I have been absconding in Providence, Rhode Island for a few days. Providence is even colder than Connecticut! I also moved house last week end. Very exhausted. Very stressed out.

I hope to be back weblogging from this weekend.

PS: I think farmers in Timbuktoo have a better quality of life than the IT professionals.

James Grimmelman has written a fashinating, thought provoking essay on privacy, democracy and internet, anchored around the Laurie Garrett fracas in mefi. Check it out.

Thanks to the Susan McDougal affair, I now take NYT Book review with a pinch of salt. First, Beverly Lowry reviewed Susan McDougal's book. No one paid it much attention until Gene Lyons published a scathing critique of the NYT review of Susan McDougal's book. Thankfully, it set a lot of tongues wagging in the book industry. NYT published a partial retraction. People still kept talking about it. Then NYT said that well, it is all because of the freelancers who write most of the reviews and who after all aren't trained as journalists. And finally they said alright, we'll publish a letter by Susan McDougal. I guess this is as close to an apology that the paper of record can get.

These days, it is fashionable for liberals to hate Christopher Hitchens. But I think he has one of the most formidable intellects among the essayists writing today and on those occasions when he does get his head away from the bottle, he is an amazing writer. His article on The perils of partition in the new issue of The Atlantic is quite interesting. I have also been meaning to read Stephen Collini's review of Hitchen's book on Orwell for some time.

Guardian has an interesting story on Escape from Taliban, the Hindi movie made about Sushmita Bandhopadhyay's escape. From what I read between the lines, it seems to be standard Bollywood fare which is a pity.

LAT says that Arthur, a contemporary culture magazine is worth checking out (you can download a pdf version of the magazine from the second link). The pdf version looks ungainly. I hope to grab a copy whenever I go to NYT next.

I have never seen as much snow fall in one day as it did last Monday. Everything went under. Our front porch was knee deep in snow. In front of the apartment complex, Jack would periodically shovel the snow off the pedestrian walkway into the road and in the next hour the trucks will shovel them back on to the walkway. Finally, I think they came to some kind of implicit understanding and now we have got these walls of snow where the car parking spaces used to be. Some people spent hours digging up their car from under. Today it was all bright and sunny. The snow now piled high on the side of the road and gray and dirty from all the soot and grime from the roads is melting slowly, making the roads all slushy.

They are forecasting rain all through the weekend and with so much snow out there already, people are predicting a flood in New York City. NYT says the city will have spent $20 million cleaning up the mess.

I am very impressed with the speed with which Stamford city authorities cleaned up the roads out here. Yesterday, I started for office in the wee hours of early morning and as the sun was breaking out, the cleaning crews and cop cars were still on the roads.

I'll be juggling 3 projects for the next few weeks (one of them should have been over by Jan 31st). I am also moving house the week after, travelling to Rhode Island for a few days and committed to deliver an article this month.

I am not unhappy. Considering the mess in which I was in last year, I consider myself fortunate just to have a contract that I like. But weblogging is going to be sparse for the rest of the month. I'll probably post a longish entry once a week or so.

Just what I needed. A weblog from Baghdad. (via Oblomovka)

I am sure there is going to be a flurry of coverage of the Matisse Picasso exhibition in MOMA. I quite excited about it. I am hoping to eventually post all the interesting stories on the exhibition to this entry.

'Matisse Picasso': Artists Dueling, Curators Dealing by Sarah Boxer in NYT
MOMA's subway series by Alexandra Lange in New York.

(via Modern Art Notes)

Ajit Balakrishnan now has a blog. (via Kiruba). I enjoyed reading What next for Indian design and Am I cut out to be an entrepreneur. But I do wish that he would check for typos before he uploads his stuff.

Balakrishnan is the chairman of Rediff.com and was the co-founder and principal owner of Rediffusion advertising agency. Rediff's aggressive and elegant advertisement campaigns for Congress-I in 1984 and '89 campaigns changed the way political campaigns are run in India. Today, Balakrishnan is better known for Rediff which changed the rules of the game for web publishing in India. Apparently, he is also well known inside Rediff for practicing his golf swings in the corridors with an imaginary golf club.

