Some more ‘made history’ days…

Some good-news updates

Well as most of the world will have seen, India and China seem to be friends, and actually seem to be resolving their disputes…. let’s hope so…. Many an American columnist has said that USA should be worried because never before in History have 2 giants awakened at such similar times… well unless you are a supporter of Deeshaa.org (”who tells it like it is”) in which case you will gladly lick China’s ass, and abuse India to the depths.

Second, there are now 100 Million telephone connections in India. This is way below China, of course, but is still a good sign for India, and approximately half of these connections are MOBILE PHONE connections. Apparently, at current growth rates (which may not be sustained) the number of connections is set to double by 2007. Let’s hope so….

Finally, the best news so far (in my humble opinion). Some time around in the early part of the century (I think it was the 1940s or 1950s) an Indian entreprenuer going by the name of Tata went on to found an airline service called Tata Airlines…. This airline service was so good, that a another fledgling airline startup, going by the name of Singapore Airlines would turn to Tata Airlines for pointers on service, and management e.t.c. Alas, those days are long gone…. A damn fool by the name of Nehru and his idiotic flirtations with Socialism put a stop to Tata Airlines – it got bought over by the government and renamed to (cringe cringe) AIR INDIA. Sigh. So that put an end to what was a good airline. Fast forward to the year 2005. India’s (not)first Private Airline launches flights to its first non-SAARC destination. Jet Airways will fly you from Delhi to Singapore today, for 14,000 rupees, and at the current US$ rate of $1:Rs. 43.6, that works out to $320…. So at last, the day has come where nasty Air India will no longer represent India’s national face. Yay. Routes to points West are being negotiated as we speak and are not long in coming. Now if only my application for Jet Airways shares had gone through

Comeback of the day….

Globalisation has gone too far!

Well…if it didn’t go very far, it would be called Localisation!

The superfluous Royals, and their language….

This is a blant – a Blog + Rant
Parth, A member of what I like to call my little blog community has just posted an article on the redundancy of the British Bluebloods and laments the trees wasted on every iota of their lives. That part is fine by me, to hell with the Monarchs. In India they’re a dime a dozen. But I do understand why the Brits do rever them somewhat, and tolerate them. The British Monarchs (responsible for that nasty corruption of democracy known as ‘parliamentary’ democracy) have been inventive enough to see through new ages and yet survive. Whereas the French Revolution almost all but put an end to French Monarchs, and the rest of Europe was going through its upheavals, the English dudes managed to hold their own, and even prosper into the 21st Century! Give them small teency mount of credit for that.

The second, ultra-loaded statement in Parth’s post was how we Indians tend to rever the British for their contribution of Railroads, Democracy and English. I have heard many people bring up that opinion, and frankly it doesn’t really bother me one way or another, and here’s why, at the risk of sounding like a Fuckface.

An old college buddy of mine (of Bulgarian origin) said “at least the British left India with some good things. All the Turks left us with was shit and destruction”. Parts of southern Europe were under the yoke of the Ottoman Empire, and from whatever I’ve heard, they were pretty nasty folk.

So let me make a few very controversial statements:
English is GOOD for India, and NECESSARY for OUR prosperity
Two commenters on Parth’s blog said that English is not required for a country to do well in this world, hell look at China. They don’t know English, and since they are growing at such a fast pace, they soon will know English too. This is a fallacy, a myth, in totality.

First off, ENGLISH is NECESSARY for INDIA to prosper, because we have never been and rarely are now, ONE NATION, but many. China has been a united kingdom for a LONG LONG LONG time. They do have close to one spoken language (yes there are many dialects, ranging from Putonghua to Cantonese, but the script used is the SAME, and so are most of the contexts). When you take some 30 disparate kingdoms and force them to become one country, you need to unify them in terms of language – which language to do you pick? Hindi? Rubbish. It is a mostly North Indian language, and even that’s not entirely true. As a Punju, I can attest that in Punjab, punjabi is the spoken/written language. You think Tamil people speak Hindi? I dare you to use Hindi in Chennai. You will get a much ruder experience. English however is safe. It’s the common bridge between all of India’s disparate languages and cultures. Sure Hindi is the official one, but English is also required, because English has reached a point of cultural neutrality that other languges lack. It’s a glue, it doesn’t belong to any country anymore (though yes, fucking Americans think they fucking invented it).

