Word of the day


1. wikidemia

An academic work passed off as scholarly yet researched entirely on Wikipedia.

"An A on my English paper? That's a fine piece of Wikidemia!'

Found serendipitously on The Urban Dictionary while googling for entha hotness.

Whose torch is it anyway?

Thanks to the greatest free thinker of our times and his everfresh views on the subject (the alma mater bred such great minds in those days!) , and this article below from Mukul Kesavan on The Telegraph Kolkata yesterday, I now have an opinion vis-a -vis Torch, Tibet and Amir Khan.Excerpts :

The moral of this story is that it’s a PR mistake to air mixed feelings in public. The trouble with the derision heaped on Aamir Khan, though, is that it seems to teach another lesson: namely, that it’s feeble-minded, unprincipled and immoral to not have a list of correct, categorical views on Everything, that if you’re tentative, less than encyclopaedically informed or ambivalent about a particular issue, you shouldn’t talk about it in public. This is a bad lesson to teach and a worse one to learn.

And then some,

So how is the Dalai Lama’s opposition to boycotting the Olympic Games (despite the fact that he virtually embodies the Tibetan struggle) different in principle from Aamir’s reluctance to boycott the Olympic torch run (despite his sympathy for the struggles of the Tibetan people)?

The short answer to that could be that the Dalai Lama has a rather longer record on Tibet than Aamir Khan does. So while his stance on the Games will be be seen as a strategic position in a long struggle, Aamir’s position is likely to be seen as expedient fence-sitting. Link..

In my opinion it is best not to have an opinion. I didn't have one before, but now I've made an informed choice not to. See how cleverly Mr. Kesavan covers his tracks in every paragraph, so it gets almost impossible to rant over his article. (Dear confused , you now have a challenge on your hands .)

Not having to have an opinion is relief enough. Especially as, post TZP, I feel inclined to forgive Amir much of his vaunted page3 activism and double standards.

In the peanuts mood

All you really need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt.



Lucy: Charlie Brown, life is like a deck chair on a cruise ship. Passengers open up these canvas deck chairs so they can sit in the sun. Some people place their chairs facing the rear of the ship so they can see where they've been. Other people face their chairs forward - they want to see where they're going. On the cruise ship of life, which way is your deck chair facing?

Charlie Brown: "I've never been able to get one unfolded."

All my life I've wanted to talk in Peanuts quotes and Peanuts quotes only.