22 December 2001

1. - 22 December 2001: Start of trip to Southern India

Arrive Delhi at 2300hrs by Air France. This has been a troubled flight plan. We were supposed to fly with our miles via Sabena, which had a direct Brussels-Chennai flight, but Sabena went bankrupt a few weeks ago and we had to re-route ourselves via Delhi. It’s a waste of time and money but we have no choice.

As we leave the arrivals area the usual mob of unlicensed taxi drivers, porters, fake guides etc. assaults us in the dark humid Indian heat. The stink of latrines and waste is a very unpleasant first impression one gets when landing in this major capital city. Anyway, we don’t have to suffer much of it as we are welcomed by our agency and transfer to the nearby Hotel Radisson, very high standard.

Southern India will have to wait for us until tomorrow!

21 December 2001

Itinerary of a trip to India 2001-2002

Trip to Southern India, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, 2001-2002

itinerary
Day
Date
Visit
Night
Km
hrs
1
22 Dec
Arrive Delhi via Paris
Delhi
0
0
2
23 Dec
Shopping, flight Chennai at 16:45
Chennai


3
24 Dec
Chennai, city tour
Chennai


4
25 Dec
Kanchipuram, Mahabalipuram
Mahabalipuram


5
26 Dec
Visit Mahabalipuram
Mahabalipuram


6
27 Dec
Depart to Pondicherry, visit
Pondicherry


7
28 Dec
Depart to Chidambaram, visit
Chidambaram


8
29 Dec
Depart to Gangaikondacholapuram, Darasuram and Kumbakonam, arrive Tanjore
Tanjore


9
30 Dec
Brihadeeshwara temple
Tanjore


10
31 Dec
Depart to Trichy, visit Srirangam en route
Trichy


11
1 Jan
Depart to Madurai, visit Meenakshi Temple
Madurai


12
2 Jan
Vishnu temple and Alargarkovil as well as the Tirumala Nayak Palace
Madurai


13
3 Jan
Depart to Periyar
Periyar


14
4 Jan
Boat ride Periyar, depart to Kumarakom
Kumarakom


15
5 Jan
Kumarakom, sunset cruise
Kumarakom


16
6 Jan
Depart to Cochin
Cochin


17
7 Jan
Visit Cochin
Cochin


18
8 Jan
Cochin
Cochin


19
9 Jan
Flight to Delhi and connection to Europe
In the air


20
10 Jan
Arrive Europe









08 November 2001

Book Review: The Idea of India (1999), by Sunil Khilnani, ****

Synopsis

A key book on India in the postnuclear era, with a new Introduction by the author. Sunil Khilnani's exciting, timely study addresses the paradoxes and ironies of this, the world's largest democracy. Throughout his penetrating, provocative work, he illuminates this fundamental issue: Can the original idea of India survive its own successes?



Review

The author tries to encapsulate the idea of India in five chapters:

Democracy (how this was possible in India, and in fact how democracy made India possible!);

Temples of the future (on growth after WW II);

Cities (and the role they play in changing India);

Who is an Indian (the most complicated of all chapters!)

The Garb of Modernity (on ongoing change)

A useful bibliographical essay completes this articulate book.

These are important aspects of what makes India, of course, but hardly the only ones and perhaps not the main ones. Most people in India still live in the countryside.

In my view the main drawback of the book is its excessive praise of Nehru. Yes he did keep India united after partition and preserved democracy but his autocratic economic planning delayed India's development, which really took off after the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty came to an end with Rajiv's resignation in 1989 and assassination in 1991.

In any case, there can hardly be any such thing as "the" idea of India. A better title might have been "One Idea of India".

See my other reviews on India in this blog.

