Harvard Pottering with Swamy

You are probably applauding Harvard University because it has decided to junk Prof. Subramaniam Swamy’s courses in next year’s summer session for the views he expressed in a piece where he, according to the report:

 …recommended demolishing hundreds of mosques and suggested that only Muslims in India who “acknowledge that their ancestors were Hindus” should be allowed to vote.

I think the Janata Party president’s role is different from the man teaching Quantitative Methods in Economics and Business and Economic Development in India and East Asia. His political views cannot and should not interfere in his academic role, and by the same token he ought not to be jusged by his stand in his other role.

If the university is trying to make a point, then it should not permit guest lectures by Bill Clinton, George Bush, Tony Blair and several others for different reasons.

There is the huge question about how much a person’s political views matter in his non-political work. I have often said it is impossible for me to like Naipaul’s writing anymore because I find his politics loathsome. In this case, he is ‘coming home’, so to speak. He is addressing the issues he feels about and I do not agree with, and there will be an opposite reaction from others. In an assignment where the topic is entirely different, I do not see the validity of such protocol.

Harvard is probably looking for an excuse to draw attention to the fissures in Indian, and subcontinental, politics. The West has courses on terrorism. India does not. Pakistan does not. Sri Lanka does not. Bangladesh does not. Nepal does not. That should tell us something.

As regards the good professor, one must always keep the salt shaker handy for Swamy’s stupidity.

3 Idiots: IIT, IIM and the Minister

A distorted image of a scene from the Hindi film 3 Idiots

Since when have IITs and IIMs become shrines that everyone has to bow before them and whatever comes out of those hallowed corridors is to be considered some holy benediction?

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh and the hurt alumni and faculty of the institutes are both narrow-minded. Here is what the minister had said:

“There is hardly any worthwhile research from our IITs. The faculty in the IIT is not world class. It is the students in IITs who are world class. So the IITs and IIMs are excellent because of the quality of students not because of quality of research or faculty.”

What exactly is world-class? Don’t we have our own standards to judge? There is some pretty wimpy stuff coming out of Ivy League universities. The IITs and IIMs depend on government funding, so Mr. Ramesh has just given them an opportunity to crib about how they are short of money and shackled by government interference.

It is no wonder that reports mention the kneejerk response that this one statement has received. Typically, they have pulled up the minister, asking him to hold forth on the quality of politicians. Pretty lame. For not only is the minister a product of such an institute, there are many others, and quite a few of them in fact confirm what he says – not about the faculty, but about the students. The hierarchy is in place and those who get in assume they are better than the rest.

And what is so great about those students? Many take the first opportunity to go overseas and then after they have made it return with a cheque to donate to their alma mater. Those who remain here end up doing staid academic jobs; the more enterprising ones consider research to mean rehashing the minutiae of what they did at the institutes in columns, books and films and these are lapped up because our ‘youth segment’ is now interested in the techie/managerial route to success decoded in simplistic paneer wrap language.

Oh, before I forget, a little bit of mandatory failure along the way is seen as idealism. Idiots.

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I had written a more detailed piece on a related subject in Understanding the Rot in Academia

Suck face

I am tired of kissing. First it was kissing as an art, now it is a science. Can people not just be left alone to do with their mouths what they wish to do?

How many of you have ever looked at the Kama Sutra for tips? I doubt it. Every glossy worth its smooth skin has covered this subject and I would in the past get terribly amused. To be honest, wouldn't you rather have a butterfly in your mouth than someone’s tongue fluttering inside in what is clearly a studied exercise?

This, however, is a subject that excites the intellectual. Sheril Kirshenbaum, a scientist at the University of Texas, has written a book The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us. Did George Bush mean that? Anyhow, she has laid bare the whole shebang about how kissing evolved, why people kiss, why some kisses work and others don’t, why people have a phobia of kissing and others don’t, why it is okay in some societies and not so in others. You get the drift.

I understand all these are important aspects of any activity. Do you know the manner in which you clip your toenails can tell you a lot about your past life? You don’t? Neither do I, but I am sure it can be explored. The point is that most of the material is available, and that is how I found out stuff, and it does not even work as relaxed beachside reading. Like, are you aware about something called the ‘hickey kiss’ when all it means is that you get a blue mark that looks like some editing details in galley proofs of newspapers? Oh, ok, it is supposed to be more animalistic, an out-of-control body experience. Then there are all those different areas where a kiss can be administered, and the motives are quite clear. Does anyone need to figure out what a cheek peck and a foot lick really mean?

Way back in the 1930s there was a manual called The Art of Kissing that spoke among other things of the Vacuum Kiss. The man must position himself as he knows and then when his lips are where they should be he must get on to the task of "sucking inward as though you were trying to draw out the innards of an orange".

I have eaten oranges and as far as I know they don’t have innards. Unless someone means to defrock the fruit and then blow into it or rather from it; sounds more like a conch shell thing. Oranges have slices and the sucking of them is messier than empty or vacuum-like.

The part I dislike about the scientific study, though, is that it says you are more likely to remember your first kiss than losing your virginity. Kirshenbaum, in fact, believes that you can remember 90 per cent of the details of that smooch. I beg to differ and I will provide a counter-scientific theory. While the kiss may have some special memory, it could well have been unmemorable.

How many of you have managed to find a prince by kissing a toad? Or have experienced the kiss of the spider woman? As for virginity, it is culture specific and may matter a whole lot in some societies and not so much in others, and there is also the gender factor – men are less likely to be affected by the loss of virginity than are women, although I believe that men will remember it more clearly because it was a boy becoming man thing. Girls become women when they start menstruating and reading Maupassant after throwing off Mills & Boon. Virginity has a lot to do with giving up oneself and I do not mean to the horse you are riding or the energetic aerobics at the gym that may cause the ruptured hymen.

It has a lot to do with oneself for women and for the conquest by men. Therefore, it is unscientific to believe a kiss will be remembered more.

These theories do start a debate. Did you know that the ‘soul kiss’ is called so because the soul passes through the breath of one mouth to the other? I thought that was the job of resuscitation and the soul kiss, which is how the French got famous, although they call it the English kiss (maybe because you end up with a stiff upper lip), was to cure tonsillitis. But then I am not Woodward and Bernstein and know precious little about Deep Throat.