Medieval South Asians and outbound Travel..

Mark Twain had a number of observations to make on Travel - and the pithier ones are listed here - http://www.twainquotes.com/Travel.html. Travel certainly widens horizons, provides fresh perspectives, liberates the mind of prevailing prejudices. As one goes back in medieval  times, we hear of  travelers "inbound" to South Asia (routine examples - Hiuen Tsang, Fa-Hien, Marco Polo) - and not the other way around.
Of course, there were the Buddhist  missionaries spreading - circa Ashoka - the religion in SL and the East, but that BC era - & much pre-medieval. But, one never  heard of  memoirs or autobiographies, a la "Great Tang Records on the Western Regions" - that provided insights into the prevailing culture and living.

Could it be that the fabled & supposed prosperity that dulled the medieval natives into staying put and not bothering to seek outbound adventure? Was it a symptom of a stagnating society, a self-conceited society?
Or maybe  a  manifestation of the inward focus -  the inherent belief that the greatest enemy to conquer lies within?  
One can only guess.

US Public Sector - Job Losses

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/opinion/pain-in-the-public-sector.html?_r=1&hp mentions job losses in the public sector, mostly in the non-federal parts. And states, that this hits the black community blocking this route to the American Middle Class dream to that community.
One wonders how this issue would have been handled in emerging/developing countries? By simply printing more notes, maybe.
Ironical that a country with the largest international debt does not opt for deficit financing as a means to pay public sector employees payroll. 

Middle Class Nuisance - A cynical View

Ever wonder why our gov.- & indeed our political class -  is dilly-dallying with the Lokpal, despite all the surrounding din. The supposed 'constitutional sacrosanctness' may be only a felicitous facade facilitating the gov to hide behind. Maybe, the gov/admin & the political leadership feel that the worst-case-scenario-electoral-math arising out of adverse anti-corruption-movement results - will not be sufficient to cause significant damage to the electoral equations, after all. Esp. considering that skeletons rolling out, should a Jan-Lokpal-like-bill be actually operationalized - will adversely impact most parties equally!
What else explains the current postures?
Come election time, the usual arithmetic of caste, religion, region will take over - esp. in the vast non-middle-class non-urban base. And how many LS seats - the politicos may calculate -  could be crucially impacted by this movement? And even in the impacted constituencies - so the strategists may think - there will always be enough to split the votes and manage the math.- keeping in perspective, the historical poll percentage in middle-class-areas.
So, working backwards from this position,  are the chances of a strong anti-corruption bill being passed, really bright? That's anybody's guess.

Swaminomically incorrect?

Corruption - however rabid - is but one aspect of the way India has adopted capitalism, selectively & not wisely - if we go by the experts on this subject.
http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Swaminomics/entry/neo-illiberalism-is-india-s-bane
Let us assume for a moment that 'neo-illiberalism' - as SAIyer puts it in this blog  - magically ends and is replaced by 'text-book liberalism'. Will this lift the still vast sections of our poor - & that is a fair number - out of poverty? Will this make the benefits of growth reach the far-flung areas of our heterogeneous nation? More importantly, has there been any model/example with a country with >700M poor people being lifted out of abject poverty in a 'liberalistic' capitalist setup? Can SA Iyer & experts of his ilk blog this point?

Source Code - When 'the what' vanquishes 'the how'

Source Code is not your run-of-the-mill movie, or is it? It has that characteristic ingredient of  Indian films and food - masala, garbed well in true-Hollywood-style to make the end product look sauve and the audience feel intelligent. Like our own Amir Khan films do, some may argue.
A single-slider-on the film could look somewhat like this -
A. Star-Trekish theme of alternate reality, time-travel ('time-rearragement', ingenuous) revisited
B. Screen mostly inhabited by the yeh-mein-naheen-hoon & mein-kahaan-hoon hero
B. Doses of romance intermittently sprinkled
C. The usual-racial-suspects-red-herring-routine dropped along the way,
D. Will-the-misunderstood-beta-baap-equation-sort-out question dangled
E.  Show a lab full of farily-ubiquitious techno-gadgetary (laptops, web-cams etc). add a dark-room, a time travel-dabba  and a few military-attired-scientists-like-amigos and an amiga, to boot
F. Explode a bomb over & over again with different camera angles, camera shots and cameras, until..
G. .. you get into the final sequence and the inevitable twist..

For a sci-fi film that sends the hero ad-nauseum into the past , the makers just do not bother to let the viewers know 'how'. And when the poor protagonist asks exactly this to Scientist-de-chief, we are told that that is too complicated for the hero and ostensibly, the audience, to comprehend. And that, well, is that.

Nor do the makers really bother to explain why the project in the film and the film itself is named 'source code'.  '8 minutes' may have been more apt, but less enigmatic..

Which is probably, why the film works, commerically, i mean.

Carnatic music - Morphing rapidly?

So, Shankar Mah. has come up with an online way of imparting classical Indian music tutoring http://www.shankarmahadevanacademy.com/. Well-intentioned, no doubt. And not the first such initiative - by famed artists - trying to keep the Indian Classical music candle lit up to increasingly Rehmanized & Indian-idolized generations.
Even while appreciating the zest to keep an ancient Indian art-form floating, connoisseurs cannot but notice the changes in how today, Indian Classical music - esp., Carnatic music - is rendered by performers, taught by teachers, learned by students and experienced by rasikas. It may seem anachronistic to go back in time & refer to the musical Trinity and, even farther back, to the founding father - Shri Purandara Dasaru - in the same breath as the online tutoring sites.
But, it is worth remembering them - not least - because it is their compositions that will be taught in these schools. And it is also worth remembering that, the krithis/lyrics that these saint-poets created were anchored in & inspired from their deeply-rooted beliefs in Bhakti (devotion) & Vairagya (dispassion/detatchment/renunciation). Music was a derivative to this belief. Music was an effect - the cause lied in their entrenched adhyatmika(philosphical) way-of-living.
Carnatic Music without these belief systems & way-of-living - in artists & audience - is like capitalism practised in a License Raj. It is crony.  It will lose its identity in essence, while retaining the name.
But, the arrow of time moves on and so do the perceptions of art, philosphy and entertainment along with it.
In another 25 years, Carnatic music will change & morph into a different entity. So, when artists sing or play 'Telisi Rama' then, little will they know that they are eulogizing the power of yogic meditation focused on the moniker 'Rama'.  But then, how many know that today?