Under this sheen of glitter and glamour lie turbid truths which the temporary tourists tend to miss. English may seem pleasing to the ears, but nothing soothes like the native language. But, alas, my mother tongue ‘Konkani’ itself is in danger because few teach it and fewer are interested to learn. Not everyone here is wealthy who wouldn’t care if their money goes down the gambling-drain.
Many here suffer due to lack of education and then lack of employment. And when cheap liquor (cost-wise rather than quality-wise) and murky emotions mix, it leads to more misery. My underdevelopment makes me feel that I am god-blessed but man-cursed. Sometimes, I blame my delayed liberty and sometimes I blame my robes for hiding my scarred body, for this sorry state of affairs.

But with these daggers in my heart I still smile at my guests who come from far-away places to admire my beauty. I don’t shriek for help, but am silently enthralled when an NGO or a journalist comes to the rescue of my dark side and I continue to hope that one day these tears of mine will turn into the cheers of my citizens. This is my story.

Yours lovingly, Goa.

After much research, a book that fulfilled my criteria (short and less bitter if not sweet) landed up in my hand. But, alas, the book issuing time was up. I cursed the cosmos for conspiring against me and kept the product of my research back, reluctantly, in the shelf.

My course-books welcomed me into the room. It was amazing, how these books which always felt irritating soothed me that day. My inner conflicts gradually settled down. My alter-ego faded away from the mirror (yeah, I have one, though a bit Bollywoodish). Back I was, to being a sweet terrestrial, no longer feeling guilty to roam around on Earth without knowing what’s going around it. Once again, I threw a glimpse at the sky and checked out the stars, not caring about the intricacies or the complexities, but just enjoying the simple beauty of the celestial roof hanging above me.

In comes the writer. A person who makes his/her living from stories and imagination. Even writing nonfiction is an art. Creating entire worlds, bringing your creativity to life, creating a story out of nothing, all in a day’s work for a writer. However, there is a difference between a good book and a bad one. All books have the content, but some have that crucial storytelling element missing, not living up to the story they promised. These are the worst kind of books, you read them hoping to bite into a delectable plot and all you get is boring, slow and complicated vocabulary. Almost anything can be made into a good story, as seen from the previous two blog posts, both about experiences that can happen to you any day. How it is written, and how it is expressed makes all the difference. The words used, the tone, pace and theme, by manipulating these, the best of writers can make almost anything enthralling.

Let us take, for example, Roald Dahl, specifically his books for children. The team of Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake was one like no other. Dahl wrote the books and Blake so aptly illustrated them that it is as though the pictures were just seamlessly coming out of the story, fitting in with perfectly with Dahl’s writing style. To describe his writing in one word, it was sparky. With slight elements of dark
humour, Dahl’s imagination when left wild was something to see. With most of his stories inspired by childhood experiences at boarding schools, he wove plots that were light, yet left you extremely enthralled and made you wanted to keep reading. They were the kind of books you could just pick up, open onto any random chapter and begin reading. From reading them, you can practically see how much fun he found writing them, and this fun is infectious. Reading him, is a pleasure.

It would be fascinating to look into the mind of a writer of his talents. To see entire new worlds, entire new populations, extraordinary new creatures, strange machines whirring away, outlandish food and other items, strange new colours and new horizons. Giving us glimpses of these worlds in their books, writers with a good imagination and writing sense combined have no equal.

Another example, J.R.R. Tolkien. In his series of his book, he created an entire new world, complete even with its own language, script, pronunciation and everything. The original creator of mythical creatures such as orcs, which have been used in numerous places since, these writers were pioneers in their own sense.

It is truly a pleasure to read such people’s books, and to become lost in their rapturous, colourful worlds. It is like exploring some new, strange part of the world that has never been seen before, all by yourself. And of course, there are numerous examples of such writers, a whole plethora of books just waiting for you to sink into them. This post is dedicated to all those writers, their creativity, imagination and talent for creating such stories, one of the most powerful objects in today’s world.

So what are you waiting for? Grab yourself some fruit juice, a comfortable couch and a book to sink your teeth into. It’s your turn to explore!