SECOND, the Chinese will NOT pick up English quickly, and it will remain difficult for them to pick it up. There are very empirical reasons why. Chinese is NOT a branch of the Indo-European languages. Indo-European languages are not tonal. Most Indo-European languages are read from left to right, and most definitely cannot be read from bottom to top!! To this day the common roots are visible. Take Hindi and French – simple example. In French, you call Teeth – Les Dents (Dents is pronounced like the English word (with british pronunciation) Aunt, with a D in front of it (dAunt). The Hindi for Teeth is Daant which sounds almost exactly the same, it’s been proven they have the same root. Lord knows what the Chinese word for Teeth is. Same goes for counting. Whether it’s French, English or Hindi, you hve the same phonetic sounds for the same numbers. You do NOT find this similarity in Chinese. In Cantonese, the counting goes as follows: Yut, Yee, Saam, Sae, Ng, Lok, Chat, Paat, Gow, Sup.

Hindi: Ek, Do, Teen, Char, Paanch, Che, Saath, Aat, Now, Dus
French: Un, Deux, Trois, Quatre, Cinq, Six, Sept, Huit, Neuf, Dix
English; (oh count it yourself, but note that English has many Norse/German influences in it)

NO similarities between Chinese and the others.
English is actually not so hard for Indians to pick up, and is GOOD FOR INDIA, BUT NOT NECESSARILY REQUIRED OR BENEFICIAL FOR CHINA.

The British would have left India anyway…
As much as I will be stoned to death for this, I think we can all agree that this true? No? Well I still think so. After WWII, England was broke as hell. America was on the rise. America would have pushed for Indian independence just to piss off the Brits, and they would most likely have left anyway. Sure they didn’t relinquish Hong Kong that easy, but Hong Kong was on a 99-year lease anyway…And who knows maybe they would have left a united Sub-Continent… but that is all part of the If’s and Buts’ dialogue. At least we Indians get to say we kicked the Limeys out….

Phew, end of blant for the day….

DaylightWastingTime

!@@!#@$$#$#%$%$%%%@$!$#!#!!!!!!
Spring Forward Fall Back – sounds something little schoolgirls/military do. The Western World’s attempt to save on power bills and increase their productivity is irritating. By playing the philosopher and proving 5 pm to actually be 4 pm on a given day and vice versa on another day has been the bane of my existence this past year.
On my recent trip to London, me and my ‘LadyLove’ as Karma (from ‘My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma’ fame) calls her, were really looking forward to taking a day trip to the seashore – Brighton. So we got all prepared, went to bed early and stuff, ready to catch our bus the next morning at 8 am. Well our alarm went off at 8 am. But guess what folks – it’s 9 am. So we rush to the bus station, only find a long line of stranded passengers preparing to be ripped off by the bus company for their oversight….

That was London. One assumes Americans would be more noisy about the time change…but no. Last night, I went on what P.G. Wodehouse calls a ‘Toot’ – i.e. hop from one pub to another consuming liver-poison in an attempt to wake up the next day in a state of anguish, much like what a pair of jeans must feel like after a hot, passionate night in the dryer. Anyway, in an attempt to find the perfect nightspot, (complete with girl-of-your-dreams-making-eyes-at-you) we kept leaving pubs. Finally when we were about settle down in one particular place called ‘Le Souk’ – famous for its Hookah, we were rudely told by the bouncer to buzz off because it’s 4 a.m. – closing time. Me and my companions stared at each other in vodka-tonic-induced hazes and looked at our watches – which said 3 a.m…. then the Bouncer mentioned Daylight Savings Time..BAH! GAH! (and GRRRR!).. confounded again by that hour which slipped through my fingers!

What I learned in The City pt 3

Different continent, but still called “The City”

1. The London Underground is spotless, compared to the New York Subway
2. Didn’t see half as many brown people there
3. London has lonely feel to it too…I guess being away from home…
4. Busaba ethai has the most delicious Thai food
5. People in London know how to speak English, and they walk slowly – In New York, that would be considered suspicious, terrorist activity…
6. London’s Daylight Savings Time takes place before New York’s – This caused two people to wake up an hour late and miss their bus to Brighton for a day-trip
7. There are only 5 skyscrapers in London, all bunched together in a place called Canary Wharf
8. I miss my home town, and am waiting to be sent back
9. In London, you can buy a single-use ticket for a bus and keep using it for three days before a bus driver actually notices it’s old (and then proceeds to stop the bus and kicks you out…)
10. Most important of all however is to never say never. 6 Months ago, the fact that would be able to go to London to visit a special someone seemed impossible. And here I am.

Ignore the read more… and in the meantime it’s a nice and pleasant 8 degrees Celcius in New York City. I think I will go for a walk…