Octavio Paz served twice in the Mexican embassy in India. In 1951 when he was transferred from Paris to Mexico?s newly opened embassy in Delhi - apparently a punishment for his participation in events commemorating of the Spanish civil war the anniversary. He was transferred to Japan soon after.

He was sent back as Mexico?s Ambassador to India eleven years later when he was already well established as a poet. He stayed on until 1969 when he resigned his post in protest against Mexican government?s repression of the student uprising of Oct 1969.

His book - ?In Light of India? (written in 1993) is more a collection of essays on India than a memoir of his years there. But it benefits from the anecdotes of his years in India and the insights that he gained during his stay.

Paz has a searing intellect and breathtaking depth of knowledge on comparative literature, religion and history. He uses them to reach interesting and provocative conclusions.

In the concluding two chapters he compared the theological foundation of Eastern religious traditions with that of Judeo-Christian ones.
I do not entirely agree with his conclusions. I always felt that Hindus for a very long time have jived far more with the rituals of religion established at a much later time than with the abstract theological ideas established in the Vedic ages (we probably would have avoided a lot of grief otherwise). But irrespective of wheather you agree with him or not, his discursive journey through the intellectual history of Asia, Europe and native American traditions is a rich and stimulating read.

This is a book of personal impressions, sometimes a little disjointed and shallow, sometimes brilliant - but always engaging. Take for example the following extract:

?The difference between Hindu and Christian asceticism is even more marked than between their eroticism. The key word of Western eroticism ? I am referring to the modern West, from the eighteenth century to the present ? is violation, which is an affirmation of the moral and psychological order. For Hindus, the key word is pleasure. (Ed: I suppose he is not talking about the contemporary VHP variety) Similarly, in Christian asceticism, the central concept is redemption; In India, it is liberation. These two words encompass opposite ideas of this world and the next, of the body and the soul. Both point towards what has been called the ?supreme good?. But there the similarity ends ? redemption and liberation are paths that lead from the same point- the wretched condition of man ? in opposite directions. ?.

The origin of the Christian cult of chastity is not in the Bible but in Greek philosophy, particularly Platonism. Nature and the body are not condemned in Genesis or the other books of the Old Testament. ?? Christianity probably would not have adopted Plato?s pessimistic vision had it not been for two ideas that, although they do not appear in Greco-Roman tradition, are the true sources of Christian attitude toward the body: the belief in a unique God, creator of the universe, and the notion of Original Sin. These two ideas are the spinal column of Judaism and Christianity, and the point of convergence of the two. In the story in Genesis, God makes man from the primordial mud, and his companion from one of his ribs. A material creation, like that of a sculptor with wood or stone. Adam is made of mud, and Even is ?bone of (his) bones and flesh of (his) flesh.?. The first divine mandate is to be fruitful and to multiply.

In Eden there are two trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The fruit of the first is the food of immortality, and while Adam and Even live in the Lord?s garden they will not know death. As for the other tree God expressly forbids them to eat its fruit. ?. Adam and Even ate the fruit and God expelled them from Eden. Their failure was disobedience. But the root of that failure is something infinitely more serious: they preferred themselves. Their sin was not loving God, their creator, but instead loving themselves and wanting to be gods. ?. Within this conception is a condemnation of the love of the body. The Platonic condemnation of the body was made to reinforce the notion of Original Sin: the shameful preference of the creature for itself. The true idol of mankind is man himself.

?..From the Hindu perspective, the story in Genesis is meaningless. Apart from certain incoherencies in the narrative, there is an idea that is difficult for Hindu tradition to accept: the notion of a creator God. ? In general, the Hindu sacred books say that the universe is the result of the working of mysterious and impersonal laws. From the Vedic era on, religious thoughts knew a unifying principle, which the Upanishads called Brahman, the being of man. Yet they never inferred from this principle the existence of a God who was the creator of this world and of men. That which is divine, not a divinity, is the creative force and the matrix of the universe. The idea of the Original Sin, the consequences of the first disobedience, in which the shameful love of man for himself and his indifference to the Other and to the others is incomprehensible to Indian tradition. The universe was not created, and thus there is no Lord, no command, and no disobedience."

