Category: About

Boston in the Spring Time

Whenever I come to Boston, I recall the song by Dave Loggins (I like the Joan Baez version best)

Please come to Boston for the springtime
I’m stayin’ here with some friends and they’ve got lots of room
You can sell your paintings on the sidewalk
By a café where I hope to be workin’ soon

The weather is rainy and cloudy. I am staying with friends in Acton, MA.

What else? Read the commencement address by PJ O’Rourke, “Fairness, idealism and other atrocities: Commencement advice you’re unlikely to hear elsewhere” from the LA Times of May 4th. (Hat tip: Sushant.)

PJ makes four excellent points. Of course I think they are excellent because I believe in them precisely. The short version:

1. Go out and make a bunch of money
2. Don’t be an idealist
3. Get politically uninvolved
4. Forget about fairness

The other two points I only partially agree with.

A bit of Chicago

A few pictures from Chicago. I was there 30th April — May 3rd.

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

Mouse-over the picture to see the controls. Clicking on the second icon from the left at the bottom shows the picture captions. Note especially the Art Institute of Chicago building where Swami Vivekanand gave his famous talk in 1893. What looks like a huge drop of mercury is The Cloud Gate:

Cloud Gate is British artist Anish Kapoor’s first public outdoor work installed in the United States. The 110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates, which reflect the city’s famous skyline and the clouds above. A 12-foot-high arch provides a “gate” to the concave chamber beneath the sculpture, inviting visitors to touch its mirror-like surface and see their image reflected back from a variety of perspectives.

A Place where Indians Thrive

Hi all from JP’s place.

No sooner do I arrive in Edison, NJ that the NY Times calls it a place where Indians (now New Jerseyans) thrive. [Hat tip: Maria]

Oak Tree Road [in Edison, NJ], which runs through this sprawling town of 100,000 people and into neighboring Woodbridge Township, may be America’s liveliest Little India, with 400 Indian businesses that attract Indian immigrants from across the region. But the impact is more than just commercial. Indians make up from 20 to 25 percent of the population, and they have spearheaded the transformation of Edison — an overwhelmingly blue-collar and middle-class white community a generation ago — into a town with a decidedly Asian flavor.

Edison is next door to New Brunswick where my old alma mater Rutgers is located. On Saturday afternoon I drove briefly through Rutgers. Those were the days my friend, we thought would never end . . .

The weather is cold and rainy.

So that’s the story. I am alive though not totally well. I got a bad stomach ailment and was laid up most of Sunday and today. I hope to get well enough to travel to Chicago tomorrow. More later.

On the Road

Go. Profit from exile. To see, listen, walk, pause beside wisemen; question savages and madmen; and listen to stories. It is always pleasant and, sometimes, improves you.

— Jean C. Carriere in his play based on the Indian epic The Mahabharata.

Big Change on a Tiny Screen

Big Change on a Tiny Screen is the title the editors of Indian Express chose for my column on the mobile phone I did for them today.

The greatest technological advancement of the modern world, after the personal computer, has to be the cell phone. The power that it gives its approximately three billion users around the world arises from its participatory nature. Consider the recent protests against the Chinese repression of Tibetans. The use of mobile phones to send pictures of the protests in Lhasa and elsewhere and regular updates of rapidly unfolding stories is power that is hard to contain.

Nothing new for the regulars of this blog. So don’t even bother.

Alan Watts Teaches Meditation

I was listening to a lecture “Alan Watts Teaches Meditation” (mp3 format) and I thought that I would share a bit of what he said on this blog. I enjoy listening to Alan Watts. Thankfully, there is a lot of great recordings of his available on the web. While in Berkeley, I used to listen to these dharma talks of his on a local public radio station. Anyway, I took the time to transcribe a few minutes of the talk. If anyone is interested in the audio files, let me know and I will tell you how to get them.
Continue reading “Alan Watts Teaches Meditation”

Leaving on a Jet Plane

I am leaving on a jet plane. This time to the east coast of the US. I will be there for a couple of weeks starting April 26th. Places I am going to be: NY, NJ, Delaware, Boston, and Chicago.

The Management Regrets to Announce . . .

. . . that the chief typewriter monkey has called in sick the last couple of days. Which also means that there will be no posts for the next few days. However, the management recommends the archives for your reading pleasure.

Open Thread: Speak up

To minimize spam, comments are closed after 21 days of posting. That’s a pity as sometimes people like to comment on archived posts. The occasional open thread should help in this regard.

I have been pondering where I want to go with this blog. One idea is to increase the range by posting all sorts of things that I find interesting. One way is to post links with very very brief commentary, and every now and then post an original article. I have some requests that I should post very brief “basic principles of economics” sort of thing. Let me see what I can do to overcome my laziness.

So stop lurking. Introduce yourself to other readers, tell us where you are from, and be critical.

NOTE: If you wish to not bother with registering before commenting, here’s a generic username and password which you could use. Username: lurker Password: lurking

POSTSCRIPT: If you do use the generic “lurker” login, please do sign off with your actual name or even a persistent pseudonym so that the comment can be referred to. Thanks.