Well put

Kuj Seher de loke zalim san
Kuj mainon jeen da shauk vi si

Nadeem Aslam in "Maps for Lost Lovers"

Swaminathan Aiyar

I didnt know this fact about Anklesaria being his wife's maiden name .... I think it is amusing. I was a regular reader of his ToI column in India. Also the fact that he is Mani Shankar Aiyar's brother.

http://www.swaminomics.org/

Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar is a noted Indian economist and journalist. An alumnus of The Doon School and St Stephen's College, he is currently consulting editor of The Economic Times, India's leading financial daily that is part of Bennett, Coleman & Co, the same company that owns The Times Of India. Swaminathan Aiyar also writes a popular column titled, "Swaminomics" in the Times of India where he discusses economic issues pertaining to India and the world. Mr Aiyar is also a consultant with the World Bank and has published several papers with Bank officials. He was also, for many years, the India correspondent of The Economist.

Anklesaria is Mr Aiyar's second wife's maiden name and he claims to have taken on this name to exhibit some sort of equality where men will take on their wives names if wives take on their husbands. His wife, Shahnaz, is a Parsi.

Mr Aiyar hails from Tamil Nadu and is a Brahmin Iyer. However he is an Atheist by faith. Mr Aiyar's elder brother, Mani Shankar Aiyar is a politician and serves as Minister for Panchayati Raj in the Indian government. Mr Aiyar has 3 children, Pallavi, Shekhar and Rustom.

[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swaminathan_Aiyar ]

Anorexia of the Soul

This is a very apt description of my state of mind right now. (I read this in this weeks NYT - the article about the stresses of the demands of the new economy on adolescent girls).
I am very drained out at the end of Friday, having put in close to 70 hours of work in the last 5 days. I am so drained that I am unable do anything to boost my spirits or feed my soul. Feeding the soul somehow is a continuous task. 2 days off on the weekend (where you still have a corner of your brain nagging you like a watchdog timer), is not enough to even start appetizers.  How do I balance life ? Bring in less variables in any one given aspect of life so that all the equations are of manageable sizes ?

Memory

" I am struck by the way memories can be formed. This is more like ROM where there is a permanent scar, but the ROM-memory has multiple states and is read to calculate the probability of turning right."



Tiny organisms remember the way to food - 17 March 2007 - New Scientist

mmediately after an amoeba turned right, it was twice as likely to turn left as right again, and vice versa, they told a meeting of the American Physical Society meeting in Denver, Colorado, last week. This suggests that the cells have a rudimentary memory, being able to remember the last direction they had just turned in, says Robert Austin, a biophysicist at Princeton who was not involved in the study.

Such memories might be laid down because of the way the cell moves. To turn, an amoeba extends part of its body in the preferred direction, which creates a scar made of protein down that side of the cell. The scar might make the cell temporarily more likely to move in the opposite direction. For the amoeba, the pay-off is that it avoids travelling in circles and hence can search a larger area.

powered by performancing firefox

Jilted Love

Hindi music usually portrays a jilted lover singing plaintively and totally unconsolable.
Although we see similar music in the west, we also see anger being expressed.
Do we as Indians find it difficult to accept that we are angry because we got dumped ?