"Looking For Comedy In the Muslim World"

Diversity. In language. Mannerism. In speech. In contexts. Its everywhere. So it should be no surprise that people have a hard time understanding each others' idiosyncracies. Be it at the individual or family or ethno-religious or national context. A lot of times, we seem to be at logger heads. Being the curious people that we are, we want to try and understand the other.

And when we fall flat and fail to understand, it is because of one and only one reason - the effort was not honestly unbiased.

Looking For Comedy..the film, is the story of one such attempt by the American Administration to understand what causes the Muslims to laugh. Tragically, they use the means of a Hollywood comic, Albert Brooks to achieve their results, and well, the result is a comedy of errors, culture shock, and misunderstandings bordering on the comic. What is perceived as a job well done by the Brooks' character is actually a botched job that may have resulted in precipitating the already tenous relationship between India and Pakistan. (Talk about difference in perceptions).

What this movie so adeptly underscores is that, despite best efforts to actually try and genuinely understand something, when we go into an initiative inadequately prepared, the result is inevitable catastrophe. Especially when the funny guy sent in by the government has had no prior exposure to the cultural subcontexts of the places that he is supposedly scouting.

Two poignant scenes that underscore the theme of the movie happen within minutes of each other...first, the State Department cohort sent with the comic asks the comic's secretary to tell him to "break a leg". Her response..."Oh please. Thats rude." The second is when, the comic has tried in vain to get the audience to respond to some of his stand-up jokes, he asks in jest as to how many in the audience knows and understands English. And much to his chagrin, the entire audience lifts their hands up.

Two vastly different experiences - one at an individual level and another at a group level that has the same symptoms of the vastly under-rated problem - the problem of understanding and appreciating multi-culturalism. When an effort is made to understand a different culture through the same lens as we view ours, the result is a grotesque misrepresentation of the glorious concept of cultural diversity.

Looking for Comedy is a fantastic indie that atleast has the guts to hint at our seeming inability to understand diversity on its own merits.

On Education

Came across a rather interesting portrayal of education by the famed English economist John Maynard Keynes on the web earlier today...and sat down to think as to how truly it resonates atleast in my personal experience with the education systems in India and the USA.

"Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent."

Brevity befitting an Englishman. Easily confounding just as easily comprehensible. Must be why the best education people generally receive is in the school of life.

Baseball Bliss

Now, it must be said that thanks in part to a series of collapses over the past several years (2001 to the Arizona Diamondbacks, 2002 to the Anaheim Angels, 2003 to the Florida Marlins, 2004 to the Boston Red Sox and 2006 to the Detroit Tigers), bashing the New York Yankees for their collapse is becoming almost too sad. Almost. Because it is never enough to poke fun at those Bronx bomber fans with their sense of entitlement, bordering on the obnoxious.

So, to all those Yankee-haters amongst us, ESPN.com has this veritable top-ten list of Yankee collapses. And you may note that of the ten, five happened in the last six years. Must be that baseball players now no longer believe the "mystique" and "aura" of Yankee Stadium. Must be Curt Schilling's famous quote in 2001 ("Aura and Mystique sound like night-club dancers") is coming true. Afterall, night-club dancers do have their shelf-life and then they are just consigned to dust-bins. Thanks to the fawning New York-based media, we've been treated to stories of Yankee mystique and aura etc, and of how Yankee Stadium is the toughest place to play in etc. Now, thanks the same media, we can gloat over the failure of these paper-champs. Until their next such collapse.

Washington Post: Gender? It's A Gray Area.

Here we go again. Another attempt at reasoning out why women are, well, women, and men are, shall we say, men.

See the single-page, printer-friendly view of the article and you can as well decide if you are going to agree or disagree.

Louann Brizendine, a Bay-area shrink, writes in her book "The Female Brain" that men and women have different systems for the brain. And her choices are rather telling. Women have Mac. And men? PC. (Sniffle. No wonder my girl thinks I am on the verge of a memory-overloading crash all the time. Atleast, now I know and have my excuse. It's my circuits. )

Some of the stuff that's apparently discussed in the book (hey, it's on my library check-out list, so can't say for sure without actually seeing it) does actually seem like tired-old rehashing of stereotypes, and the Wash Post article does make it appear like it's just a tired-old rehash with out basis in truth. But none-the-less, they make for one hilarious read. To wit...(quoted verbatim from the Wash Post along with added commentary of my own in green)

- Men think about sex every 52 seconds while women think about it about once a day. Man, I gotto wonder how they decided to estimate or measure that one.
- Women speak faster on the average - 250 words a minute to 125 for a typical male (now, I know a few women that are quite good at speed talking, but then, if you tune in to the typical radio network, you hear men that are quite adept at speed talking as well. Makes you wonder about the legitimacy of this specific comparison...but then I digress) and also adds that women use 20000 words a day while men use about 7000. This does make me realize what some men complain about when they say their wives talk too much. Its not that they talk for longer time as much as they cram too much in the time they speak...
- A woman knows what people are feeling while a man can't spot emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm. Oh boy. I surely can't complain or contradict this one. Because I for one surely refuse to "interpret" what other people are thinking, without any external sign of it. But then, what do I know? I am a man.

