The best columns of the year 2012

It is the time of the year to look back and take stock. And the best way to make an assesment of the time gone past is to make a list. During the past year I wrote over 120 columns and here is a list of my favourite columns. I also invite my readers to send in their views about these columns if they stuck in their memory for their wisdom, wit or innovation.

Here is my list for the year: The best 25 columns from which, with your help, we will select the ten best:

Vietnam today – some thoughts about its past and f...

"But the tears are extra.."

Whats it like being a baby?

Who do we listen to?

The ways of death

In the face of grief

In praise of sisters

When we are patients

The new loneliness

The secret of innovation

Things to do before you die

Is Happiness always good for you?

Down memory lane

A virus from hell

Creating your own luck

Light at the end of the tunnel

In the face of lies..

Life before screens

Wait or procrastinate

The joys of grandfatherhood

How to die- random musings

How to talk to babies

Living with uncertainty

Enjoying your second childhood

My editors and me

How children learn

One day I sat watching my littlle one year old grandson trying to put on his shoes. For him it was a major undertaking. First he tried the left shoe, then the right shoe. When that did not work he tried twisting his left foot into the shoe then the tried the right foot. But nothing worked. I thought he would turn to his father sitting beside him watching his efforts bemusedly. But no, he was going to do it on his own. There was a look of fierce determination ( that by itself was glorious) on his little face. He was going to get it right or perish in the attempt! Not really but he was really really determined.

It got me thinking about how children learn new things. According to the latest research, your child has been learning since before birth. It seems a child is born with an almost full complement of brain
cells - some 100 billion. However, these cells, called neurons, are not fully connected or necessarily used at birth. The main task of the brain in early childhood is for these neurons to forge connections. By age three, the brain has formed an estimated 1,000 trillion of these connections, called synapses. An individual cell may be connected to as many as 15,000 others. 

This tremendous growth is fueled by the child’s experiences, heredity, and maturation. The amount of
positive stimulation a child receives is directly related to the child’s behavioral and brain development. This positive stimulation includes responsive forms of play, affection, discovery, and language interactions. In situations where children are deprived of enough such early learning opportunities, brain and behavioral development slow or fail to progress in normal ways. Exactly what types and how much early stimulation young children need to promote “optimal” brain development is a topic of vigorous scientific inquiry. 

During the first 10 to 12 years of life, it is estimated that approximately half the synapses formed inearly
childhood will be shed or pruned. Most likely, the synapses that are used repeatedly are strengthened and are more likely to endure. Those used less often are more likely to be pruned or re-configured. By early adolescence, the number of synapses will have declined to about half the number of those in the three-year-old’s brain. A great deal of research is underway to understand these basic developmental processes and their practical significance.  What has been well documented for more than 30 years, however, is that the way in which the adult brain functions can be profoundly affected by early experiences. 

Recent research confirms that brains get “wired” in different ways to achieve
positive ends. But a brain is not a living “computer” waiting for the “software” of
experience. Evidence indicates that brains are as unique in their appearance and their
functioning as everything else about us. There are many compensatory and probably
idiosyncratic processes at work in the early years that contribute to each child’s brain
development.

Early brain development produces a large, complex brain by the age of three. A three-year-old’s brain is estimated to be 90 percent of the adult brain in terms of structure and function. Yet the brain’s development is far from complete. What children learn and do continues to affect the brain’s function and refinement. Such changes will continue throughout life into old age -something not fully appreciated until recently. The primary basis for this refinement appears to be experience and
active use of the brain. 

There are many different forms of learning. Learning includes a wide range of
human behavior characterized by the active process of acquiring new knowledge and
skills, as well as creating new connections among existing knowledge and skills.
Learning occurs in informal, everyday contexts as well as in structured learning
situations. It involves associations or relationships between and among elements.

Rather than give an overarching theory of how children learn, John Holt, the father of the modern home school movement, uses anecdotal observations that question assumptions about how children acquire knowledge and learning skills. First and foremost, Holt believes that children are born learners and that there is a curiosity in all children that begins at birth, not when they are put in school.  His observations of young children reveal that their brains are trying to make sense of the world. Children want to solve problems; they like to think.  The problem is that parents and educators get in the way of this natural process by placing children in large, impersonal schools, and by teaching a meaningless curriculum in an industrial factory setting. Holt rejects knowledge that is entirely taught in an abstract manner. He uses the example of teaching fractions as an anesthetic experience with little real world application.  Similarly, he is disgusted by children’s primers and picture books with their “dumb” and simple vocabularies.  Rather, Holt believes in exposing children to real world problems of increasing complexity.  For example, he encourages parents to expose their children to newspapers, letters, warranties, the yellow pages - anything tangible and visceral to promote their curiosity about the world. Holt maintains that the best results can be gained a student is given time to figure things out and to develop hunches that become more and more sophisticated with experience.  For Holt, there are no stupid mistakes as children develop their cognitive skills. The concept of self esteem is the second fundamental belief that Holt espouses.  Self confidence is the key to a child’s learning.  Overbearing teachers and parents, coercive educational institutions, the rote drudgery of learning and endless testing - all serve to create a sense of anxiety, of crushing curiosity, of making learning a painful rather than a natural and pleasurable act.  Over time students come to believe that they are failures.  Indeed, Holt asserts that stammering and stuttering are the consequences for some children of destroyed self esteem. Fear of failure, punishment and disgrace, along the with the anxiety of constant testing, severely reduces students’ ability to perceive and remember, and, thus, drive them away from learning.  Holt, with his trust children philosophy, believes, perhaps naively, that they have a strong sense of what is right and have an innate self correcting mechanism that will help them to (eventually) solve a problem.  Most instruction, especially reading, Holt argues, is self taught anyway, so why the need for overbearing teachers and parents?    Holt believes that learning can be pleasurable and that learning in the form of games can be the first step in having children embrace a lifetime of learning. What should parents do about brain development?  Mostly they should do what good parents have done for generations. Be sure your child is well cared for, well nourished, rested, happy, engaged, and allowed to play and learn with all the delight and energy of each stage of development.

