Newsweak

I had been a regular reader of Newsweek, initially by subscribing hard-copies and later through web because I turned green environmentally and red financially by then. I chose Newsweek because Fareed Zakaria was making a lot of sense most of the time irrespective of what the rest of America and the East thought about each other.

But this one article that appeared in Newsweek website recently surprised me, which presents us "The Fifty Books of our times" . I went and browsed through the list, eager to find some of the greatest works in world literature. The authors started with 'We know it's insane', 'no one needs another best-of list etc', and I was wondering then what are they up to. But on reading the list, I got why they are taking an advance bail. I think a more apt title could have been "34 American books of our times and 16 others to make it 50". So the conclusion is that literature doesn’t exist in any other parts of the world. Sartre, Camus, Chomsky, Kafka, Marquez… such names simply don’t belong to our times, may be they are all too futuristic? Or I’m too dumb? Yes, you guessed it right, the answer is - both.

Healthcare tips - for men, women and yoga enthusiasts

As a concerned citizen, I think it’s my duty to give my readers (which currently is you and the Google crawler) few healthcare tips once in a while. This post is dedicated to that and I would like to start with giving all my male readers few yoga tips(womenfolk, don’t feel left out, your tips follow). My yoga advice for men today is on ‘nakhun gharshan’, the yoga practice of rubbing the nails of both your hands against each other. Though this is a great yoga technique for making a croaky noise, care should be taken when/where you perform it. Never practice it in front of sports equipment shops, you can end up in jail, that's exactly what happened to these yoga practitioners .

Now if you are wondering why sports equipment shops, remember, everything in yoga has a scientific reason, and in this case it is the one [and only one] place where men shop while their women wait outside. Your practicing such gestural yoga techniques before the waiting women can be misinterpreted as obscenity because 1) They are already too upset with their men inside 2) They are not yoga experts 3) For most women, anything men do with their hands other than picking nose is suggestive/obscene. Another tip that I want give my fellowmen here is that if you are so tempted to show some of your asanas in public, choose something that’s more commonly understandable; nakhun charwan(a yoga technique of chewing up nails of both your hands) for example.

Next to a ground breaking discovery/invention of the week in the healthcare domain, which is also my health tip for women this week - A study by Dr. Maya Saleh, of the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre “shows that women have a more powerful immune system than men”. That explains…well, pretty much everything, including why women are so ignorant about the yoga techniques that men practice to improve their ever deteriorating immune system.

To conclude this healthy debate, I’ll give one more tip, this is gender neutral in the sense that it is useful for both men who are forced to take bath at an unreasonably high frequency and women who force them to do so thinking it will improve their health. Here is a story of a very healthy man who hasn’t had a bath for over 35 years, the point to note here is that he does take a ‘fire bath’ – by standing on one leg in front of a bonfire smoking marijuana(that’s right, marijuana). Men can adopt this to be healthy, keep a bottle of rum in case smoking marijuana is not that legalized in your part of the world, I’m sure no woman will ever pester you to bathe thereafter.

[Before I wind up, a word on the dilemma that the election results have put me in - it's now clear that Congress party is returning to power, my problem is how to celebrate it, whether by having a drink or by abstaining from the same, after all its Gandhi's party. Or on a second thought, Gandhi never said anywhere that you should not consume alcohol while celebrating electoral victory. Prove me wrong, I watched all those ten thousand election speeches he did last month, nor did his sister in any of those tele-snippet interviews , then why should I not have a drink?]

Buffalos of Bangalore

Our ancient philosophers I think had a lot of time for doing all the thinking. Firstly because cubicles were not invented then and secondly because they (cunningly) abstained from the then accepted institution called family. Barring all the confusing, contradicting and crude philosophies and mantras they had written in their life-long happy hours, they made some useful contributions as well to mankind(and kind women). Proverbs is one of them. In the wake of the Obama administration’s new mantra of “Say no to Bangalore, yes to Buffalo”, one such proverb that comes to my mind is – “Vinaasha kale vipareetha budhi”.

Now what I want to know from you, especially if you are an economist with a presidentially misspelled surname is whether this can be translated to English as “When in recession, be protectionist”. If not what is an apt translation of this? Please enlighten this economically weak - both physically and in knowledge - person.