When the Battle's Lost and Won

A New(er) Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 14

2010-04-24T13:32:00.000-07:00

Shall profit thee and much enrich thy book

The wellspring of thy feeling: hold thou, still,

The best and worst of all thy soul could brook,

And know thy heart as thou dost know thy will.

Soft! lest thy tongue's denial plague thy brain,

And bring to lowly dust its highest worth:

Be yet the greatest honour thou may'st gain

The honour of thy glory in thy birth.

Soft! yet admit the symbol of thy woe;

Relinquish not the hours of thy glee;

Mayhap thou'lt know, as surely thou must know,

The voice of all thy lords of poesy.

If still thy words be bounded by thy care,

Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear.

Happy birthday, Will!

A New(er) Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 13

2010-04-24T07:31:00.000-07:00

These offices, so oft as thou wilt look,

Are more than truth in beauty lost in truth:

For all the world such madness could not brook

As that which is the summer of thy youth.

Yet as thy days to winter's pole incline,

Uplift thine eyes to autumn's golden blaze;

Let all the glory of the world be thine,

Unnumber'd in the span of all thy days.

Into one moment breathe all thou hast known,

And if in all eternity there be

Another such, thou shalt not find it gone,

But biding for the splendour that was thee.

The sum of joy that all thy nature took

Shall profit thee and much enrich thy book.

A New(er) Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 12

2010-04-22T12:29:00.000-07:00

To take a new acquaintance of thy mind

I had not thought: art thou that wayward she

To whom with heart and spirit I inclin'd?

Art thou the soul of all my poesy?

I knew thee not when first I spoke thy name:

I scant could know the path I chose to tread

Were all the incense to thy hallow'd fame

Burnt to thy god of errantry instead.

I knew thee not; I know thee, now, too well:

I cannot plumb the fathoms of my grief

In words: there are no words this tale to tell.

There is no physic here to bring relief.

And yet, for thee, and thee alone, I brook

These offices, so oft as thou wilt look.

A New(er) Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 11

2010-04-21T10:25:00.000-07:00

Those children nursed, deliver'd from thy brain,

Deliver us, as gloriously as thou,

To whom we raise our votive song in vain:

Thou, all the past and future, aid us now!

Thy song, thine art, thy laurel's verdant green,

Are all we seek: let all our will be thine;

Thou god of light and fire, archer keen,

Our all is number'd to thy voice divine.

Let but thy Muse a single moment stay,

And give us tongue to offer in thy praise:

Do thou, bright rider of the gleaming day,

Light on us all thy music in thy rays.

As one to thee entreaties now inclin'd:

To take a new acquaintance of thy mind.

A New(er) Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 10

2010-04-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find

More hours in the substance of each day,

More graces in each hour to grace inclin'd,

Than all the best and worst of earth-wrought clay.

Speak not for Muses' art: that gift is thine,

And doubly honour'd now, since doubly won;

Surrender not to visions, though divine:

What hearken they whose mortal race is run?

But if for thee, and for thyself alone,

His golden lyric note thou fain would'st hear,

Then hold thy will to all his godlike tone:

Yet own not aught to thee was held more dear.

Seek, then; and if he will it, not in vain,

Those children nursed, deliver'd from thy brain.

A New(er) Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 9

2010-04-19T10:31:00.001-07:00

And this one brings it up to speed...

Look what thy memory cannot contain:

And if thy silence yet thy choice uphold,

Then be the sum of argument in vain;

Then let thy rhyming be thy fool-wrought gold.

What claimeth part in mortal weal and woe

Who mocketh those who kneel his grace to seek?

If knowing is foreknowing, doth he know

The darkness of the vengeance he must wreak?

The favour of his cruelty is bright,

And dark the sunlit valley of his glee:

Though still his lyre all thy soul delight,

It speaketh of the sorrow that is thee.

The awful glory of his art enshrin'd

Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find.

A New(er) Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 8

2010-04-19T09:56:00.000-07:00

Time's thievish progress to eternity,

As more than number'd in the sum of days,

More certain is: as immortality

Abound upon those prophet-trodden ways;

In silent chorus let thy virgins sing:

Be all the wealth of all their virtue thine:

Yet all for naught. How should that honour bring

To thee his lyre's music, though divine?

Then make thy choice: not seer's sacred part

Is offer'd thee, nor glory to thy name;

But in the splendour of the Muse's Art,

Thy soul be all, and all that thou mayst claim.

If yet thou speak'st of honour and disdain,

Look what thy memory cannot contain.

A New(er) Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 7

2010-04-19T07:45:00.001-07:00

Still catching up...

Thou by thy dial's shady stealth mayst know

What days awaken with their fleeting time:

Yet if thou wilst but will it, will it so,

That all thy truth were honour'd in one clime.

What is that truth whose worth thou countest such

That all the past and all the future pale

To this the word thou lovest over-much?

Wouldst thou deny thine all that thou art frail?

If for thy gift thou mournest, wilst thou hold

A mocking future higher than thine all,

And all upon thy word, in wisdom told,

Be this too great a burden? Cities fall.

Yet thou mayst measure in thy prophecy

Time's thievish progress to eternity.

A New(er) Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 6

2010-04-18T02:28:00.000-07:00

Two days behind... But that's no reason not to catch up now.

Of mouthed graves will give thee memory

A fraction of a fraction of thy days:

Yet if thou wilst endure eternity,

Mayhap thou'lt find Apollo in his blaze.

Speak, Mortal, thou who knowest the divine:

Wert thou above the vengeance of the god,

A brighter fate might evermore be thine;

Speak of the shaded shores that thou hast trod.

Speak, from those shores, of monarchs yet to rise,

Of ships that have not sailed the stormy sea:

A thousand generations ope their eyes

And find a past and future all in thee.

The hours that pass uncounted as they go

Thou by thy dial's shady stealth mayst know.

A New(er) Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 5

2010-04-15T10:32:00.000-07:00

The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show

I will not see: swift let my senses fail

Ere I the paleness of thy cheek must know

And own it truth that thou art mortal-frail.

Or, if my traitor eyes must look to thine,

And seek thy ravag'd splendour in thy gaze,

Then ere I see the proof of thy decline

Dark come the night upon my earthbound days.

I would not bide where thou art not; and thou,

The sum of glories more than I can name,

Canst never be but as thou bidest now:

Then let my spirit's weakness be my shame.

Mayhap the dawns that I will never see

Of mouthed graves will give thee memory.

Yes, I know, italicizing 'thee' is cheating...

A New(er) Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 4

2010-04-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

And of this book this learning mayst thou taste:

That, compassed in one moment's heaving life,

Nor love nor honour so the living grac'd

As when the poet sang immortal strife.

To deathless glory swift the legions ride;

Could action spell the measure of their time,

Then endless would their memories abide,

And votive flame displace an idle rhyme.

Yet, what from hour to hour we cannot tell,

Nor own the past can of its past reveal,

That knowledge from those words we must impel:

The smallest part of what our days conceal.

Go, number this, and count, that none mayst know

The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show.

A New(er) Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 3

2010-04-13T22:41:00.000-07:00

And I'm a bit late with this one.

The vacant leaves thy mind's imprint will bear,

But cannot hold the measure of thy soul;

When word to word eternity declare,

Let this one moment all thy worth extol.

The glory of a thousand burning suns

Though still the Muse can summon, and impart,

The storied path of mortal actions runs

Beyond the splendour of a mortal's Art.

Be thou the first: what can the poet say,

Save that he praise the honour of thy name?

There is no verse compos'd of earthly clay

T' outdo the self-styled worth of all thy fame.

Thine actions speak what minstrels have not trac'd:

And of this book, this learning mayst thou taste.

A New(er) Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 2

2010-04-12T08:54:00.000-07:00

Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste

Discovers, ere the questing eye can see

Thine unforgiving years upon thee trac'd,

Or mourn the sacred ruin that was thee.

Yet, though the world regret thy fleeting day,

And ponder on its hours, unnumber'd, brief,

I find no sorrows come my heart to weigh,

Nor bow my head beneath their load of grief.

What's fallen, that my sonnet cannot raise?

What lost, that cannot find the world anew?

Eternal odes if writ to speak thy praise,

What pow'r shall keep thee hid from mortal view?

But let me raise to thee this simple air:

The vacant leaves thy mind's imprint will bear.

A New(er) Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 1

2010-04-11T06:59:00.000-07:00

And just to make it harder this time, a corona on LXXVII.

Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear:
Wilst thou regret the waning of thy grace?
It is not for thy cheek, though wondrous fair,
Thou art remember’d of the mortal race.
Defended from the workings of the moon,
Relentless in her chase from night to night,
Nor thou nor I can hold thy virgin bloom,
Nor still the sun in his eternal flight.
If in the fading splendour of thy gaze
A spark of all thy knowing linger still,
Then let thy uncontained thoughts upraise
A higher monument to mark thy will.
Thy page will tell the learning thou hast traced,
Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians

2010-02-20T05:28:00.000-08:00

Chris Columbus has hit on a good thing, on the whole. I must admit that, although I fully intend to spend the next few hundred words being humorous at his expense. Greek mythology always provides plenty of opportunity for swordfights and screaming monsters and the latest special effects, and by adapting Rick Riordan (1964 - present) instead of Homer (circa 850 B.C.) Columbus is avoiding the classical-scholarly nitpicking that generally follows epic cinema.

One cannot, for instance, find fault with him for giving Athena children of her own. (One can find fault with Riordan for writing that, but that is a different thing altogether.) Those who are likely to quibble about the movie not being true to the book are, in this instance, likely to be too busy quibbling over the book not being true to Ancient Greece to worry about which background character has had his lines taken away to make room for a few more beasties.

That said, there were occasions when a bit of common sense would have helped.

I understand that if one of the main characters in the book is described as the daughter of Athena, there isn't too much you can do about it. But when you mention the Nashville, Tennessee reconstruction of the Parthenon, when you have your three main characters walk into it and see a statue of Athena Parthenos and then have one of them call her 'Mummy'... then you are simply asking to look ridiculous.

You had the whole of the United States to choose from for your unscheduled special effects, and you went out of your way to select a replica of the temple that is named for Athena's virginity? That's too ludicrous even to be ironic.

Then there was the Council of the Gods. It was very nicely put together - and I was not particularly disappointed that Riordan's 'modernized' versions of the Immortals' dress sense had been ignored. I also know that when you're making a children's movie you have to give Hermes more clothes than Classical sculptors did - but wouldn't a tunic have done just as well? Did you have to put him in what looked like a leather breastplate? Why on earth would Immortals need breastplates? Even if there is a strong possibility that they'll be at war with each other soon, I'm guessing that with the kind of weapons they use, mortal armour won't do much good.

Anyway, when you do have a council of the Twelve Olympians in a movie, your first instinct is to try to figure out who is who. So when Zeus and Poseidon are all set to get nasty, and one of the Goddesses gets up and says something along the lines of, "Is war always the answer?" you think it must be either Aphrodite or Hestia.

Then a headcount tells you that it can't be Hestia. Right, Aphrodite, then.

Oh, no, wait. Somebody just called her "Athena".

Athena? Are you serious, Chris Columbus? The whole movie you've gone on about how she's the Goddess of wisdom and warcraft, and when she gets up to talk down two very powerful Gods who are on the brink of causing the end of the world as we know it, the best argument she can come up with is to wonder whether war is always the answer? Really?

In contrast, here is Homer's Athena asking Zeus for mercy for Odysseus:

O Sire! Supreme of deities,
Aegisthus pass'd his fate and had desert
To warrant our infliction; and convert
May all the pains such impious men inflict
On innocent sufferers to revenge as strict,
Their own hearts eating. But that Ithacus,
Thus never meriting, should suffer thus,
I deeply suffer.

It goes on for a while, and I won't quote it all; suffice it to say that the argument is more persuasive than, "Is ruining Odysseus's life always the answer?"

There's only one more thing that I absolutely must comment on. When Percy Jackson encounters Medusa, he deals with her in much the same manner that his namesake did - cutting off her head and wrapping it up just in case it should prove useful.

The classical Perseus immediately found a use for the head by giving it to Athena to put in her shield, thereby earning the favour of a powerful Goddess and ridding himself of an inconvenient piece of baggage. The book suggests that Percy Jackson's mother used it to deal with his vile and malodorous stepfather.

In the movie the head is left in Percy's mother's refrigerator, on which Percy then sticks a warning note. The result, in a house containing a meddlesome and selfish drunkard, is predictable.

Once again, I understand that Hollywood may not like to have good guys deliberately turning anybody other than the designated bad guys to stone. But couldn't he have thought of something better to do with Medusa's head? Give it to Athena to put in her shield again, perhaps? Leave it next to Medusa's body? Burn it? Why would any sane person want that thing in their refrigerator?

And if you're doing that, where do you get off calling Hades a weirdo?

The Greek Verb

2010-01-09T09:00:00.001-08:00

The Greek verb (as I am told by the estimable C.A.E. Luschnig) has more than its fair share of everything. After an hour's worth of conjugations and struggling over three voices and some verbs that lack, of all things, the Active Voice, I am inclined to agree.

But it's all worth it, because the Greek verb also leads to more than its fair share of exciting discoveries. (I daresay the same can be said for the Greek noun, but I've not got that far yet.)

Take the word paideuo, for instance. (I'm going to go ahead and do the best I can with transliterating, asking pardon in advance from Euripides.) It means, "I educate," which is all very well; the thing I thought was most important is that it is derived from paidos, or "child". Leaving aside the fact that apparently the ancient Greeks did not believe in adult education, it makes you wonder. Because the Hindi word for "educate" is similar... So you would think there would also be a related Hindi word for "child", but offhand I can't think of one, or at least nothing that is in common use.

Then there's pempo, which is, "I send." The closest English derivative the textbook comes up with is "pomp" (apparently the root Latin/Greek word meant "procession"; you can see the logic). But if you cross half a continent, Telugu gives you a near-identical word that means precisely the same as the Greek.

Admittedly, these are scarcely new discoveries; but it's one thing to read an essay about the proto-Indo-European language (I think I have the term right), and another to see the certainty of its existence revealed word by word. You feel every bit as thrilled as a physicist who has measured the Big Bang, and you have the added advantage of being able to see the origins of language without having to build a Large Hadron Collider and have people accuse you of wanting to poke holes in the fabric of space-time.

Happy New Year.

Fifteen Really Good Books

2009-05-15T08:53:00.000-07:00

I started out making a list of my five favourite books. Couldn't decide, even after leaving out plays to make my life easier. So I increased it to ten. Still couldn't decide. Then I made it fifteen... And, faced with possibility of fifteen turning into twenty, I abandoned the idea of enumerating my favourite books and listed instead fifteen Really Good Books (henceforth RGBs).

Oh, and all these opinions are mine alone.

They are (in alphabetical order):

Animal Farm (1945)

Author: George Orwell

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Its just-plausible-enough-to-be-eerie atmosphere, Boxer and Muriel.

Impact on Modern Culture: Beast would not have occasioned his guards half as much merriment if he had been sitting in his cell reading 1984 in that X-Men episode.

Most Memorable Line: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Dr. Seuss's A-B-C (1963)

Author: Theodor Geisel

Best Thing(s) about the Book: You learn the alphabet and you find out what a fiffer-feffer feff looks like.

Impact on Modern Culture: Well, eventually kids have to learn that A can stand for more exciting things than "Apple".

Most Memorable Line: "Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo."

Gone with the Wind (1936)

Author: Margaret Mitchell

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Its Really Good Heroine.

Impact on Modern Culture: It gives actresses an option other than "Lady Macbeth" when they are asked to name their dream role.

Most Memorable Line: "My dear, I don't give a damn."

The Iliad (circa 800 BC)

Author: Homer (we hope; and if the wrong man has been getting the credit for twenty-eight centuries it might be a bit too late to do anything about it)

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Kleos, Hector and the Fury of Achilles.

Impact on Modern Culture: The Ban-Poetic-License Brigade would be out of work if they didn't have to spend their time proving that there really couldn't have been that many Greek soldiers at Troy.

Most Memorable Line: (In Chapman's translation) "Infinite is that I offer you,/Myself conferring it, expos'd alone to all your odds,/Only imploring right of arms. Achilles, fear the gods."

Inferno (1308 - 1321)

Author: Dante Alighieri

Best Thing(s) about the Book: That Circle of Ice. Somehow it is far more terrifying than all the previous rings combined.