01 August 2001

Book Review: In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors (2001), by Doug Stanton, *****

Synopsis

The USS Indianapolis was the last ship sunk during the Second World War. Savaged by a salvo of torpedoes from a Japanese submarine, the warship, one of the fastest in the US Navy, sank in a matter of minutes. One thousand two hundred men went into the water, and only 321 were to survive. This is their story. On 30 July 1945 the Indianapolis was returning from the small island of Tinian, having delivered the components of the atom bomb ‘little boy’, which was to decimate Hiroshima and bring on the end of the war. As the torpedoes ripped into the side of the ship hundreds of men were killed. Those lucky enough to survive were to face extremes of physical and mental hardship in the water. Many were left to float in the ocean with little or no food or drinking water in deteriorating life jackets and, most chillingly of all, open to attacks by sharks...

11 July 2001

Book review: The Slave Trade, 1440-1870 (1999), by Hugh Thomas, *****






















Synopsis


After many years of research, Thomas portrays, in a balanced account, the complete history of the slave trade. The Atlantic slave trade was one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures. Between 1492 and about 1870, ten million or more black slaves were carried from Africa to one port or another of the Americas.

In this wide-ranging book, Hugh Thomas follows the development of this massive shift of human lives across the centuries until the slave trade's abolition in the late nineteenth century.

Beginning with the first Portuguese slaving expeditions, he describes and analyzes the rise of one of the largest and most elaborate maritime and commercial ventures in all of history. Between 1492 and 1870, approximately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations, in mines, or as servants in houses. The Slave Trade is alive with villains and heroes and illuminated by eyewitness accounts. Hugh Thomas's achievement is not only to present a compelling history of the time but to answer as well such controversial questions as who the traders were, the extent of the profits, and why so many African rulers and peoples willingly collaborated. Thomas also movingly describes such accounts as are available from the slaves themselves.



02 May 2001

Book Review:The Floating Brothel: the Extraordinary True Story of An Eighteenth-Century Ship And Its Cargo of Female Convicts, by Sian Rees, *****

list of names of convicts shipped to Australia
Synopsis

In 1789, 237 women convicts left England for Botany Bay in Australia on board a ship called The Lady Julia, destined to provide sexual services and a breeding bank for the men already there. This is the story of the women aboard that ship.


04 March 2001

Book Review: A Trip to the Beach: Living on Island Time in the Caribbean, by Melinda and Robert Blanchard, *****

Synopsis

A Trip to the Beach is about the maddening, exhausting and exhilarating challenges Melinda and Robert Blanchard faced while trying to live the simple life after moving to Anguilla to start a restaurant - and the incredible joy when they somehow pulled it off. As their cooking begins to draw 4-star reviews, the Blanchards and their kitchen staff - Clinton and Ozzie, the dancing sous-chefs; Shabby, the master lobster-wrangler; Bug, the dish-washing comedian - come together like a crack drill team. Anyone who's ever dreamed of running away to start a new life on a sun-drenched island will find the Blanchards' seductive, funny tale of pandemonium and bliss unforgettable.

25 February 2001

Lettera a Indro Montanelli sulla sinistra italiana

Caro Montanelli,

la leggo dall'estero, vivo in Belgio, perché lei rimane un raggio di chiarezza nel guazzabuglio quale appare la scena politica italiana all'avvicinarsi delle elezioni.


Condivido le sue riserve sulla Casa delle Libertà, ma mi pare lei dia troppo credito alla sinistra. 


Lei dice che la voterà perché non ci ha tolto le libertà che avevamo e ci ha "portato in Europa". La sinistra non ha portato l'Italia in Europa perché c'era già: l'Italia ha fondato l'Europa negli anni cinquanta e, nonostante la sinistra ci abbia in passato provato, non ne è mai uscita; e non credo la potrebbe o vorrebbe far uscire un qualunque altro governo.


Le libertà: anche se avessero voluto, ed io non lo credo, come avrebbero potuto togliercele? Sono finiti quei tempi.


