Fantastic and Fabulous

16 Jan 2015: Seen in a bookstore (MediaMart) at the Indira Gandhi International airport at New Delhi as I was getting ready to take off finishing my trip to India. The only way I can interpret "non-fiction" here is by assuming that they meant "fantasy".

I had to go to a few places for meetings, and in the background various religion-related events were unfolding. A meeting took me to Tezpur, my first trip to the North-East. Visited Kamakhya temple where the temple opens everyday  with a sacrifice of an animal (yes, even today). Later in New Delhi stopped by the National Museum which has a reproduction of Ashoka's edicts - from the third century BC - carved on rock-face, with one of them saying: do not sacrifice animals.

Watched PK in Nagpur and many people (Hindus) who have not seen the movie tried to get it banned (as it hurt their religious sentiments - the movie of course only mocks money making). In Delhi as I was heading to the airport, I heard that a tenth of a million disciples of MSG ("Messenger Of God") descended there in support of the movie. The censor board had denied permission to it on some grounds. And now the censor board chief has quit because someone is going over her head and giving it permission to be released. In solidarity with the Censor Board chief other team members are resigning as well.

I write this sitting at the CDG airport (Paris), and it was not far from here that the massacre over a picture happened. Whether Charlie Hebdo should have printed another cartoon is a question being asked by many. New York Times has refused to republish the cartoon, but it is their issue yesterday (international edition) that had a piece by David Carr which rightly says: "News and commentary of all sorts frequently causes pain to its subjects and the audience, but it is precisely the unruly and the offensive that require protection. No one is safe from the slings and arrows of unfettered speech: an image of Christ immersed in artist's urine, Sinead O'Connor  ripping a photo of the Pope in half, Eminem fantasizing in rhyme about killing his lover - all of it is intended to offend. But each is worthy in its own way of being defended."

If we want freedom of speech and expression, we need to practice the extreme at least once in a while. Otherwise it will stay so only in theory. Violent reactions as in Paris or as on the Bhandarkar institute in Pune a few years ago cannot be justified under any circumstances.

bhut jolokia aka Ghost Pepper

15 Dec 2014: A bagful of bhut jolokia i.e. ghostly-hot capsicum peppers at the roadside market outside Tezpur University, Assam. It is over a million Scoville Heat Units (SHUs). In fact, in 2007 it was the hottest substance on the Scoville Scale, 900 times hotter than Tabasco sauce. It has since been superseded, and the current record is held by the Carolina Reaper, a cultivar i.e. cultivated variety (twice as hot).

Brahmaputra in/and Guwahati

13 Dec 2014: Brahmaputra, and Guwahati, from River Breeze, Uzanbazar. Spent a day in Guwahati before arriving for the IDMC meeting in Tezpur. The few hours I had in Guwahati became fewer by my flight from Delhi leaving a few hours late due to fog. So clearly that problem has not bene solved.

Brahmaputra, the fifth largest river (in terms of length) that flows through India is supposedly the only one which bears a male name - the son of Brahma.

Surprisingly (to me at least) Guwahati reminded me of Kerala - green, bananas, coconuts ...