Blog Posts by Aadisht Khanna

I recently came across (thanks to Dr Ajay Shah's blog) this marvelous op-ed by Professor Prabhat Patnaik, where he talks about everything that is right with the CPI(M). It is nine months old, and so was written well before the West Bengal election results. Even so, it is worth revisiting for reasons that I will explain shortly.

Professor Patnaik explains that one good thing the CPI(M) has going for it is that it's anti-imperialistic, and that it's the only anti-imperialistic party in India. I suppose that is important for people who are concerned about imperialism. Personally, I wish that they had concentrated a little less on anti-imperialism and a little more on the healthcare system in West Bengal. As things stand, they seem to have neglected healthcare to the extent that every Bengali with a mild cough and cold has left Bengal and come to Apollo Hospital in Greams Road, Chennai, for treatment. I was there this week and I was surrounded by Bengalis. It was like being at Eden

My fellow columnist Deepak Shenoy is a cheap guy. He's supposed to write a finance column - sober, straightforward, and professional - but he is funny when he does this. This is outrageous. The humour is supposed to be left to me and Anand Ramachandran. As Majikthise and Vroomfondel put it, "Demarcation, that's the problem!"

To show Deepak that he can't just walk into rigidly defined areas of humour without facing the consequences, I am retaliating with a column about finance. Specifically, I am going to rant about the worst thing about insurance today.

The worst thing about insurance is not that the regulator is mildly clueless. It's not even that insurance companies insist on selling you ULIPs where you don't see your money again for ten years. It isn't even the compulsory medical test (with twelve hours fasting!) that you have to endure to get life insurance.

It's the advertising.

In the good old days, insurance ads used to play on your insecurities. They used to tell you that even

After the United States Navy successfully killed Osama, many people have pointed out or expressed regret that India cannot do similar things. America can conduct a military operation inside Pakistan and get away with it, but we can't. America can catch Osama in Abbotabad, and we have to live with Dawood Ibrahim living it up in Karachi. It's very galling.

But there is a silver lining. True, America is a global superpower, has freedom of speech, a judicial system that doesn't have a twenty year backlog, and academic and business institutions that attract the most talented people in the world. But India can point with pride to two things it has that America doesn't: assjets and missed calls.

The assjet, also known as hygiene faucet, is that specialised small spray tap with a lever control that you use to wash your bottom. This is much more elegant, refined, and hygienic than fiddling about with toilet paper or the dipper that our fathers and forefathers were forced to use. Yes, less than

It makes me really sad that there are so many people in the world today who find it fashionable to go against our culture. They go in for surgery and allopathic medicine instead of ayurveda, eat rotis and rice instead of traditional Indian grains, and some people don't even wear pottus.

All these are passive ways of abandoning our culture. But some people go even further and criticise and mock it. For example, there are some who claim that astrology has no scientific basis and doesn't work.

This is nonsense. If astrology didn't work, why have we been using it for six thousand years? And if it has no scientific validity, why is it so accurate?

And besides, the scientific concept behind astrology is quite clear. All the heavenly bodies emit rays which fall on the earth and affect us. Gravity is part of the same rays which is why the earth goes around the sun and the moon causes tides. Obviously planets that are even larger than the moon will have an even bigger effect on us.

But people

The modern world is an excellent place, but it has its disadvantages. As Sonia Gandhi points out, greed and graft are on the rise, and this puts the principles of independent India in danger¹. There are less than one thousand five hundred tigers left in India. And of course our ancestors never had to deal with the news constantly talking about Dolly Bindra. Despite the excellent things we have today - low fare airlines, online radio, and Sushil Kumar - in many ways we are worse off than we were fifty years ago.

One of the ways in which we are worse off is that our movies no longer have vamps. Yes, they have item numbers, but the vamp in her own right has vanished. The situation isn't as bad in Hollywood, but the golden age of the femme fatale is over. Sure, femme fatales make an appearance every now and then, but by and large the manic pixie dream girls have taken over.

This is tragic because every time a movie comes out without a vamp, we lose the

I was in Delhi for Diwali and was walking to the market to buy a strip of Rosuvastatin, when I saw a large crowd of people marching down the road and angrily shouting slogans. Curious, I went over to see what was going on. To my great surprise I saw that one of the marchers was my old acquaintance Raghav the Embittered Educationist. I waved at him, and then asked him what had brought him out on the streets.

"It's an outrage!" he replied.

"I'm sure it is," I said soothingly. "But what? So many things are outrageous these days that it's hard to keep track."

"Animal Planet, of course!"

"Animal Planet?! The TV channel?"

"Yes, them. They're deliberately offending our sentiments."

I was mystified, and asked how a television channel that ran shows about clever pets and African wildlife could be offensive. Raghav glared at me.

"The channel is trying to indoctrinate our society with non-vegetarianism. It's appalling!"

"I don't understand."

"Look at the programming that's

In his column last week, my partner in humour Anand Ramachandran talked about the travails of TamBrahm freelancers, and how he has to face the scorn of his relatives whenever he tells them that he works independently writing columns and designing video games.

It could be worse - Murali's dad's look of incomprehension is not nearly as blood chilling as a withering look from Sugandhi the Asskicking Auntie. But even so, this is one of the unhappiest aspects of the non-engineer non-MBA existence. Sure, you get to set your own hours, you get to work on what you love instead of what you're told to do, and you get to become world-famous in your area of expertise - but you still have to face judgmental relatives who want to know why you aren't a TCS employee. It's tragic.

But while TCS engineers, ICICI bankers, and S R Batliboi chartered accountants don't have to deal with condescending family members (at least, unless the family member in question is an investment banker. Those