Impact on Modern Culture: "The lowest circle of hell is reserved for traitors and mutineers," said Captain Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. I don't know if he was in fact refering to Dante, but all indicators are that he is surprisingly erudite.

Most Memorable Line: (In Longfellow's translation) "Cruel indeed art thou, if yet thou grieve not,/Thinking of what my heart foreboded me,/And weep'st thou not, what art thou wont to weep at?"

The Lord of the Rings (1954)

Author: JRR Tolkien

Best Thing(s) about the Book: That nice mythic down-spiral that just manages not to be depressing.

Impact on Modern Culture: The twentieth century had its full quota of Elves and epic journeys and everyone in New Zealand got to have their name mentioned on stage at the Kodak Theatre.

Most Memorable Line: "And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise."

Making Money (2007)

Author: Terry Pratchett

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Lord Vetinari

Impact on Modern Culture: It turns banking into a profession that does not always employ geeks.

Most Memorable Line: "'That is almost ten tons of gold,' said Bent reproachfully. 'It does not have to look big.'"

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

Author: Agatha Christie

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Poirot's trials with those vegetable marrows. Seriously. That is such a brilliantly incongruous image.

Impact on Modern Culture: People (or at least Pierre Bayard) wrote books about whether or not Agatha Christie was accurate in her identification of the culprit. And it's not even a hundred years old yet.

Most Memorable Line: "I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone."

The Pickwick Papers (1837)

Author: Charles Dickens

Best Thing(s) about the Book: It gives you the pleasure of Dickens without the starving orphans.

Impact on Modern Culture: It has a syndrome named after it - what more could a book ask for? (And, on a more serious note, this was probably the first real attempt anyone made at selling secular book-related merchandise. I doubt they realized that they were setting out on a road that would eventually have "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter" as one if its main stops.)

Most Memorable Line: "Lawyers hold that there are two kinds of particularly bad witnesses - a reluctant witness, and a too-willing witness; it was Mr. Winkle's fate to figure in both characters."

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

Author: Oscar Wilde

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Unquestionably, indubitably, Dorian himself.

Impact on Modern Culture: They had someone delightfully, amorally evil for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and without being reduced to introducing Mephistopheles (which would have been cheating). Although, to be honest, Stuart Townsend is not quite what I imagined when I read the book.

Most Memorable Line: "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless."

Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Author: Jane Austen

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Mr. Bennet. That's the kind of man who would have been a sore trial to his wife and a delight to everyone else.

Impact on Modern Culture: Austen gives us the original rebellious tomboy (who, of course, settles down eventually).

Most Memorable Line: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Author: P.G. Wodehouse

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Mr. Spink-Bottle addressing the scholars of Market Snodsbury Grammar School.

Impact on Modern Culture: Anybody who volunteers to do a book-reading to any audience anywhere in the world has a nice safe fall-back option just in case everything else gets booed.

Most Memorable Line: I don't think it would be strictly legal to quote the entire book, so I'm just going to skip this part.

The Three Musketeers (1844)

Author: Alexandré Dumas

Best Thing(s) about the Book: The original swashbuckler.

Impact on Modern Culture: Anyone who claims not to have heard phrases from the book used, and abused, and then some, is either exceptionally fortunate or exceptionally tolerant.

Most Memorable Line: I hate to have to say this, but, "All for one, one for all." You can't blame Dumas for the fact that it has been done to death.

Vanity Fair (1848)

Author: William Makepeace Thackeray

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Becky Sharpe. Well, it's very difficult to like her, but you have to admit that without her it wouldn't have been much of a story.

Impact on Modern Culture: People who want to make movies or write books in which you don't really like anybody and honestly don't care if nobody has a happy ending now have the perfect excuse: they can look injured and say, "But critics didn't mind when Thackeray did it."

Most Memorable Line: "Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?"

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)

Author: A.A. Milne

Best Thing(s) about the Book: Pooh Bear and his hunny.

Impact on Modern Culture: Without a doubt, Bertie Wooster's comments on Christopher Robin going hoppity-hop-hop.

Most Memorable Line: "PLES RING IF AN RNSER IS REQIRD. PLEZ CNOK IF AN RNSR IS NOT REQID." (All right, I'm not which of the books that one's from, but a line that makes you remember the spelling mistakes has to be a good line.)

The Antiquity You Miss

2009-05-09T01:05:00.000-07:00

I'd never have thought there could be an argument, even a foolish, fallacious, just-to-be-the-devil's-advocate argument, against plunging oneself wholly and unabashedly into classical Greek literature. But there is a danger, and even in lauding those incomparable poets and playwrights you spring the trap.

Homer's Hellas is no part of the Balkan peninsula, not even geographically. How can you apply a word normally seen in the firm black print of the modern cartographer to the orderly wildness of his ancient world? How can you possibly call Achilles or Perseus or Helen "Balkan"? And yet there is a Balkan peninsula, one whose stories you will never know if you have not ventured further north than Illyria (and that only in company with the exiled Alexander).

And so, even when the crags of Illyria are described, although you have a vague idea of jagged mountains dark against the night sky, it is still Artemis in her chariot in that sky, because it is still Homer's world. And the Oracle of Dione takes on something of the quality of the Pythian shrine at Delphi: the slightly amused, slightly mocking, ultimately benevolent nature of the god.

North of that? You do not know; you imagine a few nebulous uninhabited mountains and then you are happily feeling the cold breath of Boreas and watching the Viking longboats, regretting only that so few of their ancient writings are extant.

But if you are forced, just for a moment, to abandon the sophists and go south of Poland instead of north of Greece, it is different. The crags, free of the association with Arcadian meadows, are more threatening, the moon is the symbol of things darker and more dangerous than a virgin goddess, and Dione is suddenly Dione as she was when the world was under Kronos. War is the bloody struggle that accompanied the spread of the Ottoman Empire, more terrifying in its savagery than the epic heroism that was the fall of Troy.

Does this make you want to abandon Euripides and Sophocles? Not in the least. But it does give you an odd chill, because sometimes the inventiveness of human beings is far more terrible than the wrath of gods. It does make you wonder what might have been.

Voting in Mumbai

2009-05-01T07:11:00.000-07:00

Normally I wouldn't post about things like this - poets and politics, and all that, and what happened to Ovid is a matter of public record. (He annoyed Augustus - or, I suppose, annoyed Livia - and was exiled, a dismal fate for one whose work depended on access to the libraries of Rome.)

However, having been exceedingly funny at the expense of the Election Commission when interesting things happened with my voter registration form, it's only fair to give them a tip-of-the-hat when they get things right.

April 30 was assuredly a thing they got right.

I will admit than when I first heard that the electoral rolls in the polling booths would be on paper, I was appalled. I think my reaction was something like, "Books? You mean actual books? But there are millions of people in the city! It'll be like having to sort through hundreds of phone books. I'll be in line for ever." I finished with a sort of despairing wail.

It wasn't as bad as all that - in fact, it wasn't bad at all.

I planned to leave home at eight-thirty, actually left at ten to nine, and was pointed in the right direction by helpful policemen. When I got to the polling station, there was a man sitting at a table outside. He had four books. Four very slim books. If they had been stacked one on top of another, an ant standing on a pencil would probably have been able to see over the pile.

He was helping some people find their names, but, once he had established that I was literate, he didn't make me wait while he finished with them. He gave me a book with the injunction to locate my own name (which took ten minutes or so, but that was entirely my fault, since the first time around I forgot to check the last page for the supplementary list).

Then I went in. State name to chap with list, chap repeats name to confirm, chap examines driving license, ink spot on finger. The Electronic Voting Machine was concealed from view by an upturned carton with the bottom and one side cut off, which, when you get down to it, is every bit as effective as reinforced concrete walls (provided, of course, that there is no danger of a strong wind). The EVM was easy to use - locate name of candidate, press button - and that was it.

I was back home, to my own astonishment, at nine-fifteen.

Sure, it would have rated far higher on the coolness scale to have had biorhythm sensors identifying people as they went in and voice-activated voting machines recording their choices. But until someone finds a cheap way to manufacture several hundred thousand of those, the system works pretty well.

A New Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 14

2009-04-24T08:42:00.000-07:00

Others abide our question. Thou art free.

Thou art the all we seek; more skill is thine.

How may we praise thy name? The all of thee

We know is praise, in honour more divine.

No words could tell, save only thine alone,

Nor verse, unless the offspring of thy mind,

The height and depth of glory thou hast known;

And ne'er in course of years from thence declin'd.

Live on as thou hast livèd: never now,

Shalt thou, by passing hours to ill betray'd,

Lose, in the smallest part, the grace which thou

Now hast. Thy seasons' splendour cannot fade.

So long, thy stage may say, as Men can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Sorry, Matthew Arnold... I could not resist. It was too strong a temptation.

I never imagined myself saying this, but thank God it is over. One thing these two weeks have taught me - it must have taken more than mortal skill to write 154 sonnets.

Ah, and happy birthday, Will!

A New Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 13

2009-04-23T08:06:00.000-07:00

Uncounted men have chased thee; fair thou smilest,

Full bright the stars upon thy waters shine.

From shrouding mists thou callest and beguilest:

What art thou that this sorcery is thine?

Alone, untried, into that dark unknowing,

Where cold the tempests' furies mask the sun:

Who went before and knew not in his going

That none undid what thou in rage hadst done?

Who went before, and honour'd not thy splendour?

Who heard the sea-gull's cry and turn'd away?

Though in thy gentle loving softly tender,

Thou art as wrathful as thou e'er art fey.

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

None, once enthrall'd, shall walk apart from thee.

The female rhyme was only meant to be for the first quatrain, but then it simply refused to go away.

A New Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 12

2009-04-22T07:51:00.000-07:00

Wilst thou in cold unfeeling cloak thy grace,

Thy beauty never bar'd to mortal gaze?

What shall 't avail thee if no single trace

Of thy perfection liveth on in phrase?

Not Time's hard sickle may thy splendour steal,

Nor from thy cheek e'er rob the damask'd rose;

Yet may the years in some small part conceal

Thy fair enchantment 'neath their outward shows.

Indulge thy poet, sweet, who would but write

A hundredth part of what thy beauty owest;

Thus may the world still hold thee in its sight

When in eternal lines to time thou growest.

What would the world forfeit, could it not see,

Held in these lines, the wonder that is thee?

That's three quatrains down! And the only thing that kept me from giving up after the fifth one was (if I may be politically incorrect):

There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.

-Terry Pratchett

A New Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 11

2009-04-21T08:51:00.000-07:00

Begin, O poet, with this single line,

And let thy metre fall and swiftly rise:

Mayhap, twixt verse and verse, the high design

Of Gods shall be revealèd to thine eyes.

Shouldst thou unknown, unhonour'd, sing and die,

Bereav'd in death of what thy life hath wrought,-

Still hast thou raised thy music to the sky,

Still hast thou writ, and seen: still hast thou sought.

Should thy bright years by fortune be betrayed,

Thou shalt not in not knowing be unknown:

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

What hand and mind have made outlasteth stone.

Write on, then, poet: write, and rest at ease.

None e'er found sorrow in his poesies.

A New Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 10

2009-04-20T09:18:00.000-07:00

Most fair, most true, wilst even thou forsake

Thy path? Then never grace to living Men

Was giv'n of that high bounty to partake

That heroes know. What here remaineth then?

Let not their counsel turn thee who, afraid,

Would let "We dare not" wait upon "we would":-

None was by aught save turning back betray'd

Who in the face of storms unflinching stood.

Thy days shall not of glory cede one spark,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

In silent safety harbour not thy bark:

But follow, and, in chasing, know thou knowest.

Beyond the circling sea a brighter shore

Doth wait, where never foot hath trod before.

I suppose this is what comes of trying to write sonnets in the small hours. I simply could not resist winking at that much-maligned cat.

A New Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 9

2009-04-19T08:01:00.000-07:00

Farewell! No more, through all my weary days,

Shall I upon thy beauty cast mine eye;

Though I may still address to thee my praise,

No more shalt thou in merry jest reply.

E'en now, thou gone, upon my longing ear

Thy laughter and thy whispers seem to fall;

Thou, best belov'd, shalt daily grow more dear;

All splendour else may with the seasons pall,

But thy eternal summer shall not fade:

Time cannot touch thee in thy hallow'd rest.

All else his sickle's malice may invade,

But thou hast fell'd him in his fell arrest.

Though ta'en from me, e'en in defeat art thou

The victor yet: he cannot harm thee now.

A New Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 8

2009-04-18T06:51:00.000-07:00

I lov'd thee once; no lyres sang in Hell,

No bridges spann'd the expanse of the sea,

None dar'd, none fought, none brav'd the rolling swell

With brighter flame than what I bore for thee.

Some honour most the beauty that is fled,

Rememb'ring e'er the gleaming gaze now dimm'd;

Some seek a semblance of their ardour, dead,

By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd.

Thou hast not chang'd in beauty; in thine eyes,

Still do the fairest stars of heaven shine.

Had they in slightest part regain'd the skies,

My heart had ever hunger'd after thine.

Thou art the same: then fault it is in me

To value less the grace I daily see.

A New Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 7

2009-04-17T07:59:00.000-07:00

Most potent and most mighty! Who can bear

To touch thy laurel? With what feeble gleam

Shall lesser stars the paths of godhead dare?

And wilst thou e'en ignoble pride beteem?

Thou drivest through the circle of the signs,

And swift the seasons wreak their wonted ill;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

Yet liveth on unchangèd, by thy will.

Nor to thy wreath, nor to thy golden lyre,

We lay, in base presumption, mortal claim:

If to thy lofty heights we e'er aspire,

We seek no more than honour to thy name.

We seek thee, not for glory, not for pelf;

Thou, mocking, sayest: Mortal, know thyself.

Halfway through - and this has been the hardest of the lot so far! Who would have thought that, "And every fair from fair sometime declines," would prove so troublesome?

A New Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 6

2009-04-16T07:31:00.000-07:00

More valour and more grace the poet's art

Hath giv'n to thee, more courage, than was thine;

Thou hadst but mortal longings in thy heart:

Thou wast a Man. He fashion'd thee divine.

Betimes the hero stumbles on his path,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd.

Belike of earthy temper was thy wrath,

Nor with the raging fires of godhead brimm'd.

Yet thou hast dream'd, and dar'd, and thou hast done,

And why are mortal hands accounted low?

Who once has gaz'd upon the noonday sun,

Hath solace in the hearth he us'd to know.

If thou couldst not to mortal blood confess,

Thy deeds were equal, and thy spirit less.

A New Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 5

2009-04-15T07:49:00.000-07:00

Had I but known our moments would be brief,

That deathless joy will soonest end in woe,

Mayhap it had some fraction eas'd my grief

To say, my love, I never lov'd thee so.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And thou art yet more ardent than that blaze;

Hadst thou been made a sprite of gentler climes,

I might have dared to love thee all my days.

But thou art glory as thou art a scourge:

Too low to curse, too high for mortal praise;-

Thou art the paean and thou art the dirge,

And who shall dare to meet thy fulgent gaze?

Had I but known,- I would have lov'd thee still:

Mine is my heart, but thou hast own'd my will.

Also (as a respite from the endless iambs):

I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write.

-P.G. Wodehouse

He certainly had a way with it.

A New Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 4

2009-04-14T05:12:00.001-07:00

Here once the monarch trod in regal pride;

Here once the hero sought his hallow'd fate;

But nothing past its season doth abide,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

Upon these silent shores no sun shall rise

In glory like to what the past hath known;

None to the starry vault shall raise his eyes

And see his gilded pennants proudly flown.

What second dawn shall come? What poet's air

Shall tell of deeds of greatness bravely done?

What empty page those brighter lays shall bear

Of crowns and sceptres lost, of kingdoms won?

No laurels now, save this, alone, we owe:

The earth is still. May 't not be ever so.

A New Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 3

2009-04-13T08:08:00.000-07:00

There is more life in twilight than in day,

More heat in Autumn's blush than Summer's bloom:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May;

September's breezes bear the fruits' perfume.

Regret not that the seasons fleet, nor sigh,

Nor weep upon the grave of summer's light;

What shall 't avail thee if thou dost deny

The crownèd splendour of the winter night?

Upon that barren beauty cast thine eyes,

Which, like the jasmine 'neath the sickle moon,

Is fairest seen by starlight; nor disprize

A bright December for a fickle June.

Then, as the year shall urge the seasons past,

Each month for gladness shall outweigh the last.

A New Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 2

2009-04-12T05:23:00.000-07:00

Thou art no Sylph of air and fire wrought;

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

For thee there are no epic battles fought:

Thou hast a kinder and a gentler fate.

