pilaf

I used to think that the similarity of words pilaf and Hindi Pulao is because of a recent exchange of recipes from the East. But apparently rice was grown in the central Asia when it was imported from South Asia in ancient times. The Muslim traders returned to South Asia what we know today as Biryani. The modern Hindi word pulao comes from Sanskrit pulaaka (which means a lump of rice, ref. A Sanskrit-English dictionary , Monier-Williams).

The word pilaf is found in Turkish, Greek, Armenian and some other Central Asian languages.

Tony Judt

I just started reading the book - Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 which I had been referred to by New York Review of Books. The book is very well written. It has the fluidity of a fictional work and yet the objectivity of a journalistic text. The author, a well-known historian, does acknowledge his own perspective in the description of events since 1945.

I am learning things that I had no idea about and I am so overwhelmed that I am compelled to taking notes. Here are a couple of facts that I think are interesting to note.

1. The book talks about the thirty-year war. The scale and extent of this war and the consequent deprivation of the involved states make it seem no less devastating than the First world war.

2. Stalin is know to have ordered shooting of 23,000 Polish officers in Katyn. He later blamed it on Germans.

3. The civilian losses exceed military losses significantly except for UK and Germany.

4. The war casualties were massive but there was a lot of damage also caused by lack of supply of food. Greece to my knowledge was not a major participant in the war. But it did seem to have suffered a lot of lateral damage. A third of its population for example suffered from trachoma in 1945. Pollution through industrial had shot up the infant mortality. In the British zone of Germany the number was about 25%.

5. Hitler's Nazi pogrom needs to be understood in the backdrop of the Reich. Nazis had expelled 750,000 Polish farmers from West to East in order for the ethnic Germans to return to the volksdeutsche. The soviet union moved more civilians during the war. The trend was reversed after the war, with Stalin having kept his promise he made in 1941 - that he would return Prussia back to Slavs where it belonged.

One reason why the author thinks the movement of people was at much larger scale is the failure of League of Nations. They governments were careful not to rely on changing boundaries (like they did in WWI) but instead depend on moving peoples.

says a new yorker

The world is denigrated with this game of power that I see everywhere now. I am starting to feel a bit of suffocation. Partly because of disinterest and partly because of initial failures make me feel a bit emaciated now. I feel the suffocation in my soul caused by withdrawals and half-hearted attempts. I don't and cannot blame individuals for that because it is my own tendencies that have caused my failures and withdrawals. This outlook of a power game that I see to have developed is only a consequence of my own discernment and judgment. There is a certain part of me that considers this game to be natural and to be the truth itself and yet there is this part that makes me withdrawn, jaded and having lost in this game. I wish more often if it was easy for me to be normal and be willing to play the game or be completely oblivious to the existence of the game. It is not the sorrow of having lost that I feel. Instead there is a certain guilt, sometimes felt that of having abused alcohol in the past, and having abused self-indulgence at other times. Nothing changed this rather morbid view of the world where everyone is a predator or a prey. There are no emotions, purposes and feelings; everything is a struggle for materialist and acquisitive rewards. There is nowhere you can attach yourself to. There is nobody who you can truly trust to be yours. You want to go everywhere and be everywhere but you really belong nowhere.

It should be probably be a relief to discover that I am not the only one to feel that way. But then if you really don't take optimism that seriously, even discovering other people like yourself supports the tendencies of withdrawal. To flock with your own type and to derive normal pleasures from the same class of people makes you feel having become the part of the classification process and the perceived hierarchy. I tend to reject the need of consolation by trying to become part of one community or some other. When you don't believe in a larger goal and a larger world, there doesn't seem any reason to be fulfilling responsibilities of a smaller group of people. The acceptance of lack of a larger goal only makes your own existence more meaningless. I think this is where the feeling of emaciation might emanate from. What is the right way to deny this game? I find refuge in believing in that it is not through withdrawal or denial but by endearment and creativity. For those who see ideas as separate from reality and in turn hold on to ideas more than material acquisitions the only way to exist is to seek means to realize the ideas one holds on to. This should not create a distance from reality but rather create a close connection with it.

