charlie in dallas

I’m bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas land.

To hear the moo and rattle,
Of snakes and cattle,

I’m bound for Texas land,

I’ll sing her a song,
At the end of the day,
A song that will drive all our cares away,
I’ll sing out (in) the prairie,
The blue starry skies,
And the stars shining bright in her eyes,

I’m bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas,
Bound for Texas land.

To hear the moo and rattle,
Of snakes and cattle,

I’m bound for Texas land,

I’m tried of the city,
Of smoke stack and steel,
I’m tried of the grind,
Of the factory wheel,
I’m spreading my wings,
And I’m ready to fly,
To the land of the wide open sky,

I’ll save up my money,
And look for a wife,
A wife who be true,
And a pal for life,
I’ll build her a home,
And a room for a child,
With the roses, around growing wild,

I’m bound for Texas land,

some days ago someone asked me why India's attitude toward Britain wasn't like that of the colonized for the imperialist. there was no antagonism, no hard feelings. i don't think i explained it well. all that came to my mind was "its more like a parent-child relationship, you mean?". its actually quite like that but of a child now far outgrown her parent, distant in emotions and attachments, and one who doesn't think of or visit her parent too often. and yet in lil manners realizes how her parent's grooming has created her.

even today speaking english in this country, in the tea versus the coffee; i sometimes feel British. in the arguments - for the usage of 'queue' against the word 'line'; in my difficulty to understand 'aunt' pronounced as 'ant'...

Naipaul, in describing his first visit to India explains this so much better. in the India of the 50-60s where the British-ness must have been so much fresher:

"They coexist; the society only pretends to be colonial; and for this reason its absurdities are at once apparent. Its mimicry is both less and more than a colonial mimicry. It is the special mimicry of an old country which has been without a native aristocracy for a thousand years and has learned to make room for outsiders, but only at the top. The mimicry changes, the inner world remains constant: this is the secret of survival. And so it happens that, to one whole area of India, a late seventeenth-century traveller like Ovington remains in many ways a reliable guide. Yesterday the mimicry was Mogul; tomorrow it might be Russian or American; today it is English.

Mimicry might be too harsh a word for what appears so comprehensive and profound: buildings, railways, a system of administration, the intellectual discipline of the civil servant and the economist. Schizophrenia might better explain the scientist who, before taking up his appointment, consults the astrologer for an auspicious day. But mimicry must be used because so much has been acquired that the schizophrenia is often concealed; because so much of what is seen remains simple mimicry, incongruous and absurd; and because no people, by their varied physical endowments, are as capable of mimicry as the Indians. The Indian army officer is at a first meeting a complete English army officer. He even manages to look English; his gait and bearing are English; his mannerisms his tastes in drink are English; his slang is English. In the Indian setting this Indian English mimicry is like fantasy. It is an undiminishing absurdity; and it is only slowly that one formulates what was sensed from the first day; this is a mimicry not of England, a real country, but of the fairytale land of Anglo-India, of clubs and sahibs and syces and bearers. It is as if an entire society has fallen for a casual confidence trickster. Casual because the trickster has gone away, losing interest in his joke, but leaving the Anglo-Indians flocking to the churches of Calcutta on a Sunday morning to assert the alien faith, more or less abandoned in its country of origin; leaving Freddy crying, 'Just bung your coat down there Andy;' leaving the officer exclaiming, 'I say, by Jove! I feel rather bushed.' Leaving 'civil lines', 'cantonments', leaving people 'going off to the hills': magic words now fully possessed, now spoken as of right, in what is now at last Indian Anglo-India, where smartness can be found in the cosy proletarian trivialities of Woman's Own and the Daily Mirror and where Mrs Hauksbee, a Millamant of the suburbs, is still the arbiter of elegance.

But room has been left at the top, and out of this mimicry a new aristocracy is being essayed, not of politicians or civil servants, but of the business executives of foreign, mostly British, firms. To them, the box-wallahs as they are called, have gone the privileges India reserves for the foreign and conquering; ..."

i wonder who we are aping now... as google underlines my spelling which was correct in the old English dictionaries...

every little jigsaw of every man and every woman in this world fits in and is designed to do so; conditional on every other lil idiosyncratic fit they each may share with numerous others. the world accommodates, revises, blends out; the gaps and protrusions of people to form the big painting of human relationships

pointless but happy

its been a sweet life these few days. in the real sense. bars of snickers and cookies and sweet banana chips. peppered here there strongly with jalapeno-ed potato chips. and chipotle and mexican hot sauce. and its beginning to show on my hips. the more my brain works the more my tummy greeds for. not forgeting the sweetly warm sun thats making me a browner shade of honey, where i sit for an hour munching on my hersheys bar. life is good and hungry

when the sky crackles, splits and roars with the obvious threat and the wind blows dead leaves onward to join the uproar. and the sun is pushed into oblivion and the world gets a sinister color to it. when you are wondering how much longer will that last bit of bright sky manage to fight through, you see that unexpected rain makes people run. run, was what that fat girl/woman was doing even though it looked like blobs of flesh bouncing up and down. and that cyclist raced through like he was being chased. suddenly everyone is hurrying all around, while i smile in response to a 'dude, ready for the rain?' somewhere close to me. rain makes me feel young sometimes...

was it ordained that I'd come here and by a fluky last-min-reshuffle of assignment, be put with you. and then would begin another journey in this world of probabilistic-matching encounters and following relationships, some without names. enabled with words or the unnecessarity of them, we would learn each other and continue to do so (for how long?) while I refuse to let go of you and you allow me my stubbornness.

some odd meters down the corridor you coexist and sometimes I wish you into appearing right in front of me in that very space that is a metaphor of our guarantee that this will not grow into anything disrupting to either's life.

