The world's gone nuts!

Okay, this is an update on the real world. It’s gone completely nuts. Not that it was ever sane…
Anyway, on one side, Hillary Clinton urges India to cut down on emissions while it’s her country which is the consumer freak of the world. And Mrs. Clinton, stick to the off-white suits. That shade of red and blue is a little trying on the eyes. In the meanwhile, the leaders of gloriously over-populated India should realize that the lady does have a point even if we have low per capita emission. Our per capita is nothing to scoff at seeing as how we’re vying for the position of the most densely populated country in the world.

Speaking of over population, one of our brilliant heads at the center recently talked of a sure-fire way to reduce India’s birth rate: television. That’s right. The good old idiot box, if provided in rural India, will apparently distract all the poor in the country, who procreate for lack of better entertainment. The rural citizens who heard this merely laughed and asked the minister in question if televisions nowadays don’t require electricity because none of their villages, as of yet, has seen so much as an electricity pole. Touché.

Television’s not all that it’s cracked up to be, really. It is, of course, an absolute necessity when there’s a good movie on or when I’m bored out of my mind but mostly, when I turn on the TV it invariably has something dumb going on like Paris Hilton’s pathetically laughable excuse for a reality show or news updates on how Michael Jackson’s brain is still sitting in some morgue. Yeah, I can see how this is going to distract everyone from procreating.

I’m sure there are far more important things going on like politics and wars and global warming, but that’s been going on since forever. It’s much more entertaining to watch Beyonce telling people to put a ring on it in Single Ladies and wish that you hadn’t just finished an entire packet of potato chips.

I’ve witnessed three accidents in the past month on the Maduravoyal road. I tell you, it does not make your day to see someone with their head stuck under the wheels of a lorry or school vans being smashed into. From feeling slightly nauseous and shocked, I’ve progressed to the state of just being thankful that that wasn’t me with my head smashed in. The frailty of human life which can be snuffed out in a moment fails to impress after the first few times

In a nutshell, the world’s in bad shape and most of us are too busy watching Beyonce to notice. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go and watch ‘Kate and Leopold’.

The catcher in the rye

I’ve been reading ‘The catcher in the rye’ again. It’s a great book but after the last page all I wanted to know was, what happens to Holden Caulfield?
Does he do better in his next school? Does he grow up and become a cynical author? Does he spend the rest of his life hanging out in pubs hating all the phonies in the world? Or did he decide that, what he’d do was, he’d pretend that he was a deaf-mute?

I can really relate with the character in an abstract sort of way. In the book he says, ‘I’m quite illiterate but I read a lot.’ I like that because I’m quite illiterate too. Kindred spirits, as you can see. I felt cheated though, when I got to the last page. Maybe it’s because I’ve grown up on commercial fantasy and fiction where everything is A-OK when you get to the last page. Hero’s alive, villain’s dead, everyone finds true love and lives happily ever after, blah, blah, blah.

None of the books which are closest to real life, as far as I’ve seen, gives you a happy ending. In most of them, things aren’t any better in the last page than in the first. The story doesn’t change but the characters do and you don’t even see any appreciable change. Just the feeling that something’s different but you can’t quite put your finger on what that something is.

Some would say that that’s the beauty of it. There is no happily ever after, only a vaguely confusing reality which can be captured by few women (and men) on paper. A really good author (according to J.D. Salinger) is someone you wish was your friend, someone you want to call up and talk to over the phone.

I wouldn’t mind talking to J.D. Salinger. Really, if it was a choice between Salinger, Lee and Rowling, I’d definitely pick Salinger.
There are some books you enjoy because you escape your own mundane life for a few glorious hours and then there are others that make you go, ‘Wow’ and you can’t sleep for the better part of the night because you can’t stop thinking about it.

So you know what? I don’t want to know what happens to Holden Caulfield. It’s better that way.

In Memoriam

On a grave note, the economics teacher Mrs. Paul who taught our batch in school passed away yesterday. She had been fighting cancer for a long time and finally succumbed to it. Even though she’s never taught me I still feel really sad because she was a good woman and her students loved her. She won’t be forgotten.

It’s funny, isn’t it? Some people you want to remember forever even when they don’t physically exist anymore and others you can’t wait to forget. It just goes to show you that the way you behave in this life does go beyond the grave.