I was reviewing our essays with a frienda and he commented, "You both write alike". What alike? I like the way she transitions in thoughts, punctuates her stance and look at this ...at this "exist in synchronicity" and this "demystify the physical world" usage, I will instead write some discombooberating phrase that will even confound me. I should practice sharp and elegant turn of phrases. May be I should quit the unnatural and stern tone in my writing and revert to my natural, sarcastic and facetious tone. May be I am not meant for efficient and beautiful writing. If we are all made of stardust, then may be I stopped at Helium and never conquered heavier metals, or may be I should just shut up, or may be I should just give up or may be I should just observe and learn more. The delay is with all the contemplation and anxiety.
Haha! He needs to know how utterly envious I am of the spontaneity and vitality of your prose. Not to mention that you possess that holy grail of good writing -- a unique and inimitable style. I write like every other urban Indian woman assembled on the convent-school conveyor belt. I have yet to discard my factory settings and formulate my weltanschauung. : ) Don't sweat the delay. The more you delay, the better I sleep. Lol! I will need the weekend to catch up with my deliverables. Take all the time you need.
It would have to be Didi's Comedy Show. It used to run on Doordarshan long before cable made an appearance in India. The show's premise was simple (from wiki) -- Didi is a bumbling detective who is struck by "brilliant" ideas which turn out disastrously; he eventually comes out on top, however. To be honest, my memories of the show itself are rather vague. What I do remember is the excited anticipation with which we waited all week, and gathered around the television set as a family. I remember rolling on the floor with my brothers, laughing at the silly slapstick as only children can. : ) I'd love to recreate those moments with my parents and siblings. That gives me an idea -- a Didi's marathon with my folks the next time we are all under one roof! Just the thought puts a goofy grin on my face.
Oh-yee! I used to love Didi's Comedy Show. Didi was more slapstick than Chaplin. That was late afternoon show on Doordarshan. Same pinch! We used to rush home to catch up with the show. Slapstick is the most accessible form of amusement to a child. Then we transition to wit. However, I never got around to M*A*S*H (used to scratch my head).
I was reading this obituary when I came across Throughout his adult life, Paddy was a great performer of party turns: songs in Cretan dialect; The Walrus and the Carpenter recited backwards; Falling in Love Again sung in the same direction – but in German. When I was at his house in the Peloponnese, in Greece, he restricted himself, after a lunch that lasted several hours, to It's a Long Way to Tipperary in Hindustani. Why did Paddy sing It's a Long Way to Tipperary in Hindustani? Your undersigned bumbling detective darted off to solve this mystery which took her to the adaptation here The Kannadiga playwright and poet, T.P. Kailasam, as part of a wager from a British friend, translated the song into Kannada, adding witty Kannada-specific lyrics. The resulting song, "Namma Tipparahalli balu Doora" (halli meaning "village" in Kannada), is a popular song in Karnataka. This version can be heard played by a marching band in the Bengali film, Pather Panchali, directed by Satyajit Ray. Irish jingle to Kannada poem to Bengali march band, I knew this would excite you like none other. Watch both the versions from 2 minutes into recording time.
Words that grabbed my interest. Talk: We should humanize the technological issues for people to turn their heads .. arriveste career, snivelling upstarts, parvenu climbers welch/welsh = fail to honour a debt Print: The clouds were lour (dark and threatening), louche neighbourhood (disreputable), lyrics skewered the gap between pop fantasy and real lives (bridged), Madras High Court suo moto banned Jallikattu (on its own motion), all that barnstorming (energetic and flamboyant), hot-to-trot Jennifer Lawrence was lucky (?), code-switching immigrants (Linguistics: the alternating or mixed use of two or more languages in speech Social: the modifying of one's behavior, appearance, etc., to adapt to different sociocultural norms), I hit middlescence (mid-life-crisis), she gypped me (cheat, swindle) Television: The Big Lebowski movie: micturating and housebreaking scene War and Peace drama series: Countess Natalya Rostova says, "Sonya is an intriguer" (er, shabdkosh translates that to shadyantrakaaree in Hindi) Documentary on tuna fishing: by-catch (unwanted marine creatures trapped in fishing nets) Documentary on smartphone addicted Chinese youth: Cantonese expression "dai tau juk" (head-down tribe) Documentary on Queen Victoria: Prince Albert was a moralist (a person who teaches or promotes morality) Documentary on American prisons: Commissary (a restaurant or food store in a military base, prison, or other institution) Documentary on American Civil War: offcuts of timber (a piece of waste material that is left behind after cutting a larger piece) Documentary on Human Genetics: full-blooded (thoroughbred) ?: That "hot-to-trot" is nebulous. There are variants of that phrase. Not sure if it is used only in derogatory sense these days.