Regret not that thou hast no gallant knight,

Nor sigh for duels told for aye in song;-

Thou shalt not go unsung into the night.

Though beauty fleets, thy beauty shall be long.

Thou shalt not plunge a House in death and blood,

Nor see thy nation torn in battle's rage;

No thousand ships shall ride the Spartan flood

To write thy story on a darksome page.

Thou art no fair to harrow and destroy:

Thou art the fair of wisdom and of joy.

A New Acquaintance of Thy Mind: Day 1

2009-04-11T06:21:00.000-07:00

Fourteen days. Fourteen lines. Fourteen sonnets. (And, I hope, Shakespeare's pardon for making merry with his work in this fashion. I promise to play with only XVIII.)

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day,

Or to the fairest morn of balmy spring?

Or, churlish out of season, shall I say

Thine not the beauty whereof I must sing?

Could I but say, and own it not a lie,

Could I but honour other names than thine,-

But what avail me though I shall deny?

Thine is my verse; naught save my will is mine.

The bloom is fading from the summer's face,

And hoar shall sweep the laurels from her brow,

But thou - no years shall mar thy sweetest grace;

Thou, kept in this, canst never alter now.

Though fading springs and passing suns shall seek,

None now shall steal the splendour from thy cheek.

On the Subject of Grammar

2009-03-19T10:15:00.001-07:00

I intend to be unreasonable. Utterly, irrefutably and unapologetically unreasonable. Because, really, the only way to deal with the threat being posed to the sanctity of language is to meet it head-on.

As far as it goes, preserving the sanctity of language need not refer to the kind of obscure pedantic quibbling that would only interest Henry Fowler and Samuel Johnson. One can pass over conjunctions that begin sentences and prepositions that cavort at their ends (and pronouns which fill in for Mephistopheles), and if one's will is firm enough one can do so without wailing and gnashing of teeth.

However, when a chap intends to say that he stood his old school friend dinner, and says instead that he indulged in cannibalism - which, in addition to being an uncouth practice that is frowned upon in civilized society, is a criminal offence that would draw the stiffest of punishments anywhere in the world - one begins to have strong doubts about the future of the human race.

The worst of it, really, is that people do not care. Tell them that "lesser books" are books whose quality is being called into question, point out that "high time" is either the time just before tempers are lost or time as measured by a giraffe on stilts, and they will look at you as though wondering how you managed to evade the mental-health authorities all this while. What is worse, they will then say, in the tone one uses to calm a hyperactive toddler, "It is all right. Really. How does it matter?"

Partly to blame, of course, is the proliferation of the Internet. I do not deny that it is a useful tool, but I can also not deny that some time ago I saw a website alleging - in cold blood; not referring to it as only one of the many legends surrounding the animal and assuredly not joking - that Bucephalas was a unicorn.

They had proof and everything.

If I had a rupee - and not a bright shiny one-rupee coin but a cheap forgery made of glued-together paper and silver paint - for every time someone has shown me a website maintained by "Cool Guy 01" or "JKSP in College" and used it to back their claim that "red" is a noun or the past tense of "beat" is "beated", I could put all the money in the bank and live comfortably on the interest for the rest of my life.

You can excuse people for not knowing the difference between "your" and "you're" (by blaming it partly on SMS for encouraging them to write "ur" either way and partly on their primary school English teachers for failing signally in their duty to the next generation), but it is difficult to condone their stubbornly continuing not to know, and for no reason other than sheer perverseness.

For some reason, people seem to think that not knowing science or mathematics is worse than not knowing grammar. This has always puzzled me; it seems incredible that being unable to state Boyle's Law would be frowned upon by a society that routinely permits supermarkets to get away with "5 Items Or Less".

Don't get me wrong. I'd be the last one to oppose the pursuit of knowledge in any form, and if a chap wants to know what colour the inside of an electron is then good luck to him. My only objection is to people using a desire to be engineers or scientists as an excuse not to learn good grammar, as though knowing where to put an apostrophe would somehow debar you from joining the Mathematics Club.

If only one could ask for donations of money and time to the Appropriate Apostrophe Society or the Proper Preposition League without subsequently being forced into expensive and unnecessary sessions with a qualified therapist.

Scrabble

2009-02-10T08:19:00.000-08:00

I love the game, honestly. Frequently of an evening you will find me engaged in an exciting and hotly-contested game of Scrabble against the computer. (The excitement is mainly provided by my determination to lose by fewer than 200 points one day.) But sometimes - for instance, when the computer places "MAZHBI" strategically on the board and makes more points with one move than I am likely to make in an entire game - I just have to give up.

Incidentally, I don't know what MAZHBI means, just as I do not know what GJU means, or CAJEPUTS, or SUQ, or any of the scores of other incomprehensible and frequently unpronounceable tile combinations that the computer has used to turn the scoreboard into something resembling a Big and Small diagram in a kindergarten classroom.

The unfairness of it all is that there is no way I can win against the brute force of the machine. By the time I have fiddled with my tiles for a couple of minutes and figured out that RETAILS is an anagram of SALTIER, the computer has evaluated about thirty thousand moves, calculated the probability that I will be able to hook onto any of them, and worked out at least five different ways to make 241 points. There is simply no way to estimate my probability of winning because science hasn't invented numbers small enough.

It really makes you long for the good old days of Scrabble according to the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, when you could feel thrilled if you made 20 points with one move.

Diamond Jubilee

2009-01-10T22:06:00.000-08:00

The paper tells me that Murder on the Orient Express is celebrating its Diamond Jubilee this year, but Wikipedia insists that such is not the case. Of course you have to keep the million-typewriters principle in mind, but Wiki's dates, at least, are likely to be correct.

It also has a list of novels whose sixtieth anniversary is this year. Most I haven't read. (Although The Queen of Zamba is now on my to-read list... Who could resist "an attempt to reconstruct [Edgar Rice Burroughs'] concept logically, without what [de Camp] regarded as Burroughs' biological and technological absurdities"?)

Of the handful I have read, these are my top picks:

5. Mr. Sampath - The Printer of Malgudi (RK Narayan): It must be confessed that I remember next to nothing about the plot, but I do remember Narayan's delightful prose. The glimpses of a forgotten world and the insight into rural India are irrelevant when compared to his deft touch and engaging storytelling. Equally engaging, if in a markedly different way, is...

4. Murder Most Royal (Jean Plaidy): Books about Henry VIII are always interesting, at the very least; the man can be accused of many things, but not of having been boring. Royal intrigues, scheming courtiers, doomed queens... What more do you need? Perhaps...

3. Crooked House (Agatha Christie): If it had been Orient Express, it would have been right at the top of the list, but Crooked House, while far more interesting than such (I regret to use the word in conjunction with Christie, but there is no other) disasters as The Big Four and Endless Night, is not of quite the same calibre as her best work... so much so that despite being virulently opposed to depressing books, I have to give the next spot to...

2. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell): I resisted reading this for years after I read Animal Farm, but it's one of those things that you eventually have to do. Normally I'd never recommend a book that makes you shiver every time you think of motion-capture cameras at traffic lights, but the very fact that it does make you shiver is a sign of Orwell's genius. This would be at Number One, were it not for...

1. The Mating Season (PG Wodehouse): Practically nothing could be a better read for a winter's day - or for that matter a summer's day, or any other kind of day - than Jeeves-and-Bertie chaos, with aunts, impostors, and Madeline Bassett's theories on what happens when a fairy sneezes (and, as a bonus, her views on Mervyn Keene, Clubman).

Incidentally, this is also (possibly) the four-hundredth anniversary year of Cymbeline (or Pericles, or perhaps both). Scholars may disagree.

Happy reading!

Our Sweetest Songs

2008-11-13T08:36:00.000-08:00

Tragedies usually make good reading – classical tragedies, at any rate. You know where you are with those, and you know that even if everyone dies in the end there will usually be some point to it. Hamlet had vengeance, Achilles had everlasting fame, Oedipus… well, at least Oedipus had the satisfaction of no longer having to keep running from his doom.

And, of course, there is the advantage that by the time you get to reading classical tragedy you’re old enough to either revel in the glory or not care about it, and at any rate it won’t depress you.

The Little Match Girl, on the other hand… That was probably the first story I read with the protagonist catching it at the end. I have nothing against Andersen. I like Andersen. All the same, I am forced to ask: is it necessary, or even wise, to tell children of impressionable years a story that effectively comes down to a poor, abused little girl freezing to death one winter night?

Children young enough to be reading it for the first time are quite likely to be unaware of even the concept of mortality yet, and what makes it worse is that it is all so pointless. What did the girl gain from her death other than a paradise that, it must be admitted, she could equally easily have attained at a ripe old age like her grandmother?

In this I approve, like Horatio, antique Roman tendencies. Literature and philosophy are entirely different things, and they need not always find their perfection in their union. Philosophy demands reason. Most of the greatest poets and writers of history are too busy rousing your blood and stirring your soul to waste time on logic. Were Orestes and Electra right or wrong to kill Clytemnestra? Does it really matter, anyway? If the playwright can make you sympathize, the playwright’s job is done.

Not even the greatest writers can keep their political and philosophical views entirely out of their works, nor should they even try. But stating views and then getting on with it is one thing. Those who set out to prove points are usually forced to chase logic with such assiduity that there is little possibility of blood-rousing and soul-stirring – much as Homer would have been, had he stopped every few paragraphs for a commentary, however neatly inserted and beautifully written, about the relative merits of desires of the flesh and excellence of the soul.

Perhaps, in this as in most things, greatness is in knowing what not to do.

Being Cassandra

2008-10-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

I was reading Mary Renault's chronicles of Alexander a few days ago, and she very specifically mentions the fact that kings should feel sorry for Hecabe.

This is all very well, and I feel Hecabe's grief as strongly as the next person, but what strikes me is that nobody ever wastes any sympathy on Cassandra. On Hector, yes, on Priam, plenty. And even though Paris generally comes in for a good number of "served him right" comments, at least he comes in for something.

Part of the problem is that Cassandra is such an insufferable know-it-all. If you had been the king who had his curtain drawn in the dead of night to be told half his Troy was burned, would you have been thrilled to have a daughter raising her hands and eyes to heaven as though to ask Apollo what he would have done if surrounded by such idiots? (Or, worse, turning back to shout, "I told you so!" as she was dragged in chains to the enemy ship?)

Cassandra's real tragic flaw is that she doesn't have one. She was the Seer fated to be disbelieved; had this been because of some girlish crime you could have winked slyly and said, "Ah, the girl's one of us!" But this was because she was so good and pure and virtuous that she refused even Apollo's advances, and commendable though this might be, it does give you the feeling that her shade is watching you from Hades with an air of pious disapproval. You can't really feel sorry for someone like that.

That, I think, is why so many people have a bit of sneaking sympathy for Clytemnestra. If your husband brought home a younger wife and she flaunted her nubile charms in the face of your mature but true affection (I'll do Clyemnestra a kindness and forget Aegisthus for the moment) you could at least have the satisfaction of calling her names. If she looked at you with large sorrowful eyes that saw every frivolity and transgression you had committed (here we bring Aegisthus back) while her city was being reduced to smoking ruins, and in all likelihood saw all the frivolities and transgressions you would commit in all the rest of your life, it would probably infuriate you even more than the bare fact of her existence.

The moral of the story? If you do know what's inside that nice big horse that the Greeks just happen to have left on the beach, don't tell people about it. They won't believe you, and when the warriors burst out of it and attack they'll only be annoyed with you for having been right.

Tolkien: Book to Screen

2008-10-10T11:47:00.000-07:00

Not to be a Tolkien Nazi (I did spring for the Extended Edition DVDs!), but there are legitimate simplifications of the plot that are necessary to take an epic to the screen, and then there are baffling alterations that leave you thinking that either the director foresaw some insurmountable wrangle that you cannot imagine or he simply wanted to play in the sandbox. My top half-dozen from Fellowship:

1. Bilbo Baggins Whining: The Bilbo in the book is a cheerful Hobbit who doesn’t snivel and who seems remarkably capable for his age and valiant after his own fashion. The Bilbo in the movie switches from senility to fecklessness to, sometimes, a combination of both. He snivels in Bag End and he snivels in Rivendell and you see in him not the slightest vestige of the happy-go-lucky protagonist of The Hobbit.

2. Aragorn Whining: The role is reasonably well scripted on the whole, but there are times when you wonder – especially after watching Bilbo snuffling over the harm the Ring has caused – why it is necessary for everyone to whine. The man is eighty-seven. He’s just a little too old for teenage angst. He knows that he is going to be King of Gondor and Arnor, and if sixty-seven years haven’t been enough for him to get over moping about something that happened three millennia ago then it’s hard to see how he’s fit to lead even a village with a population of two.

3. “If you want him, come and claim him.”: I can accept Liv Tyler as Arwen – after all, casting Arwen and Galadriel is like casting Helen of Sparta; you’re never going to please everybody. But need she ride around on Asfaloth brandishing her sword at the Nazgûl like a female Horatio Hornblower? You could, just possibly, take Galadriel riding to the rescue. Not Arwen, especially when it means no Glorfindel.

4. No Quest for the Sun: This is undeniably a bit demanding of me, but I loved that scene in the book. You can just see a disgruntled Dwarf muttering imprecations under his breath when Legolas runs off, leaving him beard-deep in snow, “to find the Sun.” What do you get instead in the movie? Twelve seconds of Elven shoes on the white stuff and a completely redundant scene about how the Ring is starting to claim Boromir.

5. Seventeen Missing Years: We know that it is the One Ring to Rule Them All and so on. All the same, the effect it had on Frodo was because he had possessed it for seventeen years; in the movie you’re left thinking it was more like seventeen days. The point about its insidious evil is that it is insidious; it doesn’t ambush you like a panther on a jungle trail.

6. Rivendell and the Hall of Fire: Yes, it’s a movie. Yes, it has to be short because if people are expected to sit in the theatre through five intermissions, they’ll probably discover more interesting things to do. All the same, a few minutes to establish that the Last Homely House was in fact home to somebody other than Elrond and Arwen would have caused no crisis. Besides, it’s all very well to create a general-purpose characterization for all Elves involving being aloof and cryptic and staring enigmatically into the distance, but without some music or art or poetry they are not really Elves.

New Hobby

2008-09-14T10:15:00.000-07:00

I’m going to start collecting old books.

Of course it sounds very cool to say – you imagine a large air-conditioned room filled with glass cases bearing a first-edition Gutenberg Bible, the very same copy of Romeo and Juliet that Shakespeare used to learn his lines, and possibly the lost plays of Sophocles.

Right. What I’m likely to end up with, if I am extremely lucky, is a couple of worm-eaten first editions from the nineteen twenties and a scrap of paper that looks aged enough for me to claim that it once belonged to Keats.

But how, when you get right down to it, do you start? Going to Crossword and asking the salesperson for an original copy of the First Folio is clearly a bad idea (especially if, as is no doubt the case, some enterprising person in this latter day has written a novel entitled First Folio about how reading the twenty-third line of each play in reverse chronological order will prove that the Dark Lady of the Sonnets was really Cleopatra in disguise).

The ideal – and Calvin-esque – way to begin, naturally, would be to print TIME MACHINE on the side of a large cardboard box, sit inside it, mutter strangely, and emerge an hour later with Cardenio under your arm.

Unfortunately that only works in comic strips.

I could go to Christie’s or Sotheby’s and buy whatever was coming up for auction. I could also have myself declared Empress of the Universe, and appropriate all old books everywhere on earth in the name of intergalactic peace or defending ourselves against the Bonga-Bongas planning to attack from Dimension X or something.

Yup. I think that would be best.

You Are Young, Foolish Trader

2008-09-07T05:09:00.000-07:00

With apologies, once more, to Mr. Dodgson:

“You are young, foolish Trader,” the shrewd sage said,

“And you clearly have mountains to learn;

You speak about Ratios, Values and Spread –

Do you plan by this money to earn?”

“I was told,” then the Trader replied to the sage,

“By a teacher both clever and wise

That when you’ve no knowledge the Markets to gauge,

These numbers can bolster your lies!”

“You are young,” said the sage, “and have not yet been trained,

So that first folly I will forgive –

Yet you think all this chaos in books is explained!

Will your job your psychosis outlive?”

“In my college they taught us,” the Trader replied,

“That the answers in books are but few,

But you cannot go wrong with a book as your guide –

For this secret is known just to you.”