But at the very least, it does add fuel to the gender stereotypes prevalent in our societies, and maybe, at its remotely best possibility, has stumbled onto something that is really significant. I doubt this latter possibility, but I am just willing to keep an open mind until proven otherwise. Definitely worth a peep from your local lending library, if only to laugh at the hilarity of "reasoned deductions" that are likely nothing more than convenient twisting of facts.

Walking.....Shark??

See related post here.

Ok. So we've seen an octopus that puts up an act. In any of (known till now) three disguises - a lion fish, a flat fish, and a sea-snake the octopus surely puts on a show - evasion? Safety from predators? (Thanks to Tom Tregenza at University of Exeter in Cornwall) Maybe...whatever...ultimately, its just a treat to see an animal mimicking behaviour.

Now we are getting to see another fantastic example of unusual behaviour in another sea-living animal. This time, the walking shark. It apparently walks. See image above (Copyright Conservation International, via AP). Nick-named the epaulette shark, its been observed in the area called Birds Head Seascape off the Indonesian Papua provincial coast in Asia - the so-called Asian Coral Triangle.

Whatever will they find next?

Quote Unquote

This gem is from Jim Hacker, the Right Honorable MP, from the laugh-a-thon "Yes Minister".

You know what the average Common Market official is like ? They've got the flexibility of the Germans, the organising ability of the Italians and the modesty of the French. And that's topped up by the humour of the Belgians, the generosity of the Dutch and the intelligence of the Irish.

Humorous, scathing, and skilfully enough, makes it seem like a compliment!

Would someone tell the Democrats to hire the script writers of this fantabulous BBC politi-comedy? The Republicans are catching them with pants-down at every opportunity with their brilliant fluency in obfuscating facts and concepts in terrifying cavalcade of words, morality and self-righteous out-rage. So fluent in fact that its not even funny any more.

Maybe its time for the donkeys to man-up, and atleast pretend to show that they've got a spine.

LiveScience.com - Nature's Wrath: The Most Dangerous U.S. Cities

LiveScience.com - Nature's Wrath: The Most Dangerous U.S. Cities

"Sir, would you please say something"

I've heard it said in the US that focus on careers for kids about to head to college are driven by the prevailing theme of the prime-time dramas on TV - how the current slew of crime-dramas are driving people to consider careers as detectives, crime sleuths, and all such related careers that are the part of programs like NUMB3RS, Law & Order, Miami Vice, CSI and its spinoffs.

Apparently, in just fourteen years since the cable revolution in India, the country's thriving and not-so-thriving networks and their inane focus on "news" has spawned such a mini revolution in career focus for the country's young'uns. From traditional careers like doctors and engineers to the not-so-occasional lawyers, to the omni-present "software developers", the focus has now shifted to "TV News". Or atleast, wannabe TV journalists.

The BBC's South Asia bureau chief Paul Danahar writes an interesting critique of the new phenomenon, that threatens to over-run the TV news sector with substandard and often pathetic reporters who often show up because these are jobs with "No Experience Required". No wonder there are journalistic pieces like "Sir, would you please say something?", and "Who are you?" get thrown at no-less than a person like the Home Minister of India. Paul notes the interesting phenomenon of dumbing down of TV news, that is directly, and indirectly a result of the strangling bureaucratic mess thrown up the Indian government, under the pretext of security requirements. While Paul does suck up to NDTV, calling them thoughtful and serious journalists (apparently he didn't note/care for their coverage of the Vadodara incidents earlier this summer), one cannot fault with any other segment of his thoughtful piece, including his indulgent dig at the "old or ugly" journalists that the BBC hires :)

Now what can we learn from animals?

Two specimen examples of things that we can indeed learn from animals... Frog giving a rat a piggy-back ride to help survive the monsoons in Lucknow, India. And a dog helping feed tiger cubs in Hefei, China.

If its a spade...call it a spade

http://in.rediff.com/news/2006/jun/15franc.htm

Someone with guts to say what the mainstream hype-driven media refuses to report.