Life in General

 

I had a bit of an epiphany, or maybe that's too strong, a realisation might be better. Something that had always grated on me was how native English speakers pronounced Himalayas. In all Indian languages it's pronounced with the stress on the 2nd syllable and the first "a" elongated like in "father" i.e., हिमलया  as opposed to हिमालया .

And each time I heard it mispronounced I would wince. Then all of a sudden it came to me that there are any number of place names that are pronounced differently in English than in the native tongue. Paris for example. Or Madrid, or Mexico or Rio de Janeiro and I am sure a lot of others I don't even know about.

It's a completely unfair expectation, isn't it, I mean one has to know how the native speakers say it and also be able to say it that way. And after all that you are going to sound très pretentious, like those people who have been to Spain on vacation and insist on saying Bar"th"elona.

Quick thought- why does the audience cheer when people make money on game shows, especially the kind where there is more luck than talent involved

Are teachers really the fundamental problem with the American school educational system? If you believe Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee and the people behind "Waiting for Superman" it seems that the main reason American kids are not all that competent academically is because teachers can't be fired at will.
Presumably Chinese teachers go by in mortal fear of imminent firing thus motivating them to teach ever better. Ditto for Finnish and Singaporean teachers and the other 26 countries who apparently have students performing better than American ones.

My take on this shifts the problem squarely to parenting or lack thereof. When a significant number of children don't have 2 parents at home, when the parents who are present don't have the time or inclination to sit with their kids while they complete their homework, or help them with it, at least in the early stages (times tables, anyone?)- is it any wonder they perform poorly in school?

By virtue of meeting my children's teachers and the time I spend tutoring at a local elementary school I have encountered about 20 odd elementary school teachers. Not one of them would I categorise as lazy or not dedicated. Yeah sure, not all have the same teaching skills but that holds for every profession. But all these teachers were interested in their students doing well, were interested in implementing whatever reforms the system asked them to do, most of them spend additional money from their pockets to buy supplies for the classroom. I don't see any reason to think that these 20 odd random teachers are an exclusive minority, if anything they have to represent the majority of the teachers. They struggle with kids who don't have the basics coming into school, kids who cannot master the basics because their only education happens in the school, kids who join school speaking not a word of English.

Are there bad teachers? Sure. Are there teachers who know they can't be fired and so are willing to coast through doing the bare minimum if that? Sure. Are there teachers whose lack of ability compromises the learning of the students under them? Sure.
But are these teachers the main reason that the education system is sucky? Certainly not!

The Tiger Woods affair leads me to speculate how something like this would play out in India. Let's use Sachin as an example. After all Tendulkar is idolised more Woods can even begin to conceive.

Say, Sachin has a "small house". Firstly, would this news ever become public? It's in everybody's best interest that this information stay hidden-Sachin's for obvious reasons, the fans' because they don't need to see their idol defiled, his sponsors' because he can continue to endorse their products without the companies looking bad.

Is it really possible that all these cricketers, mostly young men in their 20's earning millions, mixing with Bollywood, living the high life all around- they are all living "clean" lives? As India becomes increasingly liberalised and aspires to Western mores, aren't there bound to be groupies who wouldn't mind notching a Dhoni or Yuvraj on their bed posts? Surely the Indian media is doing a bang-up job of keeping their cavorting under wraps!

Back to the Tiger thing- is it an American thing to be unable to separate the sportsman from the man? Sachin isn't touted for being the perfect father or husband-not that he isn't, I am sure he is as devoted as they come- but people adore Sachin the cricketer, not Sachin the daddy, and rightfully so.

Did Gillette and AT&T have to withdraw their sponsorship because they were worried that Joe Q Woods' fan would switch to Schick or Sprint? After all now their products were being endorsed by a known philanderer as opposed to the arguably best golfer ever, right?
For that matter, was Joe Q Woods' fan buying Gillette to begin with because it was being endorsed not just by arguably the greatest golfer ever but also a devoted husband and father?

Is the same fan going to stop watching Woods for this reason? Did people stop going to watch the Yankees in the 20's and 30's because their roster featured an overweight ball player who caroused all the time and cheated on his wife or did they go to watch Babe Ruth hit home runs?

If Woods projected the image of ideal father and husband it was because it was thrust upon him. He, or his agents, were mercenary enough to realise that the public wanted him to be this perfect figure and darn it, they were going to provide the public with one.
The public was stupid for wanting him to be anything more than arguably the best golfer ever

OK, I'm no longer the grammar policeman I used to be. Partly because I'm quite fallible myself and leave myself exposed to corrections galore and partly because I'm inured. However, there are still some solecisms that get me. I've spoken elsewhere about the "your/you're" abuse and the "their/there/they're" mixups and misplaced apostrophes. Well, here is another, fortunately, not so frequent, irritant...

