If I have any reader left hello to you. No, I am not going to talk about one of my favourite beers which goes by the same name, but rather alluding to the fact that I am almost done with this PhD thingy, and soon will be back to having a normal life, and hopefully will start blogging soon.

Oh, and I was feeling like bitching about this bloggingheads video posted on NY Times, where Ann Althouse argues that the negative reaction to Piyush “Bobby” Jindal’s response to Barack Obama’s state-of-the-union address has to do with the fact that he is brown. If you have no idea what I am talking about, no worries. It is US politics, and like any politics it’s mostly BS anyway, and as George Carlin would have said “It’s bad for ya!”

So I went to Althouse’s blog, and posted the following comment:

Ann, you are absolutely wrong about the race comment. I hope it was something you made up for sake of argument, and did not seriously think it to be true.

I am an Indian (from the country in Asia), and so if I find Jindal to be insipid, I am probably not being racist. At the very best, he was uninspiring, ill at ease, unconvincing, and less than candid about his background. Painting a picture of struggling immigrant parents, at awe in the land of plenty, only goes so far when your parents are engineers and physicists.

If anything, it is Jindal’s race which may be catapulting him to the national stage, as the GOP scampers to find the browns and blacks in its ranks. I cannot think of a better reason why someone as ordinary as Michael Steele would be elected as the chair of the RNC. Living in Maryland, I had the misfortune of actually witnessing Steele campaign for his failed senate bid in 2006.

Jindal was subpar, and any criticism is well-deserved.

Not a particularly original argument considering the fact that Frank Rich was basically saying something similar (at least the folks who were having dinner with me on Friday can tell you that I would be saying the same thing even before the Rich article was published). However, on second thoughts, my comment actually reads a bit rude — there are certainly better ways of saying someone is wrong. Ah well, I have a long way to go before I learn to be politically correct

If you are willing to accept the urban legend that Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow, then the German equivalent must be milk products. In fact, not only do the Germans make very fine distinctions between different types of milk products by having separate words for them, you can actually buy the different categories at grocery stores or supermarkets.

I caught the first whiff of this mystifying practice soon after moving here, when I spotted a tub of a certain substance called Quark at a supermarket. It looked like something one would eat (as opposed to put in their hair), and the omnivore in me got curious. I got one, came to my apartment, and went straight for the dictionary! That’s when I knew something was wrong. The dictionary translated Quark as “curd”, which, let me tell you, is a total lie. Well, maybe a half truth. There is really nothing in the English language that can adequately explain what Quark is.

But that was just the beginning – I was soon to discover myself cruising the aisles and witness cream manifest itself to me in the multiple avatars of Sahne (regular creme), Schlagsahne (whipping cream), Kaffeesahne (half-n-half in USA), Sauer Sahne (sour cream), Crème Fraîche, Schmand, and Crème Double. If you can translate Schmand, I will buy you a year’s supply of it! In US I choose between salted and unsalted butter. Here, on the other hand, trying to buy butter I was faced with the choice of Süßrahmbutter, Sauerrahmbutter, and Molkenbutter – and all of them unsalted. For some strange reason salted butter is considered exotic in Germany, is hard to find, and costs you a pretty penny!

I was spending my days suspended in this state of confusion, when one day I demanded an explanation from my roomie. Not willing to take up the gauntlet, he hid behind the usual refrain of not knowing the right English words. But he had an obviously ingenious idea – to look it up on Wikipedia! Now, who would have thought of that? Anyone except me, I guess. So I was finally enlightened, and I want to share the revelation with you all. The following flowchart explains how all the milk products are obtained. Take a look, it’s educational.

While on the topic of music and politics – here is Siddhartha Mitter on New York Public Radio presenting you a sampling of the campaign theme songs for the 2008 primaries.

Apparently, John McCain is a huge fan of ABBA, and “Take a Chance on Me” was his personal pick to replace Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” on the campaign trail. I always thought the moment ABBA came on was the time to leave the party. But McCain’s doing pretty well in the primaries, so what do I know?

Follow the link and listen to the whole audio (I am sorry, WordPress doesn’t allow me to use Javascript to embed the audio directly here) – it is quite funny. And no prizes for guessing who turns out to be the rock-star of the whole troupe.

A quick googling of his name (what, you don’t google every new name you see?) led me to another gem – a heartfelt rambling about the mistreatment of okra by mainstream America.

I discovered my favorite vegetable at age 7 at my grandma’s table in Calcutta, India. That vegetable was okra [...] Okra has lovers and haters, but mainly haters. The reason is texture; here we call that lush consistency “slime” [...] sauce gombo from Ivory Coast involves okra sliced to the vanishing point, a green substance that stretches taut off the spoon, infused with palm oil, freckled with seeds, cradling cubes of beef, and sinews of smoked fish, and giant quarters of crab. I call that delicious, but many Americans will call it disgusting!

Listening to him one might imagine that if okra could speak, it would lament “yeh duniya, yeh mehfil, mere kaam ki nahin“! But all is not lost. Mitter provides a glimmer of hope – okra is resurgent, buoyed up by the legions of immigrants washing up on America’s shores. Listen to the whole thing here.