A lei preoccupa un Berlusconi che controlli sei reti TV, e sono d'accordo, anche se lui dice che privatizzerebbe 2 reti RAI. Ma le reti RAI, oggi, le paiono migliori, o solo diverse, da Mediaset? A me, no: la gazzarra e la sguaiatezza sono identiche; i moderatori delle trasmissioni politiche che da esse si fanno travolgere, anche; le cosce lunghe e le tettone che rimbalzano al vento, che alla fine sono le sole cose di qualità che ci propinano, pure. E poi la stessa inflazione degli applausi: ma perché in televisione si applaude sempre? Il pubblico si batte col privato per quote di ascolto e, così facendo, il guazzabuglio di cui sopra lo ripropone ed amplifica ad nauseam, con l'aggravante di farlo a spese di chi paga il canone.


Comunque lei almeno il suo voto lo potrà esprimere: io, che ho la colpa di rappresentare l'Italia in un'organizzazione internazionale, la NATO per essere precisi. Non è possibile che tutti i funzionari ed impiegati italiani della NATO e dell'Unione Europea, più tutti quelli che lavorano a Bruxelles nell'indotto, possano venire in Italia per votare, anche se la NATO me lo permetterebbe.


Godrò invece del beneficio di non dovermi turare il naso per votare, dato che anche questa volta questo diritto mi viene negato dalla mancanza di una legge che, dopo averla osteggiata per decenni, il governo "europeista" di  sinistra ora finalmente dice di volere ma che, in cinque anni di potere, non è riuscito a partorire.

05 February 2001

Recensione: "La Via della Cina" di Renata Pisu, ****

Sinossi
In questo libro l'autrice racconta il suo rapporto con la Cina, iniziato nel 1957 quando, insieme con alcuni compagni, si trasferì a studiare a Pechino, all'università di Beida. Vi trascorse 4 anni e da allora non ha mai smesso di tornare periodicamente in quel Paese che l'ha contagiata di un male inguaribile, il "Mal di Cina", segnando in modo indelebile la sua vita. Quello che leggiamo nel libro non è solo un resoconto o un reportage di viaggio, piuttosto assomiglia a un percorso tra passato e presente che si accompagna a un itinerario esistenziale.

01 January 2001

Today the new Millennium starts

Today is the start of the new millennium.

Some, like Dick Teresi, have argued that this is the result of a number of errors in year counting committed in the past, in the middle ages in fact. There never was a year 0, we went from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D. He says there should have been a year 0 however between those two years, just like there is a year 2000 between 1999 and 2001.

However, others argue that because years B.C. are counted starting from -1, there is no room for a year zero, just like on a Carthesian coordinate system, where zero is a point, not a time interval.

Be that as it may, we are stuck with that, unless we decide to renumber all years from 1 B.C. backward, so that 1 B.C. becomes the year 0, 2 B.C. become 1 B.C. and so on.

Since we are likely to stay with the current counting system for a while... pop the Champagne today!

26 November 2000

Recensione: In Sudamerica, di Italo Moretti, ****

Sinossi
Dei fatti che hanno segnato la storia dei Paesi latinoamericani negli ultimi trent'anni si parla sempre più spesso, per la loro influenza sulla politica e la diplomazia europea dei giorni nostri - si pensi al caso Pinochet, o ai figli dei desaparecidos adottati dagli stessi carnefici dei genitori. Moretti ha seguito per la Rai le vicende di quei paesi (in particolare Cile e Argentina) dai primi anni '70. Nel suo saggio racconta quanto ha visto e vissuto, riportando brani inediti delle interviste ai protagonisti della storia sudamericana.

06 November 2000

Recensione: Straneurocrate (2000), di Marco De Andreis, *****

Sinossi

Poche cose risultano più ostiche e tediose dell'Europa comunitaria. D'altra parte l'Unione europea ha un'importanza crescente nella nostra vita: le decisioni che ci riguardano prese a Bruxelles e a Strasburgo sono sempre di più. E poi c'è il fatto che le istituzioni comunitarie non sono state concepite per rendere conto ai cittadini europei, bensì ai governi dei Paesi Membri. Questo libro tenta di colmare la voragine fra il (poco) fascino e la (molta) importanza dell'Unione europea, cercando di spiegare l'utilità e il funzionamento dell'Europa comunitaria. E non in termini astratti: l'autore è stato un "eurocrate" negli anni dal 1995 al 1999, e qui li racconta.


