Excuse Me!!

From The Hindu frontpage
Saturday, Jan 28, 2006
U.S. tells India to back off Syria oil deal
NEW DELHI: Taking strong exception to India's recent decision to buy a Syrian oilfield in partnership with China, the United States has asked the Manmohan Singh Government to "reconsider" its proposed investment.
A demarche to this effect was made earlier this month and an aide memoire outlining Washington's objections handed over to the Ministry of External Affairs by senior diplomats here. In December last, ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL) and the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) teamed up to purchase a 37 per cent stake in the al-Furat oil and gas fields from Petro-Canada for $573 million.
The mature fields, jointly run by Shell, have proven reserves of 300 million barrels of oil equivalent. Indian officials consider the Syrian venture to be of enormous strategic significance, both for the value of the underlying assets and the role it will play in cementing the China-India partnership for acquiring oil and gas equities in third countries.
The U.S. aide memoire, a copy of which is in the possession of The Hindu, says: "The United States strongly opposes such investments in Syrian resources."
Pointing out that the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed two resolutions, UNSCR 1636 and 1644, "mandating complete cooperation by the government of Syria with the U.N.'s investigation into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri," the U.S. note says: "Now is not the time to send mixed messages to the SARG [Syrian Arab Republic Government] either through investment deals or through any form of economic or political reward to the Damascus regime."

It is not known whether China has been told such. And I am not sure it will be. And No, Shell is not an Indian Company! Yes, Shell has huge business interests in the U.S. itself. And yeah, Shell could have been easily arm-twisted. Ofcourse, US-Canada relations are cordial and not affected by Petro-Canada's investment in Syria for this long.
Getting a warning is one thing. I am trying to figure out what we did or did not, to let others think that they can poke their noses in our affairs. Our policy/attitude must be introspected upon. We should try to rise a little bit higher than the door-mat level.

Inquilab Zindabad!!

Do watch RANG DE BASANTI. The movie must be made a hit!
I am not going to dissect its storyline or whatever. But I swear by it!!

Driving Mad - Part II

Part I

Last week, I had to buy a car. Till then, I was enjoying my company's hospitality and latest cars. That had to end. Here I go with what happened after.

I put down the loan my company gave me for one pre-owned car. The second day I take the car to office, we had to have a snow fall. :-( And a good seven inches at that! Nature knows that I was yet to buy the snow shovel cum ice scraper.

I decide to leave office early, and still the snow catches up with me. Not sure how my new acquisition would behave in the inclement weather. I am all nerves inside as I try to gingerly drive out in the falling snow. For some time traffic is heavy making my job easier. Then I turn to the desolate road which takes me to my place.
There the road becomes a single lane either way, cars are sporadic, and people are in a hurry to reach home. They try to drive at the maximum speed possible. But one guy in his new car is blocking their way. I crawl at 25 mph, wipers work furiously and my eye balls stay glued to whatever I can see. The guys behind cannot take it after a while. They overtake me by moving into the opposite lane! Voila! I have made Indians out of disciplined law abiding Americans. Ignoring stares as they zip by, I continue to drive them mad by driving at snail's pace. Finally I reach home after an hour's crawl which usually is done in 25 minutes drive.


The next day, being a weekend, I wake up in the afternoon. Armed with a credit card, and my hands rolled in a polythene bag, I proceed to remove the snow from my windshield and scrape the ice coating that is beginning to form. One helluva job.

Above, is my car with a white fuzzy top! If you carefully see, there are lemons under the wheel to be crushed!

Fighting hearts; Connecting pain!

You have a neighbour. You have fought with him. Bigtime, thrice. And you daily argue with him. Skirmishes are there all time. It's rare that smiles are exchanged, leave alone congenial talk. Is it possible to sympathise with such a person? I thought not.

But I was wrong. Last week I was sorry for Pakistan. Here they are, bombed in their sovereign territory, by a person who is their ally. Some seventeen of their countrymen die, and all they can do is wring their hands.

I could feel what their countrymen are going through. That's because I hold my country dear. Crazy? Ironic? Seems weird, but I'll try to explain.
Long ago I had my blood boil with rage, when my stupid foreign minister went to Kandahar for the release of hostages. Submitting to the captors' demands was inevitable then, but what got my goat was the external affairs' minister's pose holding hands with the terrorist who was to be released.

