…. is a term my mother often uses to describe me and my friends — both male and female. Sometimes my dad says that i who was so focused and blinkered when I was twenty possilby regressed into my teens. My grandmother was zapped when she asked me recently “When are you going to settle down” ….My answer “Hopefully never” wasn’t really the one she was looking for….
And, now i have the perfect retort for all of them - I am part of the Odyssey generation. Odyssesy lies somewhere between adolescence & adulthood, and amongst the other peculiarities of this generation-
Dating gives way to Facebook and hooking up. Marriage gives way to cohabitation. Church attendance gives way to spiritual longing. Newspaper reading gives way to blogging.
How many people do we all know like this 
In fact I mostly know people like this….
and then….
Their parents grow increasingly anxious. These parents understand that there’s bound to be a transition phase between student life and adult life. But when they look at their own grown children, they see the transition stretching five years, seven and beyond. The parents don’t even detect a clear sense of direction in their children’s lives. They look at them and see the things that are being delayed.
They see that people in this age bracket are delaying marriage. They’re delaying having children. They’re delaying permanent employment.
Oh lord, i laughed so much when i read this. This is so much me and so many of my peer group…..
My own take on this phenomenon is that we are living longer & healthier, are more fertile till later, and are therefore compensating for it in other ways.
In my grand father’s generation - the average grand dad died at 60 and the average grandmother at around 70. Move down one generation, the average age seems to be 75 and 85. By the time it is our generation’s time to go…… we are possibly looking at a decade more of life. That is a tremendously long time to be focused and sincere. Maybe our generation has braked because it has realized that this is a really long journey …. and it might as well be fun.
Patrix & Rashmi have great posts about this.
Tags: Society
If you have ever wondered how it feels at the moment of death, you don’t have to rack your imagination anymore…
From Drowning to Explosive Decomprssion an entire list has been painstakingly put together here. Here is an excerpt….
Decapitation was regarded as swift & painless….
I would be very interested in research techniques
The NYT has an excellent op-ed on corruption. Specifically, corruption in the context of the Iraq war. Called Suicide is Not Painless (a kind of hat tip to MASH whose theme music was "Suicide is Painless"). It starts with the suicide of a civil servant who could have been indicted for corruption… and then it articulates the level of corruption in Iraq
Set against the epic corruption that has defined the war in Iraq, Mr. Riechers’s tragic tale is but a passing anecdote, his infraction at most a misdemeanor. The $26,788 he received for two months in a non-job doesn’t rise even to a rounding error in the Iraq-Afghanistan money pit. So far some $6 billion worth of contracts are being investigated for waste and fraud, however slowly, by the Pentagon and the Justice Department. That doesn’t include the unaccounted-for piles of cash, some $9 billion in Iraqi funds, that vanished during L. Paul Bremer’s short but disastrous reign in the Green Zone. Yet Mr. Riechers, not the first suicide connected to the war’s corruption scandals, is a window into the culture of the whole debacle. Through his story you can see how America has routinely betrayed the very values of democratic governance that it hoped to export to Iraq. Look deeper and you can see how the wholesale corruption of government contracting sabotaged the crucial mission that might have enabled us to secure the country: the rebuilding of the Iraqi infrastructure, from electricity to hospitals.
Read the entire opinion piece and mourn the absence of this level of incisiveness, articulation and analysis in the Indian News Media - being the largest is not going to be enough… occasionally, just occasionally you also need to be the best.
Technorati Tags: Indian News Media
Sphere: Related ContentTags: Censorship, India, Media, Media Bias, Politics
… kind of describes our politicians well, and it describes people of all political persuasion. This from CNN-IBN
"Rahul-Rajiv, Rajiv-Feroz. Until there it’s okay, but then what after that? These Congressmen who abuse Narendra Modi, show us your roots. You are the descendants of Muslims from Junagadh," he said.
The barb on Rahul Gandhi’s origins came after B K Hariprasad had said: "Vote pane ke lie hamesha Soniaji ke bare mai ulta sidha bolne wale Narendra Modi ko main bolna chahata hu ki Sonia Gandhi ka birth certificate ki humko koi zaroorat nahin hai. Janta Sonia Gandhi ko Indira Gandhi ke roop mein dekhti hai. Magar kya Gujarat ke bahar ki janta ko yeh malum hai ki woh (Narendra Modi) kaunsi naali mein paida hua hai? Usko (Narendra Modi) pata nahi hai ki uske baap ka name kya hai, jo Sonia ji ke baare mein baatein karta rehta hai. (I want to tell Narendra Modi — who always targets Sonia Gandhi for want of votes — that we do not need Sonia Gandhi’s birth certificate. Indian people see her as a reincarnation of Indira Gandhi. But do the people outside Gujarat know which gutter Narendra Modi was born in? He does not even know his own father’s name.)"