“You are young,” said the sage, “and in ignorance speak,

And your brain little learning does hold;

Yet you forecast the state of the Markets each week –

Don’t you think that is fearfully bold?”

“You can learn in each B-School that merits the name

There’s a price for refusing to guess,

And as long as you’ve thought of a scapegoat to blame,

The price of an error is less.”

“You are young,” said the sage, “and I venture to say

There are things even you do not know;

Yet you rival a scholar whose temples are grey

In conceit; tell me, how is this so?”

“I have answered three questions; I’ll answer no more,”

Said the Trader, “I will not partake

Of this half-witted dialogue. There is the door –

Be off! I’ve Excel sheets to make.”

Sparkie and the Vertically Different Brotherhood: Part III

2008-03-03T09:06:00.000-08:00

The Vertically Different Brothers returned from their day’s labour to find Sparkie spread-eagled on the floor. Try as they might, they could not wake her.

Vertically Different Brother Grumpy (who had never been fond of Sparkie and had strongly resisted all her attempts to make him change his name to Temperamentally Different) said, “Well, what now? Anyone fancy running like the wind to the fairy godmother’s cottage and asking her to sort it out?”

The Brothers stood in uncomfortable silence. None of them wanted to be the first to point out that running like the wind through ten miles of thick forest shrubbery was the kind of thing meant for people who were Vertically Different in the opposite direction.

“I propose,” Vertically Different Brother Doc said at last, “that we start a campaign. It’s what Sparkie would have done. The Queen is responsible for this, and the Queen must find a way to wake her.”

The Brothers built a plinth outside their house and laid Sparkie on it, and then stood around it brandishing boards demanding that the Queen send for the most experienced fairy godmothers in the realm to cure Sparkie. Along with them were two deer, a brown dog, a parrot, three cats and a duck, all of whom stood to have hard-won rights revoked if Sparkie were not there to plead their cause.

However, since gold does not mine itself, the Vertically Different Brothers had to abandon their vigil after a couple of days and return to their shovels and pickaxes. They were swiftly followed by the three cats, who decided that in any case dozing on warm rugs with saucers of cream was more important than having the right to their own law board.

By the time the lone figure on the proud black stallion approached the glade, it was empty except for Sparkie’s prone form and the parrot.

As the horse neared, it was possible to see that the rider was the kind of man who would never have appealed to Sparkie at all. He was probably the most different creature in all humanity. He had an imposing figure and noble bearing, and the wisdom gleaming in his sculpted face would have put Socrates to shame.

He leapt lightly from his horse.

“What fair maid is this?” he asked.

“Equal rights for feathered friends,” said the parrot, which had never been taught to say anything else.

Whither Freedom?

2008-02-05T08:34:00.000-08:00

I was reading an obit of Bobby Fischer the other day. It was a couple of pages long; after the initial mandatory homage to his phenonmenal chess-playing ability, it spent most of the two pages discussing whether his lack of friends and a wife was a sign of some form of social dysfunction.

It is an odd fact that our society, which claims to be freer and more understanding of individual desires and impulses than any has ever been before, has a name for every state that is even marginally removed from what we are conditioned to think of as normal. The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, did not even have a word for homosexuality. Why, if we have no word for people who have different preferences in the best way to cook liverwurst or enjoy the poetry of Walt Whitman, should we have a word for people who have different preferences in this?

Some of the greatest geniuses of the world were so far removed from traditional marital bliss that they wouldn't have been able to see it with the Hubble Telescope; in Byron's day the general public may have considered him eccentric, but by all accounts nobody went around after him with a notepad trying to decide in which chromosome the deficiency lay. If he had tried to curb his instincts he may never have been Byron; whether he would have been happier that way is debatable, and Romanticism would have lost one of its most exalted votaries.

The bloodletting over Alexander's empire after his death was, they say, caused because he was not sensible. If he'd been sensible he would have married before he left Macedon, or at least as soon as he entered Babylon the first time, and failing everything else he would have left his empire to someone other than kratistos. If he'd been sensible he probably would have done all those things, and he would not have tried to conquer Persia by doing battle on Darius's terrain with less than a tenth as many men as his enemy. If he'd been sensible there may have been no bloodletting over his empire simply because there may have been no empire.

Scott Adams has written a succint blog piece on the subject of what the chaps at the cutting-table would probably call being socially challenged; when the wheel really does come full circle, perhaps this will go back to being the kind of eccentricity that is good for a laugh at the local pub but otherwise harmless.

Homecoming

2008-01-16T10:02:00.000-08:00

Home to girlhood’s sweetest moments, let me now your grace implore:
From a world of gaudy glory I return to you once more,
Seeking in remembered splendours faith and courage, strength and skill.
Down the paths that I have trodden do my footsteps echo still?
Where my voice was raised in laughter, does the nymph return my glee?
Home to girlhood’s sweetest moments, are you yet a home to me?

What Are You Doing Next Year?

2007-12-31T09:29:00.000-08:00

Right, so I'm updating my blog at eleven p.m. on New Year's Eve instead of being at whichever is the coolest party going, getting happily and obliviously drunk. But then I-Bankers are supposed to have depressing excuses for lives. The markets run on January 1 as they do on December 31 and January 2.

It is, however, a valid question. It isn't New Year's resolutions I mean - everyone makes them, nobody keeps them; it's at the point where even making jokes about unkept resolutions is old.

I mean things that you know, or at least are reasonably confident, that you will do. I, for instance, can say that I am going to become a tidy and organized individual, always be fully informed and aware of what is happening, and memorize Gone With The Wind. Those are my resolutions. I can also say that I will go to work every Monday morning and sit at my desk all week, making excel sheets and piling on adipose. That is what I am doing.

There are, no doubt, people for whom the opposite is true - people who will resolve to buckle down to honest labour but will spend the year taking cruises down the Nile or following the Indian cricket team from stadium to stadium. I suppose it's all part of maintaining the balance of the world.

What are you doing next year?

Greek and War-Making in Six Easy Lessons

2007-12-02T08:53:00.000-08:00

I remember reading once in the preface to a book that the author, when in school, had been drilled so thoroughly in Latin grammar that he could have held an intelligent conversation with an ancient Roman. Recently I have been dipping into books on classical Greek; I'm not very far past the stage of being able to identify the letters but already I can tell that any conversation that is to be had can only be with Alexander, Leonidas or Agamemnon.

Normally, when learning a new language, you start by learning how to state your name and profession. Then you learn some nouns ("apple", "water", "sky" and "book", for instance), some verbs ("to talk", "to have", "to eat" or "to go") and some adjectives (like "red", "nice" and "big"). Finally you learn the rules of grammar and are able to say, "I want to eat a red apple."

The broad structure of the Greek lessons is the same, but the words are different; I cannot go to a cafe and ask for hot rolls with butter and honey, but I can - with the aid of the conjugation and declension tables - say, "I am leading the Greek army to the city."

When I had got through several pages and learnt little other than the verbs "to lead", "to plunder", "to plan" and "to send", the nouns "army", "garrison", "gate" and "city" and the adjectives "frightful" and "Greek", I couldn't resist flipping to the back. Where, in a book of Telugu, for instance, there might have been illustrations of children flying kites or elephants at a fair, there was a diagram involving many small boxes and a picture of a chariot, and bearing the label, "The Battle Formation of the Army of Cyrus".

This can only mean one of two things: either - as is more likely - the writers of these books are aware that most people learn classical Greek with a view to being able to read the Iliad or Anabasis and are unlikely ever to have to enquire after the price of a drachma of apples in Thebes, or the ancient Greeks really did teach children to lead armies and plan the defences of cities with the same enthusiasm with which we instruct kindergarten students that A is for Apple and B is for Ball.

If the second is the case, then perhaps it will eventually be possible to conduct an intelligent conversation with the average Johnny of ancient Greece - or at least to make comments like, "Brilliant use of the light cavalry," and, "I would have deployed the Thracian infantry instead," when he describes the glorious outcome of a hard-fought battle.

Jabberwocky: The True Story

2007-11-18T06:41:00.001-08:00

With apologies to Lewis Carroll, and in the hope that if he is perched on a cloud reading this, he is doing so with a tolerant and indulgent smile.

’Twas brillig; and the toves, they gyred,
The wabe, by this not uninspired,
Gimbled them most slithily.
The sun shone on the Tumtum tree.

That Tumtum tree of uffish thought
To which the Jabberwock, much sought,
At last did come with eyes of flame
And burbled madly as it came.

The beamish boy alone did stand,
The bravest knight in all the land.
Around the boy were doctors ten,
The wisest and most stern of men.

“Too much,” quoth one, “this Jabberwock!
They all recite it ’round the clock.
Each day they wake the manxome foe,
And to defeat it he must go.”

“So many times the beast to find –
No wonder it’s unhinged his mind.”
“He cuts and thrusts at empty air
While all around him stand and stare.”

E’en as they spoke, a voice was heard,
A shadow of the beast appeared.
He cut; the Jabberwock he slew,
And yet another head it grew.

Before “Callooh! Callay!” was cried,
Before the Jabberwock had died,
Another voice, another blade,
The vorpal sword anew was made.

“I know,” cried one, “what we must do!
We’ll change the words, and swiftly too.
A different ending we shall write,
A closure to this ceaseless fight.”

He said anon, “With claws that catch,
With Jubjub Bird and Bandersnatch,
The Jabberwock – a peaceful beast,
And not aggressive in the least,

“With eyes that held no trace of flame,
In willing friendship gladly came.
The vorpal blade was thrown away
And beast and man made peace that day.

“Away they went, and made a pact
That never more by heedless act
Of schoolboy would they thus be called
And in unwilling joust installed.”

They look, as one, into the wood
Where lately the combatants stood –
And see, with unbefitting shock,
No beamish boy, no Jabberwock.

Aut Insanit Homo, aut Versus Facit

2007-10-31T09:25:00.000-07:00

Someone asked me today why I like poetry. Answering that question can either be the easiest thing in the world, or the hardest.

Poetry is the food of the soul. Giving yourself to it is like being in love, only a hundred thousand times more so. It can make you feel more alive, more vital, as though you are seeing the world through a refracting glass that makes it at once grander and more terrible, heightening the joys and intensifying the woes.

A certain wonderful symmetry this world attains; if the moment is right the words on the page gain a life of their own, an improbable perfection that seems to have come from the golden lyre of Apollo himself.

The world the verses build around you is ephemeral, perhaps, but however swiftly it is gone it has enriched your life by its touch. Teresa Macri wanders through it, forever young, forever beautiful, forever the Maid of Athens. The heroes created by a hundred generations of poets are frozen in that moment of divine glory that can come to any human being only once. Even those whose tales end in tragedy are endowed with an exquisite gravity that raises them far higher than the proudest of monarchs or warriors.

It is in these immortal verses that we know what has come before, that we can read, if we are wise, what will come after. Bone fragments and pottery shards tell you how the people of the past lived, what they ate and whether or not they had domesticated the carthorse. Their poetry speaks to you of their souls, their dearest hopes and worst fears.

Archaeologists might tell you, with a certain degree of accuracy, when the Trojan War was fought. Only Homer can tell you how Achilles felt when, having chosen eternal glory over long life, he stood on the sands of Asia Minor looking at Priam's impregnable fortress. Only Homer can make you feel it yourself.

In that he is sublime, for it is to him we turn when we want to know, not the physical substance of the ancient world, but its proud, beautiful, terrible heart. He who is blind makes us see with eyes that are something more than mortal.

This, too, is how they will remember us three thousand years from now. They will not ask what kind of clothes we wore or concern themselves unduly with whether or not phytoplankton was considered a delicacy. They will turn to the works our poets, writers and artists have left behind, and read in those our innermost souls.

On the Endless Quest

2007-10-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

It's a somewhat depressing time for fans of fantasy at the moment. Harry Potter has ended, the Dragon has left us, and now that Children of Hurin is done with there's not much coming from Middle-Earth other than the possibility of another movie at some point in the nebulous future.

It is, in other words, a perfect time to indulge your own fantasies by setting off on an epic quest of your creation. If you're not particular about the merchandise rights actually being worth something, it isn't that hard.

You start by picking a location; for simplicity's sake I'll assume it's an earthbound location and we needn't go into the physics of faster-than-light travel. That done, you have to produce, like Mr Stevenson before you, a map. A black calligraphic pen works best. There must be a tiny village where the quest will begin, and the landscape must thereafter be covered with marshes, fens, barrows, rivers and mountains with direful names. There must also be a suggestion that if the map were to extend so much as a centimetre further in any direction it would necessitate red marks, danger signs and inscriptions such as, "Here be Hippogriffs".

Then comes the cast. As protagonist you have a young man employed as a farmer/shepherd/knives-and-boots boy and blissfully oblivious of the fact that he is about to be plunged into myriad dangers to reclaim a legacy he could probably have done without. In order to tell him all about who he really is and recount the story of the rise of the Dark Lord there has to be a mentor; elderly for choice, with robes and a cloak and abundant quantities of long white beard (pipe optional). There should also be a best friend, whose chief qualities must be courage, loyalty and willingness to come off as second-best all the time. Ideally he should be slightly obtuse as well, but this is negotiable.

There may or may not be a girl, but if there is one she must have blood of the purest cerulean and it must be understood that when she marries the hero gossips will shake their heads and talk about how she's come down in the world.

Finally there is the Dark Lord himself. Through magic too dark and evil to describe he will have rendered himself practically immortal. He will be the reason the hero was mending shoes or chasing pigs instead of lounging around being handsome and powerful. In order to destroy him, save the world and claim the girl the hero will have to wade through said marshes, ford said rivers and climb said mountains, battling monsters of ferocity and cunning and dodging guards of ferocity and stupidity. Along the way he will lose his companions to death or to an understandable unwillingness to lead such a miserable life, until at the final confrontation he stands alone.

He will receive hints from mysterious people and hear ancient prophecies that are as obscure as they can possibly be without actually being in a different language. If the mentor has not abandoned the hero by this point, he will understand everything but explain nothing. If, however, the hero stumbles upon the answer by chance or works it out somehow, the mentor will confirm that he already knew and have a very good reason for not having said anything.

At last, having performed feats of physical endurance and mental acrobatics, the hero will be face-to-face with his nemesis. He will at some time have thrown away his sword (or whatever happens to be his weapon of choice). He will realize that despite his strength he is not one-fourth as powerful as the Dark Lord, who has had decades more to learn new skills and has no compunctions about using unpleasant forms of magic. He will be, for all practical purposes, defenceless.

And, of course, he will win.

Sparkie and the Vertically Different Brotherhood: Part II

2007-09-02T09:55:00.000-07:00

Had Sparkie been anything other than herself she could have lived quite happily with the Vertically Different Brothers. But since she was herself, and physically incapable of leaving well enough alone, a few weeks later her stepmother opened her back door in the morning to see a brightly-coloured flyer lying on the mat. She picked it up.

“Equal Representation for All Vertical Communities in Parliament,” the flyer proclaimed. Scarcely believing her eyes, the good lady examined it in greater detail, and read, “Join the Movement for Vertical Equality,” and “We Want Heights of MPs on a Normal Curve.”

Forcing herself not to seize a green bottle that lay nearby and start chewing it, she picked up the phone, asked the operator to scramble, and called the High Consul of a little-known country whose chief export was undetectable poisons. When she was done with him she called the National Academy of Theatre.

The next day, when the Vertically Different Brothers had left the chapter house on their various pursuits, and Sparkie was in her room drafting a petition for the inclusion of a nominee of the Brotherhood in every government committee, the doorbell rang.

Answering it, Sparkie saw a wrinkled woman, bent with age, with a basket of apples on her arm and another balanced precariously on her head. Had she looked closely she might have seen the true face beneath the makeup, but nobody had ever accused Sparkie of being observant.

“Yes?” she said helpfully.

“Be you the young woman who helps the underrepresented obtain their rights?” asked the old woman.

Sparkie beamed. “Yes, of course. Are you underrepresented?”

“I’m an apple seller, miss,” the old woman said. “Know you how many of us there be in Parliament? I will tell you. There be none. There be none of us in Parliament, none in a high position in any government office, none in any Parliamentary committee or sub-committee… We are woefully underrepresented, miss. Will you have an apple?”

If the sudden change of subject startled Sparkie, she gave no sign of it. But instead of taking the proffered apple she took another one from the basket.

“What's the matter?" she asked the apple seller between bites.