Well, Mumbai has always been told to be a town of hurry. People look like they always happen have a deadline for everything and an inherent requirement to be on time. The sense of urgency just emanates from every individual, irrespective of your origin. From a 8 year old child relentlessly begging from a grudging working lady to an elderly person in his sixties, this city seems to be a like a canister, promising an astounding and non-ending vitality. People here are the ones that have defined living on the edge, both literally and figuratively. Even for the Foreigners, who just come to click some snaps of VT, also are in a sense of urgency; they might be clueless but , you know, going with the crowd always seems to keep you from seeming stupid.

The Mumbai Local at 8 in the morning

The centre and primary depiction of such urgency is the local train. I believe this creation should be certified with the title of the ‘Most Important Wonder of the World’. The gigantic amounts of humanity that rushes into a single compartment of the local is just an awakening event for everyone; people dont rush in there to grab a seat or get a window seat. The primary focus is to get a square feet area on the floor and a 5 inch space on any handle bar; if you get a seat then God sprayed you with with some lucky shit and if u get a window seat, you should declare that you drank a vial of Felix Felicis.

I was a fortunate (ok i have my doubts about that word) individual who could witness such events on a pretty regular basis. Being an intern at a social media company in Fort, a resident of Powai and a broke chap, INR 8 to Kanjurmarg was the best I could do. I never had any complains regarding travelling in the local. It rather fascinated me. I had always believed the Bollywoodish aspect of Mumbai. Everyday this city creates 20.5 million stories, most left untold, unheard. All I am trying to do today, is make an exception to such convention.

Its an account of my interaction with a middle aged man, Navin, who was from Vikhroli. As tall as me with a belly that personified curvature,  he will be a part of one of those conversations in which I discovered something important about myself. But thats not the most important aspect of this account. For me, it will always be 40 mins of travel that left me thinking for the next 20 mins about about the disappointment I was and the way to carry the burden of such realization.

Navin got on the local along with me at CST at 8:00pm. We definitely were at a very good disposition to push few men and grab a seat, but you know, once you travel a few times in local, you soon realize that its never the seat thats important, its fucking oxygen! So, I jumped to the middle bar of the entrance and slid to the side of it. Navin replicated the action on the other side of the same middle bar.

After the few introductory interactions that shot off as the train started, he started speaking about the weirdest thing I could think about: his ideas on theology! Thats one topic I have always tried to stay away from, even less talk about it. My dad is a very religious man. Its hard to accept the truth, but I haven’t inherited such a virtuous aspect of him. Not that I blame him, but I just believed that I had done well enough without a gold studded deity in my head, or a stone chain around my neck. Never did I have any concrete reason for being an atheist.

“God is the most beautiful incarnation. It all just makes sense, One creater, one preserver and one destroyer: now wonder we have the cycle of life by the virtue of our Karma.” said Navin. I shrugged, considering he was asking a general opinion of the people near the middle bar. But perhaps that shrug was a bit too conspicuous. “Why, don’t you believe in God?” asked Navin with his eyebrows converging like I was the biggest disappointment that ever walked on the face of the earth. I tried to give a sensitive, reasoned answer. This is usually awkward, time consuming and pointless. i have always considered that people who believe in God don’t need proof of his existence, and they certainly don’t want evidence to the contrary. They are happy with their belief. They even say things like “it’s true to me” and “it’s faith.” I still gave my logical answer because I felt that not being honest would have been patronizing and impolite. “I don’t believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence and from what I’ve heard the very definition is a logical impossibility in this known universe,” I said, which I realized was actually both patronizing and impolite. So to just make an attempt to bring in some humour, I added “Well, it’s the way God made me.”

Navin’s eyes were those depicting extreme disbelief. He just kept staring at me like I was a social outcast for a few moments. Then he almost shouted out “Kya?, tum bhagwan pe vishwaas nahin karte….maa baap ne kuch sikhaya nahin?” What, you dont believe in God. Haven’t yer parents taught you anything? Respecting his age, the sudden rush of adrenaline didn’t go in sync with my clenched fist. “What are you so arrogant about a power superior to you?” he asked.