Recensione

Il miglior libro per capire l'Unione Europea senza annoiarsi a morte nel tentativo! Parafrasando il film di Kubrik "Il dottor Stranamore", De Andreis racconta di come "ha imparato a non preoccuparsi e ad amare l'Unione Europea", cioè i suoi anni a Bruxelles, dove ha lavorato come membro del gabinetto della Commissaria Bonino alla fine degli anni novanta. Egli usa l'esperienza personale per sviluppare un lungo ragionamento induttivo sulla macchina comunitaria, da una parte, e sulle politiche europee degli stati membri, dall'altra.

Tutto quello che avreste sempre voluto sapere sull'Unione Europea ma non avete mai osato chiedere. Anche perché pure se lo aveste chiesto non ve lo avrebbero detto, data la mancanza di trasparenza dei processi decisionali comunitari, dai quali ormai dipende la maggioranza delle nostre leggi nazionali. Questo potrebbe essere un sottotitolo per questo libro, che parla di cose serie senza prendersi troppo sul serio. Anche se scritto dieci anni fa, per cui in parte ovviamente obsoleto, il libro resta attualissimo per penetrare la fitta cortina che oggi come allora nasconde l'apparato comunitario al cittadino comune.

Parafrasando il film di Kubrik "Il dottor Stranamore", De Andreis racconta i suoi anni a Bruxelles, dove ha lavorato come membro del gabinetto della Commissaria Bonino alla fine degli anni novanta. Egli usa l'esperienza personale per sviluppare un lungo ragionamento induttivo sulla macchina comunitaria, da una parte, e sulle politiche europee degli stati membri, dall'altra.

Da europeista convinto quale sono, il libro mi ha confermato una cosa: far gestire le cose a Bruxelles mi piace sempre di meno, ma resta forse il male minore rispetto ad un ritorno di poteri agli stati nazionali, oggi inadeguati a far fronte alle sfide del XXI.

Puoi leggere un'intervista all'autore qui su Gnosis.




26 July 2000

Book review: Zero, the Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000) by Charles Seife, *****

Synopsis

The Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshiped it, and the Church used it to fend off heretics. Now it threatens the foundations of modern physics. For centuries the power of zero savored of the demonic; once harnessed, it became the most important tool in mathematics. For zero, infinity's twin, is not like other numbers. It is both nothing and everything.
In Zero, Science Journalist Charles Seife follows this innocent-looking number from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe, its rise and transcendence in the West, and its ever-present threat to modern physics. Here are the legendary thinkers—from Pythagoras to Newton to Heisenberg, from the Kabalists to today's astrophysicists—who have tried to understand it and whose clashes shook the foundations of philosophy, science, mathematics, and religion. Zero has pitted East against West and faith against reason, and its intransigence persists in the dark core of a black hole and the brilliant flash of the Big Bang. Today, zero lies at the heart of one of the biggest scientific controversies of all time: the quest for a theory of everything.




Review

A fascinating book for the non-mathematical minds like mine. I was mostly struck by the philosophical implications of the concept of zero. I would never have thought that a number could have had such impact on religion, politics and indeed our way of life. The main concept I came away with is that zero, the twin brother of infinity, was not recognized as suchin antiquity. In fact it was expressely rejected by most ancient civilizations, and remarkably so by Aristotle: his theory of a "prime mover" of a finite universe (God) was taken up for two millennia by priests of various religions and catholic popes. To reject Aristotle and accept Giordano Bruno (there may be, indeed, there probably are other worlds and the universe is not finite) was heretical: there was no need for a prime mover any more and, ...might there be other popes besides the one on earth? Giordano Bruno paid with his life for defending infinity and, therefore, zero.

We have obviously and luckily moved beyond that by now, but zero has not yet become a familiar concept for most of us. Most people, if asked, will start counting from 1, though 0 is the first number. Most celebrated the new millennium one year early, on 31 December 1999, because they were unaware that there was no year 0, but the 3rd millennium began on 1 january 2001. And 0 is placed after 9 in the keyboard of my computer, and not before 1, where it should be.