(Click below for the rest ...)

"Indian divinities, like those of Greece and Rome, are sexual. Among their powers is an immense procreative force that makes them endlessly couple with all kinds of living things and produce new individuals and species. The activity of the universe is sometimes seen as an enormous divine copulation

?.Indian philosophy always depended on religion; it was an exegesis, not a criticism. And when it broke with religion, it was in order to found a new religion: Buddhism ?..To condemn the body and human sexuality in a tradition like Hinduism would be to condemn the gods and goddesses, the manifestations of a powerful cosmic sexuality. The Hindu chastity and asceticism must have another source.

??.The opposing attitudes of Hindus and Christians towards the human condition- the karma and Original Sin, moksha and redemption- are also apparent in their different visions of time. Both are manifestations and consequences of temporal succession: they not only exist in time and are made of time, but they are also an effect of an event that determines time and its direction. That event, the case of Christianity, occurred before the beginning of time: Adam and Eve committed their sin in a place that previously was immune to change: Paradise. The story of humanity begins with the expulsion from Eden and our fall into History. In the case of Hinduism (and Buddhism), the cause is not anterior to, but rather inherent in time itself. In Christianity, time is the child of Original Sin, and thus its vision of time is negative, although not entirely so: man through the sacrifice of Christ and through the exercise of his freedom, which is gift of God, is capable of saving himself. Time is not only a life sentence, it is also a test. For the Hindu, time in itself is evil. By its very nature impermanent and changing, it is illusory: a lie with a charming appearance that is nothing but suffering, error, and finally the death that condemns us to be reborn in the horrible fiction of another life that is equally painful and unreal.

The complexity of Hindu cosmography and the enormous duration of its cycles seem to belong to the logic that rules nightmares. In the end, these cosmographies vanish: we open our eyes and realize that we have lived among phantasms. The dream of Brahma, what we call reality, is a mirage, a nightmare. To wake is to discover the unreality of this world. The negative character of time is not the consequence of Original Sin but of its opposite; man?s Original Sin or fault is to be the child of time. The evil is in time itself, Why is time evil? Because it lacks substance: it is a dream, a lie, maya.

For Hinduism, time has no meaning, or more exactly, it has no meaning other than its obliteration by total Being, as Krishna tells Arjuna. The conception of time explains the absence of a historical consciousness among the Hindus. India has had great poets, philosophers, architects, and painters, but it has never had, until modern times, had a great historian. Among the various means of negating time among the Hindus, there are two that are particularly astonishing: metaphysical negation and social negation. The first prevented the birth of that literary, scientific and philosophical genre we call history. The second, the institution of the castes, immobilized society. ?.."

Stephen Roach's recent comments seem to have started another round of hand wringing (not that he is saying anything that he hasn?t been saying for some time in a more guarded way). Respected investors like Gross and Buffet had been exhibiting a similar belief either through word or deed for quite some time now. (For a gallows humor perspective read this Daniel Gross story on John Snow)

If the subject interests you, Nouriel Roubini?s web page on US current account deficit seems to be a good place for keeping track of the big picture.

The Wikipedia entry on fiat money is nice reading.

In next month's New York Review of Books, Amartya Sen talks about the exchange of ideas between ancient Indian and Chinese civilizations (Via Another Subcontinent)

backgrounder in NYT about the impacts of the falling dollar :

"...There are at least three schools of thought on whether a dollar collapse is likely and, if it happens, what it would mean.

For Mr. Rogoff and several other economists, the question is not whether the dollar declines - but how fast and how far the fall turns out to be."

What does it mean for India?