Now this got on my nerves. Arrogance was another accusation which seemed particularly unfair. I had always believed that science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence – – evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition. If it did, you wouldn’t get a shot of penicillin, you’d pop a leach down your trousers and pray. Whatever you “believe,” this is not as effective as medicine. Again you can say, “It works for me,” but so do placebos. My point being, I say that God doesn’t exist. I’m not saying faith doesn’t exist. I know faith exists. I see it all the time. But believing in something doesn’t make it true. Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true. The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you surely can’t have your own facts.

We had arrived by then at the Parel station and a hoard of figures just barged in as if they didn’t realize my existence near the bar. However, just to stand my ground, I resisted a bit while allowing them to pass through at the same time. The last thing you can be on a Mumbai local is a push-over. People will just trample you straight away.

However, as the train again started, Navin threw me another instance of his disbelief. “Why don’t you believe in God?” he questioned. Now it was really getting on my head. I had to stop this discussion, not because I didn’t like being questioned, but the truth about me being everything like an atheist just hit me hard with the fact that I am a non-believer of everything that my dad wants me to believe. And thats one thing, I just dont want to believe, much less think about. I asked “Why do YOU believe in God? Surely the burden of proof is on the believer which is you. You started all this. If I came up to you and said, “Why don’t you believe I can fly?” You’d say, “Why would I?” I’d reply, “Because it’s a matter of faith.” If I then said, “Prove I can’t fly. Prove I can’t fly see, see, you can’t prove it can you?” You’d probably either walk away, call another person or throw me out of the running local and shout, ‘’Fucking fly then you lunatic.””

Navin seemed to have taken offence, but all I could think about was my dad and how he taught me my first Vedic mantra, the expectations he had from me, the beliefs he had imparted to me. All that was hitting me was the realization that I had failed his beliefs. I had failed him as a son. And I knew that such a feeling would consume me, if I don’t fight it with whatever reason I have left in me. So, despite a son’s remorse, the atheist in me continued.

“As an atheist, I see nothing “wrong” in believing in a god. I don’t think there is a god, but belief in him does no harm. If it helps you in any way, then that’s fine with me. It’s when belief starts infringing on other people’s rights when it worries me. I would never deny your right to believe in a god. I would just rather you didn’t kill people who believe in a different god, say.Dictionary definition of God is “a supernatural creator and overseer of the universe.” Included in this definition are all deities, goddesses and supernatural beings. Till date, Hindu mythology provides over 3 crore gods and goddesses. So which one do you believe in? Or is it that you belief that heaven too has a legislature of its own, which runs on one-time elections only. With Brahma holding the portfolio for the creation, Vishnu for maintainence, and Shiva for municipality, Indra for monsoon with Meneka as his Private undersecretary, Ganesh and Saraswati with a joint alliance for Ministry of Education and Vishwakarma for Ministry of Engineering? And do you think they have a Lokpal? How do you think they function? Do they have their regular cabinet meeting indicative of every season? Does Indra specifically gives a Rain budget and Kubera the general budget on a centennial basis? Are earthquakes and famines the results of one of the Gods who has escaped heaven’s jail? Tell me, how do you think it is? And now if you gonna say that you believe in just one God, then let me tell you that you as as big an atheist as me. I dont believe in 3,00,00,000 gods. You dont believe in 2,99,99,999 of them. Approximation works it out.”

I was so caught up emotionally that I hard hardly noticed a mixture of emotions that had come up on Navin’s face. It was a polymorph of disbelief, intrigue, confusion, and impatience. He was urgently looking out for the next station, maybe because he had never met an individual who wasn’t a brainwashed chap. All he knew would make me stop was the Vikhroli station.

We luckily arrived at the Vikroli station at 8:35pm. Never did I see a man running away from me like that. Its was literally like a rat scampering off to the a place of safety for his food. He kept turning his head back looking at me, as if he was trying hard to imagine I didn’t exist, trying hard to convince himself that I was just an apparition, a figment of his imagination. But I existed, right there in front of him, with an unending realization of disappointing my dad.

As the train left, now all I could think about was my dad and how different I was from him. I remembered one instance when I asked him why he gave me the nickname ‘Licon’. It was a very uncommon name in our household, and resembled too much to Abraham Lincoln. I had never accepted the idea that my dad could be influenced by a Western political icon. He is really a tradition man who takes pride in his culture. He then told me that I was named after Loknath temple, a temple in dedication to Hanuman. I was built on his ideals, even my identity was a depiction of the same. I wanted to kill myself and wouldn’t deny that the thought of jumping off the train didn’t pass my mind.