Towards the end

As the year draws to an end,  thoughts often turn to our own end. Too often now the prospect of a new dawn fails to dispel the darkness of the past. These poems capture these emotions of conflict and loss perfectly.

First the deeply passionate lament for a love lost:

"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He (She) is Dead
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policeman wear black cotton gloves.

He (She) was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week, my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song:
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out everyone;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood
For nothing now can ever come to any good." 
(Funeral Blues by W. A. Auden)

Then an oddly comforting poem:

"Release me, let me go.
I have so Many things to see and do.
You mustn't tie your self to me with tears,
Be happy that we had so many years.

I gave you my love and you can only guess,
How much you gave me in happiness.
I thank you for the love you each have shown,
Buth now it's time I traveled on alone.

So grieve awhile for me, if grieve you must
then let your grief be comforted by trust.
It's only for awhile that we must part
So bless the memories whit’in your heart.

I won’t be far away, for life goes on,
So, if you need me, call and I will come.
Though you can't see or touch me, I'll be near,
and if you listen with your heart,
you'll hear all my love around you soft and clear.

And then, when you must come this way alone,

I'll greet you with a smile and say, welcome home."

(When I'm gone by Mary Alice Ramish)

And some reassuring words in this poem: 

"To laugh often and much;

to win the respect of the intelligent people

and the affection of children;

to earn the appreciation of honest critics

and endure the betrayal of false friends;

to appreciate beauty;

to find the best in others;

to leave the world a bit better

whether by a healthy child,

a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;

to know that one life has breathed easier

because you lived 

This is to have succeeded."

(To laugh often and much by Ralph Waldo Emerson).

And finally why all this is worth it in the end:

"If I can stop one Heart from breaking I shall not live in vain If I can ease one Life the Aching Or cool one Pain Or help one fainting Robin Unto his Nest again I shall not live in Vain." (I Shall Not Live In Vain by Emily Dickinson)

My editors and me

I have now written four books and survived the editors scissors. The fact is that despite the fond thanks in the acknowledgements of most books, the relationship of a writer to his editor is at best described as adversarial during the writing of the book. For editors are like that cold hearted sniper who finds any hair out of place to be unacceptable and is sharp eyed enough to spot even the minutest of details being out of place.

My relationship with my editor is even more complicated because my wife is my editor. And a colder more precise person as an editor you would have difficulty in meeting. During the writing of the book the state of affairs can at best be described as a state of cold war as writer Angela Scott points out.

But I love my editor, I do, I do.

The problem is that editors, as a whole (oh, yeah, I'm lumping them all in there together) really don't like much of anything. Okay, maybe that's not entirely true. I do believe they ALL love well written prose and perfectly manicured manuscripts--but come on! How many of those even exist? Seriously. That's just unrealistic and quite unfair to us little guys who THINK we're doing a pretty good job at this writing gig. But I guess that is the job of the editor--to hate (the whole bunch of haters). Oh, and editors love booze (yep, all of them. There I go again, lumping them together). So booze and perfectly manicured manuscripts. That's about it. 

For example she will take my detailed paragraph and witty words and chops them down into one or two sentences that say the exact same thing, but with less words. In the margins she will write WORDINESS. What the....? HELLO? I'm a author, I write with WORDS. Lots of them. I love words. I'm a lover not a hater. But editors? Nope, they're not lovers at all.I can't even imagine it being so (yuck).

So here is a list of things I find editors hate (what I've seen first hand and what I've been told): 

1) The word "I" in a first person POV story. Two many "I's" close together and WHACK! You will get your ego slapped. So how in the heck do you write in first person and not use I so much? Good question. Rule: try and make the object of the sentence the subject. This is what I've been told. I still don't execute it very well.

2) Narrative that breaks up action. They will delete it, toss it out, and then tell you to knock it off. 