Bad things obviously. We are sitting on the biggest reserve of US$ in our history. I read a few news stories that suggested that Chadambaram is looking to invest them in infrastructrue projects. (I wish we would use it to pay off part of our debt!)

The IT Industry is probably slightly better prepared for the short term. The big three have long since recognized that future holds a stronger Rupee. They may be able to buy themselves some protection fo the immediate future, . But in long run, it would obviously impact their revenue stream adversely - about half of India's IT revenues come from USA.

Unfortunately, this is happening at a time when the effects of rising staff cost are also being felt. The bigger firms are increasingly looking towards China and elsewhere to bridge the resource gap. (I should note here that right now English speaking Chinese software engineers are more expensive. But Indian salaries should reach parity soon. On the other hand, the churn rate in China is lower. They also have a larger pool of untapped IT personnel). Add to this, increasing commoditization of many sortware support / maintenance activities.

IT sector in India is staring at serious margin erosion. I think we are looking at a shake up in the industry in the next two to three years. Obviously like all such naval gazing, this could be way off base.

This article in Outlook looked at a different set of parameters and reached similar conclusions.

There goes my pipedream of getting a doctorate someday and moving to a leafy campus and quiet library.
(via Crooked timber)

Pasta is a tool developed by Maciej Cegłowski to paste text in del.icio.us. It is extremely useful for keeping track of notes jotted down quickly or of stray links associated only through a random idea.

In case you do not know, del.ico.us is a web based social bookmarking application. (Similar to flickr). It is winning new converts every day.

Del.ico.us was developed by Joshua Schachter. (Joshua Schachter and Maciej Cegłowski had also co-developed LOAF)

I had been wasting an enormous amount of time on del.icio.us for the last couple of months. It is both an obvious and a blindingly brilliant idea! Very addictive ...

This post from July 2004 by Clay Shirky (via Manageability) mentions a whole bunch of applications that started with the same basic idea. But looking at the Internet landscape now, it is obvious that del.ico.us won hands down.

Peter Merholz in this article called Metadata for the masses provides a terrific context for a conversation on this subject. Peter's weblog is a good place for tracking conversations on this subject (or what he calls 'ethnoclassification').

I had been struggling with the idea of a personal schema for quite some time now. This, kind of ties into that.

I somehow found this very funny.

Dahlia Lithwick has a dry wit that makes even the most obscure of cases being argued before Supreme court interesting.

Durgesh - a friend of mine - is a gifted ameteur landscape photographer. I had been pestering him for ages to start a photoblog. He finally created one.

Please welcome him to the blogosphere.

The Delhi High court, in its infinite wisdom, decided to maintain that homosexuality is illegal.

Meanwhile, AIDS in India is slowly gaining crisis proportions. Here is another article from 'Foreign Affairs' that I had flogged here earlier (PS: although in retrsopect, I ought to stay away from pointing to any AEI research)

Check out Tyler Cowen's provocative twin posts on Mrs Gandhi and the irrationality of the Indian Voter. I have very different views on the Indian voter, But I would get to that later.

But let me direct you to his more interesting remarks on Bollywood.

From what I see around me, there seems to be two largely distinct and seperate audiences. The urban, English speaking population that likes Hollywood films is not much into mainstream Bollywood films (And of course I am excluding parallel/art films from my definition of Bollywood). Likewise, the mainstream Hindi film consumers in India watch very few American films. There is certainly a subset of the audience that watch a lot of both (and cable has increased this audience substantially), but I do not think that it is still a significantly large number)

There is also very little distribution for good English movies outside the metros. Only soft-porn and action blockbusters usually get into the smaller cities. (Again, cable tends to short circuit these easy assumptions)

Can it change? Of course it can. I feel ambivalent about (what I think of as) cultural exports to and from India. I wrote a longish post on this here. My views have not changed substantially since then.

A few additional points to what I said there:

1) Bollywood has a vast consumer base outside of India in Central Asia, Middle East (including Iraq!) and China. We have done a terrible job of exploiting that.

