Monthly Archives: September 2008

India’s visa system shows every sign of excellence

Posted on September 18, 2008 | 3 Comments

ANDREW THOMAS of this yard round here right now might have had problems getting an India visa, but we can tell you the new system is 100 feet ahead of the old one which used to happen at the Indian High Commission in the Strand.

Not only is it efficient, it is effortless, so when we put our application in for an Indian business visa on Monday it was ready by Wednesday afternoon.

One question remains. India is promoting its “Incredible India” programme, via TV and street adverts. Why do tourists going to India have to have two sponsors before they can get a tourist visa? Obviously I am no tourist, and go to India for business regularly. How can no-one who has ever been to India ever before in the whole of their lives have two referees in India who know them?  The people at this place near to Victoria railway station (picture below) are super efficient. I won’t hear a word said against them.

Their website is here. ♦

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Wall Street Journal gets redesigned

Posted on September 17, 2008 | 1 Comment

THE AUGUST WALL STREET JOURNAL has gone through a redesign in the last few days. I’d like to say things are better but they’re not.

It would be too harsh to say the WSJ has undergone a dumbing down, but we understand from sources close to the Journal that there’s been a sea change and now it has to compete against the New York Times. But the New York Times is free, and the Journal seeks subscriptions.

Unless the Journal gets miraculously better, we will be cancelling our subscription to it forthwith. Call me old fashioned, but I expect breaking news, not re-writes and shill generated copy.  ♦

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Pack of dogs pursued me in BIAL dash

Posted on September 16, 2008 | 3 Comments

LAST TIME I rode in a Meru cab from Ole Bengaluru to BIAL airport, I had an uncanny experience. Caught short in the middle of the ride, I asked driverji to stop at the side of the road so I could make a call of nature.

Driverji obligingly let me off at the side of a road, outside a village, where I made my oblations and went back to the car. Just as I was getting in, five or six stray dogs started running towards me, barking furiously. I closed the door, and as the car drew off, the dogs banged into the side of the door. And kept banging.

There’s also a large pack of dogs which runs up and down the concourse at BIAL, in search of goodness knows what, and much to the bemusement of recently arrived international travellers. And the Louis Vuitton sculpture at BIAL has totally disappeared.  What gives with that? ♥

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Webcam at CERN shows shape of things to come

Posted on September 12, 2008 | 1 Comment

THAT SPINOLA at the www.itexaminer.com sent me a link to two webcams watching the LHC at CERN.

They’re really worth a dekko. Here. ♦

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Smallpox, chickenpox goddess still lives

Posted on September 10, 2008 | 2 Comments

IN VARANASI, the Smallpox Devi Shitala still lives. Although she has been wiped out by science, her little sisters like chickenpox still survive. And presumably cow pox too. We believe Smallpox is dead – the UN declared it to be dead years ago. Let’s hope no samples still exist in warfare labs worldwide, eh?

And a kind word to Louis Pasteur, who figured out the connections and eradicated this Smallpox scourge to people. These horrid little Herpes families of virii live in the spine, and sometimes erupt as ”shingles”, cold sores, and worse.  Kids with chicken pox want to scratch the pustules, and that leaves scars.  If the kids manage not to scratch the scars, the horrid Herpes virus might erupt 40 years later and scar them. It is  a horrid little virus and there’s no accounting for the damage it might and does do.

Eradicating Devi Shitala is practically impossible, we’d guess. You just have to wear her down.  Or bow to her.  In Benares, of course.    ζ

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Steve Jobs is the sheesh kebab of earlugs

Posted on September 9, 2008 | 2 Comments

ON THE EXAMINER a certain C Shanti has expressed scepticism about Apple’s Steven Jobs’  launch of yet more stuff that plays music and that.

Everywhere we go, people have tiny little plugs in their ear lugs – we’ve on some occasions seen people being decked by bicycles and buses because their little, lovely ears are filled up with earphones.

It puts people in a different world – actually a nihilistic world divorced from the banality of life – because of course they are “listening to what they like”.

You can shut yourself up in a cocoon like a butterfly and moth caterpillar and internalise, internalise again and again. But when the wasps specialising in butterflies and moths decide to lay their eggs in your cocoon, you might find you never get to spread your wings and instead become a tiny waspette, looking for daft moths and butterflies again. And earphones.

I sort of deplore earphones in peoples’ earlugs although I am liberal on many other topics. We should talk to each other – it’s taken goodness knows how many years for us faux chimps to develop speech. We don’t need Apple’s commercial crapitude to reverse people talking to each other, do we?  And if they wear these lagged lughole warmers in Bangalore on the 100 Feet Road, they will be bygones of a past era. ♥

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