The Maanga

As Borges wrote sixty years ago in his short story, “Averroes’s  search”, Arabic has no equivalent words for “comedy” or “tragedy”.

I wonder if there is a how to write about India like this one?

If you think Obama is just rhetoric and great oratory, you should check out his latest race speech.

I wanted to write some clever and funny analogy type here.

I was hoping you’d gloat over Andy Roddick’s loss to Tommy Haas.

Please do.

Wealth, like other segments of the evolutionary construct, is still largely a function of chance.  Not change.

Rushdie has an unusually brilliant take on America in the wake of Sep 11. The lectures ends with a hope:  

“We are living I believe in a frontier time, one of the great hinge periods in human history, in which great changes are coming about at great speed. On the plus side, the end of the cold war, the revolution in communications technology, great scientific achievements such as the completion of the human genome project; in the minus column, a new kind of war against new kind of enemies fighting with terrible new weapons. We will all be judged by how we handle ourselves in this time. 

What will be the spirit of this frontier? Will we give the enemy the satisfaction of changing ourselves into something like their hate-filled, illiberal mirror image, or will we, as the guardians of the modern world, as the guardians of freedom and the occupants of privileged lands of plenty, go on trying to increase freedom and decrease injustice?  Will we become the suits of armour our fear makes us put on, or will we continue to be ourselves? The frontier both shapes our character and tests our mettle. I hope we pass the test.” 

Lectures from 2002 that take care of Wright, Ferraro, Bush, McCain and Hillary. Now tell me, was Obama’s soporific speech really as good as this one?  The only time I woke up was when he talked of former gang bangers, thinking he was talking about Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer. But even they turned out to be of the wrong kind.

After a short silence he looks you straight in the eye and says: “Acting is like puking!”

Is it necessary to travel so far back in time and space to find an Obama equivalent? Just hop across the pond to Sarkozy, who came to power promising change, and then kept everything the same and changed his wife.

He was making a speech for posterity, not just for the Democratic Party nomination, and his populist pandering, which lacked the nuance that set the rest of his speech apart, struck a discordant note.

Suddenly, the idiot desi who was seriously arguing why Tommy Bowden should be sacked because he did not even attend a Clemson church, has become reasonable.

Since most people have decided this is clever, I will assume you are.

Now, tell me: why are TV commercials, and worse, radio jingles, that were originally made in Hindi, being translated to Tamil? I’d rather watch translated versions of obscure European advertisements, made in societies and cultures I don’t know enough to despise.