3) Puppies. I'm pretty sure they hate all kinds of baby animals. 

4) Excessive use of dialogue tags, (said, asked, demanded, spoke, explained). They HATE those. So use them sparingly or your editor will grow horns and beat you with a pitchfork. No joke. 

5) State of being verbs, otherwise known as SOB verbs (makes me laugh every time I type SOB). SOB verbs like am, is, was, are--editors will kill you. Maybe not literally, but you will feel like you've died a little inside when they get through with you.

6) Show don't tell. That's a given. But sometimes, as a writer, it's hard to recognize when you're doing it. But boy...the angry eyes your editor will give you when you make the mistake of telling *shivers* 

7) Monotonous sentence structure. Whether it's long sentences or short sentences. They'll make you mix it up. They will chop and they will add (all suggestions, of course. But those suggestions will be AWESOME. Darn them). 

8) One editor I know foams at the mouth when you use the word "titter". So don't do that. Foaming at the mouth is a bad thing.  And forget using the word "suddenly." You will get a backhanded slap for that one (I never use that word because I'm not a fan of pain. I learned my lesson). 

9) Words. They hate words. "Simplify it stupid." Okay, they don't say that, but when you see how they took your mega long paragraph and shortened it into two sentences that pretty much said the same thing, it's what you'll be thinking. Editors are subtle that way.

10) "Blinking with her eyes" or "Pointed with her finger" or "Nodded with her head"  OHHHHHH, they HATE that! What else are they going to blink with, their ears? Editors think they're funny when they say this, but they're not. Editors aren't funny people. Not really. But they know how to make people cry really well. 
And did I forget unicorns. They hate unicorns. Or anything else magical for that matter. Of this, I'm pretty sure.

In all seriousness, though, I wouldn't give up ANY of my editors especially my wife. They may be haters, but I know it's all for my benefit. They might not like the way in which I wrote something, and they might not like my excessive use of words, but they LOVE me! Because they love me, they want me to present the best work I can so that I can succeed. THAT'S what a great editor does. 

My editors are truly amazing people, really they are. They sacrifice and work so hard on my behalf and for that I am ever so grateful. They help me to write in the way I had always hoped to write. I've learned more about the art of writing from them than from any teacher, professor, or writing instructor. And even though I'm a slow learner, they hang in there and encourage me onward. 

If you find the right editor, you will totally feel the same. I guarantee it. 

The story of the scorpion and the frog

This delightful little piece by Timothy Noah caught my eye as it so accurately portrays the political mess in the US today. Read it and weep or laugh- your choice.

"Republicans are Scorpions, Democrats are Frogs (and What this Means for the Fiscal Talks)

All you need to know about the current state of the fiscal cliff negotiations is that Republicans are scorpions and Democrats are frogs.

Do you know the story of the scorpion and the frog? A scorpion asks a frog if he can piggyback across a river. The frog says he’s afraid the scorpion will sting him. The scorpion points out that if he were to sting him then they both would drown. Persuaded, the frog invites the scorpion onto his back. When they’re halfway across the river the scorpion stings the frog. Gasping for breath, the frog says, “Why did you do that? Now we’ll both drown.” The scorpion replies, “I know. But I can’t help it. It’s my nature.”

The scorpion’s sting is, of course, the House GOP’s refusal to pass even House Speaker Boehner’s “Plan B” limiting the scheduled Jan. 1 tax increase to income above $1 million. This act of self-destruction invites a bigger tax increase. But Republicans just can’t help themselves. The House GOP's refusal also increased Obama’s leverage, because in Washington’s version of this fable, the frog (President Obama) shakes the scorpion off his back, swims to shore, and lives happily ever after. Only the scorpion drowns. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve observed that this is one lucky frog.

Sen. Joe Lieberman insists on sticking to the original version of the tale. If America goes over the fiscal cliff, Lieberman said Dec. 23 on CNN’s State of the Union,  “it will be the most colossal, consequential act of congressional irresponsibility in a long time, maybe ever in American history.” We all drown! But that isn’t true. It will merely be the most colossal, consequential act of Republican self-sabotage in a long time.

President Obama left Washington for his Christmas vacation in Hawaii urging congressional leaders to put together a stopgap deal blocking the Jan. 1 sequester (i.e., steep budget cuts), extending unemployment benefits, and allowing the scheduled Jan. 1 tax increase only on income above $250,000. That isn’t going to happen. We know it won’t happen because Boehner couldn’t get enough Republican votes behind his much more GOP-friendly Plan B, which did nothing about the budget cuts and unemployment benefits and allowed taxes to rise only on income above $1 million. Conceivably Boehner could try to put together a coalition of Democrats and Republicans to pass Plan B, but that would put his speakership (which is up for renewal in a couple of weeks) at serious risk. Also, what would be in that for the Democrats? Much better to wait till Jan. 1, when Democrats can dare Republicans to oppose what by then will be a tax cut for incomes below $250,000.

