1 sunny weekend afternoon
1 portable grill
4 stalks of fresh corn
1 significant other for making pomegranate-blueberry-banana smoothies
2 garden chairs
1 copy of the latest New Yorker

and, most importantly…

0 mails from co-workers.

In India, whenever a significant object – a bridge, a canopy, a streetlight – related to the government succumbs to gravity, the COVERUP policy is triggered, under which an official enquiry is ordered. In almost all cases, as befits scientific enquiry, the examination goes far beyond the immediate nature of the incident and focuses on the more fundamental underlying theories. The date of the next election, the popularity of the current administration, and the amounts of little pieces of paper passed under tables, for example.

For something as important to the national image as the CommonWealth Games, however, it is occasionally pointed out that nobody actually listened to the order and an Enquiry Commission is set up to handle the enquiry. In special cases Commissions for Ordering Enquiries have also been set up to set up Commissions of Enquiry that can be ordered to institute said enquires.

Not much scientific progress, however, has been recorded as legions of Indian Civil Service men and women spend weeks, months and years pondering over the root causes of objects transitioning from high to low, up to down. The ever-present ghost of Newton, yelling, ‘It was gravity!’ in their ears goes unheard. That changed today as a bright young recruit turned in his report in response to an enquiry merely two months after it was ordered, beating the previous record by several decades.

The report, titled “Principia Incompetencia”, also has a subtitle, “Don’t Do It”. While the author freely admits deriving the title from Newton’s seminal research, he denied that the subtitle borrows from Nike’s motto. “They stole from us,” he said in a prepared statement. “The Indian Civil Service has been following Don’t Do It for centuries.”

The report, as always, is long and mostly incomprehensible, but in a startling departure from the norm; the prologue summarizes the thesis in nearly understandable language. Bureaucratic efforts, it says, follow three simple laws of stagnation.

The first law, “Work that is not done will continue to not get done even though unreasonable amounts of external force are being applied.”

The second law, “The material progress in any project is inversely proportional to the sum of the number of babus and their close relatives in the sub-contracting business. The financial cost, on the other hand is exponentially related to the same number.”

The third law, “All government action is a rumour.”

As the nation ponders this explanation of its affairs, the author of the report has been accused of circumventing the vetting process for commission reports and an enquiry has been instituted into the same.

The Fake But Possible News Network understands that reading beyond the subtitle of an official report violates journalistic codes of conduct. However, our editor is on leave and couldn’t correct the error before press time. We seek your understanding.

Yesterday I was feeling mighty adventurous and in the mood for trying something different. So I headed to the grocery store and came home with some cabbage.

What induced me to buy cabbage I do not know. Maybe it was some shred of memory of being advised to eat green leafy things. I don’t believe that I could identify cabbage the day before yesterday if my life depended on it. I’ve been trained to eat, not to remember and identify leaf names. In fact, on my way back I read the label on the packet and it said “Wong Bok” which nearly made me decide to get my head examined. A quick Google, however, assured me that the now ominous oval in my hand was indeed cabbage.

I describe the vegetable as ominous because I was now at a stage familiar to nervous bungee jumpers who, having made a painful climb to the top of some bridge or ravine, now ponder the wisdom of letting mindless gravity take charge of their lives. Here I was, someone who barely knows how to cook an omelette and who forgets how many cups of water are needed for one cup of rice – handling a vegetable that in everything but taste was as alien to me as multilateral diplomacy is to George W. Bush.

Like your foolish but egoistic bungee jumper, I decided to take the plunge. Let me warn fellow non-cooks – all the health benefits you may accrue from cooking and eating cabbage cannot make up for the rise in blood pressure that must occur when untrained folk try and get this herb to behave in the kitchen.

A vague intuition told me that I should probably cut this thing before trying to cook it and so I dutifully picked up a knife. If you want to analyze how to cut a raw food item, I doubt you’ll find anything as unyielding as cabbage. Apples are easy, tomatoes are messy but simple, cucumbers can be dangerous but obvious but cabbage… cabbage is a total mystery. I stood there for a few minutes, knife in hand, my mind in knots about the right approach. I was so bashful you’d be forgiven for thinking that I was planning to ask this vegetable out to dinner. Come to think of it, I was. From a certain point of view.

I managed to cook it somehow; though words cannot express how glad I am that no authorities on cooking were on hand to observe me and laugh hysterically. As for the the result – suffice to say I ate what I cooked and lived to tell the tale.

Maybe its because I’m a computer scientist and I tend to discretize everything; or maybe it’s because I’m a glutton – but I simply cannot fathom anyone halving sliced cheese. A slice of cheese to me is like a 1-cent coin. It can’t be broken, and it’s way too little to bother breaking anyway.