Thanxs to that thought my mind came crashing down to earth. I turned my face from beliefs to reality. I realized that I was losing hold on practicality. I knew that I wouldn’t do my dad any good dead. He would prefer to have an atheist as a son than mere human pulp. This idea was enough to console me and try convincing me that I was not actually disrespecting my dad, rather standing my own belief; I actually wasn’t dis-respecting his belief, I was merely respecting mine.

So I wondered from a broader perspective what the question “Why don’t you believe in God?” really meant. After a lot of pondering over this question, I realized that when someone asks us they are really questioning their own belief. In a way they are asking “what makes you so special? “How come you weren’t brainwashed with the rest of us?” “How dare you say I’m a fool and I’m not going to heaven, fuck you!” Let’s be honest, if one person believed in God he would be considered pretty strange. But because it’s a very popular view, it’s accepted.

“Do unto others…” is a good rule of thumb and I prefer to live by that. Forgiveness is probably the greatest virtue there is. But thats just what it is – a virtue. Not just a Hindu virtue. No one owns proprietary on being good. If I’m good, I don’t believe I’ll be rewarded for it in heaven. My reward is here and now. It’s knowing that I try to do the right thing. Its the conviction that I lived a good life, for me, my family and my friends.

The local arrived at Kanjurmarg Railway Station. I got down.

It was a typical hot day and here I was, waiting for the train that would take me to the sailing club. Due to a highly irritating promise I had made to my mother, I was forbidden from playing ‘cricket cup’ on my mobile phone to pass the time as I normally did. I decided
to interest myself by watching everyone around me.

Most of the people around me were specimens of that typical, delightful my laporean chennaiite wearing either lungis or veshtis, as concerned with other people’s problemsas with their own stomachs. However in the afternoon, the time at which I was traveling, these people were mostly fast asleep. Since my compartment was quite empty and uninteresting, I started looking out at Chennai. It was really quite a beautiful place. Unlike antiseptic, ultra clean places like Singapore, Chennai was buzzing with life be it mosquitoes or humans. We do have a lot of trees too. In most of the places, people were chiefly occupied and highly focused on their activities which mainly consisted of deriving entertainment from a bat and a ball (cricket).

In 20 minutes, I was given an unbiased tour through all parts of Chennai. It was wonderful how so many varied cultures, people and beliefs coexisted in one place. The loud and boisterous temple festival, the people singing in the church, the mosque broadcasting its prayers on speakers. The man calmly jumping a traffic light, the dutiful citizen who waited even though the roads were empty and thousands of other things. Amazingly, I had never before stopped and appreciated these things even though I knew they took place, being an Indian at heart.

Soon, with the compartment virtually empty, I felt like a king in my territory. I had complete freedom to stretch my legs onto the opposite seat and soak in the sunshine (not that I wanted to).

The sun had by now ensured that the few remaining people in my compartment were in the arms of sleep. To accompany the visual movie taking pace through the train window, I now had surround sound though it mainly consisted of snoring.

All good things come to an end though and so did the train journey. After it pulled into beach station, I started on the long walk through the breeze scented with coal dust that would see me at the sailing club, reflecting on my experience and thinking how I should do this more often.

On the way back, I consecutively won 6 matches in cricket cup.

Nothing like doing something differently to break the monotony…

Edison was born in Milan, Ohio on February 11th, 1847. Growing up in Michigan, he would often not listen in class, prompting his teacher to call him ‘addled’. Due to this, ended Edison’s three months of official schooling, Homeschooled by his mother, Edison later said that “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint”. He also learnt much from reading books. In Michigan, life wasn’t all a bed of roses. Earning by selling candy and newspapers on trains, he also sold vegetables to supplement his income. However, he still continued with his work, studying qualitative analysis on the train until he caused a fire in the compartment, forcing him to abandon further work of the kind.