Now, in Bengali okra is called dharosh. In our practice of describing personality traits with names of animals or vegetables, dharosh signifies incompetence and lack of the smarts. If the world’s favorite leader grew up in rural Bengal, he would have surely earned the moniker of dharosh, and that would have been the end of him. Just like some speculate that the name Schiklgruber could have altered the course of history for the better, the lowly dharosh could have saved the day too; if only it got a chance!

The Foo Fighters are playing during the Grammys tonight, and sometime back they launched a YouTube competition for an accompanying instrumentalist for their chart topper song “The Pretender“. There were a bunch of really awesome (for want of a better word) submissions, of which some of my favorites are Asha Mevlana on Viper violin, Ann Marie Calhoun, Brian Fitzgerald, and Abigail Loving on violin, and Tara Klein on cello. But today I saw this violin piece by Aishwarya Venkataraman where she presents a Foo Fighter ala Carnatic. She won’t be playing tonight, but I think this was one of the most unique submissions (together with Asha Mevlana’s Viper violin).

This reminded me of the Channel [V] ad that bobbed up on the “series of tubes” a while back – a Hindustani classical rendition of “Sweet Child O’ Mine”.

I personally feel that the vocals kind of messed up the brilliant sitar duo, but it was salvaged to some extent by aunti-ji at the end What do you think?

I was prompted to write this after reading an article by Michael Blim at 3quarksdaily, but I will come back to it later. Unless you are living under a rock, you may be getting some news of the Democratic primaries. It has started swinging in ways few expected it to, making it fraught with more drama than it needs. It is a complicated choice between candidates with essentially similar agendas, but starkly different personalities. That is why the choice for a Democrat is not so much about “issues” or “experience”, as some keep on parroting, but about who can win a general election against any of the Republican candidates, and who possesses the personality for leading and inspiring the country. And even by those measures it is very hard to say who is the right candidate – if there ever is any.

But what is troubling, without doubt, is the strategy adopted by the Clinton camp. Make no mistake, this is not an upset husband lashing out in his wife’s defense – the Clintons are way too sophisticated for that – but a well-calculated gambit, even though Senator Clinton’s supporters would like to believe otherwise. It is simply wishful thinking that President Clinton acted without the tacit or explicit approval from his wife, and her well-oiled campaign machinery – the dirt is on her hands too.

First, there were the lies – a comment from Obama about the transformative nature of Ronald Reagan’s presidency was spun as a sign of his love and support for Reagan’s ideologies. In his book “Dreams from My Father”, Obama writes:

In 1983, I decided to become a community organizer. There wasn’t much detail to the idea; I didn’t know anyone making a living that way. When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer then directly. Instead, I’d pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed.

Remember that this was written in 1995, well before he ever run for a public office. At what point does it sound like that this man loves Reagan’s ideals?

Then came the sleazy racial onslaught, for which it is best to quote Michael Blim (he is rather vitriolic, but rightly captures the repugnance felt by many):

Bill Clinton, self-proclaimed and rather foolishly acclaimed by some who shall go nameless as the first “Black” president has played the race card with a finesse that even Wallace might have admired. He has niggered Barack Obama. After he and Mrs. Clinton began to see that African-Americans were turning to Obama [...] this most ruthless and cunning couple, the Macbeths of our time, played the race card.

[...] “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice in 1984 and 1988. And he ran a good campaign. Senator Obama’s run a good campaign here, he’s run a good campaign everywhere.” (Financial Times, January 28, page 4) The Financial Times [...] concluded: “Mr. Clinton’s bleary-eyed implication was clear: Mr. Obama is a black candidate whom blacks disproportionately support.”

[...] Clinton seeks to take out not only the black vote (if Senator Clinton can’t get enough of it), but to pick up both whites and Latinos – a kind of multi-culti racism without a ready precedent as I see it, at least now.

[...] Watch out, they are saying to whites and Latinos, those old black block voters are going to get their way. And God knows, you both will find yourselves on the outside looking in. Think of what would happen if they escape the plantation? Given what’s been done to them, their revenge could be frightful.

Read the full article here.

Nobody knows how the primaries or the general elections will turn out to be, or for that matter the next presidency itself. But one thing for certain, the true colors of the Clintons were briefly flashed before us, and it looked every bit as repulsive as Rudy Giuliani. It is just plain sad when a former president of the stature of Bill Clinton tries to ape Karl Rove in campaign tactics. They may yet again get a free pass, riding on the collective amnesia of the American electorate, but my guess is that many will remember, and the country will suffer more fractures as a result. But who cares about collateral damages when the prize is a stay at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

PS: Finally came across a well-balanced article on this issue at Spiegel Online, which is a part of a tangible shift from the “too-happy-to-dismiss-Obama” articles they were publishing a little while back.

Some interesting reading I came across recently:

Welcome to America…You’re Under Arrest is a collection of unfortunate but ultimately hilarious (specially with the luxury of not having to experience them first-hand) incidents to befall a fellow Desi.

