The Guardian describes the

The Guardian describes the Arab-Israeli conflict with a Flash slide show. Perhaps an oversimplification of the region's troubles, but not a bad way to explain the events that led to the creation of Israel and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

When you know you

When you know you need to be more active: I was sitting here in my new office, editing, reading, thinking -- when the lights suddenly shut off. At first, I thought someone was playing a joke on me, but there was no one else near the office. No, the lights had gone off because the motion sensor hadn't detected any activity in over ten minutes.

Such is the sedentary life I lead.

Too funny: "Giving new

Too funny: "Giving new meaning to the term high tech, a couple of stoners have turned an old Macintosh into a bong." No wonder people like Macs.

The Unix whoami utility

The Unix whoami utility is strangely reassuring. Sometimes I find myself typing it in even if there's no reason for my username to have changed. It's just nice to know that I'm still myself, that's all.

% whoami
aasarava

% whoareyou
who do you think I am, kid? i'm the freakin' computer. now quit being so damn faux intellectual and get back to work.

According to some official

According to some official estimates, 415 people are dead after five days of religious rioting in India. But Indian officials are often known to underestimate death tolls. The Indian Congress thinks the total number is actually much higher, perhaps over 800.

The Associated Press writes: In Ahmedabad, charred bodies lay in the streets amid piles of burned clothes, home furnishings and vehicles. My aunt’s family lives in Ahmedabad, a city that is still recovering from last year’s 7.9 magnitude earthquake. When I last visited them I was a child, and Ahmedabad was like any other Indian city to me—dusty, hot, streets full of rickshaws and beggars, paan walas and stray dogs. One morning, a funeral procession passed by the house. Stoic mourners surrounded a body shrouded in white. I had a fever at the time and could not keep any food down for days.

The Press Trust of India reports that a mob has set fire to huts in Surat. Like Ahmedabad, the Surat of my memory is small. In reality, it is a large port town and a center of the diamond trade. Someone in my family had a diamond shop there, where the kids would go to watch the little stones get cut and ground. But that memory is fading.

Until recently, Surat was one of the dirtiest cities in the country. That part I remember clearly. In 1994, nearly 500,000 people fled in panic after an outbreak of the bubonic plague.

My grandparents lived in Surat, although, for most of the time that I spent with them, I did not know them as my grandparents. I still have guilt over this. Each time I went to visit, I realized that I had lost more nouns, verbs, prepositions—I was losing the language due to misuse, to neglect. By the time I was old enough to reverse the loss, I was a teenager and would not see past my own brooding. My grandfather didn't care about all this, or was careful to never let me know that it bothered him. In the sickening humidity of July in India, he continued to sneak down to the corner vendor to buy me cold Limca and Gold Spot long after my superstitious relatives banned cold drinks.

When I finally understood the importance of things like history, it was late. My grandmother had already passed away, her body shrouded in white and cremated. My grandfather had begun to talk to people who were not there. Or maybe he spoke to himself, trying to command his old body through all the right steps and down the alleys to the old house where he took me to meet relatives I didn't know I had. Maybe he felt sorry, like I did, for the way distance and silence had eroded our ability to speak to one another in a common language, and so was trying out phrase after phrase in his mouth until he found one we both understood.

One morning, back in the States, I received a phone call at college and learned that my grandfather had died. He had spent his final days in a Surat hospital, sick with malaria. He had lived through a lot of pain in his lifetime, had lost a lot: his wife, his son, my mother. That’s the thing I never could accept about India: it’s too easy to die there. It’s a country where malaria kills people, where the plague still exists, where hundreds at a time are killed in train wrecks, thousands in earthquakes, and perhaps 800 in a clash over the site of an unbuilt temple. It’s a place of suffering that brings added suffering upon itself. No wonder that officials regularly underestimate death tolls. It's too painful to do otherwise.

March 4th. Rioting continues.