail to see why this is such a bad thing. Is it not time we get out of the “we-represent-all-the-oppressed-third-world-countries” mindset and act like an emerging and responsible political player? India has claims to first-world status in the next 30 years. Should we not start with behaving as one on matters of international politics and stop exaggerating the intentions of the “American Imperialists”? Why would the US want to colonise India anyway? I firmly believe that India has a lot to gain by cooperating with the US on nuclear-technology, especially for energy-production and everything to lose by refusing to do so. The biggest cities in India suffer periodic power black-outs and struggle to cater to the needs of the burgeoning economy. The harsh truth is that we are in dire need of energy to keep our growth rate robust and economy healthy. Why should we not cooperate with the US and build a healthy and lasting political and military partnership with it? It is the biggest extra-regional power in the Indian Ocean and India will only stand to gain by cooperating with the US Navy. After all, we need to secure our maritime and continental borders too. If the US is helping us make our immediate strategic environment more secure, then what is the problem?
I do not believe that military cooperation with the US will result in the transfer of sovereignty or the loss of autonomy of the Indian Government. It will only help India secure its frontiers better in the long run and build a healthy relationship with what is arguably the world’s most powerful country.
A hyper-connected generation?
I came across this article on BBC News a short while ago. An increasing interest in social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Orkut is giving rise to hyper-connected generation. As the writer puts it, users are not only sending mails and text messages but “lifecasting” words and video 24 hours a day. I wonder whether all this worth something. Why are we so obsessed with remaining “connected” with the rest of the world all the time? Why are we so entirely incapable of living our lives “offline” without feeling the obsessive need to check our mails every 10 seconds? There is also apparently a new phenomenon that the author calls micro-blogging. They are one-to-many messages broadcast like blogs that help people keep up with goings on in your life.
Now, I am all for blogging, seeing as I am myself a regular blogger. However, I fail to understand why anyone would be interested in whether you have brushed your teeth and had coffee in the morning. Being on both Facebook and Orkut myself, I can vouch for the fact that both are terribly addicting. In fact, they actively encourage you to abandon all pretense of productive work and distract yourself. I have been guilty of the behaviour several times myself. But now, the novelty has worn off. I am no longer as interested in either site as I was when I first joined. It is convenient to get in touch with friends when you feel like, but sometimes I feel constrained to check and update my profile because my friends expect me to do so.
Then, there is the question of who exactly a “friend” is. Does someone you knew when you were five years old and in kindergarten count? Believe it or not, I actually got a request from someone claiming he was in kindergarten with me and would like to be my friend. He added, in his scrap on Orkut, that he thought I was a fantastic person and warm-hearted too!! What the hell? How does he know I am a nice person when he hasn’t even seen me for 20 years? This spurred me on to abandoning my Orkut profile. I am back on it now, a year later but am much more conservative about who I accept as friends than I was then. There are days when this networking nonsense goes completely out of hand and I feel like a fool for having accepted it in the first place.
So, while staying in touch is an excellent thing, a balance must be struck between a person’s online and offline life. To me, my offline life is more important than my online life, hopefully. And, I certainly hope I never become one of those Facebook-obsessed individuals who are online all the time. I do have a life outside of the Internet and proud of it!