However, this is from when Edison’s genius and forward thinking really came out. Earning the sole right to sell newspapers on the road, he hire four assistants to print the Grand Trunk Herald and sell it, this being his first entrepreneurial venture among the 14 that he started during the course of his life.

His next job was that of a telegraph operator, He requested the night shift so that he could spend the daytime doing his two favourite pastimes, reading and experimenting. Eventually, the latter cost him his job, when he spilled sulphuric acid on the floor. However, it was not for naught. His earliest inventions, including a stock ticker, came during this time. He also invented the electric vote recorder, for which he got the patent on June 1, 1869.

Finally, he started his career as an inventor using money earned from one of his inventions. He is famous for inventing the first commercially successful incandescent light bulb, something without which we cannot live today, the carbon telephone transmitter and finally, the electric distribution system. He started a company to distribute cheap DC electricity to people and in 1887,he had 21
power generation stations around USA. In his life, he invented numerous other items, mostly utility items, patenting them and then using his keen business sense to make the maximum possible profit. He had that keen sense that allowed him to judg markets and see how much something was actually worth.

However, like any other man, he had his failures, in promoting DC over AC, in which DC ultimately lost out due to high transmission losses.

Edison was many things. An inventor, businessman and a good man. He possessed that rare quality that usually distinguishes successful people. He persevered like no other and his success is clearly evident. Among his 14 entrepreneurial ventures, he founded General Electric, the largest publicly traded company even today. His life clearly shows that the impossible is indeed, possible and that
whatever life throws at you, you can always recover, somehow. He is proof that one man can change the life of the entire world, that you do not need to be born extraordinary to be an Edison, you just have to want it hard enough.

Why are smart people usually ugly? I get this isn’t always the case, but there does seem to be a correlation. Attractiveness doesn’t predict intelligence (not all ugly people are smart), but it seems like intelligence can be a good predictor for attractiveness (smart people are usually on the ugly side). Keep in mind, I have nothing against people who are really brilliant, I’ve just always wondered.

The answer: They’re not.

The idea that an ugly face might hide a subtle mind has attracted scientific inquiries for many years. At first, scientists wanted to know whether it was possible to read someone’s intelligence from the shape of his face. In 1918, a researcher in Ohio showed a dozen photographic portraits of well-dressed children to a group of physicians and teachers, and asked the adults to rank the kids from smartest to dumbest. A couple of years later, a Pittsburgh psychologist ran a similar experiment using headshots of 69 employees from a department store. In both studies, seemingly naive guesses were compared to actual test scores, and turned out to be accurate more often than not.

Many such studies followed, and with consistent results: You can learn something about how smart someone is just by looking at a picture. But scientists couldn’t figure out where that information might have been hiding in the photographs. The Ohio researcher said that some of his subjects were “greatly influenced by the pleasant appearance or smile, but for some the smile denotes intelligence and for others it denotes feeble-mindedness.” The author of the follow-up in Pittsburgh wondered if the secret of intelligence might not be lurking in “the lustre of the eye.”

While some researchers pondered this question, a Columbia University psychologist named Edward Thorndike made another, related discovery. In 1920, Thorndike published his theory of the “halo effect,” according to which subjects, when asked to describe someone’s various qualities, tend to “[suffuse] ratings of special features with a halo belonging to the individual as a whole.” If they were describing the person’s physique, for example, along with his bearing, intelligence, and tact, they would assign high or low ratings across the board. Later studies confirmed that the halo effect could arise from a simple photograph: If someone looks handsome, people tend to assume that he’s smarter, more sociable, and better-adjusted, too.

Now there were two findings: First, scientists knew that it was possible to gauge someone’s intelligence just by sizing him up; second, they knew that people tend to assume that beauty and brains go together. So they asked the next question: Could it be that good-looking people really are more intelligent?

Here the data were less clear, but several reviews of the literature have concluded that there is indeed a small, positive relationship between beauty and brains. Most recently, the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa pulled huge datasets from two sources—the National Child Development Study in the United Kingdom (including 17,000 people born in 1958), and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the United States (including 21,000 people born around 1980)—both of which included ratings of physical attractiveness and scores on standard intelligence tests. When Kanazawa analyzed the numbers, he found the two were related: In the U.K., for example, attractive children have an additional 12.4 points of IQ, on average. The relationship held even when he controlled for family background, race, and body size.