2) I always thought that Bollywood films tend to reflect existent social mores more than they shape social mores. As a high school student, I enjoyed reading Pritish Nandy's back page commentary in the 'Illustrated Weekly'. He used to make the same point very well. (although he is now producing duds as a producer of Hindi films)

Over the last few years, Bollywood films have been becoming more open and secular in their treatment of sexuality. It is possible that they only cater to metropolitan India and to the broader diaspora living abroad that has more far purchasing power than it did a decade back.

3) I am not very familar with films coming out of the South. It doesnt sound like I am missing out much (obviously, there are always exceptions like Adoor Gopalakrishnan). Similarly, there are exceptions in Bengal too. But mostly, watching new Bengali films these days is torture.

I think the really interesting stuff is happening in the realm of low budget films made in English. The current generation of art filmmakers in India often think in English. Unlike the previous generation which grew up under the shadow of colonialism, they are far more comfortable with the idea of creating in English language. Unfortunately, by doing so they are giving up on a large audience.

Indian historian Ramachandra Guha was on his way to UC Berkeley and Oberlin to give a series of lectures. He was turned back from Toronto airport.

Guha also writes for the consumer magazines. Essays he wrote for Outlook magazine are available through this page (registration needed). I quite liked 'The absent Liberal' and 'The ones who stayed behind'.

Both Josh Marshall and Marshall Whittman have comments worth reading.

Across the ocean, Guardian tried to be funny.

What a mess ....

I am terrible with predictions (I too expected a narrow Kerry victory). But since that has never stopped me, here is what I see as the major fallouts in immediate future of the Bush win this morning:

1) Iraq is of course going to remain a disaster. I dont see any country coming up with the additional troops necessary to give the US troops the breathing room needed to do a good job. Bush will either have to add new divisions to the existent army (unlikely) or institute a draft (also unlikely) to be able to do this with any probability of success. Even if US decides to add new divisions, the necessary approval process, recruitments and trainings will probably takes months, if not years.

This administration is likely to choose the domestically painless option of letting Iraq get Beirutized. The only remaining hope is that Allawi will prove to be a capable thug and keep Iraq relatively bottled up.

2)The $ - With the deficit as big as it is, I suspect that only the belief that the second term would be the belt tightening term has not led to a serious slide so far (and obviously thanks to the the East Asian central banks too). I find this administration fiscally reckless. The market has been brooding over that for some time now. Barring serious intervention from the European central banks, I see $ sliding against the Euro for some time.

3) Scandals - Investigative reporters will be kept busy. All the scandals that the government was struggling to keep under wraps over the last few months - the theivary in Iraq, the espionage scandals in Doug Faith's shop in the ministry of defence et al - will start leaking out. There is also no incentive to do dicey stuff to hide them any longer. The memory of these scandals will fade in 4 years.

4) Big media - The White House is gonna be brutal on the national press corp to get them to toe the line. The broadcast media will make some further moves to court the right leaning audience, but there is no chance that they would be loved back by the Fox audience.

4) Supreme court - This is the big prize. With two to three justices expected to retire over the next few years, this election will likely yield the most conservative Supreme court in a very long time. Bush is gonna get the opportunity to shape the direction of the court for the next 20 to 30 years.

6) Education - I dont know a great deal about the subject and probably should keep my mouth shut. But I do think that Bush genuinely wanted to do something constructive. I think his instincts were right, although his executions have been disastrous (like everywhere else). The empirical data from the Texas schools on which some of his policy prescriptions rested now appear tainted. Get ready for act two.

7) More Tax cuts

8) Health care - Fucked

9) Economy: - I think the over all shape of the economy is going continue to get better (so long as you dont mind the dollar bleeding) even though it is not going make us ecstatic

10) Stem cell researchers: California will pick up the best minds among those who are not moving to Europe

Daniel Drezner looks at the positive side.