Another time. This time the government was the same but the ministers had changed. We conduct a nuclear test, and the superpower frowns at it. Each country has its own reason to behave the way they do.You do what is good for your country and stand by it, come what may. But what we saw was our minister chasing the super power's then under Secretary of state, all through the world, buttonholing him wherever possible. It was almost like a sub begging a dom after playing truant. I personally felt humiliated. If you don't have the guts to do something, you shouldn't do that at all.

Okay, I'll stop here, for still I get worked up just thinking of those incidents. Such events like these humiliates the ordinary patriotic citizens. And because we have had our own share, I am able to relate to the collective psyche of the Pakis.

A government is not some amoebic torso of a creature. Ultimately it boils down to some individuals who take decisions what are touted as Government's actions. And when they have no sense of self respect, integrity and steadfastness, first their character taints the government's actions. Then such an action stains the country. And this, pains ordinary people like me.

My sympathies are with such ordinary people of Pakistan who are caught in a vicious cycle of jingoism, over dependence on military and religious extremism. It seems that to keep people from asking to be alleviated from poverty, the prescription world wide is fundamentalism. It is the opium of the masses.

Ofcourse, I can be thought of as mistaken. I have read only our history books.

Preening myself

When I was in Chennai last month, I visited my previous organization. I have a big gang of friends there, and pretty close they are to me.Nearly 2 years have passed since I quit. It's a home like thing to me still. I know almost eveybody there, even now, after so many changes.
I stroll in. It's a six storey building and I used to work in the fifth floor. I walk to the lift. A group forms waiting for the lift to come.
A person suddenly smiles at me. I don't know him. I smile back at him.
"Are you not here anymore?", he asks me.
"No".
"Have you been transferred to any other place?", he asks.
"No, I quit", I say.
Again we trade smiles, and we are on our way. He is a customer, who has been attended to, by me. A long time ago, and I don't even remember him. Well, it's a service organization and scores of customers come daily. But it's a big organization and the staff also, are considerable in number.
I was happy inside, thinking somebody remembers me even after such a long time. It seems I am good at CRM, after all!
Ofcourse, customers remember you even better, if you are bad at service.
The guy wasn't scowling at me, though.

Makaan ka talaash (or whatever they say in Hindi for house-hunting)

I am stressed this week. Not because of any work load. I have to find an apartment to move in, as I can stay in hotel, for only one more week. I began looking for one. My friend K advised me to go for a shared accomodation, as that would be cheaper. And I faithfully started following the Indian websites where classifieds are the staple diet sorted by cities. And my research resulted in several findings but not a suitable acco for me.
1. If the ad is for the area you are looking for, then it would have been taken already.
2. If the rent is very low, then it would be far away from the place you want to move in.
3. If it's your area that's advertised and the rent is fabulously low, then it would invite only females! Infact men are almost a minority, I felt, going by the ads.
And I started hunting for apartments on individual sharing basis too. There too, I became experienced enough to write a thesis.
1. If the place comes up to all your expectations like affordability, accessibility, then the owner would reveal that there are already people who have shown an interest. Infact only if the background checks on them reveal a lurid past, you'd get a chance.
2. If there are no takers for the apartment you are shown, then it is sure to have some faults.
Here I am, searching in a far western suburb of Chicago (infact it's almost another town) and yet there is enough competition.
Next week would reveal how I fared in my hunt for a home...

Food to the hungry; Friends to the lonely!

I've seen pictures of pythons after a meal. A monstrous bulge in the middle of their slithering body indicating the size of the creature they have swallowed. How the python must be feeling! It can't move, the prey weighing in like an anchor. How it must have been for the python to starve for a long period and suddenly having to stuff itself with so big a meal at one go!

I can understand its feelings. After going without a leave for more than 8 months, I managed to finagle a leave of absence for a princely 7 days. In those seven days I was to catch up with my friends and relatives for the past months that I've not seen them. Too little time to achieve that. And I end up feeling guilty towards everyone for not devoting enough time. I was like the python gobbling up whatever I could manage, boning up on all events that I missed out, enjoying the camraderie as much as I can. Not with anyone, I spent as much as I wished!

And now I'm back at work, far removed from my friends. Only the memories are with me, still to be dwelt and digested. And the next meal is far away, beyond the time horizon!

Art in my heart

Last weekend of my business trip, I thought I'd catch a glimpse of history of the city. So I contacted the Chicago cultural center who arranged a volunteer to give me a 2 hour walking tour. It was a nice experience. Learnt about some of the important buildings of the city.