I know, to some of you out there this post will seem ridiculous. Hindsight is 20/20, once somebody tells you that a slice of cheese can be cut, it seems obvious. I like to think that my state of mind is akin to Rutherford’s after conducting his alpha-particle experiments and realizing that even an atom is made up of tinier parts. Sure, today every 12 year old knows what an atomic nucleus is. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t a big discovery. The guy got an element in the periodic table named after him.

I do not, of course, plan to use this information in any way. Just because you know that an atom can be broken, doesn’t mean you go ahead and try. Bad things have been known to happen. I’ll leave slicing the slice to the experts. But if somebody wants to name a fine cheese after me, I promise I won’t complain.

Every cloud has a silver lining however, and today ought to find Steve Bucknor smiling from ear to ear. A team of scientists have nominated him for the most prestigious prize in mathematics, the FIELDS (Fatally Idiotic Exhibition of Lousy Decision Schema) Medal. Apparently Stevie compares favourably with comsic gamma rays in at least one respect – generating random numbers.

Picky Ronting (name changed to protect identity), who nominated Steve Bucknor and is clearly in awe of the guy, explained. “True random number generation is one of the hardest challenges in mathematics. The best hope we’ve had so far have been purely physical phenomena – the amplitude generation of cosmic rays, for example. But even they have problems – the folks over at the SETI project keep finding patterns even in these signals and tell us about alien communications. We took a string of decisions given by Steve Bucknor and had the SETI folks run it using their distributed computing network of 50,000 computers, and it turns out his decision-making ability is unique for its pure, unadulterated and utter randomness.”

In a world where reasonable accuracy is so easy, we must applaud Mr. Bucknor for risking his outstanding position for the sake of service to science. Let not a few raised eyebrows stop the randomly raised fingers.

The Fake But Possible News Network asserts that any remote similarity of the events reported to reality is purely coincidental.

Then the inevtiable happened. The ladies up ahead made a tiny gesture of come-join-us with a perfectly matched roll of the eyes. People who invite other people behind the queue do so in complete confidence. Complete confidence that if someone’s caught and humiliated, it won’t be them. The response of the invitee, however, varies with queue-cutting skills and experience. Real experts can simply melt away from the back of the queue and smoothly appear in front in a process thats similar to gaseous diffusion and is still being examined by many scientists.

The dame behind me, however, after a hesitant glance left and right (I’ve no idea why, all the queue members were in front) shook her head no, and mouthed in a very low voice, “Log maarenge!” I was impressed. And wondered what other things she learned at her mother’s knee. For about twenty seconds.

So our hitherto courteous lady tells her friends surreptitiously in Hindi to just order an extra plate for her. A tactful gesture, assuming nobody figures out what she’s saying. Unfortunately, while this is Singapore with a dominant Chinese-speaking population, the queue is in front of a North Indian stall. All of this becomes irrelevant, however, as soon as this plan is given swift approval in the committee and the question of whats to be ordered crops up. At which point our heroine taps me on the shoulder, asks me to please keep her place in the queue (in English), and moves right up to the stall for the special preview of the chef’s recommendation. Returning, she helpfully translates terms like “chicken”, and “egg” into Hindi and shouts out her order to the co-conspirators in this subtle deception. An order which subsequently gets changed only twice as the lead implementers move up to the front.

By this time everyone in the queue is either trying to hide their smiles or their scorn, depending on how their pre-lunch class went. We’re Indians, queue-cutting is built into our DNA. It’s not that which worries us. It’s just that this particular damsel was saved from being in distress only because we’re way too civilized to helpfully point out glaring errors in queue etiquette. A concern about a fellow Indian who’s clueless while cutting a queue. A concern which only deepens as her two friends come down the queue with three plates of food, and suddenly, she seems to have an idea. Brightly she makes a double circular gesture with her hands and says, “Why don’t I come with you gals?” and walks away leaving behind some people with a palpable mix of emotions, ranging from homesickness to amusement.

I couldn’t hear the mutters of everyone in the queue, but I did hear someone who had to be a Star Wars fan say in a low voice, “Much to learn, she still has.”

Indeed, this is the nub of the nurturists’ argument. Natural selection should have pushed intelligence genes as far as they will go, so all variation should be environmental. That it is not suggests there is some unknown countervailing advantage—at least in reproductive terms—to being less than averagely bright.

In India, we used to celebrate the 14th of November (birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru) as Children’s Day in school. It was one of the few days when wearing our uniforms was not compulsory, and instead of classes we used to have games and fun all day long. Truly the good old days.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

– Khalil Gibran

The photo is a mosaic of snaps taken from my Flickr stream.

Here’s another:

Looks like our two esteemed world leaders have decided to make love, not war. The happy couple are, of course, to be applauded except that I wish they would, maybe, find a room? And no thank you, Rediff, one can do without the images.

A high-level parliamentary committee has been formed to investigate such distressing cases and is widely expected to recommend that CBI teams start having emergency medical training and carrying defibrillators, and offer the accused a stiff drink while reading them their rights which include, ‘You have the right to go to hospital in case jail is a bit too harsh for you.’