(Boehner may lose the speakership anyway, but that wouldn’t change the underlying dynamic of the negotiation. It might even improve it by freeing his successor to surrender more quickly because he or she lacks any taint from prior negotiations. The appropriate attitude about whether Boehner will get to remain as speaker, in case you’re wondering, is not to care. Say it with me: “I don’t care.”)

Congressional Republicans have to have known that they could cut a better deal on taxes before the Jan. 1 deadline than after. Certainly Grover Norquist knew, and encouraged them to vote for Plan B, even though it violated his silly “I’ll never vote for a tax increase ever, swear to God”pledge. But the Club For Growth, which carries a considerably bigger stick than Norquist’s Americans For Tax Reform, took a more literal view of the situation and forbade Republicans to support Plan B. The Club For Growth, and the Republican members of Congress who either agreed with it or were cowed by it, could not acknowledge that there were some circumstances under which voting for a tax increase would be the lesser of two evils, even if all you cared about was keeping taxes low. They couldn’t do that because it would be the thin edge of the wedge. Also, they just couldn’t bear to shatter the perfect record Republicans have pointlessly maintained for 22 years in never, ever supporting tax increases. (The Tea Party, which seems to feel the same way, is also urging Republicans to dive off the fiscal cliff, though the Tea Partiers’ self-destructiveness appears to be less self-aware.)

The same automaton-like behavior that kept House Republicans from supporting Plan B will compel them to vote for a tax cut after Jan. 1. It may not be Obama’s tax cut. It may not even be Obama’s ill-conceived compromise version of the tax cut, which raised the threshold to $400,000 and proposed Social Security benefit cuts at the very moment the president should have realized he was holding all the cards. But they’ll have to vote for some tax cut, and then it will be Obama’s job to wait them out until they vote again, this time for something more reasonable. I hope it’s Obama’s $250,000 threshold, but Obama may have blundered into accepting a threshold closer to $500,000.

The pressure on Republicans ought to be so great that Obama can simultaneously win extension of unemployment benefits and the payroll-tax cut and various low-income tax credits, including the Earned Income Tax Credit. I’m guessing he can also shoehorn some stimulus spending in there, and win at least a two-year postponement of the next debt-ceiling fight. Remember, the automatic income-tax increase won’t be Obama’s only leverage; Obama also will have leverage involving less-publicized increases in the capital gains tax and the inheritance tax, not to mention automatic cuts in defense spending.

As this interactive chart prepared by Time magazine’s Michael Crowley makes clear, Obama can put off most of the bad stuff through the month of January. In nearly every respect, the fiscal cliff poses no more of a threat than the Mayan apocalypse. The single exception is the stock market. It will almost certainly go bonkers. But even that will have a beneficial effect, because Republicans will take the blame for angering the gods of capitalism, and will have to work overtime to appease them. Here’s hoping Obama will have the fortitude to wait them out. (In addition to stock market turmoil, the president must steel himself to ignore pleas for surrenderfrom the Washington Post editorial page.)

Republicans’ vote against Plan B pretty much guaranteed they’d be cast as the bad guys, and may even have rescued Obama from his own premature concession. I know that sounds simplistic. But honest to God, sometimes life really can be this simple."

Why we wrap presents?

Tis the holiday season and so we are all covered up in wrapping paper. It seems no gift today comes without a colorful wrap around it. But where did this strange custom emanate from?

There is something quite trivial about wrapping paper. But we spend almost $2.6 billion annually on it ,as per one estimate. As much as half of the 85 million tons of paper products Americans consume each year, apparently, goes toward packaging, wrapping, and decorating objects. Wrapping paper and shopping bags on their own account for about 4 million tons of the trash created annually in the U.S. In Britain, per one estimate, people throw away 226,800 miles of wrapping paper over the holidays alone -- enough to stretch nine times around the world!

So wrapping paper is expensive. Wrapping paper is wasteful. Wrapping paper is, technically, impractical. That said, however, wrapping paper is also pretty awesome: It's pretty, it's arty, and it's one way, among others, to make even the most impersonal offerings -- gift cards, electronics, even (eeeek) cash -- seem meaningful. For better or for worse, there's just something about a big, red bow that captures your heart.

But where did the wrapping tradition come from? Why do we, each time we give a gift, ritually wrap that offering in decorative tree pulp? 

The short answer is that wrapping, as a practice, has been around for ages -- literally, ages. The Japanese furoshiki, the reusable wrapping cloth still in use today, is a pretty faithful rendition of the version that's been around since the Edo period. The Korean bojagi dates from the Three Kingdoms Period, possibly as early as the first century A.D. In the west, using paper as a covering for gifts has been a longstanding, if largely luxury-oriented, practice: Upper-class Victorians regularly used elaborately decorated paper -- along with ribbons and lace -- to conceal gifts. In the early 20th century, thick, unwieldy paper gave way to tissue (often colored in red, green, and white) that would similarly work to conceal offerings until they were opened. The practice was echoed in a slightly more practical form by stores, which would wrap customers' purchases in sturdy manila papers. (A note, printed in Hardware Dealers' Magazine in 1911, hints at the core pragmatism of this practice: "Whatever your business," it advises, "leave the freak wrapping papers to the other fellow and you will make friends for your store by this means.")