This is not a heavy math book, but a pleasure to read for the scientifically minded, especially if you have a propensity to look for the root causes of philosophy and politics.


08 March 2000

Book Review: Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, by John Gray, *****

Man and woman in a Sikh temple
Synopsis

A practical guide for improving communication within relationships, helping both sexes get what they want from love and friendship. The author encourages readers to accept the other gender's particular way of expressing love and helps men and women accept each other's emotional needs.

'A treasure', 'a bible' and 'an heirloom' are some of the words used to describe the book that has saved countless relationships and improved innumerable others. Now repackaged to relate to a new generation of readers, this phenomenal book continues to carry its legacy of understanding and trust into the world.

Since its first publication, over a staggering 15 million copies of MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS have sold globally to single men and women looking for guidance on how to find the perfect partner, married couples seeking to strengthen their bond, and divorcees hoping to fathom where it all went wrong. Gray's insights into how to allow your other half to "pull away" like an elastic band, prevent your emotional baggage from polluting your current relationship, and translate the phrases of the opposite sex are as relevant now as when they were first published.

With straightforward, honest writing from that precious male perspective, Gray unlocks the secrets hidden in your partner's words and actions to enable you both to reach true mutual understanding and a lifetime of love. Discover for yourself why thousands believe that MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS should be mandatory reading for everyone.


Review

This is one of the most important books I have ever read. It succintly puts together the reasons why men (all men) are different from women (all women); why this creates problems of communication in a couple; and what to do about it. I found it fascinating reading and illuminating for its insights. This is a summary table I have written based on the book. I think it summarizes the main thrust of the argument Gray makes and is spelled out  in the video by Paul Dewandre (in French) Les hommes viennent de Mars, les femmes de Vénus.


Man
Woman
values competence
values relationship
reasons in sequential mode
can do multi-tasking
wants to resolve a problem alone
wants to talk about a problem
is rational
is emotional
needs trust
needs attention
needs appreciation
needs understanding
is like a dolphin, wants a fish when he gets something done
is like a garden, wants to be mantained every day no matter what




For alternative arguments on the same topic, read my reviews of the books by Cordelia Fine and Allan and Barbara Pease

25 February 2000

Recensione: Lettera da Singapore, ovvero il Terzo Capitalismo, (1995) di Giuseppe Bonazzi. ****

Sinossi

Il libro nasce da un'esperienza personale dell'autore ed è strutturato in maniera inconsueta: a una prima parte scritta nella forma diaristica di lettere ad amici è consegnato il racconto emozionale, soggettivo dell'impatto tra l'autore, armato delle sue spesso inadeguate categorie "occidentali", e una realtà così contraddittoria, esotica e misteriosa.

Accanto a ciò, la riflessione propriamente teorica. "Unicum" politico, sociale, economico, Singapore è retta da una singolare forma di democrazia autoritaria, con il Presidente e "dittatore benevolo" Lee che gode di un consenso elettorale plebiscitario.

L'autore scorge in questo sistema una caso di "terzo capitalismo", non riconducibile né al liberismo classico né al capitalismo sociale.


Recensione

Bonazzi ci racconta il mese da lui passato a Singapore a fare ricerca sull'economia e la società di questo paese molto peculiare. Il libro è interessante perché oltre a raccontarci le sue esperienze dirette l'autore fornisce anche molte informazioni di tipo politico, economico e storico che aiutano a capire il contesto in cui lui si è mosso.

In particolare Bonazzi ci spiega come a Singapore si sia potuto sviluppare, con contraddizioni ma anche enormi successi, il "terzo capitalismo", una via alternativa sia al liberismo eccessivo sia alle socialdemocrazie dirigiste dell'Occidente.

Un ottimo libro da leggere prima di andare a Singapore, anche se l'esperienza dell'autore risale al 1995 molto di quanto scrive resta ancora valido a distanza di anni.