A long (long!) article on the Greek financial crisis, by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair:
Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds.

It tells the story of Greece’s tragic descent into utter financial ruin. The entire country seems to have conveniently chosen a bunch of monks to blame for it all, while the faults lie elsewhere.

---

The story is well worth reading in the full, but to switch topic, these excerpts from the beginning and the end:

But beyond a $1.2 trillion debt (roughly a quarter-million dollars for each working adult), there is a more frightening deficit. After systematically looting their own treasury, in a breathtaking binge of tax evasion, bribery, and creative accounting spurred on by Goldman Sachs, Greeks are sure of one thing: they can’t trust their fellow Greeks.

[…]

But there’s a second, more interesting question: Even if it is technically possible for these people to repay their debts, live within their means, and return to good standing inside the European Union, do they have the inner resources to do it? Or have they so lost their ability to feel connected to anything outside their small worlds that they would rather just shed themselves of the obligations? On the face of it, defaulting on their debts and walking away would seem a mad act: all Greek banks would instantly go bankrupt, the country would have no ability to pay for the many necessities it imports (oil, for instance), and the country would be punished for many years in the form of much higher interest rates, if and when it was allowed to borrow again. But the place does not behave as a collective; it lacks the monks’ instincts. It behaves as a collection of atomized particles, each of which has grown accustomed to pursuing its own interest at the expense of the common good. There’s no question that the government is resolved to at least try to re-create Greek civic life. The only question is: Can such a thing, once lost, ever be re-created?

If there is such a thing as civilizational spirit, Greece seems to have lost it (going by the article). A lot of Greeks are very bright, though, so let’s see.

In this regard, Greece seems a scary version of what India may have been, and may still become. Both are wounded civilizations (though Greece is probably closer to dead), and one can see, in India as in Greece, the spectacle of empty pride in an old great civilization by people who cannot legitimately claim much connection or even awareness — while simultaneously the country attempts to discard all that and absorb American culture, and is impatient the process isn’t happening faster.

Well, if an insight from a five-day glimpse is to be trusted. :-)

Advertisement

Hindi history

I had a vague idea, but wasn’t aware of the extent:

Wikipedia has an article (version I read); it freely injects opinion into the page and is amusing to read.

Ramachandra Guha’s historical summary from The Hindu

Articles like this are alive and well, I see…

Students write about LaTeX

There is an article in the PracTeX journal with the first-person accounts of three people who attended a course in LaTeX. There’s nothing special about the article, but it is always nice to read us Indians write in what I call vernacular Indian English. I don’t mean this in any elitist way (I know “prescriptivist!” is a bad word, etc.); it’s just amusing to observe.

The three of them took the course at different times and are from different backgrounds, but all three essays have the same structure and share some sentences almost verbatim. They also contain gems like this one:

After that I had prepared a manuscript in LATEX (on the seventh day) and showed it to our revered teacher. He really appreciated my work and showed it to the class and above all it was surprising that the paper was accepted in the Current Science.

Why was the water yellow? What’s with the hat thing?

We went to a temple today.

Vulgar language

[This should have been another “Film I saw” post, but I don’t think this deserves one.]

I saw the fifth Harry Potter movie on Sunday night. It was awful.

Also, I’m not sure I heard this, but I think at some point in the movie, Cho Chang said “Anyways”. Which reminds me…

I have (or had) a theory about Indians and a cultural linguistic inferiority complex. We see a fair bit of hypercorrection when it comes to English — and many (too many!) misinformed, well-intentioned people finding fault with perfectly cromulent words and often offering invalid replacements. In addition, there is a tendency, upon hearing a “foreigner” say or use a word differently, to change one’s own usage; it disturbs me how frequently I hear “skedule”. And I nearly cried when I heard “soccer” even on DD.

This brings us to “anyways”, a “word” that has successfully leapt from illiterate, rustic Americans (“dial. or illiterate” — OED) into India’s fashionable shopping malls. I literally cringe every time I hear it, but I promise that it has nothing to do with my considering the film awful.

[I used “vulgar” in the title; am wondering if I could have said villainous, or would that have been too much of a stretch?]