I suspect a major part of the credit for Rediff's web initiative also goes to Anita who from inside Rediff has been a tireless promoter weblogs in India.

Clay Shirky has the definitive essay on the subject; spurred partly, I suspect, by the discussions following Steve's post. Jason Kottke's weblogs and power law covers the same ground and has an interesting reading list. I also enjoyed Mark Pilgrim's post.

The whole thing about why isn't my weblog becoming more visible comes up from time to time and let's face it, exercizes most of us at least occasionally.

As someone whose weblog is not by any stretch of imagination setting the Atlantic on fire, here is my take. If you are weblogging, it is going to be very frustrating if you have the expectation that this shit is gonna make you well known. I read somewhere sometime back, that a weblog is a very good way to sustain your existent brand equity through the web. But it is not a medium ideally well suited for developing your brand equity. I tend to agree. Outside of being very, very good, you also need to be very regular in your posting and in the vast majority of cases, have a lot of PR Savvy. Now, you probably already need to do that at work, right? This stuff is supposed to be fun, a creative outlet. Once you start taking it easy, you would realize that it is contributing to your self development in myriad small ways that you did not anticipate earlier.

The other thing that the weblog world rewards is giving back to the community. If you are doing stuff that is useful/helpful to the netizens, it spreads the word. e.g. people like Mark or the boy genius came to the party later and had not gone out of their way to spread the word about their weblog. But they give back a lot and people appreciate that.

But there simply are way too many weblogs out there. And if you let your self actualization needs ride on your weblog, that may turn out to be frustrating. Go out. Enjoy the sun (or the snow, if that is the case..we are expecting 5 inches by the evening). Have a drink. Spend some time writing that book you always want to write.

Norah Jones has a lot of music from her live session at the House of Blues (Chicago) available for download. If you like her stuff, you may want to check this out before it goes away! (via Maria).

Sean Kernan's work.
The new issue of 28mm.
Chin-Chin Yap's article on contemporary Chinese art photography.
The LA Times story on the ongoing Ansel Adams survey in LA county museum of art.

I think I am going to follow Anil's example and have a daily links side bar kind of thing. However, I want to loosely categorise the links so that I can look them up later if I want to. I'll figure it out as I go along ...

Michael Wolff has a highly readable story in NY Metro about the ouster of Ann Godoff from Random House. (via mobilives)

Five wars of globalization is an analysis of how cross border illicit trades in drugs, arms, intellectual property, people, and money are raging and how governments are losing that fight. I haven't read it yet. But it looks like a damn good read. (via Z+blog)

Timothy Garton Ash's article on Anti-Europeanism in America is very well written. There is thread on this on mefi somewhere. I'll link to it later.

Also, someone ought to tell that judge that Bappi Lahiri became famous only through outrageously ripping other people's music. They should have forced the prosecution to listen to some of the crap that this guy produces. (via Anil)

Somehow, I find the idea that Columbia collectibles are already soaring on eBay faintly disgusting. (via antipixel). One aspect of a modern Western society that I can't internalize is how it can sometimes rob people of dignity. They now sell trinkets where Kennedy died.

I liked the profile of Kalpana Chawla in NYT. You can almost always count on Amy Waldman to write a balanced story.

Simple.

I have been wondering about it for a while. There is so much static here these days it is no longer funny. I have to get down very carefully from the car to ensure that I don't get an electric shock. Crazy!

From Pankaj Mishra's 'The Other Face of Fanaticism':

It goes on to narrate some of the more ridiculous:

Mishra's previous article on the subject is available here. It was a review of this (pdf file) Human Rights Watch report on Gujarat and is very well written.

While on the subject, the short condemnation penned by Amitav Ghosh is still one of the most powerful indictment on the subject of Gujarat that I have read so far.