In 1917, however, in the United States, all that -- the tissue paper, the luxury paper, the "freak" paper -- changed. Decorative paper became democratized. According to Mental Floss, which knows of such things, that happened for the same reason so many innovations come about: by accident. The story goes thus: 

Two brothers ran a stationary store in Kansa. One year they ran into a problem during the 1917 holiday season: Business had been too good at their Kansas City, Mo., shop, and they’d run out of the white, red, and green tissue papers that were the era’s standard gift dressing. Poking around the shop, Rollie realized they still had a stack of fancy French paper meant for lining envelopes. On a lark, he placed the lining paper in a showcase and priced it at 10 cents a sheet. The paper sold out instantly. The next year, the Hall brothers pressed their luck, offering the fancy paper again during the holiday season. Again, it flew off shelves. By 1919, the brothers decided to print their own special paper for concealing presents, and the gift wrap business was born. Today, wrapping paper is a $3.2 billion industry, and you can buy it by the roll at any store. 

The brothers? Joyce and Rollie Hall. Their store? Hallmark. The industry ? Wrapping for gifts. The annual take over $ 2 billion!

Of course there will likely come a day, sometime in the not-too-distant future, when we will look back on wrapping paper with the kind of retrospective condescension we reserve for the most naive elements of our history. Wasting precious paper -- killing trees -- for decoration! Spending money on a total frivolity! How ridiculous people were back then!

An anti-depressant pill

All of us go through depression periods when things in the world seem all akilter, family affairs are in disarray and relationships seem to be fraying. That is the time most of us resort to anti depressant pills. 
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported that antidepressant use in the United States has increased nearly 400 percent in the last two decades, making antidepressants the most frequently used class of medications. 

And why has U.S. antidepressant use skyrocketed?  While nowhere in the CDC report is there any explanation for the 400 percent increase of antidepressant use from 1988 to 2008, however, there are several common explanations offered by mental health professionals and journalists. Money is a large factor. It has become more lucrative for psychiatrists and other physicians to prescribe medication than to provide talk therapy. Actually, most antidepressant prescriptions are written by physicians other than psychiatrists and, according to the recent CDC report, among Americans taking one antidepressant, less than one-third of them  have seen a mental health professional in the past year.  

Antidepressant use has also skyrocketed because of the increased practice of prescribing antidepressants for many conditions other than severe depression, and prescribing them for longer periods of time. According to antidepressant manufacturers, the increase in antidepressant use has been caused by their creation of more effective antidepressants. Of course the real reason may be  their greater publicity that stimulated public acceptance. 

One publicity coup commenced in 1997 when U.S. government agencies changed the rules for broadcast advertising, no longer requiring full information about side effects (which had previously made it problematic for drug companies to run a thirty-second spot). TV advertising dramatically increased patient requests for antidepressants from their physicians. A largely neglected explanation for the huge growth of antidepressant use is that Americans have increasingly been socialized to equate all states of demoralization and immobilizing despair with a medical condition, and to seek medical treatment rather than other remedies. 

Depression is highly associated with a variety of overwhelming pains, including physical pain, relationship pain (such as a dissatisfying marriage and social isolation), traumas. But depression is as much about feeling hopeless, alienated, isolated, and powerless. Everybody will remember that their demoralization and despair was “cured,” at least for a time, not by a pill or any other consumer product but by their own actions.  

But now I have one anti depressant pill that I have developed after much trial and error. It works for me all the time and the best part - it has no side effects at all.

I have organized a file of photos of my grandson at his naughtiest and cheekiest. And  whip it out at the first sight of depression and point my finger at random at one of the photos. One look and all tension drains away and life seems so much more cheerful. Try it. It will always work!

A tale of two cities

A Bombay based journalist vents his spleen at Delhi!

"Delhi is a vast medieval town of indisputable botanical beauty, spectacular red ruins, Sheila Dixit, and other charms. Its women, rumoured to be high maintenance as if there is another kind, take so much care of themselves that one would think the men are worth it (but they make a gesture that suggests puking when asked to confirm).

Space is not compressed here. Everything is far from everything else. There are real gardens where you do not see the exit when you stand at the entrance. It has sudden small parks that in Bombay would have been called, 'Chhatrapati Shivaji Mini Forest'. Homes have corridors, and they are called corridors, not half-bedrooms. Yet, Delhi has a bestial smallness of purpose.

Those men there who drive the long phallic cars, sometimes holding a beer bottle in one hand, there is something uncontrollable about them. Even for a man, it is hard to understand   their mutation. What is the swagger about? What is the great pride in driving your father's BMW, what is the glory in being a sperm? And what is the great achievement in stepping on the accelerator? It is merely automobile engineering—press harder on the pedal and the car will move faster. Why do you think a girl will mate with you for that?

