Ebay is currently holding auctions for 10 Things To Do Before You Die, including floating weightless in a space simulator in Moscow, skydiving in Thailand, watching the Wimbledon gentleman’s final, driving a race car, and spending a night at the Burj-al-Arab hotel in Dubai. The highest bid, the last time I checked, was for the weightless experience. That’s what I would have bid for too, had I been bidding. Being an astronaut always seemed like it would be a kick, though it sounded like a little less fun after I read that farting inside a spacesuit can damage it.
At any rate, the Ebay auction naturally makes me want to create my own list of Things To Do Before I Die. None of them is about the wonderful places I want to visit, because it’s understood that that sort of thing is on everyone’s list. I plan to visit them all the minute I become one of the idle rich. No, my ambitions are more like a set of general principles that might prove to be improving in some way I don’t yet fully understand. Here is a random sampling of fifteen, in no particular order.
1. Read Finnegan’s Wake word for word, and understand it. It’s by James Joyce, and currently makes no sense at all.
2. Have a nice passport picture taken. The one I have to show to immigration officers all over the world for the next ten years was taken while I had conjunctivitis, and makes me look like one of the less valuable Picassos.
3. Stop compulsively editing spelling, grammar and pronunciation, and feeling resentful when other people don’t. Nobody likes it, and it’s weird, and it makes no difference to most of the world.
4. Learn one sport and play it respectably well. Scrabble counts.
5. Stop talking to the stuffed blue dragon on my desk. Because that’s really weird. Also, we’ve grown apart and he’s been spending a lot of time with the plaster skull next to him.
6. Buy a nice pair of sunglasses and never lose them. Ever. Ever. If I made a pile of all the sunglasses I’ve ever lost, I’d be able to lean comfortably against it.
7. Learn how to efficiently cook healthy, tasty food. I’ve begun by mastering how to optimally spread Nutella on bread. (The secret: slather it on, baby.)
8. Learn a foreign language, and use it to tune unpleasant people out. Even if they know I’m faking it, it’s my word against theirs. And who’s going to fight with you in a foreign language?
9. Stop smoking, even if it kills me. Particularly if it kills me.
10. Figure out when the people in 24 go to the bathroom just to pee, rather than to make covert mole-type phone calls or illegally upload satellite links to rogue operatives who keep telling them, “You’re going to have to trust me”.
11. Find the fountain of youth and the elixir of immortality, and then change the name of this list to just ‘Things To Do’.
12. Hunt down a Smurf and kneel on his chest until he tells me where his people get their hats.
13. Pretend to know what I’m doing with my life, like normal people. It makes one less of an outcast at parties, and besides, it’s the only way they’ll give me a credit card.
14. Master a musical instrument. Mine is the car horn.
15. Stop blaming my poor long-suffering mother for everything. (Ha ha! Only kidding. I just threw this one in to make her happy.)
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Saturday, March 08, 2008
X-philes
In 1968 Erich Von Däniken published Chariots of the Gods, thus forever ruining my credibility with friends to whom I fervently repeated his theory that Earth was visited by ancient extraterrestrial astronauts, who taught our forefathers how to raise obelisks and build spaceports for their craft to land on. Of course, my friends also knew me to be waiting for the superheroes in my favourite television cartoon, ‘Force G’, to cart me away from the tedium of family life to a career in fighting interstellar baddies, so it wasn’t a great shock.
Däniken’s critics think he’s a fraudulent crackpot. He didn’t help his case when he got a potter to fake pottery shards decorated with flying saucers and planted them at an archeological site—a surprising move since he’s a Taurean and therefore stable, prudent, with a great work ethic, and ideally suited to a career in banking or any kind of bureaucracy (or so Wikipedia says). Even in India, where the most outrageous claptrap is routinely given serious consideration by the media, the courts, and Parliament, the press ridiculed von Däniken when he came to research a radioactive cave in Kashmir that he thought might be an alien landing site.
Be that as it may, the whole thing has left me with an abiding interest in UFOs, partly because I’m still waiting for the Force G chaps. I read books on the famous 1947 ‘Roswell Incident’, in which a crash site in New Mexico was treated with extreme weirdness by the military, and Budd Hopkins’ research on alien abduction, which explains some people I know. I badgered my editor to do a story on UFOs until he said, “If you can get me the advertising, knock yourself out.”
So when I recently had a chance to watch the world’s most well respected documentary on UFOs, I grabbed it. For a few minutes there was just the presenter and me in the room, both of us looking faintly sheepish, but then twenty other space cadets turned up and I was excited again. Social stigma is a terrible thing.