I don’t like Narendra Modi and his brand of politics. But, this is really not on… If the Congress wants to win votes, it needs to show that is a better party, not a worse party…
Technorati Tags: Narendra Modi, Congress
Sphere: Related ContentTags: , Gujarat, India, Narendra Modi, Politics
IT seems that we have more in common with our distant reptilian relatives/ancestors than I thought. This from Discovery:
Dinosaurs probably did not enjoy many carefree teenage years, since most were parents before they reached adulthood, according to recently announced research.The find puts dinosaurs on the list of animals that had teenage pregnancies. Others on the list include crocodiles, lizards and humans.
And, they did it for to ensure large numbers of future generations.
“If these species had waited until full size to reproduce, they would have had very few years in which to produce offspring.”
I wonder if dinasaur parents hired dinosaur private eyes to keep a watch on their dinosaur kids….
Sphere: Related ContentTags: Science
James Watson seems to have been infected with the Prince Phillip Syndrome - this is a syndrome when otherwise intelligent men open their mouth in public and plunge head long into it…..
It is also sad to see once brilliant men, instead of evolving with society and new thoughts — remaining fossilzed in the past especially in areas of society and culture. These sort of views on matters of society are the social sciences equivalent of those who think that the universe was created over one week…
Sure we are all racially different - and we have different core abilities based on geography, history, culture, etal….. But, i would think that it would be more a function of ’social & locational’ factors than genes.For example - a kid growing up at 18000 ft, who sprints 10 km to school everyday is probably going to have a great chance of being a marathon runner, but take that same child and put him in Mumbai and send him to school 10 minutes away walking — it is highly likely that he will be an asthmatic wreck in 10 years. But the same asthmatic kid in Mumbai may learn to speak four languages simultaneously while the kid in the village at 18,000 feet may just be comfortable in one language. …As with linguistic abilities or physical abilities, the same with intellectual abilities — if i am living to survive, then my survival skills will be honed, if survival and comfort is assured, then i will develop other skills… including academic etal…
Maybe, 
james watson and his ilk will be better of figuring whether it is race that makes the powerful nations & corporations interfere in the affairs of African countries, perpetuating civil war across the board….. or is it pure selfishness….And maybe, just maybe, if this question is answered and peace comes to the continent as a whole… and children can grow up without drought, civil war, rape, hunger, poverty, destruction and a constant battle to survive…. then maybe, we can figure whether it is nature, nurture or third thing…..At this point of time you cannot compare someone living in peace with basic physical & emotional security taken care of…..with someone who isn’t….. It is basic bad science… be it social science or physical science.
Also read: wired — The Science & Assumptions behind Watson’s views on Blacks
Scientific American — on Won a Nobel, Go Nuts and on James Watson’s Greatest Hits..
Technorati Tags: James Watson
Sphere: Related ContentTags: Culture, Development, Science
University corrections continue… and i relieve the utter tedium by jotting down interesting bits from answers. Here are today’s picks:
What is scary is that the paper we set was one that a brain dead hedgehog — or a student who had never attended a single lecture — could pass. But, stuff that is going wrong in quite a few papers are fundamentals. We won’t even go into the fact that most of these are functionally illiterate in most languages (or can communicate very little in most languages) — but look at stuff like general knowledge, basic stuff . Two days ago i blogged about a student who wrote that the language spoken in Hyderabad is Tulu. Today there is a student who writes that the language spoken most in Bangalore is Bengali, Urdu and Hindi … I know that the ITES boom is getting people to Bangalore…but……
A few years ago while making Dial One aur Jeeto, the live interactive gameshow on Sahara One - we had a caller who’s answer was “Chin ki Rajdhani Cochin Hai” (The capital of China is Cochin)…. and we laughed…. but today, we seem to be putting out graduates like that. And these are graduates who have a high probability of joining journalism as a profession.
Technorati Tags: Dial One aur Jeeto, Sahara One
Sphere: Related ContentTags: Teaching
growing wild …. in Lonavala. 
And pretty little wild flowers…. 
Simple things like wild flowers making your heart sing.
It was Kishore Kumar’s death anniversary over the weekend, and Radio Farishta on World Space radio had a lovely tribute to his music.
It kind of got me thinking of my favourite Kishore Kumar solo’s over the decades of Hindi Film Music. So hear they are in alphabetical order (more or less)
Which are yours ?
Technorati Tags: Radio Farishta, World Space, Kishore Kumar, Hindi Film Music
Sphere: Related ContentTags: , Films, Hindi Film Music, India, Kishore Kumar, Music
… University corrections began today…. in the few that i managed to plough through here are some sparkling gems. (italics mine)
And one day … these will not only inherit the earth but also the media….
More gems here.
Tags: Teaching