 It is somehow natural that the contemporary version of Devdas, Anurag Kashyap's Dev D, would be set in Delhi, where a man can debase himself because life does not challenge him, he has no purpose, whose happiness is a type of sorrow. This motiveless Delhi male, you can argue, can be found in Bombay too, where not all BMWs are hard earned. But that's not very different from saying Bombay, too, has bungalows.

Like a rich man's son, Delhi is a beneficiary of undeserved privileges. That is at the heart of Bombay's contempt for Delhi. Bombay is a natural city, like all great port cities of the world. It was not created. It had to arrive at a particular moment in time, it was an inevitability caused by geography, shipping and shallow waters. Bombay eventually earned its right to be a financial force through the power of enterprise, which created a system that allowed, to some extent, anyone to stake a claim at wealth through hard work. That culture still exists. It is the very basis of Bombay. That is the whole point of Bombay.

But Delhi as a centre of power is an inheritance, a historical habit. An unbearable consequence of this is the proximity of easy funds for various alleged intellectual pursuits, which has enabled it to appropriate the status of intellectual centre. It is a scholarship city, a city of think tanks, of men who deal in discourse, debates and policies. And of fake serious women who wear the sari the other way and become leftists, nature lovers and diurnal feminists.

Delhi, often, confuses seriousness with intelligence and humour with flippancy. People will not be taken seriously here if they are not, well, serious. There is much weight attached to the imagined sophistication of talk, of gas. It is a city of talkers. There is always The Discussion. When you are in Delhi, you have to talk, and then they talk, and they appear to be solving an enigma, they seem headed towards achieving some revelation. But then, you realize, they were peeling an onion, an act that leads to more peels and at the heart of it all, there is nothing. Delhi is an onion. It is a void-delivery device.

Of course, all this is a generalization, but then generalization is a form of truth. One of the most repulsive images I bear in mind of Delhi is a scene in JNU, when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez delivered a special lecture. It was like a rock concert and Chavez, who is a scion of the same imbecilic philosophy that once destroyed the great economies of South America, was the star. As students pumped their hands in the air and cheered him for his anti-capitalist calling, I looked at their faces. I knew those faces. They were from homes that once profited from India's socialist corruption, and then from Manmohan's revolution. They were hip. They would, of course, later join MNCs and chuckle at their youthful romanticism. That moment in JNU was despicable because it captured a meaningless aspect of Delhi's fiery intellectuality, and also laid bare the crucial difference between intellectuality, which is borrowed conviction, and intelligence, which is creativity, innovation and original analysis.

It is for the same reason that the greatest misfortune of Indian journalism is that it is headquartered in Delhi. Needless to say, like in any other city, Delhi has astonishingly talented editors, journalists and writers, but there is a Delhi mental condition, which is incurable—a fake intensity, a fraudulent concern for 'issues', the grand stand. Readers, on the other hand, have many interests today apart from democracy, policies and the perpetual misery of the poor. But the Indian media, based in Delhi, refused to see it until recently and very grudgingly, when The Times of India proved it. It is not a coincidence that The Times Group, the most profitable media organization in India, is based in Bombay. It is not a coincidence that the game changer came from here. In Bombay it is hard to convert air from either side of your alimentary canal into cash. You have to do something here. You have to work. It is appropriate that the National School of Drama, with its phony distaste for money, is in Delhi. And commercial cinema is in Bombay.

It must be said though that in recent times Delhi has become somewhat more endearing. This is partly because of Bombay's own degradation and its loss of modernity, and partly because of a remarkable cultural irony. Bombay's films were increasingly becoming pointless because, like Delhi has those silver sperms in BMWs, Bombay's film industry, too, suffers the curse of the privileged lads whose fathers were something. As actors with no real talent they could still survive, but some who did not look so good could do nothing more than remaking movies about love and parental objection. Then two things happened. The flops of the brainless boys from the film families gave opportunities to talent that had arrived from all over the country, including what is called North India. They were waiting, and when they got a chance they created a new kind of commercial cinema in which Bombay was not necessarily the focus. That resulted in the startling revelation here that Bombay is a culturally impoverished, rootless setting compared to Delhi. What films like Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Dev D have achieved as hilarious, poignant and self deprecatory narrations of the North Indian way of life, has changed Hindi cinema, probably forever.

So Delhi is being seen a bit differently in Bombay, with some affection too. Though, the best thing about Delhi will always be its winter. When there is this mist. And you do not see its people." Whew !!

Why we laugh ?

It seems there is some science behind all jokes. Understanding why jokes are funny isn’t amusing in itself, just as the process of understanding why ice cream tastes good doesn’t produce pleasurable gustatory sensations. "The big problem with theories of humor is not that they are somber; it is that they are often implausible or myopic" writes Tim Lewens.