Out of the Blue, narrated by Peter Coyote and produced by James Fox, investigates seminal sightings such as the 1997 Phoenix Lights phenomenon, in which hundreds of people reported the passing of a huge triangular craft with lights; and the Rendlesham File, which documents the physical investigation of a UFO by American military personnel in the Bentwaters area in England.
Besides a hopelessly spoofy musical background it’s a rather compelling movie, focusing only on credible witnesses, most of them in the military or government (although this might be definitive proof that they’re out to lunch). It also looks at only that tiny percentage of UFO sightings that do not submit to any conventional or easy explanation.
One of the interesting points the movie makes is that governments are beginning to declassify information related to UFO sightings, moving away from the strictures of the Robertson Panel set up by the CIA in 1952 to discredit floods of reported sightings. The Russians, British, French, Mexican, Brazilian and Chilean governments are finally releasing documents, in many of which authorities swear UFO witnesses to oaths of lifelong secrecy.
Now, I’m as big a fan of Men In Black as anyone else. The whole idea lends itself to parody. National Enquirer-style flying saucers and creatures with big black eyes and bulgy heads don’t do anything for me. But I’m quite willing to stick my neck out and say that anything is possible, because truth is almost always stranger than fiction.
It could be just because I’m Aquarian, and therefore eccentric, dreamy, given to meditating on abstractions that bear little relevance to life, and unable to take a position because I see both sides of the argument.
Däniken’s critics think he’s a fraudulent crackpot. He didn’t help his case when he got a potter to fake pottery shards decorated with flying saucers and planted them at an archeological site—a surprising move since he’s a Taurean and therefore stable, prudent, with a great work ethic, and ideally suited to a career in banking or any kind of bureaucracy (or so Wikipedia says). Even in India, where the most outrageous claptrap is routinely given serious consideration by the media, the courts, and Parliament, the press ridiculed von Däniken when he came to research a radioactive cave in Kashmir that he thought might be an alien landing site.
Be that as it may, the whole thing has left me with an abiding interest in UFOs, partly because I’m still waiting for the Force G chaps. I read books on the famous 1947 ‘Roswell Incident’, in which a crash site in New Mexico was treated with extreme weirdness by the military, and Budd Hopkins’ research on alien abduction, which explains some people I know. I badgered my editor to do a story on UFOs until he said, “If you can get me the advertising, knock yourself out.”
So when I recently had a chance to watch the world’s most well respected documentary on UFOs, I grabbed it. For a few minutes there was just the presenter and me in the room, both of us looking faintly sheepish, but then twenty other space cadets turned up and I was excited again. Social stigma is a terrible thing.
Out of the Blue, narrated by Peter Coyote and produced by James Fox, investigates seminal sightings such as the 1997 Phoenix Lights phenomenon, in which hundreds of people reported the passing of a huge triangular craft with lights; and the Rendlesham File, which documents the physical investigation of a UFO by American military personnel in the Bentwaters area in England.
Besides a hopelessly spoofy musical background it’s a rather compelling movie, focusing only on credible witnesses, most of them in the military or government (although this might be definitive proof that they’re out to lunch). It also looks at only that tiny percentage of UFO sightings that do not submit to any conventional or easy explanation.
One of the interesting points the movie makes is that governments are beginning to declassify information related to UFO sightings, moving away from the strictures of the Robertson Panel set up by the CIA in 1952 to discredit floods of reported sightings. The Russians, British, French, Mexican, Brazilian and Chilean governments are finally releasing documents, in many of which authorities swear UFO witnesses to oaths of lifelong secrecy.
Now, I’m as big a fan of Men In Black as anyone else. The whole idea lends itself to parody. National Enquirer-style flying saucers and creatures with big black eyes and bulgy heads don’t do anything for me. But I’m quite willing to stick my neck out and say that anything is possible, because truth is almost always stranger than fiction.
It could be just because I’m Aquarian, and therefore eccentric, dreamy, given to meditating on abstractions that bear little relevance to life, and unable to take a position because I see both sides of the argument.
Monday, March 03, 2008
On Saturday March 1...
...Stet did not appear in Business Standard, having been unceremoniously thrown off the page by a special edition on the Union Budget. Back on Saturday, March 8.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Mass rabid transit
I assume I’m not the only person in Delhi to be looking at the construction of the Bus Rapid Transit corridor with the sort of emotion that, thanks to the complex biological wiring evolved in humans over millions of years, directs all the blood flow to the extremities in order to prepare the body to wring its hands.
Premise: Apparently Delhi is a global city—a fantasy widely believed by people who are in the higher echelons of government and who therefore rarely have to actually deal with the city—and needs to upgrade its infrastructure.
Problem: It has lots of traffic, which is growing at the dizzying rate of people getting richer and motor transport getting cheaper all at the same time.