Seattle on Tablet

State of Economy and right to information

Almost everyone who reads news and occasionally scans the opinion pages of the newspapers has given some thought to the state of modern economy. The crisis that appeared in mid-2008 is an unprecedented failure of financial systems. Personally, having had a chance to work in a financial corporation during the time, I realized like many others, that a deeper introspection of the consumer driven economy would follow the crisis. Since then, those in the media have given us complete opposite outlooks on the crisis. Some have called this the end of the neo-classical economics while others don't think this is going to be more than a cyclical crisis. There has been for example, a lot of discussion about whether a consumption based economy is sustainable or not. There are those who have always thought that consuming at one end of the world and producing at the other end doesn't usually result in desirable uniform growth. An extreme case like that of the current crisis arose when the sellers of risk ended up forcing the production of risk. Fundamentally it is not much different from the colonists lashing the farmers in poor countries to support high production in the world, or merchants burning harvests while people starving at some other place in the world. Of course, that is the nature of our systems; and to some extent, humanity itself. To make it all fair we have rules and regulations. A game without rules, most of us would agree, can't be played for long. The good news is that rules aren't that many and are really simple to follow. But again, it is hard for businesses to follow rules that inhibit profit-making. After all the profit-maximization functions don't take parameters like happiness and pain as input. Hence despite all law and order, when the manager of a company takes charge he is more likely to see the revenues and sales than his moral responsibilities or goals of the society. There lies the fundamental inadequacy of the regulations and the pretentious self-criticism of the media. It would take a lot of effort and time to understand why honesty and integrity in our world are mere vanities of the poor and working class. What I've found rather amusing are the attacks on large corporate firms in the visual media - from Michael Clayton to Avatar. But sadly other than minor insults and complaints against "large" bonuses there hasn't really been much thinking or introspection on the matter. We still don't have an alternative to large corporates. To generate more jobs and revive the economy, we would still need the corporates, the CEOs and their compensations. It is just not possible to shun everything and start over, not for most of us except in an avatar-like fantasy. We neither have escapes from our basic tendencies of trying to be rich and powerful nor do we possess enough desire to start things over. For those reasons and many others, the current system isn't really going away. There are ways of slow evolution which the system might adopt, but neither our basic tendencies (of hunger, avarice and desire) nor the resulting economic system can be put on hold for even a little while. What would happen for example to our political goals in the global arena? Where would America be if its not the most powerful and the most benign country in the world?	A sudden reversal of our system is neither feasible nor desirable. We still would continue to be an industrial society. Mixing go-green, savings accounts and Buddhism is great on paper, but unless we embrace fundamental changes in our system, all of it would only amount to hypocrisy. The acceptable way of solving the current crisis or attempting to do so, in my opinion, is to establish transparency in our systems. The deeper thinking on goals of the individual and society would automatically follow. In our current system, it would be argued that freedom of the individual to get the information he wants is very limited. The laws of this country have put so many filters on the information through devices ranging from security concerns to corporate interests that the laws curtail the freedom of the individual. I emphasize on freedom on information not just because it is the fundamental right of an individual in the society, but also because it is a way to avoid and put a check on the kind of failures that a banking system or other systems (governments included) would run into. In a true capitalist system, transparency would provide the opportunity to monitor and control large financial systems. After working for financial companies for a significant part of my life, I do feel there is a sheer lack of transparency. The transparency is really hard to embrace, because the business model of the banks itself is based on opaqueness. The "proprietary models" and "sensitive data" are actually just shields to profits. If people do not demand the information that is used for determining policies applicable to themselves, there is no possible way for people to take control of what is desirable for them. Mere complaints through art and insincere political allegations to developing economies (like China) wouldn't really reverse the trend of increasing lack of control over corporates. It is not surprising that our political leaders, with so much control in their hands easily manufacture the political consent to go on war for purposes that have nothing to do with the wishes and interests of the people. The world certainly seems to be better than when in the Cold War era and so I think the policy response would be more than protectionism. Also Internet and Information can really provide a cheap way to access information, unlike ever before. What is still needed is a sincere effort in the direction instead of visceral allegations against unknown enemies.