Surveys typically list three broad varieties of humor theory: superiority theories, release theories and incongruity-resolution theories. Superiority theories say that humor illustrates the inferiority in some respect of the joke’s butt, provoking laughter as a sort of small triumph in the superior witness. This works well in some cases, but struggles to account for “butt-less” humor such as puns, or the kinder forms of imitation. Release theories have a Freudian pedigree: humor provides a sort of relief from a build-up of nervous tension. Again, it is not clear that one can plausibly think of simple puns as having such therapeutic functions. Incongruity-resolution theories are more popular: they assert that humorous situations involve the presentation of an incongruity that is subsequently resolved. We find things funny when our expectations are overturned

Hurley, Dennett and Adams go some way to explain the importance of comic timing, and other aspects of delivery, to the quality of a joke. A talented performer can lead the audience down the wrong conceptual route via gesture, tone of voice and so forth. An incompetent raconteur instead gives the punchline away in delivery, and thereby ruins any chance for an expectation to be overturned later on, by discouraging the faulty expectation in the first place.

There are a lot of theories that try to explain why we find things funny. But like the blind man's description of the elephant, most of them are only partially right. In their recently published book Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind ,Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams Jr. — a cognitive scientist, a philosopher, and a psychologist — set out to discover a grand unified theory of humor. That theory would properly address questions such as: Why do only humans seem to have humor? Why do we communicate it with laughter? How can puns and knock-knock jokes be in the same category as comic insults? Why does timing matter in joke telling? And, of course, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing to be funny?

The researchers assert that humor serves an evolutionary purpose. In comprehending the world, we sometimes commit too soon to conclusions we've jumped to; the humor emotion, mirth, rewards us for figuring out where we've made such mistakes. In developing this view, the authors considered — but ultimately had to discard — some long-cherished theories. Here, they present five such hypotheses — plus the jokes that demonstrate that they don't hold water:

#1: The Superiority Theory

We learn a lot about humor on the playground, where taunts and teases produce laughter for the masses but shame and embarrassment for an unlucky few. Without a doubt, ridicule is one of humor's primary uses. Thomas Hobbes took this view very seriously when he suggested that laughter is a"sudden glory" we feel over the butt of a joke. 

Police were called to a day care, where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.

#2: The Incongruity and Incongruity-Resolution Theories

 People laugh at a situation not just because it's incongruous, but because they realize that the incongruity can be resolved or interpreted in a different way. This theory seems to make sense when you consider how a punch-line works: First, a joke sets up a situation; then, a cleverly constructed punch-line causes the listener to reconsider what he's just heard. 

A man at the dinner table dipped his hands in the mayonnaise and then ran them through his hair.When his neighbor looked astonished, the man apologized: "I'm so sorry. I thought it was spinach."

#3: The Benign Violation Theory

In the late '90s, a theorist named Thomas Veatch offered a model that is called the BenignViolation Theory. It helps take into account the deficiencies of theory #2, by claiming that we laugh when something is violated — like morals, social codes,linguistic norms, or personal dignity — but the violation isn't threatening.

"Donald Trump said that he was running for president as a Republican. That's funny,because I thought he was running as a joke." — Seth Meyers, WhiteHouse Correspondents' Dinner, April 2011

#4: The Mechanical Theory

Most comic characters depend for their laughs on enduring personality traits: Take Homer Simpson's inability to anticipate consequences — "Doh!" — or Austin Powers' single-mindedsex-drive.  If Kramer , Al Bundy , Dwight Schrute ,or Blanche Devereaux are getting a laugh, anyone familiar with these characters can guess the general reason why within three tries. Puns are easy examples:

"Email is the happy medium between male and female." — Douglas Hofstadter

#5: The Release Theory

Freud thought that hilarity and laughter were reactions we produce in order to release sexual or aggressive tension. The release, Freud said, would be triggered by the dramatic or surprising occurrence in the punch-line. But many dramatic surprises are not pleasant at all, and jokes that are neither aggressive nor sexual can work on us regardless of how tense we are.

"A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking." — Steven Wright

 So the next time you laugh, you will know why ?

Love of books

In the past few years, there has been a raging fight going on between those who love ebooks and others who relish the traditional paper books. The ebook proponents argue that its portability- you can actually carry a library of 5000 books on one of these tablets- sets it far apart as the device of choice. The traditional book lovers however argue that there is nothing to neat the crinkle of pages of a paper book. Indeed the smell of a new book is something to die for. But there is one thing the ebook cannot have and that is a visit to second hand bookshops in search for a book which then leads circuitously to a dozen others that you did not know even existed.

