Peas at 5:30

Last Sunday I watched a movie after almost 3 months, which is quite an incredible gap given my habit of watching a couple of movies a week through my Netflix subscription and going to the theaters every other week or so. But then, Saarbrücken does not make it easy to find movies in a language I will follow, and the sentiment that “dubbing is murder” does not seem to have many takers in these parts. OK, end of rant; now comes the review.

Have you ever thought how the world feels when you cannot see it? Do you still say auf Wiedersehen (or “see you again”) if you cannot see? Without sight, how do you define beauty, or yet, feel beautiful? Is it better to never know what yellow or blue is, than to know what you are missing? Can you see a face by feeling the raindrops bouncing off it? How do you eat if you cannot see your food, how do you know where the meat is or where the peas are? Lars Büchel’s movie “Erbsen auf halb 6” (English title: “Peas at 5:30″) raises many such questions. But instead of suffocating the viewers under the weight of the subject matter – blindness – it takes them on a fairy-tale journey full of joy and sorrow, tension and relief, desperation and hope.

Rhabarber Barbara

Last evening my three flatmates and I were sitting at the dining table, sipping on some tea, and chatting, when the discussion turned to the compounding of German nouns. As it always happens when this particularly touchy topic of compound nouns is brought up, people started competing to come up with the longest words they could think of. We were still trying to remember the classic example of Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän (in English “Danube steamship company captain”), when Robert dealt the killer blow with Rhabarberbarbara.

OK, it is not the longest word per se, but more like an unholy love-child of tongue-twisters (or Zungenbrecher in German) and the German penchant for compounding nouns. It is the German version of “Betty bought a bit of butter…”; but one in which the words ‘Betty’, ‘bit’, ‘butter’, ‘bitter’, ‘batter’, ‘better’ and so on, can be arbitrarily combined together to form longer and longer words! It is the story of a young woman named Barbara, who sells rhubarb cake at a bar, and her three customers who are barbarians, their beards, and the barber for cutting their beards, and the beer – you get the idea. Now that you know what to expect, watch the video below and continue for the text.

Happy Turkey Day!

It is that day of the year again, when legions of hungry Americans, in an extreme display of national solidarity, decide to eat turkey. Depending on who you ask, you will get figures like 92-95% of Americans surveyed said that they ate turkey for Thanksgiving – or figures like 45 million turkeys being consumed during this period, which is roughly one turkey per four Americans. In light of such revealing statistics, there can be no debate when someone calls it “Happy turkey day” – of course, it is not such a happy day if you are a turkey, but I am inclined to write that off as standard occupational hazard.

The disquiet on the western front

The day after General Parvez Musharraf led a coup d’état against the “democratically elected” government of President Parvez Musharraf, and declared a state of emergency, eleven men from each of Pakistan and India were acting out yet another episode of the long-running series “Rivalry in Flannels“. By the end of the day I was supposed to be happy since the Indian team came out comfortably on top, but instead I was rather disturbed. The fact that such shenanigans are happening comes as no surprise to anyone from the subcontinent, specially since Pakistan seems to be perpetually recouping from coups. But, with each passing decade, the stakes seem to grow higher and higher. The fact that they have nukes, a dangerous track record on proliferation, and and abundance of nutcases running amok, makes even the geopolitically oblivious American media sit up and take notice. New York Times stoked the very real fear on everyone’s mind, following it up immediately with the ‘perfect’ solution, faster than you could say “Mush”.

“The nightmare scenario, of course, is what happens if an extremist Islamic government emerges — with an instant nuclear arsenal,” said Robert Joseph, a counterproliferation expert who left the administration this year. John R. Bolton, the former United Nations representative who has accused Mr. Bush of going soft on proliferation, said more bluntly that General Musharraf’s survival was critical. “While Pervez Musharraf might not be a Jeffersonian democrat,” Mr. Bolton said, “he is the best bet to secure the nuclear arsenal.”

99 Luftballons

It is not often that I get a lesson in general knowledge from watching Scrubs, but this was just one of those times. In one of the episodes JD had a German patient and, this being Scrubs, the episode was replete with over-the-top caricatures. And then there was this song with a catchy tune, which I had never heard before, and watching it on Scrubs I was not even sure whether it was a real song.