jab kisi ek mein duniya ke saare rishte dikhne lage
tab samjho ki koi mil gaya

jab uske saath aas paas sab kuchh thham jaaye,
aur bas woh hi woh rah jaaye
aur uske jaane ke baad achanak duniya ka ehsaas ho
tab samjho ki dil ko padaav mil gaya

words drip from my mind like the drops from my hair as i let the flowing water wash it all away. and yet i cannot express myself.

and my hand cannot control the pencil like it used to. its gone, lost. just like that. in fact i'm scared even to hold it and try now.

i think i'm missing that country where one is never stared upon, never talked about in whispers. where one is alone but more than that, is on one's own.

and i'm missing some conversations. its not the same thing to be lonely as it is to miss someone. and nor does it mean the same to want to bawl like a 2 yr old in a tight hug and be told repeatedly that its ok. and yes it matters who the arms belong to

there should be no reason why two people like each other, they just do
and there should be no limit to how much they can
there can be no name to express what they share
and there's no embarrassment to a mutual confession, that this is true

and it's not the same in a third's presence
it comes alive only away from the world
and the initial ripple of the excitement of every meeting
isn't anything compared with the peace that comes in its wake

the leaf let the wind take it
sometimes enjoying the flight
and some just weighing down

and on my way i saw a bush of giant white flowers.
and from one flower, on tipping it onto my palm, i got a handful of pink tipped cream colored pollen stems

the numbers of yards of wildflower-spotted grass
that i crossed with a lowered head
thinking of the people who can make me cry without wanting to hurt me
of the power i give into their hands
that i'm happy not to take back
for which i ask nothing in exchange

fond memories and farewells ... and gratitude

magic, love and wonder
and simple acceptance of these
(to the point of self-defeat and helplessness)
in the little things of life

the night could contain it no more
it finally rained like the confession (that never came)
and she could hear it on her window incessantly
through her wakeful sleep

so most environmentalists say emission standards should be set. and most economists say 'pay to pollute' is more efficient. they never try and understand what the other implies. pay to pollute would actually (given rational polluters) reduce pollution in a cost effective manner, accepting humbly that no pollution is impossible. and the proponents of this see standards as allowing 'free' pollution upto the standards and that is preposterous to their calculating minds. they conclude that the environmentalists are nuts.

now the environmentalists cannot understand economic math and so they don't see the efficiency being talked about. their argument is simple. how can you let anyone pay to commit a serious offence against the environment. its like saying, once you've paid, the offence doesn't remain one. its morally wrong. it doesn't send out the right signal to the world which should be 'do not pollute'. ok, so no pollution is impossible, but humankind should aim to reach as close to that impossible as possible. so set tight standards.

three borrowed thoughts

its so obvious and yet so deep. never seemed to realize it. cost-benefit analyses assume that the marginal utility from a unit of money is constant and the same for everyone involved in the study. which is kind of restrictive.

you would think a rich guy wouldn't care to earn a dollar and someone else may consider that very important.

and yet counter to this is Edgeworth's argument that a rich guy can enjoy an extra dollar more than a poor guy can. meaning a rich person because he has already satisfied his basic wants, can get more pleasure out of extra money where as someone who really needed that money will maybe not break even with it. so in that case, sensitivity of the rich to additional money is higher than that of the poor.

so, welfare considerations get confused. obviously

tell me i haven't changed you, and i would consider it my greatest success

"he was at once both too great and too small for love"

while in his stories he tries to decipher the mysteries of the nature of the characters he narrates to have known, i wonder about him. at some point i'm convinced that he detested women in a way, that he was contemptuous of them but then he surprises me toward the end of the tale by springing on me, this woman who is a contradiction to the most ubiquitous of womanly faults. and is yet, so whole a woman. was it that he never found the ideal that he was searching in woman? and therefore he was gay...?

the moon came and went unnoticed
and so will the sun again tomorrow
the clouds heavy in their heart
just hung there
and failed to share their sorrow

and now my blog becomes as accessible as chat. i'm sure that'll make the posts even increasingly tweet-like. and so update for the day - i'm hoping tonight-tom's snow will be the last of this winter. its been a thick-skinned winter not to take the hint and end its stay

they'd rather leave it as an imagined claim of right, than make what meat they can out of reality. what they sure do, is deserve each other

good old non-credible days

the world has changed so much. some non-credible threats have now become so credible. in a hijack-game in undergrad class today, the prof referred to the game as being played in pre 9/11 days. that one sentence held so much information for a game theory student. it made me smile, despite the underlying gloom in its meaning. there was a time in this world when killing oneself (with killing others) was considered an incredible threat, by theorists at least. even though the people threatened often took it seriously and thus obeyed. though this started to change in parts of the world even before 9/11, it was 9/11 that left no doubt about the credibility of such threats. since then, blowing oneself up in order to blow others, is no longer seen as having a negative payoff for the perpetrator of the threat. in fact, sometimes the suicide bomber may not need the excuse of his demand not being fulfilled to threaten to bomb. the bombing may in itself be an end result to him/her. and what's scary is that, in such situations, for reasons still bewildering and half unknown, there may in fact be a positive and dominant payoff to the bomber.

so the prof changed the payoffs to represent a present-day scenario for comparison. subgame perfect: bomb no matter what.

the be-nice-to-strangers is beyond me. how can she paste that smile on her face for so long while checking so many people out, and greet everyone with the same pleasantness. and then make small talk, "enjoying the sunshine? i'm loving every minute of it". how can she love the sunshine when she is indoors the entire day beeping objects and cards and smiling and saying, "thank you, have a great day". i guess its nice to be nice and to have people being nice to you. but did anyone wonder about the dipping curve of the marginal utility of niceness.