“Only that you took the wrong apple,” said the old woman. “And therefore it is time for Plan B.”

Sparkie never saw the man who emerged from the bushes to her left, put a pipe to his mouth and blew.

Sparkie and the Vertically Different Brotherhood: Part I

2007-08-26T10:52:00.001-07:00

Once upon a time, in a far away land, there lived a young woman of unspecified ethnicity and racial origin. Her mother, in a wrongheaded and prejudiced moment, had christened her Snow White, but she preferred to call herself Sparkie. Her father was the democratically-elected ruler of the country, where they had polls every three years and all sentient creatures had the right to vote.

Sparkie’s father, on the death of his first wife, had married again. The girl’s new mother was a victim of the unfavourable circumstances surrounding her upbringing and for that reason was in the habit of resorting to unorthodox and even illegal means to get what she wanted. However, as the psychologists pointed out, this was entirely due to factors beyond her control and was not her fault at all.

Sparkie was a political activist and spent her time championing the cause of the less privileged. This made things somewhat uncomfortable for her family. One day her stepmother, in a fit of madness for which she could in no way be held responsible, decided that enough was enough and the living room could no longer be treated as a storehouse for pamphlets saying, “Alfalfa is sentient too!” or, “Votes for budgerigars!”

She called her chauffer, and asked him politely if he could see his way to taking the girl to a country house the family owned and leaving her there. The chauffer knew that this was a violation of the girl’s fundamental right to ruin her parents’ peace by calling press conferences in the garden in the middle of the night, but his devotion to his employer was so strong that he consented.

He took Sparkie out of the city, but he had not the heart to leave even the person responsible for the fact that curly-haired spaniels had the right to stand for public office in a place where she would have only those curly-haired spaniels for company. Happening to be aware of a small rural branch of the Vertically Different Brotherhood in the vicinity, he took her there and returned to the city.

The Vertically Different Brothers, of whom there were seven in this particular establishment, had heard of the girl and her activities on behalf of the downtrodden, and they welcomed her warmly.

The Idiot's Guide to Surviving the Corporate World

2007-08-04T10:18:00.000-07:00

It’s called the real world. It’s the name people give to long hours tapping away at a keyboard with benumbed fingers and staring at a computer screen as though it is about to reveal the deepest mysteries of life.

A friend of mine, on condition of anonymity – he assures me that his boss has a well-developed sense of humour, but feels it would be better not to put it to the test – gave me some advice from his own experience.

The first step, he told me, is to develop a rapid walk and cultivate a permanently harried expression. This will serve to give the impression that whenever you leave your desk, even if it’s for a coffee break or to buy tickets to the Friday night movie, you are on an assignment whose success is vital to the continued profitability of your company.

The cell phone must be your best friend. Commit to memory every technical phrase and bit of jargon that is used by people in your office, and as soon as you sense the attention of a superior on you, start reciting them at random while talking into your phone and nodding vigourously.

Excel must be your second-best friend. Contrary to popular myth, the simplest formulae and spreadsheets are seldom the best. An ideal spreadsheet to send your boss has formulae that sprawl across three lines and references to at least eight different workbooks. The more he has to flip from sheet to sheet tracing your logical acrobatics, the more likely he is to feel that you have put serious thought into your work.

If you are relatively free, the safest way to spend your time is to sink into a pleasant daydream. But before that, ensure that you adopt the classical thinker’s posture and lean towards your screen. If possible, furrow your brow as well. Shake your head and mutter under your breath from time to time. (It is best to practise this in front of the mirror first, so that you look like a hardworking employee grappling with a fundamental problem in the way the company’s IT systems are run, and not like a deranged lunatic with a neck tic.)

Find an excuse to do as much work as possible outside the office. Sure, it might be an hour’s commute in the baking afternoon heat to make a ten-minute presentation to somebody who isn’t even listening and has already made up their mind anyway, but is anyone really going to notice if you take a half-hour longer than necessary to get back?

These five simple measures, I am assured, will make the corporate jungle seem like a children’s amusement park.

And if they don’t work? Well, there’s always Dilbert.

With a Hey, Ho

2007-06-19T06:15:00.001-07:00

The wind and the rain have begun in Bombay, and the city being what it is, one will be able to say, "The rain it raineth everyday," without pausing to draw breath, for the next three months, and not put a dent in the truth.

That the monsoon is always an occasion for cheer would probably be a source of surprise, if not astonishment, to people who live in more temperate climes; one can understand their point of view. In places where "Summer" implies beachball and sunshine that is warm without being oppressive, the thought of the skies opening to ruin the beachball and put paid to the sunshine is hardly a happy one.

The romantic associations of the monsoon aside, it certainly is one of the most pleasant times of the year. Finally at an end is the summer's dilemma of choosing between sleeping in relative comfort and doing your bit to preserve the habitat of the polar bear. And then there's the fact that nothing brings out the finer points of a murder mystery better than reading it during a thunderstorm. Even the squelchiness and dampness that can result from a July commute is bearable, when taken as a part of a happy whole.

Besides, is there anyone who really doesn't like the occasional walk in the rain? If such there be, go mark him well - in him no monsoon raptures swell. (With apologies to the poet Scott.)

NSE's Certification in Financial Markets

2007-06-11T20:59:00.000-07:00

I took the NCFM last week. The exam itself was easy enough; it seems to have been set keeping in mind the fact that traders have very little leisure to devote to the perusal of the NCFM study material (and even less to decode its legalese). One of the questions asked was:

Regarding which of the following is the NSE not flexible when candidates take the NCFM exam?

a) Place of the exam
b) Candidate’s presence
c) Time of the exam
d) Date of the exam

Since we had all selected Mumbai, June 6 and 9:30 am on the NSE website, but none of us had found an option to take the exam by proxy, it was fairly straightforward.

Any euphoria we felt at our success in the exam was swiftly driven out of our minds by hunger; we had several hours to wait until our second exam in the afternoon, and the NSE seemed not to want us to eat.

We had brought our lunch with us, and on asking the guard at the door where we could eat it, we were told to go to the canteen on the first floor. Thither we went, and as soon as we stepped out of the elevator we were accosted by another guard who demanded what our business was.

We explained, in as few words as possible since we were ravening by then, that we were between exams and wanted to eat lunch. He shook his head ruefully and told us that the NSE was always sending people up here to eat; it was, however, the ONGC office and he was very sorry but he could not permit us to enter without legitimate cause.

We went back downstairs thinking dark thoughts of the man who had sent us there. “I think,” said one of my friends, “that they make bets on how long people will argue with the ONGC guard before returning. Ten-to-one on two minutes, fourteen-to-three on five minutes, that kind of thing.”

After the second exam we were positively starving. We went and asked the guard if we could, at least, eat in the atrium.

“No,” he said conspiratorially, “but why don’t you go back to ONGC and sneak in while the guard’s back is turned?”

In the end I ate one sandwich standing on the sidewalk outside the NSE and the other when I got back home. But it was, without exception, the hungriest I have ever been while writing an exam.

Felis Domesticus, or the Habits of the Cat

2007-06-01T05:37:00.000-07:00

One of the few failures of the Oxford English Dictionary is its inability to define a cat. It tries, certainly, but descriptions of mammalian characteristics, short snouts and retractile claws, which might be scientifically accurate, fall woefully short in other respects.

Every time I watch the clock with the firm conviction that some mad scientist has been fiddling with the space-time continuum and then been unable to make time go at its proper speed again, I find myself wishing I had the temperament of a cat. Not even the meanest alley-cat will consent to do something you want unless that coincides with what it wants.

Nor will a cat, if you are attempting to bribe it with food or drink, ever settle for anything other than precisely what it wants. If it wants a 56% solution of milk powder in water, it wants a 56% solution of milk powder in water; if you are thick enough not to comprehend this immediately, it will wait with growing impatience, rejecting bread, three different kinds of biscuits, and cake, until you finally hit on what it wants. Even then, and no matter how hungry it is because of your ineptitude, it will not accept a 55.5% solution.

And having taken the bribe, it will go back to doing what it was doing before you interrupted it, without doing what you wanted it to do in exchange for the milk.

Reproach it, though, point out its base perfidy, and it will regard you with an expression of injured innocence. Not even a newborn lamb can look as blameless as a cat that is guilty of enough sins for twenty cats.

The cat will then go on its way, no doubt feeling that it has done enough towards the maintenance of its relationship with you simply by consenting to be a part of it, and you will be left sweeping up the biscuit crumbs.

Home?

2007-05-05T08:55:00.000-07:00

I've been unpacking today. Sometimes things like that cause nostalgia; in my case it caused plain homesickness.

It's odd, the kind of things you remember when you're unpacking. I don't mean memories of strolls from the dorm to the back gate on moonless nights, or of struggling from the Case Unit to your room with an armload of books and unsuccessfully attempting to unlock the door without dropping any. Things like that one would expect to remember.

There was an afternoon when I was playing Scrabble with a friend. It was one of those particularly frustrating games when you seem to have only vowels on your rack, get rid of them by making euoi, and then find yourself in possession of a rack full of consonants and nowhere to put them. My friend, in this position, placed ZQXG on a triple-word score. Quite naturally, I objected.

"You can't even pronounce it," I said.

"It's the name of the alien species that Calvin thinks Miss Wormwood comes from," quoth he.

"That," I pointed out, "is a Zogwarg."

"Well, this is the plural."

At this point I began to giggle helplessly.

Several weeks later, I was with another friend at the British Library sale of withdrawn books. I had bought a few of them; he, on the other hand, had fallen only slightly short of buying enough books to set up a library of his own. We were standing outside the library in the blazing afternoon sun - and when the afternoon sun blazes in Ahmedabad, it really pulls out all the stops and lets you have it - and attempting to get an auto to take us back to campus.

As usual, at the time when you most need an auto - for instance, when you're standing on a street corner with your arms full of books - all those that pass will, perversely, be full. But we found our way back in the end.

As we were getting out, the string holding one of the bundles snapped and forty-one magazines spilled onto the ground. After picking them up, I went to my room and proceeded, once more, to giggle helplessly at the memory of those cascading glossies.

Thomas Haynes Bayly said it much better than I can:

This the hour when happy faces
Smile around the taper's light,
Who will fill our vacant places?
Who will sing our songs to-night?

But, as one of my professors told me, between IIMA and the PGPs it's never really farewell.

Counting the Days

2006-12-31T04:37:00.000-08:00

Back in first term, when I was being driven like a mule whose master knows it is insomniac and therefore feels it can work through the night as well as not, I never thought I would be sorry about having to leave IIMA. The departure, when I imagined it, was accompanied by a gleeful whoop and one of the joyous jigs that can only be executed when you are too drunk with happiness to care what the world thinks.
First year is one of those things that you can laugh over only in hindsight. When you're being cold called on a Monday morning by a Finance professor who is under the misapprehension that you know eight different methods to calculated Weighted Average Cost of Capital, it is very difficult to keep your sense of humour. It was at moments like that that my classmates and I, knowing that admission interviews were in progress on campus and feeling that it would be a violation of Human Rights not to tell the unfortunate people attending them exactly what they were letting themselves in for, were overcome by the strong urge to stand by the gate brandishing banners with messages like, "Run, if you value your life," or, "If you come here, you will never sleep again."
Then along came second year. The sheer bliss of a well structured second year at IIMA can only be experienced, never described. Suffice it to say that people who, only a few months ago, could function on a cumulative total of ten hours' sleep in four days and knew holidays as things that only happened to other people now feel hard done by if they have classes more than three days a week and feel peevish and irritable if they are woken up before they have had their full ten hours. The spirit of second year is best epitomized by the tricolour cat watching me type even now, and demanding why I am occupying myself with such trivialities when I could be usefully engaged refilling her bowl.
And since there is no better way to end this without sounding depressed, this is where I shall stop.

A Student's Lament

2006-10-17T02:49:00.000-07:00

Oh, hear this tale so pure and true,
And let its wisdom speak to you –
For wisest is the one who knows
How far a little knowledge goes.
A week ago, I read a case.
The Saviour of the Human Race
If I could solve it, I would be.
No ill or want or poverty
Would ever strike this nation more;
But happiness from shore to shore
Would mark the land. Though scholars bent
The greatest part of their intent
To helping cure each scurvy ill,
Though statesmen gave it all their will,
Though they were learned, clever men,
And years spent on it five times ten,
Still, where they failed, we shall succeed –
A single night is all we need.
And we need neither work nor strive,
But trust in Porter’s forces five –
The secret weapon we possess
In lieu of toil and earnestness.
An hour think we, and we say,
“To wish the country’s ills away
We only need to educate
The masses. Let us meditate
On how to do this, for, if done,
The nation by itself shall run;
No poverty, no foeticide,
But joyful mirth on every side.”
How strange that this efficient plan
Occurred to not a single man!
Ah! If the PM only knew
Our wisdom, then as true as true
He could dismiss his Cabinet
With little worry or regret,
And act upon our sage advice:
It would be simple and concise.
“Come, educate!” “Ban foeticide!”
“Bar poverty!” “Abolish pride!”
“Propose a bill in Parliament
To make all criminals repent.”
“Make peace, for war is but a waste
Of time, and one in poor taste.”
“Make all pollution go away.”
“Command the crops to grow today.”
And so we wisely solved the case,
But saw on our Professor’s face
No silent smile of happy pride;
Instead, he did his students chide.
Alas, he did not recognize
That we were clever, bright and wise.
And so, our simple answer spurned,
We to our empty rooms returned;
Alas! For none appreciate
Our words, so few and true and great.

Checkmate

2006-10-05T02:58:00.000-07:00

I can't play chess. I'm not bad at the game. I'm appalling. People who are bad at the game have their men taken systematically off the board and their King surrounded by five of the opposing pieces for a checkmate. I, on the other hand, seldom lose pieces. I face a checkmate in the first two moves with all my men still in play and not one of them of any use.

Chess seems to require faculties which I simply do not have. I get along all right when it comes to things like addition sums and learning nursery rhymes, and even an occasional game of checkers, but chess has always been to me one of those deep and incomprehensible works of art that you admire deeply, but whose meaning you know will always elude you.

For one thing, chess requires that you think about several things at once. I have never succeeded at that for more than five seconds. Usually, I concentrate on not losing my King, sacrificing Rook after Pawn after Bishop until the inevitable happens. Sometimes I decide to vary my strategy. Then I launch a full-fledged attack with both Knights and the Queen, completely oblivious to the advances the opposing Bishops are making on my King.

On a few happy occasions I have managed to think about both attack and defence for fully three moves. Then I manage to get in a check, but in the euphoria following that I lose all sense of proportion and send my men on reckless sorties that lead to a rapid change in my fortunes.

In the end, though, it all boils down to one thing: the moment when the other person says, "Check," and I, searching for a means of escape and finding none, think that it is simply impossible that I should lose more spectacularly than this - only to be proven wrong with the very next game I play.

One Down. Fourteen to Go.

2006-07-03T23:47:00.000-07:00

Tonight France plays Italy in the World Cup Final.

Not that I knew that before I checked, just now, the Times of India. Nor that I will know, tomorrow morning, anything about where the spoils went. It is safe to assume that they will go to the victor; the consideration of fairness and equity and natural justice - excuse the LAB hangover - being met, it is the concern of the French, the Italians, and millions of football fans the world over, but none of mine.

Next week shall bring with it new dawns, monsoon rain, great learning experiences, and the Midterms. Odd that they do not evoke in one the nameless dread that they did in first year. Odd, too, to have only one exam.

The Managing Negotiations course is over. I am compelled, however, to wonder whether MN has made of me a negotiator any more than SFI is making a strategist or LAB a keen legal mind. A single swallow, and a few case facts, and that kind of thing. Although I dare say summers are more complicated things to make than managers.

Somehow, it doesn't feel like I've been back nearly a month. It feels like a few days, or like a few days longer than forever, but it doesn't feel like four weeks.

What does?

Banned Books

2006-06-01T00:03:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a man called Girolamo Savonarola, who restored morality and righteousness to the city of Florence. He thought the way to go about it was by destroying the masterworks of centuries; whether Florence had gone from civilization to decadence is debatable, but returning to barbarism in the hope of eventually finding civilization again seems an unnecessarily complicated way to solve the problem in any case.

Consigning Botticelli's paintings and the plays of Sophocles to fire ended with Savonarola's excommunication; Pope Alexander VI had realized that his restraining orders were being thoroughly and decisively ignored.