How often do you come across constructs like this that make you flinch? This is an example of starting to write a sentence and then not being willing to back up and rephrase it! From Slate.com

The body in charge of assigning and overseeing domain names said that Internet addresses will soon be able to be spelled in any of the world's scripts, not just the Latin alphabet.

So, internet addresses have the ability to spell? Or is it you and I who have the ability to spell internet addresses?

Why isn't there more acknowledgement of the fact that this song is an eeyadichan copy of "Hare Ram, Hare Ram" from Bhool Bhulaiya?

Googling "mary J blige" "bhool bhulaiya" has quite a few hits but none officially admitting this- has Pritam not been made aware of this yet? Or is he in the imitation is the sincerest form of flattery mode?

Pokkisham, more than anything else, is a showcase for Cheran's writing abilities. I found it interminably long, the plot device of having the son read Cheran's diary entries and Cheran's and Padmapriya's letters palled pretty soon and the whole thing became an exercise in how flowery could Cheran express his love and regret.
Even given I'm not schooled in Tamil, and that my knowledge of the language is strictly functional, which meant that I couldn't appreciate the writing, my grouse is that a movie is not a vehicle for reading 'literature' aloud. Which is really what much of the 2 plus hours of this movie ended up being.
The story FWIW, is fairly cliched (boy meets girl, falls in love, girl's father opposed to relationship)- so it needed something special to move it along, not an endless series of vignettes with voice overs. And did I say how slow this moved? Wading thru molasses...

What if Ichiro had made his major league debut before the age of 28?
What if Monica Seles hadn't been stabbed?
What if Ayrton Senna hadn't died?
What if Gale Sayers hadn't been injured?
What if WWII hadn't interrupted the Don's career?
What if Nadal's career hadn't intersected that of Federer as early as it did?
What if MJ hadn't taken time off to play baseball?

I was watching 60minutes this past Sunday and one of the items was about this huge dump in China where electronic stuff is sent for recycling. In the introduction to this piece they talked about the culture here in the US where people constantly keep replacing their otherwise functional items and dump them. I dumped a couple of working monitors on the sidewalk but rationalised it by saying that
a) replacing CRT's with LCD's reduces energy consumption and
b)I was getting more desk space

I didn't take the trouble to find a place where they recycle monitors in a green fashion, so I am guilty of that.

Anyhow back to the consumption culture- people do replace all sorts of electronic items like cell phones and digicams and DVD players on a fairly frequent basis just because a new version has come out

Just saw this poll on ESPN's website where like 80% of the people rank Phelps above Bolt as the athlete of the Olympics. Of course all 100% of them are American!

I wonder how many Americans knew about Mark Spitz, say, 3 months before this Olympics. Expand that poll to the world outside the US and the number would be even smaller. At the same time ask the world outside about Carl Lewis- the answer is bound to be resoundingly in the affirmative.

Likewise 20 years from now way more people will remember Usain Bolt than Michael Phelps. Of course it helps if you are a champion sprinter called Bolt.

Why?

At the end of the day swimming is primarily a rich (OK well off) white person's sport. Once you take Australia and the US out of the equation how many other nations won medals? Not many. How many were non-white? Even fewer (that Algerian guy really stood out, didn't he?) Even the Zimbabwean swimmer is white.

Many other Olympic sports are the prerogative of rich white people- dressage, sailing, modern pentathlon, ballroom dancing (what? ballroom dancing isn't a sport? could've sworn it was, along with trampolining and rhythmic gymnastics )

The majority of people in the world have limited, if any access to swimming pools, everyone has taken part in a running race at some point in their life.

And that is the reason why people remember Lewis and will remember Bolt- running fast is the most elemental of athletic activities. It's the simplest competition, no equipment needed, just some open ground.
[I'd classify long jump and javelin as the other two "elemental" athletic activities.
The high jump is not a skill required very often, we are more likely to face a requirement to jump across a gap than over a wall (we will clamber over it)
The shot and discuss require peculiar motions to be successful, the javelin is simple. Just run and throw- the exact motion that a child is bound to execute if you ask him to throw something as far as he can ]

Sorry Michael, you are undoubtedly the greatest swimmer ever, arguably the greatest Olympian, but definitely not in the same bracket as Bolt when it comes to identification.

Btw, does anyone remember a guy called Alexander Dityatin? Won 8 medals at a single Olympics (not all gold). No. Why? He won them in gymnastics- another sport like swimming that enables an Olympian to win multiple medals more easily than athletics. Or how about Larissa Latynina who won 18 medals across 3 Olympics (again, in gymnastics)