the ‘un’feeling

We live our lives in phases. At the end of each phase, we pack our bags, gather our memories and move on. Just like that.

So, this is my last week in college. 3 classes to go, 1 presentation, 2 exams. That’s it. The end of college, the end of student life for me. I’m moving on. And the gravity of it is not hitting me. There is no nostalgia, not yet anyway. I don’t feel a sense of discontinuity that the future promises to bring. The next few years are going to be radically different from the last 20. I know that, and yet, somewhere within, I can’t seem to acknowledge it. I guess it will come with time. Right now, I could equate myself with some cold-hearted soul who is ready to trash the last 3.5 years and never look back. It’s my last week in college and I don’t feel anything. 

I wonder sometimes if things could’ve been different. If I had studied in Delhi (paid 6000 Rs a year, oh my dear money), I would’ve graduated in July this year, and as my friend very aptly put it, escaped the whole damned recession. I’d probably have a job, people would’ve had lower expectations, and there would’ve been much less pressure. Well, who knows? I might just as well have hated my life. Anyway, this is not a time for cognitive dissonance. It’s a time for reminescence. The 3.5 years have done me good. I would do it over again, just for the people I’ve met, the friends I’ve found, the lessons I’ve learnt, the mistakes I’ve made. It still, however, feels like I’m not ready to reminisce just yet, ike it’s not all over yet, like there’s more to come.

Maybe tomorrow will feel differently and more human!

Wordle: Funky text designs

If you’re bored of monotonous looking text, or just plain bored, check out Wordle. You can write a bunch of text and it’ll convert the text to some funky patterns, with the words repeated more often appearing more prominent. I spent all of last night playing around with it! I’m considering using it for my presentations soon.

The good things in life.

Trilympics

20 kilometers in a day, 24 hours without sleep, for the cause that was Trilympics. It was a fund raiser-cum-awareness event for disabled athletes in Singapore, who are heading out soon to Beijing for the Olympics. In support of the cause, Trilympics aimed to get people to run / spin the distance equivalent to one round around the world within 24 hours. A distance of 40,000 km, from 1 pm on Saturday to 1 pm on Sunday. The turn-out was decent, and in total, we accumulated a distance of 36,000 km! I did my .06% by running (and partially walking) 20 km. It took close to 5.5 hours and I couldn’t do it again. Instead of sleeping away the Saturday night, we were out on the track at 5 in the morning. Insanity really. Even more insane was the number of people out there with us. Not just Trilympics volunteers and participants, but regular runners / joggers / walkers. People in the age range of 40 to 75! Old, stooping, frail. Yet motivated. I wonder how. I wonder why. At 5 in the morning? Every day? I don’t know whether to call it impressive, compulsive or just insane.

I do believe in the cause, I guess. But that’s not why I volunteered or participated. I did it to clear my 80 hour requirement at college, to serve the community. Noble and all, but to me it’s sillier than even all the other stuff they do. First up, the only reason behind community service should be self-satisfaction and the desire to help. Nobody that I know would volunteer for Trilympics out of pure choice. I didn’t. I don’t even deserve the 80 hours I clocked from it. Other than the running and some ushering (as an organization liaison officer!), I spent 3 hours playing cards at Coffee Bean and another few watching a movie. I think that’s the core of the problem with such requirements. It does not even close to motivate you to do something for the causes you believe in. If you really want people to contribute to the causes they believe in, you have to lead by example. It’s not the stuff that should be looked for in a resume. Or as part of your degree requirement. It’s what should stem from inside of you. It’s the stuff of all action and no talk. How much longer are we going to score in the name of those who really do suffer?

Ikea: no tax, no threat

Mostly, we know Ikea for its good-looking, value-for-money, comfortable furniture and housing appliances. And for the layout of its stores, where all its products are arranged such that you can picture how exactly they’d look in your own home. I’m definitely not the only one who’d go in there to pick up a table lamp and walk out with a big bag full of things I don’t quite need.