It's amazing, though, how many books have been banned or challenged since then. It seldom does much good unless, like Savonarola, you destroy every existing copy of the book - something much harder today than it was in Renaissance Florence. It simply means that people who would have read the book casually in public read it with far greater attention in secret.

The Right to Freedom of Expression is universally applicable, although it might be better for the environment if people exercised it without building bonfires on the streets; if one wishes to express oneself by banning Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because it is "trash", one should have little objection to other people expressing themselves by reading it nonetheless.

At least Huckleberry Finn excited such controversy only at the time of its publication. When books written centuries ago are challenged and even banned because they reflect the attitude and customs of the times in which they were written, the logic seems a little skewed.

It is somewhat understandable, even if not ideal, when people want to judge their contemporaries by the standards of the present; to expect people who lived in the time of the old empires and military navies to see freedom and equality the way we do is distinctly unfair. There were days and ages when only the most enlightened philosphers and social reformers spoke of egalitarianism; you can't fault a playwright for not being an enlightened social reformer any more than you can for not being Albert Einstein.

Starting or even encouraging people to start cultural revolutions is not remotely a job for me, though; this was inspired by reading a list of challenged books that included some I could not imagine anyone having any conceivable reason for wanting off the shelves.

On a Shoestring Budget

2006-05-15T03:25:00.000-07:00

That's what you are as an intern. Somewhere towards the bottom of the food chain is the fachcha. Below that may be found the phytoplankton, the amoeba, and the chlamydomonas. Then there are rocks and sand. Then you have bits of lint, and then you have the summer intern.

The easiest way to get by on an intern's stipend is to keep in mind that coming from Ahmedabad and its monastic architecture, you should be a firm believer in simple living and high thinking. But that sort of thing is easier said than done, especially when you have the ready excuse that company HRs would not be enthused by employees who come to work looking like they've stepped out of a picture of life at Nalanda.

So you don't have pockets bursting at the seams with hundred-rupee notes, and you do have a desire not to spend your summer subsisting on spinach and steamed cabbage. Even without complicating the issue with conservative ambitions of supping on fondue and Irish Cream (we'll get to that later), you have a poser on your hands.

Here, then, are some helpful and not-so-helpful suggestions for penniless interns in the big city.

1. Everything that the city guide says may not be applicable to you. If it is something related to the price of a meal for two, it is definitely not applicable to you. Providing dinner at half-price to the compilers of restaurant information probably goes down in the books as "Sales & Admin. Expenses". If you are not a card-carrying member of the Press, you are not a Sales & Admin. Expense. You are Revenue.

2. Be sure you're at work on occasions when there is a possibility of lunch being on the house. These include inductions, seminars, presentations and training programmes. It doesn't matter if the training programme is on another floor; judicious timing and a sudden and urgent need to speak to a colleague in the other department will enable you be a member of the luncheon.

3. There is such a thing as a free lunch, and it can be obtained by never doing anything else for free. Even so simple an act as looking up the address and telephone number of a restaurant can be traded for a meal at that restaurant if the other party is sufficiently desperate.

4. If you are at the receiving end of the above strategy, don't be dimwitted enough to concede to the first demand no matter how dire your need is. A bargainer who starts with a sponsored dinner at Mocha will almost certainly settle for a Popsicle.

For those whose list of needs includes abundant quantities of the blushful Hipppocrene, full credit for suggestions 6 through 10 (suggestion 5 is "Don't get sued if you can't afford the legal charges"; this is a practical illustration of how to go about it) goes to a friend who wishes, for the sake of his reputation, to remain nameless. My apologies in advance for any mutilation of his sentiments that has occurred at the editing table; please don't litigate.

6. Save all beer bottles, newspapers and mineral water bottles. They can fetch you money. For instance, our old beer bottles financed two bottles of beer at the fag end of the month, when money was hard to come by.

7. Make sure you exhaust all supplies of free snacks and coffee available in your office. Some offices (like mine) also supply neat stationery that you can use to doodle when you are jobless. (I am all set to release a graphic novel right now.)

8. Always check if your office phone has STD; if it does, stay late in the evenings and avail yourself of the facility to talk to family and friends or abuse annoying people. (Never use your own extension for that last, especially if the invective is aimed at a person in power; do it over the extension of someone who particularly annoys you.)

9. Never miss alumni bashes. Lots of booze is ordered and nobody boozes. You can get to be in charge of the bar and drink a lot of premium whiskey that you would otherwise not have been allowed to touch with a twenty-foot pole. The more enterprising can also siphon off four bottles of whiskey to be enjoyed at home in the company of friends.

10. Start playing poker with people who bet like mad despite having the worst hands imaginable, so you can make money despite lacking the ability to keep a deadpan face.
P.S. It helps if they are drunk and half-asleep.
P.P.S. Be careful; you could be at the receiving end.

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any adverse consequences of following this advice. Please don't ask me to cover poker losses, negotiate with enraged employers or come to the police station with the bail money.

Through the Inferno

2006-04-26T06:05:00.000-07:00

There are those who could, at this point, quote with justifiable pride the words from the banner borne through Caesar's triumph. But, as a friend commented to me, "we conquered" can be, for some people, a rather inappropriate description of IIMA's first year. A better one - although he was politer about it - would be "we cowered on the sidelines until Vercingetorix had his hands full with Julius, and then snuck quietly past while his back was turned".

Good or bad though, it is over. And unless the glory days of Rome return, complete with the slaves on the rowing decks of the triremes, there is very little that could prove more stressful. The greatest "learning" you get from first year is the knowledge that your limits are a lot farther out than you thought they were; when you've sat up till half-past five in the morning to finish an assignment, run into your classroom at five seconds to nine, and stayed up till three the next night - all this two days before your end-of-term exams and in the certain knowledge that you weren't going to get a good grade on the assignment anyway - you're unlikely to be fazed by stress on the job.

All I can feel right now is relief. Forget placements and grades and social pressure, the biggest incentive to study in fachcha year is that if you don't, you'll have to go through it a second time. No more waiting with bated breath in front of the Quiz Notice Board, no more running through the underpass with the brown envelope on Saturday afternoons...

Congratulations to everyone who has slain, tamed or crept stealthily past the dragon. This will be a day to remember.

In the Year of Grace 1564

2006-04-17T01:42:00.000-07:00

Maybe, a few months earlier, Mary Arden had seen the shadow of Venus on the snow. Maybe, on that April morning, the sun shone benevolently from a cloudless sky on the sparkling waters of the Avon. Maybe, just maybe, every lark in England alit by a country church in a small village and burst into joyous paean.

And maybe, as is far less poetic but far more likely, it was a muggy day with the rain pouring in sheets and turning Stratford's picturesque lanes into strips of unpleasantly squelchy mud, and those larks who were not going about their business in other parts of Elizabeth's realm were cowering beneath eaves and rafters waiting for the showers to stop.

Whether or not the birds and the sun and the clouds marked that day, the Muses did. The year was one of abundance for them; they had, exactly two months previously, stood over the cradle of the one person since Euripides who could, had he not been rudely interrupted by a rooming-house brawl at the age of 29, have equalled if not exceeded Shakespeare's mastery.

In the years since he lived, volumes have been written about the Bard and his work. He has been reviled, extolled, equated with God and Satan and a host of entities in between, accused of being Bacon/Marlowe/both, and had his work dissected with a 0.001-micrometer scalpel under a 200X microscope. That he manages, despite the weight of his reputation, to enthrall his audience today as surely as he did when that audience consisted of sixteenth-century Londoners, is testimony to his mastery.

By now I daresay I would have been, mentally at least, relegated to the ranks of those who should be marooned on a desert island in the Pacific with only a palm tree for company. Before some civic-minded citizens decide to suit the action to the word, let me only say that performances for the Elizabethan court and gravely intellectual pedagogues who had read more words than they had heard spoken were not the reason for Shakespeare's popularity in his day, and are not the reason for his enduring appeal.

Enough mystery still surrounds him to keep historians occupied for years. In 1612 he wrote Henry VIII, the disputed The Two Noble Kinsmen and the now-lost Cardenio; there, to the best of our knowledge at least, his writings end. It was, perhaps, natural for the playwright to choose to leave London and return to Stratford as his fiftieth year neared; why he chose also to stop writing remains open to speculation. Maybe it was a sudden distaste for the stage. Maybe he wanted a break from writing. Or maybe Shakespeare did write, and the greatest literary find of the century is waiting for some venturesome tourist to fall through a solid wall into a priest hole.

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

Oompa-Loompas in Large Numbers

2006-04-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

I have my Strategy Formulation and Implementation exam tomorrow. I have Finance as well, but I’ve given up on getting a respectable grade for Fin, so it’s only SFI I’m going to worry about.

Due no doubt to a regrettable lack of application on my part, I have failed, in the past month and a half, to become a brilliant formulator of strategy for multibillion dollar international firms.

Take, for instance, a company called – to avoid copyright violation and keep myself from getting sued right, left and centre – XYZ. A couple of hundred billion worth of assets, retail outlets in 47 countries across four continents, fifty billion sales in the past quarter… OK, so I tacked on a few zeroes here and there. It makes it all sound so much more impressive.

I start by identifying the problem or potential for improvement or whatever it is. Step One is to go to the Google advanced search option and see if some philanthropic person has posted the solution to the case as an Adobe document on the Internet. If Step One results in success, the job is done there. If – as is more common – it fails, you curse a bit, close the browser, and define a problem.

So XYZ has massive profits, its CEO owns two yachts and an island in the Caribbean, and it had higher earnings last year than several countries. What could possibly be wrong? Nothing. Nope, it’s perfect, nothing to do, just be careful not to rock the boat.

Do not rock the boat, one types. And then one realizes that may be a little too short for a graded submission, and makes liberal use of the backspace key.

There isn’t a problem I can see, so let me assume a problem. An underground party of Oompa-Loompas is planning to take over XYZ because they don’t like the CEO’s twelve-storey island home. It spoils the view of the palm trees.

OK, now I have a problem. To repel the Oompa-Loompa takeover bid and emerge a better, stronger firm. But that is a very nebulous objective; to be scientific and disciplined and logical and deserving of a good grade, I should introduce some quantifiable aims. God demands Numbers.

I could just add another zero to the profit margin and advise the CEO to gun for that, so that earning enough money to buy XYZ would require the entire Oompa-Loompa population to engage in pillaging ancient treasures for the next six decades. But no, five hundred billion is an obscene figure, and I doubt it’s achievable in any case.

I haven’t any other numbers, so let’s find some quantifiable parameter and give it a Number. The state of the CEO’s relations with the Oompa-Loompa chief, that’s one. When all is peace and light and friendship, the Number is one, and when the Oompa-Loompa chief is busily handing out the Violet Beauregarde treatment, the Number is zero. The way things are at the moment, the Number is roughly 0.05.

Objective: The Number should be above 0.95. (An argument about whether daffodils are prettier than lilies is acceptable.) (A full description of how the Number is calculated is provided in footnote 4(a) to Exhibit 25.)

Strategy: Offer the Oompa-Loompa chief $25,000,000,000 to tell the people back home that the twelve-storey house is just a mirage. Back it up with the theory of relativity, and fund research on bending the space-time continuum to solve the problem. There may be some legal issues involved in the bribery though – no, wait, there is no group in the entire universe that has authority over human beings and Oompa-Loompas. No trouble there, then… Now we just fork another hundred million or so out to a mad scientist to come up with the physics of the explanation, and we’re all set.

Time Horizon: An hour to call the Oompa-Loompa chief and explain the proposition, another two hours to arrange for the money transfer, thirty seconds to make a trans-Atlantic call and three minutes to tell the Head of Research to stop playing with his toys and expound some reasoning. Totally, 183 minutes 30 seconds. Allowing some cushion for the telephone lines being busy, 184 minutes 14 seconds.

Positive Outcomes: The Oompa-Loompa chief keeps his sceptre, the CEO keeps his yachts and mansion, and XYZ will shortly be able to finance a submarine or so.

Negative Fallouts: Well, it just may happen that the Oompa-Loompas throw their chief in the chocolate river and go at the CEO’s mansion with a truckload of dynamite and a match, but then again it may not. And anyway it’s worth the risk.

As was writing this.

Methods? Or Madness?

2006-03-27T07:25:00.000-08:00

You know that dull, sinking feeling you get when you're on a ship that's going down in the middle of the Pacific Ocean a thousand miles from the nearest dry land and you suddenly realize that the sole lifeboat has sprung a leak? It's a feeling not many people would know first hand, so if you don't know it, imagine it. Then square it and then multiply it by a randomly chosen number greater then twenty. That'll give you some idea of what it felt like to sit in the exam room on Saturday afternoon and skim the QM paper. And that was before one read the instructions at the beginning and saw all the double-whammies.

And then there's the issue of selling ice cream in Moscow. The importance of marketing is all very well, but if I were selling ice cream in a city where it was an occasion if the temperature touched twenty-five on the Centigrade scale at the height of summer, and if people were actually willing to buy enough of it that I was not run out of business in the first week... I would be at least marginally less worried than I would have been had I been vending Popsicles in the Gobi Desert and still not had people out on the streets clamouring for my product.

I have endterms next week too. It's an odd sort of limbo here, where you're perpetually either convalescing from one lot of exams or just getting ready to face the next set. To cap everything, it never seems to make a difference how much you prepare. I spent most of Thursday and Friday either studying in the library or studying in my room, and I will still have to rely on a healthy combination of divine grace and a lenient evaluator to get a passing grade on the exam.

As for what's coming next Monday... all I can do is take a few deep breaths, make sure I have the cyanide capsules handy, and go to the tumbrils.

One a Penny, Two a Penny

2006-03-18T23:19:00.000-08:00

A week since course bidding, but somehow I don't feel as though I am much more focused or aware of what I am doing and where I am going as a result of knowing what I will be studying in fourth term. Let me qualify that. What I will allegedly be studying in fourth term. I will not commit the sacrilege of suggesting that second year is actually meant for work.

For the same reason I will not say that there was learning from the bidding process, but it was fun. I did give a small start of horror when I logged in to the bidding server and realized that it was nine minutes ahead of my computer clock - my computer being four minutes ahead of the classroom clock so that there is absolutely no chance of my running into class in time to receive the what-kind-of-manager-do-you-think-you'll-make look from an irate professor. But then I figured it didn't really matter. An hour and forty-five minutes, I mean, honestly, who would take an hour and forty-five minutes to allocate points for courses? Especially when, like me, you're more worried about getting out of the institute unscathed than about getting out of the institute with FORM and IPM and MACR under your belt.

The most agonizing part - and therefore, with the benefit and objectivity of hindsight, the funniest - was the tantalizing random number X.

One hour and forty-five minutes after bidding starts, the timer frame will go blank. Thereafter, bidding will continue for X minutes, X being a randomly generated number between 1 and 15.

It was rather like playing Hot Potato as a six-year-old, when the thought being the one holding the ball at the end of the game inspires such dread you would think it really does burn your fingers. Points on MN, you think. MN is climbing, I have to have - oh my God, IDF is running away. Wait, wait - no, please don't stop now, please don't stop... Reallocate points, one eye on the clock, your finger practically trembling on the mouse. And then try to watch all six courses at once while doing a mental analysis of how much risk is acceptable on each.

For once I was actually happy to see the error message on the screen when X was reached and the server disconnected.

Chaos

2006-02-06T09:45:00.000-08:00

It's funny how the word was originally used. I don't mean the version in Genesis; that makes perfect sense, not only etymologically, but also, as Hercule Poirot would say, psychologically. But when Hesiod talks about the primeval emptiness of the Universe, and ends that void with, not Gaia and Uranus, but Erebus and Nyx, you really have to wonder. Even given Boeotia's admittedly difficult weather - at least, difficult weather compared to the Isles - it remains undisputedly Greek; the Mediterranean sun over the Gulf of Corinth should have made up for the cruel winters and hard summers.

The downward spiral that ends in the inevitable Dusk of the Gods is something you can understand in Scandinavian myth; the land of the Norsemen would have told Hesiod a thing or two about the cruelty of winter. When snow covered everything for miles around, falling endlessly through a seemingly endless night, with no sound save the wind in the trees and the wolves in the distance, old women who spun tales for children clustered around them before the fire could have been forgiven for thinking up Ragnarok. The paths of glory must lead somewhere.

Admittedly, the children of Hellas were, as a rule, far more cheerful. Their tragedies spoke of grief, but not of despair. One sympathizes with Niobe, but one is not overtaken by a sense of the hopelessness of life and an overwhelming urge to end it all.