At borders

At borders today, a book called "Death of Conservatism" caught my attention and due to tiny size of the book, I ended up reading it all up at the table itself ( it was under the "thought-provoking" category). I don't like to be a promoter for any book-store, but I do think that I am more likely to find my book at borders than at Barnes and Nobles. That they have better coffee (Dean&Deluca) than the latter (Starbucks) strengthens this prejudice further. About half-way through reading the book, I realized that the author is one of the editors of New York Review of Books, a fact that was affirmed by the well-researched essays of the book. The writings of McCarthy, Burnham, Schlesinger and Disraeli were recollected in the book and were used to evaluate the movement conservatism. New York Review of books is very left leaning, and sometimes it even bothers me by its extreme support for Obama. But that apart, the writings from the journal or such books, form a very informative read. This book, for example pointed out the contradictions and shallowness of last few years of conservatism - its blind support to failed policies.

One interesting perspective the book presented, and the one that I am increasingly inclined to believe in is that the current conservatism is incapable of being constructive. What it represents today through the likes of Limbaugh and Palin is the destruction of institutions that we have in the society. The way this movement proceeded in the past few years or claims to proceed further, is by vandalizing our democratic establishments and destroying our values that they themselves claim to defend. As the book pointed, a new era always marks the end of a previous one. The end of conservatism and the new "Hope" could be another chapter in American history, a history that is full of self re-invention and re-evaluation. http://www.amazon.com/Death-Conservatism-Sam-Tanenhaus/dp/1400068843

World was never flat

I get somewhat amused every time I hear people talking about world becoming flatter and people shunning the boundaries that separate them. The more I think about that, the more dubious the evidences appear. The world certainly seems to be better than at the Cold War. During those times, our media was so biased that we would hear extreme opposite coverage of the same incidents when reported by West and East blocks. The Gulf war or even the post-911 war-mongering was probably not nearly as bad as how things were during Cold war. The sentiments against each other were so deep that the most intellectual pursuits failed to overcome them. On one hand, the Eastern block had scientists commanded by the dictator of proletariat while on the other scientific communities were shying away giving Nobel prizes to intellectuals from the East. At one point, the peace Nobel prizes seemed to be a prerogative of previous US Cold War is over, but the institutional propaganda and our conscious ignorance are still a part of our lives. My last few observations have been the about the way East is covered in the West (I am clearly more likely to observe them than most of others). The fact that we get filtered information about the world in US is very well established. One thought that I wanted elaborate was how media has successfully been able to engineer into most of our minds that India is a rising power, and that to a large extent, outsourcing is responsible for it. presidents. Both of these claims are inaccurate. That India is rising as a competitor to West, is itself a myth. A country with such extreme poverty and malnutrition clearly doesn’t have enough resources and institutions to sustain its own people. Poverty is not an unfortunate side-effect of growth in India. Poverty in India is incomparably widespread and a part of life. The little progress and growth that account for 8% GDP growth rate, is largely due to foreign investments in India and is limited into Western establishments localized into metropolitan areas.

But that is not to suggest that India by itself is incapable of doing much. Of course, the investments in India are not out of charity. They are market holdings in an economy capable of clear growth. But that is not what we learn from our media.We are made to believe that most of India is coming out of poverty because of American intervention - a combination of foreign aid and monetary investment. India's growth is indeed tied to the growth of US, but the relationship is not out of charity or a cold-war era agreement. It is largely due to the way world is changing. The impact of the kind of fear built against imaginary monsters like India and China are long lasting and extremely susceptible to political manipulation. One example is how Americans are made to fear about Iran’s possession of nuclear power; the American media chose not to mention the pact between India and America, which was not liked by the most of European countries as it gave undue advantage to India despite it’s refusal to sign the test-ban treaty. People are made to fear the outsourcing (something that apparently jeopardizes American interests but is widely accepted in the corporate world) and the nuclear proliferation (in India’s case it was favored by the corporate America) at the same time, yet it is institutions in the US itself that are are responsible for these developments in the East. Media doesn't offer any transparency in those matters. It offers us contradictory yet comfortable truths that we want to believe in.