Recently, I read an article in the Economist about Ikea’s accounts. The Swedish company plays around the weak policies of the Dutch corporate-registration system and manages to legally evade the major part of its taxes. Not just that, it’s complicated ownership means it pretty much rids itself of any fear of a hostile takeover. There are several layers you need to uncover before you can really know who owns Ikea, here’s how.

As a company, Ikea is divided between the actual manufacturing company and its franchisee arm. The manufacturing / operations division is owned by a Dutch company, Ingka Holding. Ingka Holding is in turn, part of Stichting Ingka Foundation, which is registered as a not-for-profit foundation in Netherlands. Meaning? NO TAXES!!! The best part is yet to come. The Stichting Ingka Foundation is controlled by the Kamprad family, who are indeed the founders of Ikea! The tax exempted profits are therefore solely and wholly reaped by the Kamprads.

The franchising part of Ikea (its concept and trademark), however, are owned by a separate company called Inter Ikea Systems. This further belongs to Inter Ikea Holdings, registered in Luxemburg. The next few layers of Inter Ikea Holdings’ ownership are apparently very complicated, but it can ultimately be tracked down to being owned by a company with the same name in Netherlands. This Netherlands based company further belongs to some trust company, based in an island of the kingdom of Netherlands. Who owns this trust company is pretty much unknown, although the Kamprads are the most obvious suspects!

The franchising arm does pay its taxes in the figures of millions, but these are not half as much as the amount they’re exempted from. The non-profit Stichting Ingka Foundation defines its purpose as dedication to architectural and interior design innovation. While a substantial amount is invested in research and some of it donated, the major part still goes to the Kamprad pocket-deepening fund. In fact, according to The Economist, if Ikea was publicly listed, it would easily surpass The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as the world’s wealthiest charity!

And we thought that that Ikea pillow we sleep on every night has no dreams of its own.

Seriously, Mr Bush?

The blame game just resumed. George Bush and Condoleezza Rice issued a statement a couple of days ago, blaming the fueling food prices in the US on India and China! According to our dear geniuses, the Indian middle class is demanding better nutrition, which is driving the food prices up. Wicked, man! As though blaming India & China for global warming wasn’t enough.

So here’s what I found.

First up, world consumption statistics rank Westerners as the highest consumers of calorific content and nutrition, not Chinese, not Indians. Not just that, the US also ranks the highest in food wasting. Apparently, 40-50% of edible food, or $43 billion worth of food gets thrown away every year. In fact, Brit environmentalists have been campaigning that a reduction in such food wastage would also result in reduced harmful emissions responsible for all the climate change. And they say that the US went into the whole food crisis because of their sectoral shift to biofuel which used up 12% more food grains than 2007, reducing its agricultural production. There’s lots more scientific data to support all this and I found some here.

If you’re still thinking that the Indian middle class is suddenly eating too much, get a load of this. In a year, Indians consume an average of 178 kg of grain, compared to the 1046 kg consumed per capita in the US. In fact, this consumption has actually increased in the US, by 100 kg since 2003, and it has remained nearly static in India, despite its growing middle class. So it turns out, people have started eating more in the West. And it’s not just about grain, India definitely has a whole lot more vegetarians and pseudo-vegetarians, meaning much less meat-related consumption too. Times of India can give you many more stats too, here.

Well, aren’t you glad his term is finally coming to an end? I’d say there is one more place for him, on TV.

Are you smarter than a fifth grader?

Surnames, where do they come from?

Ever wonder what your surname means? Or where it comes from? Or which generation of your ancestors chose it? Or how?

I ran a quick search, and it seems that like most other things, the origin of family names varies with culture and geography. Their use started when people started finding it difficult to identify each other with their first names alone. Population growth you might call it. Most surnames were obviously chosen long long ago, close to the middle ages, but different societies still use them differently.