This is the point where I realize I'm rambling and wonder how on earth to end this without it being painfully obvious that I am doing it to put myself out of my misery. Having said it, though, it is obvious... and thus I say Audaces fortuna iuvat. And bid farewell, in the end, to the Latin poet.

UFO

2006-01-16T00:31:00.000-08:00

No, seriously. I may be a little nutty, but I'm nowhere near completely mad. I am not suggesting that a flying saucer landed on LKP and offloaded its full complement of little green men armed with laser blasters and poised to take over the world.

I'm just saying it passed overhead on a reconaissance trip.

I saw it on Saturday night, when a friend and I were walking back to our dorm from dinner at Curries. I grant that we were high on chocolate, and possibly not entirely cogent, but both of us saw five orange lights hovering in a straight line, too low to be stars and too high to be street lights. And I mean, come on, how likely is it that two people, however questionable their normalcy, have the same hallucination?

There, in a nutshell, are the facts of the case. Five orange lights.

In our defence, we did consider all possible explanations before we arrived at our conclusion. They could have been weather balloons. They could have been lights strung between two reasonably tall buildings. They could have been a college physics project. They could have been bits of a meteorite. They could have been stealth fighters from Never-Never Land. Or they could have been strobes on an alien spaceship.

As to the first option... Who ever heard of such a simple answer to such a complicated question? It's absurd. It's laughable. Nope. Not weather balloons.

Lights strung between two buildings... We really had to think to figure out why that was impossible. Given wind velocity, drag, and friction due to the earth's rotation, and taking into account the speed of light in air and the relativistic effect of acceleration due to gravity on the space-time continuum, the lights could not exist.

A college physics project? But both of us did physics in college, and neither of us ever considered it necessary to have weird orange lights hovering on the horizon to puzzle, worry and bewilder innocent passers-by. That just about ruled out that idea.

Meteorites we rejected out of hand. Shooting stars do not hover. They shoot.

That left us with Captain Hook's minions and spies from E.T. When you have two options equal in all respects (the chief criterion here being viability) you can trust your fate to the fall of a coin, or you can choose the more interesting explanation. We did the latter.

And thus it became our bounden duty to warn the world that the Martians are coming.

Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!

2006-01-12T05:25:00.000-08:00

The title is an exaggeration. Let me say that right at the outset. It is true that fever pitch (excuse the truly dreadful pun, but it was too much to resist) has been reached, with all the candidates for the SAC elections campaigning with everyone in sight. It is true that at any time, day or night, you might be pounced on and your vote canvassed in the name of dorm loyalty/section loyalty/forget-loyalty-and-read-my-manifesto-because-I-am-the best. But nobody has yet sworn to storm the Bastille.

Having established that - and a reputation for frivolity along with it - let me move on to other things. Important things. Things that are going to shape human thought in ways beyond our wildest imaginings.

Or, in other words, I simply put in the title and started typing without the faintest idea what I was going to say.

It's rather odd; in the end there isn't that much of a difference between the Bourbon lily and Napoleon's bee. You rather get the feeling that if you took one of them and let the ink run a bit, you'd end up with the other. There should be Orwellian philosophy somewhere in that. Or at the very least a hint that Lear should have kept his head and not put so much faith in the filial devotion of Goneril and Regan.

The question of whether they really were to blame is not something I shall torture myself by attempting to answer. There was fault on both sides; serpent's teeth grow in serpents and serpents come from serpent eggs.

All I need to do now is find an excuse to mention Caligula and equine parliamentarians. There is the excuse, there the mention; now I may put myself out of my misery. What can the rest be but silence?

Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds

2005-12-24T10:57:00.000-08:00

That's the beauty of a title. It doesn't have to mean anything. Take the one above, for instance. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what I have written so far and what I am going to write in the rest of this post. But still, in the extremely unlikely event of these chronicles surviving for a century or two, some historian may well read into them deep and profound meaning and into the blog a commentary on the metaphysical state of the world at large.

The human mind is kind of strange that way. Right now, for instance, I am sleepy enough that I could write, "Bertie Wooster married Cleopatra and Hitler was their great-grandson" and not realize that anything was amiss. On Wednesday night, on the other hand, no matter how little sleep I have between now and then, I will be all set to sit up watching TV while reading a book and sending SMSes to friends in the intervals of prolonged chats on the cell phone... and all this juggling without dropping a single ball. (If this seems improbable, let me specify that right now refers to an instant of time when I am supposed to be studying Economics, and Wednesday night refers to an instant when I will, for good or ill, be done with ISLM graphs and long-run aggregate supply curves.)

Exam-time resolves are right up there with New Year's Day resolutions as things that aren't meant to last beyond the first week. In college every time I realized that I was eight hours away from my Number Theory paper, not entirely certain which textbook we were following, and in grave danger of being awarded zero marks, I decided that it was positively the last time I would find myself in such straitened circumstances. Every time.

Circumstances apart, it really is rather nice weather now. It's just cold enough to make snuggling into the blankets with a book a whole new kind of nirvana, but not cold enough to make you quiver like an aspen in a strong wind if you happen to forget your sweater in your desperate haste to reach wherever you're supposed to be going before the clock strikes whatever hour it shouldn't strike before you get there.

Is there anything else to say about the blackbirds? Nothing... except, to those who can afford time to enjoy it, Joyeux Noel. 'Tis the season to be jolly... But I daren't sing, even on paper. 'Tis hardly the season to offend the ears of all around. The first day, the partridge in the pear tree. By the time it is joined by the five golden rings I shall be home free.

EEP!

2005-12-07T09:52:00.000-08:00

Twenty-Four Hours to Go

I just got back from class. I am tired. I am in no frame of mind to worry about the effect of an increase in US Government spending on the Forex reserves of Guatemala. And I have the entire afternoon, evening and night ahead of me in any case. There's no need to panic and fall over myself memorizing the textbook. I think I'll do the crossword.

Twenty-Two Hours to Go

I have done three sudokus and four crosswords. There's no getting away from it now. I have to open the textbook. Such a nice textbook, too... It seems a pity to spoil it by underlining and writing notes in the margins. But no, it has to be done - Wait a minute. It's time for tea. I can't be expected to study on an empty stomach. It's bad for the kidneys, or the liver, or... whatever. I'm sure it's bad for something. And while I'm at it I might as well shower too, and start afresh.

Twenty-One Hours to Go

Now is the time to get to work. I am warm, full, and refreshed. I am also... sleepy? No. Something wrong there. Time out. I can't be sleepy. I have to study. I have - where's the syllabus sheet? - yeah, I have... er... let me count... Five, is it? No... six... seven... uh-oh. I have a terrifying number of chapters to finish. I can't be sleepy... I can't be...

Twenty Hours to Go

The blankets are so comfortable. Do I need to get up? Damn, there goes the alarm clock. Hit it... It hasn't stopped. Oh, no wonder, it's the cell phone alarm. It won't stop unless I push the right button. I'll have to wake up properly.

Eighteen Hours to Go

Finally I have done something productive! I have finished a grand total of... umm... three and a half pages. Inspiring, really inspiring. But don't worry, it's still not time to panic. It's just eight o'clock. There'll be plenty of time after dinner.

Sixteen Hours to Go

Right. Now it's time to panic. I have done... ah... never mind. And how much do I have left? One, two... flip a whole bunch of pages... OK, never mind that either. Keep calm. Keep absolutely calm. There's only one remedy for a situation like this - candy bars. Call CT and ask for some... [Several expletives deleted.] He doesn't have any. How do I survive the night without chocolate?

Thirteen Hours to Go

I have done four chapters. That's decent. On number five now... I have consumed enough tea to keep the Darjeeling planters laughing all the way to the bank. But it's a losing battle against sleep. No. I must read.

"You will recall from the previous chapter."

I don't recall from the previous chapter. I don't even recall the name of the previous chapter. I am in so much trouble...

Nine Hours to Go

The wretched alarm again. Going on... and on... and making the pillow vibrate. I have to get up. I have to avoid an F. Poke one finger out of the blankets. This is patently not the weather to get up before the crack of dawn and study economics.

Six Hours to Go

Ethical dilemma: Do I go to class and not study Economics and feel guilty, or do I stay in my room, not go to class, not study Economics and feel guilty? On the whole I think I'll go for Option Number One. Not that it's going to make any difference at this late hour.

One Hour to Go

A morning spent surreptitiously leafing through the textbook during classes, and feverishly turning pages between them. Lunch has been aborted. I have to learn all about economic policy formulation in sixty minutes. It doesn't matter how. Somehow. This is when those Matrix-style information downloads would come in handy.

And then... the inevitable!

Perfect Peace

2005-11-18T09:53:00.000-08:00

A commodity, I do not doubt, that is only slightly more common than fields of amaranth on this side of the grave. But if anything comes close to it, it is the feeling you get when you realize that there is now no need to step from the shower into a blazer and shoes that were never meant to be walked in.

I learnt one thing from the process though: the number of howlers you think you can perpetrate in the space of an hour is nothing to the number you actually can perpetrate if you put your mind to it. And I don't mean the kind that involve not knowing how many yuan traded to the dollar when the markets opened last Monday. I mean the kind that resemble wearing an "I love Rasputin" badge to an interview for the position of personal bodyguard to Nicholas II.

"So, tell me why you think you're the best person for the job."

That's a question that ought to be easy to answer. Exaggeration is required, yes; you will sound narcissistic, possibly; but it shouldn't be difficult. Unless, of course, you are thoroughly disorientated, dead tired, unbelievably hungry, and you aren't really sure which company the interviewer represents and what position he is offering.

I pitched myself as a financial analyst to a marketing firm that was looking to hire me for an IT position. I think that sums it up to a nicety. There was the interviewer, clearly wondering why understanding finance should qualify me to work with a systems design team, and there was I, wondering if his complete lack of reaction boded good or ill.

Some of the bloopers - not all mine - were more memorable, though...

Interviewer: I was at IIMA myself.
Student: Really? So am I!

Student: I'm in Section C.
Interviewer: Oh, really? So was I.
Student: Did you win T-Nite?
Interviewer: No.
Student: We did.

Interviewer: So, is there anything you'd like to ask me?
Student: Do you have those T-shirts in the Large size?

Interviewer: You want to apply to position X?
Student: Yes.
Interviewer: But you've filled in the form for position Y.
Student: Oh.

It just can't happen at any other time.

How Not to Get Shortlisted

2005-10-20T06:26:00.000-07:00

What steps did you follow in deciding which XXXXXXXXXX firms to apply to?

I opened the list of companies visiting campus for summer placement and related my CV to all of them. But that’s just twenty words and I have to stretch this to ninety somehow, so let’s pretend there was deep thought and profound logic involved. I analyzed my strengths and weaknesses – nope, sorry, I’m not supposed to mention my weaknesses here – my strengths and skills relevant to the XXXXXXXXXX industry to arrive at this vital decision. That’s seventy-five words, and this sentence brings it to ninety, so here ends the story.

Why would you like to intern with AAAAA?

Let’s get one thing straight. I would not like to intern with anybody. I would like to spend next summer lounging on a sunny beach with a book, preferably in Majorca. But that would mean a long and arduous fight with the PGP office – not something a girl in her right mind would undertake.
So that’s why I want AAAAA; I have no information about whether AAAAA wants me. If they do I hope they will tell me so immediately; I can then stop distorting the truth six times daily.

What made you choose the BBBBBB position in the firm?

Does it matter? It’s just two months; nothing you do to me could possibly be more taxing than the first term at IIMA. Since you’re asking, though, it was eighth on the list and eight was listed as my lucky number today. Don’t ask me where. I’m sure it was somewhere.
Being of sound body and allegedly sound mind, I can guarantee that I will not set the building on fire. There’s no other damage I can do in eight weeks, so it’s not such a dusty proposition. I hope.

Discuss your Extra-Curricular Activities and Interests.

I doubt cursing myself for not keeping every certificate I ever won (I should have hyphenated that to save words) counts, so let’s stick with the usual… books literature drama poetry math. It would have been maths but for Microsoft Word. I have wasted enough time clicking “Ignore” to be willing to concede the point.
Something missing? Oh, yeah, proof that I’m not lying through my teeth because I think it matters to recruiters that I won a prize for reciting “Jack and Jill” at the age of three.
Er.

Not the best way to get a job offer, I concede, unless there are points for originality.

My Kingdom for a Verse

2005-10-19T03:24:00.000-07:00

I haven't a kingdom, though. It's as easy to offer endless expanses of gold-bearing soil as it is to offer a square foot of barren and parched earth on the other side of nowhere if you have neither.

I'd very much like to say I would give anything, even unto half my kingdom, to anyone who can tell me the rest of this or even put a name to the "Anonymous" that I ought to stick in at the end of it:

A single word, a single page,
The remnants of a distant age;
Fair breezes touch a greener lea,
A brighter sun, a bluer sea –
Naught left to us but poetry.

But that wouldn't be fair when I possess as many kingdoms as I do kings to go with them.

Excuse the rambling. It's been a hectic week so far... Again with the CVs, the Statements of Purpose (beyond, "not flunking out of the course"), the assignments, the sundry other things that seem too minor to mention but somehow fill every free second of your day.

Need I even mention that there are now less than three weeks to midterms? It's become a fact of my life that there are eternally less than three weeks to something. Deadlines... you just have to love them. Or at least tolerate them, since whether or not you like it they're here to stay.

Because if the young Lord Paris goes before you, you really have no option but to follow.

How to Travel

2005-10-09T11:12:00.000-07:00

With a salmon.

Umberto Eco should have written a book on how to spend a Sunday. I'm surprised that there have not been any particularly famous polls on the subject. They would probably turn up enough unexpected results to merit an inch or so on the front page of the Times of India.

I can guess what some of them would be... Lie in bed with a book... Loll on a sandy beach under a tropical/Mediterranean sun... Watch TV... Watch a movie... Play online chess against somebody in Honolulu...

OK, that last one is stretching it a bit. You get my point, though... The things that would feature high on the list would definitely not include, for instance, writing a paper about how reading four lines from Pygmalion filled one with the knowledge of how to be a better and more effective manager. A very edifying way to spend the holiday, no doubt, but not a particularly entertaining one.

With due apologies to HH Munro and Clovis Sangrail, what is needed at this moment is an Unrest Cure. I am now legally old enough to stand for a by-election in some out-of-the-way constituency, but somehow I do not believe that is quite the answer.

And whatever quiz there is tomorrow will certainly prove unrestful enough for anybody, up to and including Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, Fifth Earl of Ickenham, so I guess that's taken care of.

She Walks in Beauty

2005-10-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

Three handsome aristocrats at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that was the end of any stereotype that ever existed of a poet as a tiny, sorry-looking specimen of humanity who used vicarious verse (which has an odd sound to it despite the alliteration, I know, but bear with me) to make up for the total lack of romanticism in his life. Nobody can accuse Byron of being boring any more than they can accuse him of wasting too much time polishing his poetry.

I tried to pick my personal favourite of his poems, but it was rather difficult. I can only name the ones that wouldn't figure: All is Vanity, Farewell! If Ever Fondest Prayer and When We Two Parted. It is not that I love Caesar less, but that I love Rome more... and I am now lost somewhere on the cobbled streets, and the day I can make up my mind where to go will be the day Wile E. Coyote turns vegan.

Well, it might happen.

On a slightly less illogical note, I think it would be a toss-up between Maid of Athens, The Isles of Greece and By the Rivers of Babylon, with The Destruction of the Sennacherib coming much higher on the list of Honourable Mentions than, I dare guess, most people would place it. Technically, I suppose, it is simply an exalted example of the misuse of metre, but it's the kind of thing that gives the impression that Byron himself had a very good time writing it.

One day, as I keep telling myself, I will know which I like best, whether the refrigerator light really goes off when you shut the door, the name of the person who commissioned the assassination of Philip of Macedon, and the exact value of pi. Until that day comes... There is, however little I like admitting it to myself, work to be done.

Such Stuff as Dreams are Made of

2005-09-27T09:34:00.000-07:00

Our little lives really ought to be rounded with a sleep. Will said so, and to suggest that Will was wrong about it is like saying Einstein never really understood Physics - not something the normal person would do.

I've clocked in very few hours for the past couple of days. People said the second term at IIMA was lighter than the first, and I'm starting to think it was just to make the fall harder. Free time, they said. Plenty of time to wander around the campus, they said. What I have to say to that is... but, in the interests of propriety, I'll censor it.

