Paramendra Bhagat's Blog
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Berea College among America's 25 hottest schools according to this MSNBC article. Wow.
Sunday, August 08, 2004
Check out these Laloo tidbits at the Calcutta paper The Telegraph:
• Ever since he took over as railway minister, more than a hundred foreign missions in India sent for his bio-data to study the man. Among them were mostly countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America
• The BBC (on the eve of the new millennium) termed him the second highest talked about political and social leader after the mighty President of the USA (Bill Clinton)
• The London School of Economics dubbed him a messiah of the poor and the right kind of leader for any third world country
• The Harvard University School of Social Sciences has researched about the minister and sees him as a harbinger of ultimate good in the form of social security, personal dignity of the common man.
Monday, August 02, 2004
I came to visit, and I have fallen in love: New York City. I have decided to move to the city, in a few months: the nerve center of the world. This is no melting pot, but a cauldron. Arguably people from all towns in the world are here: Chinatown, Little Italy. Jackson Heights: kulfee, paan, Amitabh DVDs. New York City. The concrete jungle that adds layers over decades like the tropical jungles go through rain and rain and shine and shine. People are actually walking around like ants, working like bees. Swarming, pulsating. Every other building shoots for the sky in earnest. There is the dazzle of Times Square: light, so much light, that it is actually sound. The torpor of Central Park. The water line. The downtown. The passing ships, the heliports. Celebrity hangouts. The night life, the day life, the life. So many people never seem to go to sleep, and hence perhaps the name, the city that never goes to sleep. And yet it is not a Calcutta mess. It is the human crowd as an organism. It is not about individual New Yorkites. Like the human body; a person has been so many different bodies before she dies, all those cells that die and birth. People moving in and moving out, and simply moving. The power, the wealth, the big names. The homeless seeming nobodies in their trademark carts: they too are on the move. They look busy on their face. The serpent of the subway, slimey, slithing, slicing through the thickets of the underworld. What is myth elsewhere is life support system here. For what would you do without the metro? An apartment for all conceivable income brackets. Food of every taste and some. Loud and not so loud music. For the really curious, it could be Charles Darwin in the Galapagos Islands. For the artist, the thinker, the doer, the somnolent. There is vibration. There is evidence. For life. Outside the skin, outside the biology of it.
Clinton's tome is close to a thousand pages, and it still reads like a summary, especially when he talks about the presidency: I did this, I did that, then I shook that hand kind of laundry list. The first half is much more fun. The guy is incessantly interesting, and you end up liking him even more than you did before. He can say the darndest things. Like after the whole impeachment deal, he is glad because he does not have anything to hide anymore! Or his first experience with the word epidermis: "Your epidermis is showing. Your father and mother's epidermises are also showing." There are snippets like that all over the place. He is always understandable even when he is talking about the most difficult things, like the Middle East conflict. This guy is anything but over. He has one major mission left: to have Hillary run for the top job. And he is going to hit at that from many different angles over many different years. After all, Hillary did not marry him at the first call. It was the third or fourth.
Barack Obama, making much news. Kenyan father, Kansan mother. I think his appeal is he does not have some of the "baggage" some of the African American leaders tend to have. He does not come across as deeply angry. He is more into job creation and health care than into the elaborate vagueness of race relations, more to do with the past than the future.
I was at the Grand Central train station in Manhattan yesterday afternoon, at this newsstand, reading this Kerry article for free, and two women walked by me, white, one of them was going on and on about Obama. Today I proceeded to watch his convention speech online. Impressive. The guy could be someone's running mate a few election cycles down the line. He is crisp. He is sharp. He comes across as practical enough not to disillusion those who might reposit their hopes in him.
And he has a blog.