The Spanish for instance. Unlike most English societies, in Spain, every person has two family names, the first is paternal and the second, maternal. My Spanish professor, who is from Valencia in Spain, writes her name as Maria Jose Romero, or Marijo Romero for short. Upon marriage, Spanish people retain their own two family names, including the women. For women, the name however, may be linked to her husband’s surname using ‘de’. So if my Spanish prof were to marry, say Enrique Iglesias, she could be called Maria Jose de Iglesias – Maria Jose of Iglesias, to put it cheesily.

I also know that names work in a rather interesting way in Bali, this time, the first names. Balinese surnames originate from and reflect the heritage of the people or the clans which their ancestors belonged to. We worked on a advertising project for a Balinese guy called Wayan. From that we found out that every first child in a native Balinese family is called Wayan! Not just that, in a Balinese family, every fifth child’s first name is also Wayan. So considering the population of Bali to be over 3 million, you can just about imagine the number of Wayans in Bali. Whew!

In India, and I just found out, for north-Indian families, the surnames usually originated from occupations (Eg, Patel meant village headman), clan names or names of places. My own surname, Nath, has its origins in a Sanskrit word “natha” meaning lord. Apparently, it was used mostly as a compounded first name, from where it evolved into a surname. I can’t seem to trace its exact ancestry.

According to my friend from South India, surnames there generally don’t trace back to clans or occupations. They are mostly based on the ownership of people back in the day. Her surname, Vazhappily (pronounced somewhat like Varapily), partly means “Banana tree”, and a long-handed-down joke in her family traces this surname’s origin to the fact that their ancestors owned a sprawling estate of banana trees in Kerala. In fact, most Mallus (Malayam, the local language of Kerala and a local reference for the people) have surnames based on the location of their ancestral homes (Puram, a common part of Mallu surnames, for instance, means ‘On top’). People would often refer to others using the location or the kind of their house (on top of a hill / in a field, etc) and such reference gradually turned into identities. Anyway, because of the complexity in the pronunciation of their surnames, most south Indians prefer to use abbreviations / initials.

Sikh surnames are mostly guided by Sikhism, according to a scripture of which, all Sikh men must use ‘Singh’ in their name and all Sikh women must use ‘Kaur’. Singh is Punjabi (the local language of Punjab) for Lion while Kaur means Princess.

More interestingly, in Rwanda, Africa (of the Hotel Rwanda fame), surnames usually refer to God. I found some such ones on Wiki. The most commonly used surnames here are Hakizimana, meaning God cures, Nshimirimana, I thank God and Havyarimana/Habyarimana, God gives birth.

In Ethiopia, as Wiki also says, the surname given to a child is the father’s first name.

And in Tibet, a child is named by a Buddhist Lama. There are no family names, just two randomly chosen names. People in the same family usually have different second names! It is also common for them to change their first / second names midlife, if the name is believed to be an obstacle. How much choice!

Wow, I never thought there could be so much history and variation for choosing a name. Then again, a family name lives with you for a long long time, handed down over many many generations.

Throw your kid for good health

Yeah, you heard it right. Throw your baby fifty feet below onto a sheet / mattress so (s)he can have good health. Bizarre, I know. But it’s what they believe, and have been believing for over 50 years now in some remote village in India. The absurdity of it gained enough attention to feature it on BBC world news! Apparently, however, no kid has ever been hurt in this age-old practice. I saw the video too, and it looks as crazy as it sounds. The parents go to some rooftop and chuck the kid down, 50 feet in the air to where a whole bunch of people are standing, holding a white sheet. Of course, there are a bunch of surprised, horrified on-lookers. Obviously something that weird must attract attention. I wonder how the parents are brave enough to do it though. They believe it makes their kid brave. Really? Probably I guess. If a ten year old kid is told he fell fifty feet and survived without a scratch, he’ll most likely think he’s invincible, hence the bravery. But seriously, FIFTY feet and a little baby?