I've spent several hours trying to make my CV. It's not that it's a time-consuming process; how long does it take to calculate a few percentages? It just seems extremely absurd, when I haven't the faintest clue how to run my own life, to try to persuade HR managers that I know how to run projects for them. I mean, it's just been a year since people stopped commenting, "Teenagers!" with an accompanying shake of the head when I did something particularly foolish, and now I'm sitting in an air-conditioned classroom in a swivel chair passing judgement on Microsoft's accounting policy.

Does it make any sense at all?

My point exactly.

But I have work to do... a CV to write... another ridiculous attempt to prove that I actually know what I'm doing here...

Inferno

2005-09-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

After a week of freedom, a week dedicated exclusively to pretending that I never heard the word "B-School" in my life, being back on campus is rather like descending, one by one, through the circles of Hell. The countdown, which touched zero just seven days ago, is now excrutiatingly close to the three-digit-number. The last page of the previous term's schedule just went the way of the dodo, but tomorrow there's going to be a brand new schedule for a brand new term full of working Saturdays.

I don't want to say lasciate ogne speranza, I really don't. It would not be very optimistic; furthermore, it would not be strictly true. There is some hope, and not just that the six days in December will ultimately come. If rumour is to be believed - and nobody ever accused the Hydra of lying, after all - the circle of ice is behind us, from the Caina to the Judecca. One could say Malebolge is behind us as well.

For that matter, one could say all the circles are behind us; the next two terms are Purgatorio more than Inferno. And once we have suffered for all the pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony and lust of our lives... Well, what comes next ought to be worth all the trouble.

Sometimes Dante's logic is slightly bewildering. Poor Virgil is left in Limbo because he did not follow a religion that did not even exist during his lifetime, but Dante himself, having set his allegorical stage with such pagan props as the Styx, and populated it with Minos, Cerberus and Antaeus, among others, is raised not just to the highest sphere of Paradiso, but to the Empyrean beyond.

I suppose he knew what he was about. And I will be satisfied if even the Sphere of the Moon is at the end of the terraces.

O, Courage, Courage, Princes!

2005-09-10T05:16:00.000-07:00

There are two things I've always wished I'd seen. One is Alexander standing... well, suppliant is hardly the right word under the circumstances, so I'll just say standing... before the Oracle. Alexander's reputation for being remarkably easy on the eye has nothing to do with it - or so I claim. What I really want to see is the expression on her face, the most powerful person, without exception, in all Hellas, the voice of Apollo, at whose word kings were wont to tremble...

Yeah. Right.

The other thing is Achilles riding out after the fiasco with Patroclus. The Iliad builds to that, in the end; all the grandeur and savage beauty of twenty-four books lead up to that one passage. The fall of Ilion may have dropped the curtain on the Greek mythic pantheon, but Troy fell when Hector fell.

That's the trouble with the Iliad - with all books and plays about the Trojan War, for that matter. You don't know, at the end, whose side you were supposed to have been on.

At some point in the past four paragraphs I should possibly have mentioned that I have end-of-term exams from Monday. That is easily remedied; I'll mention it now: I have end-of-term exams from Monday. Last night my situation was dire, but it has now become so bad that it's actually funny... And I have no choice but to put all my faith in my guiding star.

And that's enough about exams. There's no reason to devote these fifteen minutes to them as well.

It's at times like this that I wish my knowledge of Greek extended beyond, "Phobos kai Deimos," which, incidentally, is what I'm feeling now. They're a nice pair to be the constant companions of the warlord. You don't even need a battle; the briefest hint of a skirmish is enough to make them pop up unpleasantly.

I know what Plum would have said. He would have said I should go through the next six days brandishing my pen like it's a banner with the strange device Excelsior. The only problem is that, brandish I never so well, I will not have Longfellow to write my epitaph.

But then... I will hopefully be alive and kicking on Thursday afternoon, all set to board that flight to freedom.

The Mome Raths Outgrabe

2005-09-01T03:38:00.000-07:00

I've forgotten exactly how Humpty-Dumpty defined the words mome, raths and outgrabe, if indeed he did. But I do know that, had Lewis Carroll been a part of our week so far, he would have compared the experience to being bitten by the frumious Bandersnatch and clawed by the Jubjub bird, before falling afoul of the Jabberwock.

The week began with a Monday; need I say more? And this was a Monday that followed a weekend that was, for all practical purposes, nonexistent; furthermore, it ended with an Operations Management quiz. The thing about OM quizzes is that you're never quite sure to do with the preparation time. You think you know things. Two minutes before the TA starts handing out the paper, you stop thinking and start hoping you know things.

Then, of course, all illusions end.

Our HR project presentation was scheduled for Wednesday, which naturally put paid to all thoughts of sleep on Tuesday. And then there was the fact that we had been under the impression that the presentation would be next week... Anyway, we sat up till the wee hours of Wednesday morning, reducing twenty-page articles to twenty words to go on a powerpoint slide, and not preparing for the quiz we knew we would have.

I would feel slightly less aggrieved about that, and about the grade that I know will be on that quiz paper, if we had actually been called to present on Wednesday.

Wednesday's quiz... I'm not going to pretend I would have aced it under other circumstances, but I might have done marginally better - written in at least one correct entry - if our professor had not kept us in twenty minutes past time, giving us a recap of revenue recognition. (To add insult to inury, I thought that meant the quiz would have at least one question on revenue recognition, which it did not, and spent precious pre-quiz preparation time revising it.)

Today, though, was the icing on the cake. At 1240 hours, we were sure we would have an IC quiz at 2:30 pm. At 1325 hours, one of the TAs told us we had a quiz in Individual Dynamics at 2:00 pm. Since it was the first ID quiz (with ten days to go for the term), and since "Quizzes and Assignments" are worth 20% of our grade for the course, we were understandably alarmed, and we bolted.

At 1330 hours, we came to a screeching halt in front of a Quiz Notice Board that was... empty. There we were, ready to glower hatefully at the slip of paper announcing our doom, and there was the Notice Board, smug, omniscient, and irrefutably vacant.

"Nope," said we. "That can't be. We know we have a quiz. Ergo, the Notice Board must be wrong."

Never believe that. The Notice Board is always right, and we didn't have a quiz. But it was still five minutes of unnecessary tension followed by ten minutes of agonizing uncertainty. People who skipped lunch and ran straight to their rooms to mug might take a sterner view of the situation, but now I think it was all a bit funny. And I ask myself, what does the PGP system gain - other than seeing a classroom empty itself out in fifteen seconds, which is hardly an event worthy of the Olympic games - by making us think there's going to be a quiz when there isn't?

Will would put it down to Ariel - or possibly Puck. But to add Puck to the mix is not comforting.

Gnothi se Auton

2005-08-27T09:18:00.000-07:00

Know thyself.

Transliteration aside (for which I trust Apollo will forgive me; I'm not quite ready for the inside of a padded cell yet, and it would make my life very complicated if people thought I was) it's a very useful thing to keep in mind when you're hoping for ESP. There are people who, knowing what is to come, will arm themselves beforehand. There are people who won't. And then there are people (like me) who will convince themselves that nobody can really interpret what the Oracle says until after the event, so it doesn't matter in any case.

I hope the previous paragraph hasn't been taken as confirmation that some concerned person should start looking for a good psychiatrist. It's just the effect of a very crazy week. Gnothi se Auton.

The campus is going to be rather on the empty side next week, with half the students off on term break. That doesn't mean we won't have quizzes, though. If anything, since we've not been burdened with too many of them this week, next week is going to be an occasion for all the professors to revenge themselves for all the lack of preparation during T-Nite and after.

I think it's the "after" part that really bugs them. The trouble is that once you've got through T-Nite, devoting, at the very most, an hour a day to mugging, it's very difficult to get back into the pre-midterm routine. The profs look at it differently; they probably think that with T-Nite out of the way, you should attack your books with twice the enthusiasm. The policy of the Delphic Council doesn't quite work here.

Having said that, I suppose they knew it was coming. Some of them, at least, told us so in the first week. That makes me feel slightly better about myself and my present disinclination to spend hours with cases... That may change as endterms approach. I certainly hope it does.

But it's the Pierian spring I'm after as far as that's concerned.

The Brief Chronicles of Time

2005-08-21T00:52:00.000-07:00

Drama seems to be everywhere right now. I don't mean drama as defined by Jacques sitting in the forest of Arden being wise; that's always there in any case. I mean drama in the more usual sense of the word.

The final show of Kamala was last night. Somehow people generally seem to perform best on the final night. I've never been able to figure out why it works that way. In any case, last night was good. I rather think Will would have enjoyed it if he had seen it, although he would probably have written a different ending.

One of my old classmates is doubling as Oberon and Theseus in Dream. You would have thought he'd be happy, with two leading ladies. But apparently he gets slapped by one and kicked by the other, so it isn't as pleasing a prospect as it seems. I can only feel sorry for him; to double in one of Will's plays and still have to count yourself lucky if you get so much as a smile from your counterparts...

This is my first relatively free weekend in a very long time. First it was midterms, then it was T-Nite... But I suppose a few weeks of not having time to think, leave alone eat and sleep, makes you far more appreciative of that time when you get it.

We predicted our quizzes with remarkable accuracy this week. That doesn't mean I studied for them very much; it just means I knew in the morning what iniquities were going to happen in the afternoon, and so the slip of paper behind the glass came as no major surprise.

While I'm on the subject, I have come to the conclusion, after much deliberation, that Hamlet was sane. That I'll probably change my mind in two days is immaterial; at the moment I am decided. He was just brilliant, and a far better actor than the abstracts he had in Mousetrap.

I've always wondered if Agatha Christie had Hamlet in mind when she wrote that play. Being Christie, she may have done, even if only as a decoy. And maybe not that much of a decoy, at that; if you stretch your imagination a bit, there's something in the concept of revenge and dead brothers that may have seemed familiar to the Elizabethan court.

And now, if I can keep my mind made up about Hamlet, and decide once and for all whether Macbeth would have killed Duncan even without the witches teaching him to know himself - both highly unlikely propositions - I will be somewhere.

Taste Not the Pierian Spring

2005-08-16T05:30:00.000-07:00

The title doesn't mean anything. Really. It's just the effect of having functioned on three hours of sleep a night for a week, then having slept very nearly round the clock yesterday, and finally having topped it off by trying to make sense of Microsoft's accounting policy and decide whether stock options really motivate CEOs. All I have to say for myself is that I didn't get sozzled - not on alcohol, anyway.

T-Nite is over. In retrospect and with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, it was fun, although going to bed at four in the morning is not something I would recommend as a lifelong policy. Some things are best left to Gally Threepwood.

So now it's back to business as usual. That's a rather depressing thought. During T-Nite I had enough to do that I didn't have time to worry about EA and QM backlog, or give more than a passing thought to midterm results. Now that I have the leisure to sit and work out what they're going to do to my grades for the term... But why think of that when I needn't?

One of my friends is playing Titania. They're putting up the show in the middle of September; I'll be very sorry to miss it - not least because I want to see her kiss Bottom with the ass's head. Still, maybe I'll have someone take photographs for me. I could do with some fun.

Less than a month now, until endterms. At this point I'm not too worried. When you're deluged in tests and quizzes as numerous as - well, as anything that anybody ever called numerous; I can't think of a simile right now - they all boil down, as one of my professors is wont to say, to punctuation marks in an essay being written by somebody with a warped sense of humour. (He just mentioned the punctuation marks; the rest is my own.)

It's raining again. So I'll just listen to the drizzle and let the Alps arise as they will.

If Music be the Food of Love

2005-08-07T04:03:00.000-07:00

Play on!

When you read the line by itself it sounds remarkably cheerful, as though whoever said it had drunk just enough to be in a benevolent, expansive mood. You can almost see him raising his wine cup to an imaginary orchestra.

Then you read the rest of the passage, and you wonder why Will insisted on hamartia for his comic heroes. Macbeth does not come across as manic depressive, nor does Othello, nor even Hamlet. But, traitorous though the thought may be, it is very difficult to read Merchant without wishing Antonio would stop being so noble, stop trying to save Shylock's soul, and get himself a life.

That has nothing to do with my life right now. I started with the quote because it's one of the happiest-sounding lines I know, as long as it's read by itself. The imaginary wine cup, the imaginary orchestra.

It's strange, how you discover that some things aren't as bad as they seem. While I would not make a habit of dressing like a prominent member of an underworld chain gang and going about shouting slogans, it is not without its attractions - on occasion. When I did it last night it was rather fun.

So was Welcome Night - or Nite; I don't know how they spell it. What I know about music, other than the spelling, pronunciation and etymology of the word, can be inscribed on a grain of rice with a blunt carving knife. It didn't make too much of a difference, though. I'm sure people who can tell C minor from C major had a nicer evening than I did, but I had, for lack of a better word, fun.

The week ahead is supposed to be the one where you learn how not to read an HR case and still avoid writing a 1000-word assignment in one evening. It seems a remarkably useful thing to learn, rather like the sixth sense some people develop that tells them whether or not there's going to be a quiz on any given day.

Aristotle would say that the expectation causes the quiz. But such accuracy would be a little too much to expect, even of Pythian Apollo.

In the name of Phoebus, then, play on.

Elysium!

2005-08-03T05:15:00.000-07:00

The servants of Hades may be stoking the fires of Tartarus, the Moirae may be sitting at their spinning wheel with identical sinister smiles, Zeus may be giving orders to the Cyclopes and gearing himself to say it with thunderbolts, but nothing can change the fact that midterms are over and that for the first time in six weeks there is not a monumental amount of reading material demanding immediate and undivided attention. The battles are over, and it will be a few days until we learn who has lost them, who has won them, and who has lost some and won others.

Around this time I should start feeling particularly aggrieved about the fact that we have classes this Saturday, and on every succeeding Saturday excepting the one that is listed in our timetable along with the dreaded letters W, A and C (followed by the dreaded word "Submission"). But I really can't feel aggrieved about anything right now; it's too much trouble, especially considering that sleep is going to be in short supply for the next two weeks.

Post-midterms... it's a little hard to believe that I've been here only six weeks, or that I've been here six weeks already. Six weeks of perpetual sleep deprivation, of deadlines to be met and no time to meet them, of trying to balance Assets and Liablilities and track down vast sums of money that have mysteriously vanished, rather al0ng the lines of Houdini... actually, it isn't as bad as it sounds. While I would not go so far as to say that being mistaken for one of Cleopatra's slaves is a pleasure that grows on you, it certainly becomes less painful with the passage of time. Dark may lower the tempest overhead, but I can console myself with the thought that whatever happens, I am unlikely to find myself hobnobbing with a hungry crocodile at the bottom of the Nile. Or even at the bottom of the Sabarmati.

It's drizzling. It's a very soothing sound, rain, when it doesn't interfere with fruitless trains of thought that you know will lead nowhere, but that you hope will provide you with a brilliant insight on how to solve all the problems of the Indian economy with one swift stroke. Until those thunderbolts start falling, life is, to quote the ninth earl, capital, capital, capital.

The Hurlyburly's Just Begun

2005-07-31T05:01:00.000-07:00

And the clock's ticking. Fifteen hours and some change until I discover how little I actually know about subjects about which I thought I knew something.

Incidentally, I do hope nobody was deceived by the title and expects this to be either intelligent or philosophical. I, personally, am all eagerness to get pally with wisdom (or knowledge, if you prefer to translate it like that), but wisdom thinks I am one of those mortals best avoided; that, then, is the status quo.

This is, of course, not such a wonderful time to start blogging. That change I was talking about is getting shorter by the second. But I've reached a point where I do not care who produces how many shirts and sells them to which client as long as nobody expects me to do anything about it. I'm hoping the situation will change by tomorrow morning: feelings like that with the OM paper in front of me, and "trouble" will not begin to describe what I will be in. Nor, for that matter, will several other words that, in the interests of propriety, I shall not list.

I can't help feeling that the past week has been the lull before the storm. Five days, five free afternoons, and just one quiz? Nope. Something's fishy. I don't know if it has something to do with tomorrow being a Sabbath, but I can't help thinking that the next three days are going to be a brew with ingredients beyond Will's wildest imaginings... And that takes some imagining.

By now, half the people reading this have probably resolved to tell me that my chances will be brighter if I stop writing pointless posts and mug. I daresay they're right. In any case, the change may be getting shorter, but there's always the uplifting thought of Elysium, or the day after midterms... Onward, then, and hopefully there are calm seas and auspicious gales waiting.