I heard the song again a few years later, after I moved to Germany. Knowing that it was a real song which even the Germans listened to, I looked it up and found that it was the biggest hit of the 1980s German pop-star Nena. The original was called “99 Luftballons” (literally 99 balloons in English), while the English version of the song is called “99 red balloons”. I also found the music video on YouTube.

Rethink ourselves…

Came across these really cool videos on the online communication, collaboration and networking revolution that we are living through, commonly referred to as Web 2.0. The creator is Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. The presentation is very stylish, though I found it to be a bit jarring at times.

The first video explains the Web 2.0 phenomenon, where the internet is, in essence, moving away from being only a network of computers to being a network of people, where the computers are just an extension of the humans.

Who is a terrorist?

Came across this brilliant OP-ED piece in New York Times today. It compares the Jacobian Club of post-revolutionary France, who brought on a series of mindless events known as “The Terror“, to the current crop of conservative hacks who guided much of US government reaction to September 11, 2001. Excerpts from the article:

The Jacobins shared a defining ideological feature. They divided the world between pro- and anti-Revolutionaries — the defenders of liberty versus its enemies. The French Revolution, as they understood it, was the great event that would determine whether liberty was to prevail on the planet or whether the world would fall back into tyranny and despotism.

Pro-war Jacobins believed theirs was a mission not for a single nation or even for a single continent. It was, in Brissot’s words, “a crusade for universal liberty.”

Oans, Zwoa, Drei, gsuffa!

That roughly translates to “One, two, three, drink” from Bairisch, and you will probably say that tens of times in the course of an evening at the Oktoberfest. Not that you really need a “On your marks. Get set. Go.” routine to drink beer, and neither do the Bavarians who started it all. But the brass bands playing in the tents will, after every few songs, return to “Ein Prosit…“, at which point you stand up, raise and swing your Maß, and at the end of the song (which only has two lines repeated a couple of times) you join in, “Oans, Zwoa, Drei, gsuffa“. You take a gulp, then comes the customary display of camaraderie with complete strangers by bumping your Maß with theirs; clink, clank, clunk! “Prost!!!” gulp, gulp, gulp… ahh!

That is basically what the drill boils down to; your cosmic purpose for being on this patch of concrete called Theresienwiese (literally translates to “Theresa’s meadow”, though you should not expect lush green turf), at the heart of Munich, during the last week and half of September and the first few days of October. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Cheap books!

Interesting article in New York Times on books and reading habits in Germany, and the threat it might be facing from a very surprising source. From the article:

Germany’s book culture is sustained by an age-old practice requiring all bookstores, including German online booksellers, to sell books at fixed prices. Save for old, used or damaged books, discounting in Germany is illegal. All books must cost the same whether they’re sold over the Internet or at Steinmetz, a shop in Offenbach that opened its doors in Goethe’s day, or at a Hugendubel or a Thalia, the two big chains.

What results has helped small, quality publishers like Berenberg. But it has also — American consumers should take note — caused book prices to drop. Last year, on average, book prices fell 0.5 percent.

Now this system is under threat from, of all people, the Swiss. Just across the border, the Swiss lately decided to permit the discounting of German books — a move that some in the book trade here fear will eventually force Germany itself to follow suit, transforming a diverse and book-rich culture into an echo of big-chain America.

Expensive books!

… more from the continuing saga of my tryst with German bureaucracy

Before moving to Saarbrücken, I decided to get some books with me, and since they were quite heavy, I decided to parcel the books and ship them over to Saarbrücken. When the books did not arrive after a few weeks (it was supposed to be 6-10 day delivery), I tried tracking the package on USPS website. The tracking info showed that it cleared customs in Germany on September 5, just six days after I posted it. When I called up USPS, they told me to talk to Deutsche Post. I went over to the university post office, and was told, “It has only been 3 weeks since you sent it, you should wait a few more weeks and then check back”! I showed them the tracking info, and it cut short that line of reasoning. After some prodding, we managed to get the name of the person who physically gets the packages to the campus.