I saw the Hay Market memorial where a violent end to a labour meeting gave rise to May 1 being observed as the Labour day the world over. At the end, I thought going to the art museum would be a better way to spend the hour I had before catching the train back to suburbs.Called the Art Institute of Chicago,it's a veritable treasure trove of art, from the world over.

They have a hall for Indian art, where scultures from Karnataka, Tamilnadu,Rajasthan and AndhraPradesh were displayed. Mostly they were donated to the museum by people whose ancestors were in India during the British occupation.

There is a special sculpture showing Shiva and Parvathi with Muruga in betweeen. The uniqueness is Lord Muruga is in a dancing position, normally never in such a position in any temple. And it's not in our country!


There are rare paintings, sculptures, artifacts ranging from very old to Modern abstract ones. One day won't suffice. I did it in hour! Just 2, 3 halls. That's all.



A sculpture by Rodin in the foreground. Claude Monet's paintings in the background.



P.S: The volunteer who accompanied me in the morning walk till my museum visit, had been to many places in India than me. He embarassed me saying that he'd even been to the Andamans!!

Environmentally yours!

My city, Chennai, has been again beset by torrential rains. The good thing is that government is in damage control, full swing. Prompt disaster relief and elections next year maybe beyond happenstance. Anyway I don't want to nitpick as long as something good is done. The bad thing is the poor, the homeless bear the full brunt of the Nature's fury. At times as these, it's hard to find justification of uneven distribution of material wealth through the society.
It seems in recent times the climate is going haywire, world wide. A slew of hurricanes have blasted the Central and North America. They have come in such huge numbers that the meterologists ran out of conventional allotted names and resorted to Greek alphabets. In India too, Mumbai had its share of rains and a lot more. For that matter be it rains or drought, they hit us severely.

For some time, I've been thinking whether these phenomena could be a result of man-made causes such as the green house gases and stuff. Global warming and such stuff are gobbledygook for me. Recently in US some liberals (or whatever such people are called) got together at Vegas, conducted a show called, "Earth to America". It was a two hour skit kind of thing. Stand-up comedians like Wanda Sykes, comedy show men like Ray Romano, Larry David, actor Tom Hanks, country singer Tim McGraw and other assorted entertainment industry people got together to garner support for environmental consciousness. They went bashing Dubya Jr., bigtime. The show was humourous and I liked it. They wanted everyone to logon a web site and click to show support. It was like a virtual march in support of environment protection. I never got to do it. Later I bought a Tim Mcgraw CD, though! At the end of the programme there was a brief mention of the Kyoto protocol. It seems even though the US is not a signatory to it, many US cities, around 40, have adopted it. Seattle was the first.

It was then I decided to bone up on the Kyoto protocol. Kyoto protocol is basically an agreement committing 38 countries to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2
percent from 1990 levels, by 2012. Greenhouse gases are carbondioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and Hydrofluorocarbons. US and Australia are the only developed countries not to sign it. And now,there is a Montreal protocol too.

The Kyoto protocol is peculiar in that it is valid only when countries that agree to the protocol, account up to 55% of worldwide emissions or more. It very recently came into force(Nov '04) when Russia ratified it. Developing countries like India, China and Brazil are not required to sign up, for now. The world's largest polluter US has refused to join, on the one hand saying that it's too costly to implement while on the other maintaining that developing countries too should be made to join. I guess it's cheaper to implement for the developing countries!

Ofcourse, it's a moot point that just by agreeing to control emissions, whether a country will overnight become 100% safe to breathe.Infact the signatories themselves are actually facing increasing emissions year over year! And there's a big club of nay-sayers who pooh-pooh the theory that the gas emissions harm our earth's climate. There are some prominent men like Michael Crichton, who wrote an entire book, not just a blog post, to denounce it. "State of Fear" became a best seller, infact.

Generations to come will vindicate either of the side. Hope they don't do it at their own cost.

Work of love!

I was on a drive to NY last week. Driving through snow covered landscape was an enjoyable experience. Pennsylvania and NewJersey are beauties. On the way, through Penn, I was idly gazing around while my friend was at the wheel. Suddenly something caught my eye. It was some graffiti in an Indian language, complete with the heart and arrow symbol!! Even in desolate places, my countrymen, diehard romantics they being, strive to declare their love. One must be a complete whacko to take out a paint tin and brush to a remote place, just to scribble his love.I naively assume here that Indian females are not given these tendencies. Now I'd like to visit Everest, just to know whether any Indian who had gone there, has proclaimed his love, thousands of feet above sea level! What all a love lorn guy is driven to!!