In the wake of Dark Ages, a rumble amongst the Protestant thinkers and early Renaissance philosophers to topple scholasticism with a more fluid model to accord with the emerging sciences galvanised into a forceful movement. The stiff binding of God and Science in the theological discourses could not scale up with scientific discoveries, for instance, speculations on nature of reality that were firming up as newer understanding of the universe threatened to destabilise the incompatible scientific precepts of religion. Geocentric model of the solar system was dethroned in favour of the Heliocentric Copernican model. Religion needed a facelift to combat the profligacy of science. Entered René Descartes (1596 -1650 ), a brilliant French philosopher with a background in Jesuit education. Descartes' aptly titled book Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641, saved the day for religion by formulating a model which was consistent with burgeoning science and fixed god. Descartes accomplished this by proposing a two-step philosophical inquiry into the nature of things. (1) What is reality composed of? (2) How to prove the existence of god in this reality? Descartes discounted every form of knowledge known till then, doubting all our senses to be unreliable. He declared that all knowledge harvested from our sensory experiences is deceptive. Therefore, senses cannot be trusted. Question: What can we know with certainty using such deceptive mental faculty? Descartes argued that as every known fact can be doubted, the only reality is the “doubt” itself. There is only an inquiry of mind to begin with which is the fulcrum of philosophy. He called it the Archimedean or First principle of Philosophy. Except a mind that doubts everything, there is no tangible reality. He encapsulated this bedrock principle in a stark phrase: Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I exist). Further, mind is a non-physical substance which he called res cogitans. What about the physical reality around us? Does it exist or is it an illusion? By now, he divided everything into two classes: (1) mental things and (2) material things. Let's go back to the two-step philosophical approach we touched upon earlier. To prove that material stuff exists, Descartes first had to prove that God exists because God created both the physical and non-physical world. In our mental impulses, we imagine an infinite God. For a finite entity to imagine an infinite being is impossible, unless, someone has planted that idea in us. Descartes correlates the enabling of a thought much higher than the thought process itself as existence of Providence. God must exist for a finite mind to conceive a non-finite and sublime mental presence. From here, Descartes proceeded to establish the foundation of material world which he called res extensa. Since God, an infinite and non-material being exists, and Mind, a finite and non-material entity also exists, and though our fallible minds can deceive us, God cannot deceive us. If God deceives, that will make him a fraudster. We experience a physical world around us. Though our senses can deceive us, like a spoon bending in water, God has given us reason and logic to refute such claims. If God has not endowed us with high-functioning reasoning to disprove the material world then we are unable to discredit such knowledge. If material world was an illusion, God would have given us the know-how to debunk it. Our experience of the physical world is God's stipulation. The only reason why God made us feel and touch the reality is because it exists. Using the existence of God as the guiding principle, Descartes proved the existence of material alongside mental substance in that God would have equipped us with the intellectual capacity to disprove falsity in nature if they were mere illusions in our mind. Thus, Descartes separated everything into spheres of existence. (1) Finite material substance — Physical reality around us. (2) Finite mental substance — Mind with which we perceive the physicality. (3) Infinite mental substance — The benevolent God who created both. He handed over the “finite material substances” to the science to examine using God's toolkit in the form of our “finite mental substance”. He further expounded the finite mental substance to be our intangible soul, conscience and mind. He created a dualism of nature wherein the intangible and abstract inquiry is the preserve of religion and the concrete physical world is the purview of science. Thus, Descartes was able to demarcate and pander to both the schools of inquiries. Modern philosophers later pointed several flaws in Descartes' circular reasoning. To prove the existence of physical world, he had to prove the existence of a just God who does not rob us of the as-is reality. To prove the existence of God, he presumed that our finite mind conjured up an infinite god only via omnipotent intervention, i.e, someone must have planted it in a compelling manner. His assumption that our finite minds on their own, pushing the frontiers of self-deception, cannot hallucinate an infinite god was later disputed. What if, no one planted that thought and it was a fantasy in our mind all along. A discerning eye can spot that the later assertion: God does not deceive us of the reality leaks into his former assumption: God does not deceive us of himself, with no proof on why God should exist independent and immune to the deceptions of our mind. Despite the incoherence in the model, Descartes was instrumental in shielding science from religious bigotry by splitting the philosophical grounds into two distinct arenas: material world and mental world. With no overlap between rigidity of theological doctrine and freedom of scientific inquiry, his dualistic model of reality boosted natural thinkers to pursue science free from the scrutiny of religion. God's preserve over man's soul and mind was still retained in religion because mind is distinct from matter. However, Descartes' failure to skewer the gap between mind and matter raised serious concerns in the coming decades. How do mind and matter interact? How does the non-material world communicate with material world and vice-versa. Descartes' model though untangled the codependency of science and religion on outset only sowed rivalry for dominance of one field over the other.
I woke up this morning and worried that you would defriend this slacker, so, furiously started to pound away my keyboard to salvage whatever goodwill fostered in this venture. Promise, swear, I will be as regular as an atomic clock hence forth. I've spread myself too thin across several activities. I should jettison few and focus on what really matters. My Evernote has been playing up. I am unable to export highlights or even kludge my pithy notes into a workable merge. Vocabulary stylesheets are still pending ...
Unfriend you over an essay? Ain't happenin'. My excuse is that I have come down with bout of cold and fever. Couple more days is all I need. Pinky promise.
I had a long chat with a friend last night. Sniffling ... sobbing... and moaning over my writing style. I chewed off his head. I cannot write a serious line. It takes me forever to compose anything in a staid diction. Here's what he proposed. Don't write a long essay if it hurts your head in your attempt to conjure up a serious tone. Split into a formal essay and an informal and chatty memo. So here is my attempt to save my head from withering on the wine with sobriety. Damn! I wish I could be broody at times just to knock up an essay.
