Tag: India

Easy switch

A friend1 recently mentioned how many of our old acquaintances self identify as libertarians, and how comfortable many of them are with authoritarianism.

In my head, this played out as…

I’m smarter than you, don’t tell me what to do, how to live. (Libertarian)

…turns easily into…

I’m smarter than you, I will tell you what to do, how to live. (Authoritarian)

Of course, there’s a big execution gap between telling people what to do, and forcing people to do it. In other words, between being an armchair authoritarian and the real one chaining up the country. Supporting the real one provides a comfortable bridge over that gap.

  1. The friend is an IIT-IIM grad. The acquaintances are all IIM, if not IIT-IIM grads. Perhaps the superior status signalling provided by these institutions is a trigger for the “I’m smarter than you…” base that leads to the two isms. ↩

Faith. Blind?

Parents are shit scared. They realise how bad is the situation. Their network is full of infected and suffering people. They’ve lost friends and acquaintances. They will not hear one word against the God or his organisation.

Friends are shit scared. They’ve suffered and recovered. Their parents and siblings are infected but stable. They’re scared, not of Covid, but of the God who demands and commands this blind loyalty. They’re scared of what’s happening to the nation, the society, and their future and safety in it.

I fear for both.

I’m sad that I’m so far from both.

No dogs allowed

Parents are moving out of the home we grew up in, and into a flat in a ‘society’.

They didn’t want this change but have now accepted it and are looking forward to it.

I struggled to accept this change, specially the circumstances that forced it, but had slowly accepted it. Till now.

I just realised that given it’s a flat in a small town Indian ‘society’, there’s no chance of a pet dog being allowed in there. It breaks my heart.

I had a long pending plan/hope/desire of visiting them and staying with them for a couple of months. I can’t take Chewie there, but I’d plotted about adopting a young dog, training him during my stay in Karnal, and leaving him with them once they developed a bond.

But now that they live in a flat in a ‘society’, this can’t ever happen 🙁

😞😢

Petrichor

It’s probably the rarest natural scent here in the UK. It’s always raining (pissing), rarely sunny for long enough to make the earth go dry, and very rare to have a period of sunshine immediately followed by a shower. Usually the weather changes are interspersed with days of dull blue-grey clouds and occasional pissing drizzle.

Today I woke up to that lovely, earthy smell. It’s been unseasonably warm and sunny last few days. It hasn’t rained in nearly a week. The spell was broken early morning with a short, sharp shower. The result is a sweet, lingering smell. The smell that reminds me of home. Petrichor.

Agra sky over the decades

The BBC has an article with photos of celebrities in front of the Taj Mahal over the decades. The thing that caught my eye was how the sky is nearly never blue in the recent photos. While the yellowing of the Taj’s marble is well documented, the slow yellowing of our sky is well known but rarely discussed (GDP growth trumps everything else).

Here are the photos, chronologically arranged:

1959, Eisenhower
1992, Diana
1966, George Harrison
2000, Putin
2001, Aussie cricket team
2001, Musharraf
2015, Zuck
2016, Kate & William
2020, Trump

Of course this set is in no way representative. They are too few data points. All susceptible to the weather on the day, the camera settings, and the post processing.

There is also a bit of confirmation bias on my part. I’ve noticed, sadly, the disappearance of blue day skies and starry night skies for over two decades. And I probably looked at the photos to confirm that.

But this also gives an idea that this may not be the worst approach. There are probably billions of photos shared of the Taj on social media every year. We could create a program that scans for them, dates them, filters out the outliers, and then analysis the trend of sky colour (and Taj’s marble colour) over time. Time to put all that social media oversharing to good use :)