From this, Kanazawa concluded that the famous halo effect is not a cognitive illusion, as so many academics had assumed, but rather an accurate reading of the world: We assume that beautiful people are smart, he argues, because they are.

The story does have some caveats and complications. First, a few other studies have come up with different results. A recent look at yearbook photos from a Wisconsin high school in 1957 found no link between IQ and attractiveness among the boys, but a positive correlation for the girls. Another researcher, Leslie Zebrowitz of Brandeis University, noticed that the looks-smarts relationship applies only to the ugly side of the spectrum. It’s not that beautiful people are especially smart, she says, so much as that ugly people are especially dumb. Then there’s the fact of Kanazawa’s having gotten into trouble last spring for asserting—using the same dataset and similar methods to those described above—that African-American women are objectively “far less attractive” than whites, Asians, or Native Americans. (He later acknowledged some flaws in his analysis.)

So, getting back to the original question, the bulk of the evidence suggests that smart people are not “usually ugly.” In fact, the opposite seems to be true: Either smart people are more beautiful than average, or dumb people are more ugly (or both). And while no facial features within the normal range could ever be that useful as a predictor of intelligence, people can perform better than you’d expect from random chance using nothing more than a head shot.

All of which leaves one great, unanswered question. If smart people tend to be good-looking, that might explain the halo effect. But what led our questioner to get things backward and assume that smart people were ugly? And why are there so many like-minded others, asking the same question—or its inverse—around the Internet? (Here’s one, and one more.) Aren’t we all familiar with the archetypical nerd, who is both ugly and smart? At the opposite end, what about all those beautiful, airheaded women and beefy, brainless men we see on television? Could the person who wrote in with the 2011 Question of the Year be succumbing to a bias that hasn’t yet been documented in the lab—a sort of halo effect in reverse, a “horns effect,” perhaps?

Ugly geniuses aren’t uncommon in history, of course, and while these anecdotes tell us nothing about the population as a whole, the memory of people who were famously hideous and brilliant might have an outsize influence on our judgments. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, was short, bespectacled, and wall-eyed. (“I cannot even decide whether [my face] is handsome or ugly,” says one of his characters in Nausea. “I think it is ugly because I have been told so.”) Ancient sources tell us that the great philosopher Socrates had thinning hair, flared nostrils, widely-spaced eyes, a thick neck, slobby shoulders, and a pot belly. Ludwig van Beethoven was ugly and smelled bad; Abraham Lincoln’s face struck the poet Walt Whitman as being “so awful ugly it becomes beautiful.”

In addition, Kanazawa points out that a closer look at the data reveals an interesting fact: The very ugliest people in his dataset are dumber on average, but they also tend to be the most diverse when it comes to intelligence. That means that if you’re at the low end of the spectrum for looks, you’re more likely than anyone else to be at one extreme end for IQ (either very dumb or very smart). If that’s the case, then it might provide another reason why Sartre and Socrates types stick out in our minds. We know (consciously or not) that ugly people tend to be a little dim; but at the same time, there are more brilliant brutes running around than we might expect.

For his part, Kanazawa rejects the notion of the horns effect—he doesn’t believe the smart-and-ugly stereotype exists at all. (Indeed, it has never been shown in the lab.) Instead, he says, we may be assuming that smart people are nerdy, and that nerdy people tend to lack social skills. Since people with social skills are attractive, there could be an indirect link between at least one kind of “attractiveness” and intelligence. But if you’re looking at pure “beauty,” as measured by rating photographs or measured facial features, then intelligence and looks go hand-in-hand.

(Via Washington Post)

Pink Floyd - The band

Founded in 1965, the original members included Richard Wright, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and the frontman and lead guitarist, Syd Barrett. Barrett was pioneering in his music with the psychedelic rock genre and with his expressive guitar playing. He also was one of the first artists to venture into the space rock and psychedelic folk genre. He gave the band its name, and its initial feel, which it
would continue to have for the rest of the time it operated. Truly, his contribution to music is a big one. In the music field for only seven years, with Pink Floyd and then as a solo artist, Barrett was ruly a great man if he could still contribute this much to music.