[Non-update: Need to find some place to put this article!]

Postfix operators we learnt in kindergarten

I don’t know about your school, but in our school we kids went through several years without ever realising what the multiplication table we were saying actually said. As a result, we were all familiar with at least one postfix operator — the postfix multiplication operator “zar” (pronounced “zawr”). As we recited our “tables”:

Two one zar two,
Two two zar four,
Two three zar six,

and so on (always ending with a singsong, triumphant, “two ten zar twenty”.)

“Zar” was routinely treated as an operator (“what is six seven zar?”), and it was quite an epiphany to me (in class seven I think) when I suddenly realised what had been going on; I suspect many of my classmates still haven’t caught on. (BTW, what is the technical name for this, where “ones are” → “one zar”? Closest I know is Allomorph.)

Also, our “into” (for multiplication) is used for division in the US (at least), so our “five into twenty is hundred”, but their “five into twenty goes four [times]”. And the “by” — “thirty by forty is 0.75”, but a thirty-by-forty site is 30 × 40.

More to ponder — which parts of India say “by” in fractions and which say “over”? (Is “3/4” “three by four” or “three over four”? Of course it’s “three-fourths”…) Which ones say “aitch” and which ones say “hetch”? We always learnt it with the aspirated “h”, and that’s the way it seems to be in Chennai too.

“Pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ (and hence spelling haitch) is […] standard in Hiberno-English. In Northern Ireland it is a shibboleth as Protestant schools teach aitch and Catholics haitch.”

Meanwhile, I’ve always wanted to slaughter the (incorrect) Hindi-inspired “give exam” speakers, but it looks like the battle is being lost (in CMI, it had spread to even proper Bangalore/Chennai types). Maybe I should also find and resurrect my old zedzee and emptyset-not-phi rants while I’m in the mood…

Indian music in the west: Ravi Shankar

Indian Express article on India in the west, including the “disastrous” Woodstock.

The disastrous “non performance” was at Woodstock, the greatest pop jamboree ever. But, alas, it was too noisy for classical music. Worse, the flower children closest to the stage took their clothes off and proceeded to make love in the spirit of hippie freedom, even as Allah Rakha closed his eyes and covered them with his hands.
On this, the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s death, it is worth our while to remember the distinction between cultural “fusion” and cultural “confusion”. Ravi Shankar at Woodstock represented the latter.

From Wikipedia:

Ravi Shankar has been critical of some facets of the Western reception of Indian music. On a trip to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district after performing in Monterey, Shankar wrote, “I felt offended and shocked to see India being regarded so superficially and its great culture being exploited. Yoga, Tantra, mantra, kundalini, ganja, hashish, Kama Sutra? They all became part of a cocktail that everyone seemed to be lapping up!”

From an interview with Rolling Stone:

What did you think of “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”?
To tell you the truth, I had to keep my mouth shut. It was introduced to me by my nieces and nephews, who were just gaga over it. I couldn’t believe it, because to me, it sounded so terrible.

Did you like the Monterey Pop festival?
I was shocked to see people dressing so flamboyantly. They were all stoned. […] Then I saw Jimi Hendrix. I saw how wonderful he was at the guitar, and I was really admiring him, and then he started his antics. Making love to the guitar. And then, as if that was not enough, he burned the guitar. That was too much for me. In our culture we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God.

Do you miss the big audiences you had in the ’60s?
When George became my student, I got a new audience: the younger generation. And, of course, they came like a flood because the whole thing happened together with the hippie movement and this interest in Indian culture. Unfortunately, it got all mixed up with drugs and Kamasutra and hash and all that. I was like a rock star. The superficial people who just came because everyone else was going dropped out. Those who stayed are still there. They’re in middle age, and they don’t have beads or long hair, and they’re free from drugs. I never said one shouldn’t take drugs or drink alcohol, but associating drugs with our music and culture, that’s something I always fought. I was telling them to come without being high on drugs. I said, “Give me the chance to make you high through our music,” which it does, really. I think it’s good I made that stand, and that’s why I’m still here today.