It was about five years ago. I was returning from Pakistan and standing in the immigration line at JFK, completely exhausted after a 20-hour flight. When my turn came up at the counter, the INS agent looked at my papers, typed a few things into his computer, and then asked me to follow him to a large room at the side of the immigration hall. I was informed that I was being detained. Two agents handcuffed me and led me to another smaller room. When I asked what I had done. They said things like, “Oh, you know what you’ve done. We know who you are.”

“Who am I? What have I done?”

“You should know that better than we do, now shouldn’t you?”

When I asked to contact a lawyer, I was informed that I hadn’t yet been admitted to the United States, and so had no legal standing. No lawyer would be called, nor would I be allowed to call anyone else. They took my cuffs off, fingerprinted me (very difficult because of my sweaty palms), recuffed me, and then left me there.

Read the rest of it here (via 3quarksdaily).

Odyssey of State Capitols and State Suspicion is the story of an Iranian-American photographer on a journey to photograph each of the 50 state Capitols of USA and the hurdles he faced on the way.

But there was a problem. On a flight from Sacramento, Calif., to Honolulu, Mr. Fazel described his project to a fellow passenger. He later discovered that she had reported him as suspicious — perhaps to the pilot or the Transportation Security Administration — and taken a picture of him as he slept.

Read the full article here (via Schneier on Security).

The Future of Marriage is a very thought-provoking commentary on the evolution of marriage as a social institution.

Because of marriage’s vital economic and political functions, few societies in history believed that individuals should freely choose their own marriage partners, especially on such fragile grounds as love. Indeed, for millennia, marriage was much more about regulating economic, political, and gender hierarchies than nourishing the well-being of adults and their children. [...]

[...] It was just 250 years ago, when the Enlightenment challenged the right of the older generation and the state to dictate to the young, that free choice based on love and compatibility emerged as the social ideal for mate selection. Only in the early 19th century did the success of a marriage begin to be defined by how well it cared for its members, both adults and children.

These new marital ideals appalled many social conservatives of the day. “How will we get the right people to marry each other, if they can refuse on such trivial grounds as lack of love?” they asked. “Just as important, how will we prevent the wrong ones, such as paupers and servants, from marrying?” What would compel people to stay in marriages where love had died? What would prevent wives from challenging their husbands’ authority?

Read the full article here (via 3quarksdaily).

More on the theme of Globalization: Last week I met a German guy at a housewarming/birthday/as-you-like-it party and, finding out that I was from India, he mentioned that he had attended Diwali once. That made me curious, since during last year’s Diwali none of the local Indians I know in Saarbrücken seemed to know of a Diwali celebration anywhere closer than Cologne or Frankfurt. I thought maybe this is the Great German Conspiracy of keeping the locations of Indian festivities secret from Indians and attending those themselves. So I asked him where he attended Diwali; his nonchalant answer, “Why, In Korea”! Now, when was the last time you expected a German guy to attend an Indian festival in Korea?

“Oh, nice! Who got the cream puffs”?

“I did. What do you call them in English”?

“Cream puffs. Like, you know, they are puffy and have cream inside”.

“That sounds like ‘The Powerpuff Girls‘”.

“I bet the Powerpuff Girls will be very good to eat too”!

The other day at the Christmas market near the Saarbrücken palace (Saarbrücker Schloß) I spotted a stall with bright red-on-yellow sign saying “American Donuts”. Getting closer, I saw that the person frying and selling the donuts inside the stall was a middle-aged Indian man. Picture this – an Indian man, selling “American Donuts”, in Germany – am I the only one who finds this amusing?

I am going to Strasbourg today. I woke up around 6:30 in the morning; in fact, I didn’t sleep all too well last night in the anticipation of getting up early. The train was at 7:45, and I live a short 5-minute walk from the station. I still managed to miss the train! Don’t ask me how. But it gave me about 3 hours to kill before the next train, and I came across this rather amusing article in Spiegel about doctors from a cancer research institute in Naples stripping to draw public attention to funding shortfalls in cancer research.

From the article:

Chest hair, biceps and boxer shorts: Doctors at a cancer research institute in Naples have posed half-naked for a pin-up calendar. Research in Italy is burdened by bureaucracy and funding shortages. It is hoped that this private initiative will re-animate patrons.

Through his glasses, Professor Mozzillo gives the camera a penetrating, slightly skeptical look. His hands are passing lightly over the abdomen of a patient, lying on an operating table. The surgeon is wearing gloves, a face mask and plastic cap, as though the operation were about to begin. But there’s a small problem: The woman on the table is fully clothed, the doctor practically naked.

Mozillo is one of 20 doctors and researchers at the Pascale Foundation, a cancer research institute in Naples, who are going to unusual lengths to raise awareness and money for their work. Just in time for Christmas, the Fondazione Pascale is bringing out a pin-up calendar in which oncologists, surgeons, nurses, caretakers and even the institute’s director are posing in their underwear. The slogan: “Without you, research is bare.”

This kind of made my day – now I am off to Strasbourg; I won’t be missing the train this time!