Born to a middle class family as Roger Keith Barrett, Syd’s father died a month before he turned 16. In order to distract him from his sadness, his mother encouraged him to pursue his music actively. Soon starting the band that would become Pink Floyd, they initially became famous for their style of music in the London underground, garnering fame and support.

However, soon due to his continued use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, Barrett’s mental health had started deteriorating. Soon becoming very erratic in behaviour, he used to stop performing on stage and blankly stare, detune his guitar and the like. In order to continue playing, the other members got another person to play his parts as he did not while on stage, wandering around, choosing when to play. On January 26th, 1986, the band members elected to not pick him up. He was then made a non touring member and finally on April 6th, 1986, he was officially replaced in the band by David Gilmour.

After spending two more years as a solo artist, Barrett then withdrew into isolation, avoiding the private eye and taking up gardening as his interest. Pink Floyd have many of their albums and songs tributed to him. The Dark side of the Moon contains references to him, Wish you were here and Shine on you crazy diamond were written as a tribute to him and loosely based on him respectively. With his departure from the band, the band’s theme’s started including a lot of mental illness based songs.

The future is something that almost none of us see. However, here was a man who saw the future of music, one who in his short career, introduced a whole new genre and moved music into its future. He was a man who was the change music needed, giving the world a whole new helping of song. His continued drug use was a flaw, yes, and he could have given so much more to the world. However,
without this so called flaw in him, he wouldn’t have been the man he was. Now acknowledged as an artist whose contribution to music is huge, we can safely say that Barrett was an artist in the true sense of the term.

Having learned photography from Maneckshaw Vyarawalla, whom she married later, Homai was to spend nearly three decades of her career in Delhi. After a career of 33 years as press photographer, Homai gave it up one day at the age of 57, disillusioned when the Nehruvian dream began to falter. She lived in near-anonymity until 1989. Fiercely independent, she continued to live on her own in Vadodara until she passed away.

The great value of Homai’s work lies in her vast collection of photographs that archive the nation in transition, documenting both the euphoria of Independence as well as disappointment with its undelivered promises. She was the only professional woman photojournalist in India during her time and her survival in a male-dominated field is all the more significant because the profession continues to exclude most women even today. Ironically, Western photojournalists who visited India such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Margaret Bourke-White have received more attention than their Indian contemporaries. In an already invisible history, Homai Vyarawalla’s presence as a woman was even more marginalized.

Homai received India’s first National Photo Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010, and the Padma Vibhushan in 2011. In 2010, Vyarawalla gave her entire collection of prints, negatives, cameras and other memorabilia to the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi for safekeeping and documentation. A retrospective of her work was held at the NGMA soon after, bringing her vast archive into public view.

Reproduced here is a selection of photos from the biographical work – India in Focus: Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla by Sabeena Gadihoke, published by Mapin Publishing in association with Parzor Foundation, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts and the National Gallery of Modern Art. The result of extensive interviews conducted by Gadihoke with Homai, the book is a tribute to her indomitable spirit.

(Courtesy: Yahoo news)

The lean and the obese are equally malnutritioned today (sounds democratic, right?) The ‘junk’ is to be blamed here- some may think; but I prefer to blame the ‘junkyard’ instead.

And here comes a deadly virus that prefers its victims themselves coming to it to get infected. The name is Internet. The more time you warp your life with it the more you get sucked into its wormhole. And coming to ‘official’ diseases, stress and diabetes are the reasons for doctors being secure from recession. With today’ lifeline being ability to meet deadlines, stress seems inevitable. Diabetes supposedly being linked with stress and genes forms a part of this infinite loop. Wonder how it will be to live in a ‘sucrose-intolerant’ futuristic world!

And as if being caught in a torrential rain of ailments wasn’t enough, the news of new microscopic villians being discovered (remember ‘Superbug’) and the complex links between various diseases and other stuff that is meant to be read by only the Ph.D. students in the field of Biology, come across like thunderbolts. Well, instead of focusing on the vast research done (and doubting its genuinity), I would seriously recommend practising the age-old adage, “Prevention is better than cure” for myself and the rest, as majority of the diseases today are self-generated and can’t be taken over by pills, but by our own habits.