B-Log

The academia around is keen to make some fast bucks on the flourishing seminar industry. More and more colleges are jumping into small scale industry called running national and international seminar because it is seen as an easy way to raise fund for the college. Not many questions are raised by the participants who either are mere participants or are contributing papers to be read in the seminar. End of a seminar, the balance sheet looks pretty promising and in the rush to reap the monetary gain principles and ethics are thrown to winds.   National and international seminars are being organized in the country more often than not with financial assistance from the University Grants Commission (UGC). UGC often provides decent financial support for the organizing colleges and departments to run the show. It also promotes fund raising by the college through registration fee from the participants. But what is happening in the guise of the seminars and conferences is...

Figurative language does not just add colour, it is an important tool in aiding comprehension. A simile or a metaphor makes the comprehension pretty easy, by switching on the neural paths of comprehension. They can also help us build our knowledge by connecting the unknown to the known. Since majority of the common similes or metaphors are part of the collective (linguistic) wisdom, it is a shared playing ground.  When a figure employed in a specific context to help illustrate a meaning is culled out of the situation and is allowed to roam free, the effect could be strange and unedifying.  A curious case in point which played around in the media recently and is just fading out is the case of the head of CBI. In the course of a media panel discussion, he was commenting about legalizing betting. He asserted that betting need to be legalized. If there are no existing laws pertaining to the same, it is necessary to take up measures to have legal checks in place. We...

A fan is admirer gone overboard. Drugged with an excessive sense of the real, a fan misplaces her hero. The actual turns into fabulous. The fabulous is deified into icon. In the process, the fan is uprooted from the terrains of normalcy. She trades the axis of the earth for the spine of the hero-ine. When the bloated ego of the fan's body grows big enough to eclipse the life around, 'fanism' is complete. Pivoted  to one sole direction, a fan is a phoney phenomenon.   Enjoyment is a requisite for an action, any action. When an individual performs an act, without being fully there, sans real involvement, the performance lacks merit. Some kind of a rupture happens between the doer and the done. Even for the one who watches from outside, the put on side of the act shows. When this is applied to sports, the sporting act raises interesting feels in us. A player begins to play enjoying the game. As he/ she begins to gain further skills and finesse in the art, playi...

Tendulkar will take his final bow when the test which gets underway today between India and West Indies is done. If I state that I will miss him a lot, that won't make me exceptional in any sense. If my sorrow won't automatically elevate me to exception, it's because Sachin fan club is cosmic in proportion and a lone ordinary mortal won't count for much there, unless you happen to be a Mathew Hayden or a Lara or Bradman. Or   a Ramachandra Guha or a Nirmal Shekhar. Even the easily nameable list of illustrious big ones states the story of the fan club membership. If Sachin helped us proudly identity ourselves with our country, when the nation was dragging its belly through a quagmire of mediocrity, it indeed was some kind of a relief. There could be arguments of the Gamicider side of cricket and of pseudo- self-belief it provided to Indians, drugging them off the harder realities. Let’s leave that behind for a while. If cricket can be discredited as a g...