Blog Posts by Girish Shahane

If we accept Samuel Johnson's contention that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, how should we classify Indian mediapersons for whom it is the first line of defence? Perhaps it isn't surprising that an increasing number of television channels are choosing the path of jingoistic ranting over that of neutral reportage; ratings peaks, it seems, are more easily scaled by that route.

I spent Independence Day and much of last week feeling superbugged about the issue. It started with a study published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, identifying the spread of an enzyme that confers bacteria with resistance to antibiotics called beta-lactams. Beta-lactams include a powerful sub-group called carbapenems used to treat infections impervious to other antibiotics. The enzyme was first identified in a Swedish individual who had previously been hospitalised in India's capital city, and was given the name New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase, or NDM-1. Subsequent to this discovery, a multi-nation

The government of India now resembles a weather-beaten house in a relentless monsoon. Kitchen walls are peeling, the living room leaks, bits of plaster lie on the bedroom floor. Despite assurances that the structure remains sound, there's a growing fear the roof might collapse.

It began with a disastrous offensive against Maoist guerillas in which Central Reserve Police Force troops were repeatedly outmanoeuvred. In the north-east, Naga students blockaded National Highway 39, denying citizens of Manipur a number of essential goods (The blockade has recently been reimposed). Then, residents of the Kashmir Valley marched against the state's excessive use of force. India's security forces haven't learned to quell mobs without killing protesters and bystanders by the dozen. Each demonstration in Kashmir led to deaths by police fire which inspired more demonstrations. The Home Minister's response in Parliament was a cookie-cutter denunciation of Pakistan.

The administration's best and

The Palestine International Festival of Dance and Music, designed to draw attention to water shortages in the West Bank, isn't exactly the hottest ticket on the global performance circuit. The only reason the disco band Boney M's gig in Ramallah gained coverage was that organisers asked the band not to play one of its greatest hits, Rivers of Babylon. The lyrics, derived from the Old Testament's Book of Psalms, are words spoken by Jews lamenting their exile from Jerusalem, which is frequently referred to in the Bible as Zion:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down

Yeah we wept, when we remembered Zion.

When the wicked

Carried us away in captivity

Required from us a song.

Now how shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

Any mention of Zion is a tricky matter in the Arab world, where the state of Israel is frequently disparaged as 'the Zionist entity'. The Wachowski brothers discovered this when their film The Matrix Reloaded was banned in Egypt. The authorities claimed they

Why is India so terrible at football? The question crops up every time a World Cup comes around and we find ourselves farther from the main draw than Christiano Ronaldo is from humility and self-deprecation. There are two conventional answers to the question: one, that Indians are physically ill-equipped for the rigours of the game; two, that we ignore football in our love of cricket.

Ian Jack took the second tack in a Telegraph article last week, producing three pieces of evidence to back his claim that football is about more than muscles and eggs: A) Indians play cricket well; B) we once played hockey well; and C) Scotland beat England regularly in football's early days, despite the English being bigger and better fed.

Let me address these points one by one. A) While we play cricket well, we have never been world beaters in the manner of the West Indian teams of the 1970s and 80s, or the Australians of the late 1990s and much of the noughties. Even our best teams have never filled

I've come up for air after two weeks immersed in art and the art market. It began with a week long trip to Switzerland arranged by Pro Helvetia focussed on Art Basel, the world's premier art fair. This was followed by a four-day workshop in Bombay, concluding with a panel about art as a commodity. Meanwhile, several important auctions took place in London and India, hinting at the likely future course of the trade.

Art Basel, as usual, offered works by the biggest artists of the past hundred years. They're the same names you would encounter in a museum, but the spirit of a fair is very different from that of a museum. One example will encapsulate what I mean: a work by Giorgio de Chirico painted in 1944 that I saw hanging among other trophy pictures in a Basel booth. De Chirico was an Italian who made a lasting contribution to art's history while in his twenties, developing a form of painting he called 'metaphysical'. If you've ever seen cityscapes featuring sharp yet brooding shadows

The events in James Joyce's Ulysses unfold on June 16, 1904. That day (known as Bloomsday after the book's protagonist Leopold Bloom) is marked annually with readings and enactments, specially in Dublin where the twentieth century's greatest English language novel is set. Ulysses introduces us at its start to the clever Malachi 'Buck' Mulligan treating his morning shave like a mock Catholic Mass. Soon after, he recites a poem called The ballad of joking Jesus, the three stanzas of which open thus:

I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.

My mother's a jew, my father's a bird...

If anyone thinks that I amn't divine

He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine...

Goodbye, now, goodbye! Write down all I said

And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead...

When Ulysses came out in 1922, irreverence of this sort was relatively rare in published literature. The bird in the first line of Buck Mulligan's ballad refers to the Holy Spirit, frequently depicted as a dove or

"Homeopathy is witchcraft". Those words, spoken by Tom Dolphin of the British Medical Association, garnered a few headlines in the UK, and many more in India. We rarely favour 'less is more' ideas, but make an exception for homeopathy which, though born in Germany two centuries ago, has been conferred a kind of honorary Indian citizenship.

Reactions to Tom Dolphin's statement were predictably apoplectic. The Delhi Board of Homeopathic System of Medicine discerned a "sinister design to malign homeopathy". Thankfully, apoplexy is treatable through preparations of opium, mercury and belladonna.

Dolphin's denunciation had come at a conference of junior doctors, which concluded with the resolution:

"This Meeting believes that, given the complete lack of valid scientific evidence of benefit:

(i) homeopathy should no longer be funded by the NHS; and

(ii) no UK training post should include a placement in homeopathy."

The Press Trust of India gave it a different spin: "Describing homeopathy as

Brad Pitt, who has stayed impeccably diplomatic throughout his career, grew unusually opinionated while promoting Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, in which he had a starring role.

Pitt said, about the movie that gave Jews fictional revenge on Hitler, "The Second World War could still deliver more stories and films, but I believe that Quentin put a cover on that pot. With Basterds, everything that can be said to this genre has been said. The film destroys every symbol. The work is done, end of story." He went on to dismiss his Interview with the Vampire co-star Tom Cruise's Valkyrie as "a ridiculous movie". Pitt's agent, immediately activating damage control mode, stated the actor had not seen Valkyrie, and suggested much had been lost in translation because the interview appeared in the German magazine Stern.

I caught Valkyrie on its release, and found it a passable, workmanlike effort hobbled by its adherence to historical fact (we knew beforehand the plot to assassinate