Solution: It would seem reasonable to build flyovers for a signal-free Ring Road, build a Metro, build an eight-lane highway to Gurgaon, and a build a Bus Rapid Transit corridor, all to create an orderly way of getting growing numbers of vehicles and commuters across the city in the fastest possible way.
Unfortunately, of the millions of drivers in this vibrant metropolis, about three hold valid drivers' licences that weren’t bought at a street corner. Even more unfortunately, the people responsible for designing the infrastructure seem to have about three brain cells in working order.
I have nothing but praise for the Metro, but if you’ve driven along the signal-free Ring Road, you’ll have noticed that bus stops have not been relocated or pushed off the road onto a shoulder. This is so that, now that the traffic lights are gone, traffic can still be held up, but for no good reason, and without the predictability.
If you drive on the highway between Delhi and Gurgaon, you’ll notice that the beautiful swirls of roads and roundabouts and exits have been opened to traffic without any signage, presumably so that people can drive without an agenda, enjoying the mildly seasick buzz of repeatedly circling a roundabout wondering what leads where and admiring the setting of the concrete.
Where there is signage it is tiny (craftily saving the public unnecessary expense on boards and paint) and placed in the least useful position possible, such as at the fork of a road instead of much before it, and preferably behind a tree. This serves the purpose of causing motorists in the right lane to have to swerve wildly across seven lanes perpendicularly to traffic at 60kmph (or, more realistically, 80kmph) in order to take a left, assuming that they spot the sign at all on a wild impulse to see what happens to be behind the tree.
But the real beauty of the provider-consumer relationship lies in the Bus Rapid Transit system. Here, bus stops placed in the middle lanes of the road allow people to alight and have to cross other traffic to get to the sides of the road. To avoid an unseemly death-march through traffic, they will be let off at bus stops placed at traffic lights. This will cause traffic to have to get through masses of red lights on the BRT stretch, slowing it to a blood-curdling crawl, which neatly solves the problem of how to get it moving as fast as possible.
I’m just a layperson, of course, so what do I know? There’s probably some glaringly obvious logic that is escaping me. I have no idea who gets put in charge of these things, or why; I don’t even have a clue where to start looking for the answers. Maybe I should check behind a tree.
Premise: Apparently Delhi is a global city—a fantasy widely believed by people who are in the higher echelons of government and who therefore rarely have to actually deal with the city—and needs to upgrade its infrastructure.
Problem: It has lots of traffic, which is growing at the dizzying rate of people getting richer and motor transport getting cheaper all at the same time.
Solution: It would seem reasonable to build flyovers for a signal-free Ring Road, build a Metro, build an eight-lane highway to Gurgaon, and a build a Bus Rapid Transit corridor, all to create an orderly way of getting growing numbers of vehicles and commuters across the city in the fastest possible way.
Unfortunately, of the millions of drivers in this vibrant metropolis, about three hold valid drivers' licences that weren’t bought at a street corner. Even more unfortunately, the people responsible for designing the infrastructure seem to have about three brain cells in working order.
I have nothing but praise for the Metro, but if you’ve driven along the signal-free Ring Road, you’ll have noticed that bus stops have not been relocated or pushed off the road onto a shoulder. This is so that, now that the traffic lights are gone, traffic can still be held up, but for no good reason, and without the predictability.
If you drive on the highway between Delhi and Gurgaon, you’ll notice that the beautiful swirls of roads and roundabouts and exits have been opened to traffic without any signage, presumably so that people can drive without an agenda, enjoying the mildly seasick buzz of repeatedly circling a roundabout wondering what leads where and admiring the setting of the concrete.
Where there is signage it is tiny (craftily saving the public unnecessary expense on boards and paint) and placed in the least useful position possible, such as at the fork of a road instead of much before it, and preferably behind a tree. This serves the purpose of causing motorists in the right lane to have to swerve wildly across seven lanes perpendicularly to traffic at 60kmph (or, more realistically, 80kmph) in order to take a left, assuming that they spot the sign at all on a wild impulse to see what happens to be behind the tree.
But the real beauty of the provider-consumer relationship lies in the Bus Rapid Transit system. Here, bus stops placed in the middle lanes of the road allow people to alight and have to cross other traffic to get to the sides of the road. To avoid an unseemly death-march through traffic, they will be let off at bus stops placed at traffic lights. This will cause traffic to have to get through masses of red lights on the BRT stretch, slowing it to a blood-curdling crawl, which neatly solves the problem of how to get it moving as fast as possible.
I’m just a layperson, of course, so what do I know? There’s probably some glaringly obvious logic that is escaping me. I have no idea who gets put in charge of these things, or why; I don’t even have a clue where to start looking for the answers. Maybe I should check behind a tree.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)