Theodore Dalrymple, in a lovely article writes of his sojourns in various second hand bookshops. "Birds of a feather flock together: and if birds could be tweedy rather than feathery, I would be of that genus or species." he writes , " With others of my ageing type, I assemble outside provincial book fairs waiting tremulously for them to open, as drinkers waited outside pubs in the days when they still had opening and closing hours. We all rush in, hopeful of finding something special and fearful that others will find it first. It isn’t only fish that get away.How many hours, among the happiest of my life, have I spent in the dusty, damp or dismal purlieus of second-hand bookshops, where mummified silverfish, faded pressed flowers and very occasionally love letters are to be found in books long undisturbed on their shelves. With what delight do I find the word ''scarce’’ pencilled in on the flyleaf by the bookseller, though the fact that the book has remained unsold for years, possibly decades, suggests that purchasers are scarcer still."

Alas, second-hand bookshops are closing daily, driven out of business by the combination of a general decline in reading, the internet and the charity shop. Booksellers tell us that 90 per cent of their overheads arise from their shops, and 90 per cent of their sales from the internet. Except for the true antiquarian dealers, whose customers are aficionados of the first state and the misprint on page 287, second-hand bookshops make less and less economic sense in the present day economy.

Second-hand booksellers are not in it for the money, of course: it is probably easier to make a good living on social security. The booksellers love books, though not necessarily their purchasers, and in their way are learned men. When they have been in the trade for many years they know everything about books except, possibly, their content. Possessed of astonishing memories, they say things like “I haven’t seen another copy since 1978”. Some of them seem destined to be mummified among their books like the silverfish, and probably cannot conceive of a better way to die.

Certainly, those of us who like ancient books on arcane subjects have noticed that many of our purchases emanate from institutions of learning. It makes no difference that Mrs Theobald Smedley-Wilkins left Lead Poisoning in the Later Roman Empire to an institution in perpetuity in memory of her late husband, Alderman Theobald Smedley-Wilkins. The librarian takes his revenge upon the now redundant work by stamping it sadistically with a large and ugly “withdrawn”, thus successfully reducing its resale value. This means that those of us who would like to leave books to public institutions as being exceptionally rare or even unique now think twice about doing so.

Customers of second-hand booksellers are in general a rum lot. What kind of person spends two-and-a-half hours in a shop and then havers indecisively over whether he really wants a copy of Augustine Birrell’s (unjustly) forgotten essays marked at £3? If he fails to buy it, he will regret it the moment the shop has closed or he can’t get back to it. If, on the other hand, he (and customers are almost always he) buys a book that his wife will find outrageously expensive by comparison, say, with a pair of shoes, or even a single shoe, he will ask the bookseller to rub out the price. All booksellers are so familiar with this pattern that they are ready with their rubbers even as their customers buy.

Browsing among the shelves is rewarding in a way that surfing the internet (the largest second-hand books website searches through 140 million volumes for sale, or says it does – I haven’t counted) can never be. Of course, if there is a particular book that you want urgently, the internet is a wonder: you type in the title, you pay by credit card, the book arrives the next day. There is no need any longer to resort to the bookfinder, that strange professional searcher after needles in haystacks, who guards his sources more jealously than any journalist and, I suspect, would not reveal them under torture.

But serendipity is the greatest pleasure of browsing, and there is no substitute for being able to hold the physical book in one’s hand. Among other things to be found in books are the markings of previous readers. When I first started buying antiquarian books I rejected those that had been marked, but now I find the markings sometimes more interesting than the books, and certainly revealing of the byways of human psychology.

There are, for example, those who seem to read hundreds of pages with the express purpose of finding the single spelling mistake or misprint contained in them and underlining it, putting a triumphant exclamation mark in the margin, as though finding the error established their intellectual superiority to the author. (Of course, they attribute all errors to the author and none to the printer.)

Then there are the underliners. The majority of these rarely get past the first chapter or two; some underline things so banal – Smith then went to London, for example, or The snow fell in flakes – that one wonders what kind of mind wants to commit such things to memory. Philosophy books of the Forties and Fifties, meanwhile, tend to smell strongly of tobacco.

The joy of finding something that one did not know existed, and that is deeply interesting or connected in a totally unexpected way with one’s intellectual interests of the moment, is one of the great serendipitous rewards of browsing, and one unknown to those who take a purely instrumental view of bookshops, leaving them the moment they discover that they do not have the very book that they want.

As for book aficionados, the strange thing is that one is guided by a kind of instinct to the right shelf and to strange book titles : for example a slim paperback entitled Making Sense of the NHS Complaints and Disciplinary Procedures – an illustration of an important literary principle, namely that there is no subject so boring that no one has written a book about it. This little book had so many bullet points that one felt one’s brain had been attacked by a Maxim gun; in the foreword, Sir Donald Irvine, erstwhile president of the General Medical Council, wrote the following one: “The early recognition of dysfunctional doctors, adequate public protection, and the chance of effective mediation before damage dependent on sound local self-regulation in which doctors know what their duties and responsibilities are, and how to make the system work.”

Why on earth did I hone in on this book, so dull and tedious? There was a slip of paper in the book. It was a review copy, and had been sent out by a medical publication to a doctor for review. The doctor in question was Dr Harold Shipman, and the book had obviously been read thoroughly. I bought it for £5, not as a memento but more as a reminder of the irony of human existence.