If you love words the way I do, you’d love this.

“we should invite britishers again to manage our country step by step. first Bihar & UP last kerala. like they developed Hong kong.”
That’s a direct quote of a comment from a reader, Jitendra, on a rediff.com article, “India’s ‘real’ Poverty“. Don’t bother reading that rather pointless article — it goes into details of how the poverty line should be defined and what the level of real poverty is in India — but let’s ponder that non sequitur quoted above.

That ad is from 1979. It says, “Via PIA” but if there was truth in advertising, it would be “Via Pakistan”. [via Liberty News Central.] And talking of Islamic terrorism and advertising, here’s something that does not surprise me.

I am off to Mumbai for a couple of days. I hope to write a real post later today but for now, I recommend this one hauled from the archives of “the tangled web” series on “The Lumpy Universe.” Now I must go as I have a train to catch. Bye.

If the people of the village, in the best traditions of the hallowed democratic process, elect the village idiot as the King and Supreme Ruler of the village, I cannot for the life of me bring myself to find fault with the village idiot. It’s not the idiot’s fault that nature dealt him or her a lousy hand in the random genetic draw of life. He’s a congenital idiot and makes no demands on being recognized as a paragon of wisdom and insight. Based on that principle, I indicted the …

The Times of India recently came up an idea that essentially amounts to this: if Indians and Pakistanis have a love-fest, there will be no war. That reminded me of this piece of dialog from Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder:

Are you surprised to see the blog back to its old form? I had redirected the URL of my blog to Asian Correspondent for a couple of months. It was like going traveling — you do like the places you visit but in the end, there is no place like home.

Most emphatically yes, if it is within your power to do so. A child accidentally falls into a river and your jump in without a second’s thought – assuming that you can swim – and save the child. But what if there are people who are thoughtlessly or even deliberately pushing children into the river. Should you continue to be fully engaged in saving the drowning children or must you at least tackle the problem where it originates, and go tie up the adults who are dropping children into the …