Story of the day: on voting and democracy

From my favorite newspaper in India:

It was a rare moment for Chief Election Commissioner Navin Chawla who met independent India’s first voter at remote Kalpa village in tribal Kinnaur district of Himachal Pradesh on Saturday.

Ninety-three-year-old Shyam Saran was the first to cast his vote in independent India’s maiden election on October 23, 1951 as the exercise was held in Kinnaur, which remains snowbound in winter, ahead of other places in the country.

Mr. Chawla spent some time with Mr. Saran and discussed the arrangements for the election then and now.

Academics gone, .. .but sports saved!

It is amazing how tolerant we are of a system that continues to make atrocious decisions.  No, I do not mean any particular university system--it is all pervasive ...

I read this about CalState at Bakersfield, which is from where I moved to Oregon.

CSUB students, faculty sad to hear of temporary cuts to some graduate programs

That news was in the local newspaper, and to get more details I checked with the university's website.
And in the home page, the news is this item "Sports Saved!"--thanks to fundraising.

Meanwhile, there is major realignment in the Pac-10, Big-10 and other NCAA leagues, and it is all because of money--this exchange between NPR host Bob Siegel, and Dan Wetzel explains it succinctly:

SIEGEL: Why? What's driving these universities to go into these conferences?
Mr. WETZEL: Well, with college athletics, you know one thing: It's not academics, it's all money. And increasingly, athletic budgets have soared and schools are desperate to try to balance their books.
Currently, one of the really two ways to make money is television contracts. So what you're seeing are schools herding together in bigger and bigger groups to try to attract the most money possible.
SIEGEL: So who stands to win in all this and who might be the losers?
Mr. WETZEL: The people who win are the athletic directors, the college football coaches who get million-dollar salaries. It's about money. It's where is the money going. They're not paying the players. It's going to someone, and it's really going to a small group of people.

Even though this money aspect is all well known, we are supposed to pretend that it is all about amateurism.  I mean, that is exactly what the NCAA said in explaining why it was punishing USC's athletics.

Finally, here in my hometown, while, as previously noted, universities are hiking up their tuition, the gazillion dollar Nike's chief, Phil Knight, donates even more to athletics .... how much did he give recently, you ask?
It is not only how much for athletics, but the manner in which it will be done:

Knight is making yet another extraordinary gift to the UO: a 100,000-square-foot addition to the Casanova and Moshofsky centers and a new field, stands and scoreboard for soccer and lacrosse. The new building would include space for a UO Football Hall of Fame and Museum, covered parking for 300 cars, surface parking for 75 cars, a 20,000-square-foot weight room and space for ticket offices and the Duck Shop. If past is prologue, no corners will be cut when it comes to design, materials and furnishings.

The gift comes with extraordinary terms. As with the stunning new John E. Jaqua Center for Student Athletes, the university will grant a license to Phit LLC, a private group financed by Knight. The license will allow Phit to lease the property and build the projects to its specifications, and give them to the UO upon completion.

The arrangement makes it a private construction job, not subject to the usual bidding requirements for state projects, though prevailing wage rules will apply. The dollar value of the gift will not be disclosed, and the UO will be obliged to maintain the facilities and staff them with a half-dozen full-time positions. It’s an arrangement that is unique to facilities donated by Knight — unique not only at the UO, but nationwide.

The higher education board approved the project with no dissenting votes, through four of 12 members abstained. “This is an act of astonishing generosity,” Lariviere said. “And instead of celebrating that generosity, we’re analyzing it to a level of scrutiny one doesn’t expect for something such as this.”

Oh, wait, UO's president also had the following to say:

In an earlier meeting with Register-Guard editors, Lariviere said he’s “bumfuzzled” by skeptical questions about Knight’s gifts. “Do I wish he’d show the same level of support for Sanskrit? Sure,” the president said of his own academic specialty. “Am I surprised that a man who made his fortune by building the biggest sports equipment company in the world is interested in athletics? Not really.”

Lariviere would be serving the UO poorly by showing anything other than unqualified gratitude for Knight’s gifts.

Blame the system.  We can't do any damn thing.
BTW, I liked one comment I recall reading somewhere: If ever University of Oregon were to play Oklahoma State University, we ought to bill that game after their respective benefactors, Phil Knight and Boone Pickens :)

Environmental impacts ... birds and wind turbines

In my intro class, I routinely remind students that every economic activity has its own set of environmental impacts, and that there are no technical answers to those challenges--as in technical answers for zero impacts.  Which is why then we resolve those trade-offs in the political domain.  I am not sure whether all the students understand this, but I know that some really do.
The video here is an example of one such impact:

Now, compare this with the other kind of impact on birds--the BP gusher in the Gulf Of Mexico

Which trade-off do you prefer?  Quite a Morton's Fork, right?

Tuition increases in universities, while worry elsewhere is about deflation?

Hmmm ... something does not make sense ...
The Oregon University System approved the new tuition rate structures for the institutions that it oversees:

Including all credit hours, the campuses’ averages for tuition increases overall are 6.2%, with individual campus overall increases at the following: Eastern Oregon University = 2.6%; Oregon Institute of Technology = 6.2%; Oregon State University = 6.0%; OSU-Cascades Campus (Bend) = 6.2%; Portland State University = 6.0%; Southern Oregon University = 5.2%; University of Oregon = 6.0%; and Western Oregon University = 5.2% for non-Promise program students, and 8.8% for new cohort Promise students (students who have a guaranteed, stable tuition rate for 4 years while at WOU). More detail of nonresident and graduate program tuition and fees and room and board rates are available at: http://www.ous.edu/state_board/meeting/dockets/ddoc100604-FB.pdf .

And the inflation rate? Nation-wide, according to the May press release from the BLS:

Over the last 12 months, the index increased 2.2 percent before seasonal adjustment.

And, get this, the US and the world is increasingly worried not about price increases, but about deflation.  Because, deflation is not easy to deal with--just ask the Japanese ...

Anyway, even the least increase at EOU is greater than the national inflation rate.  But, EOU is an outlier in the data, which is otherwise in the 5 and 6 percent categories.  Really?  The cost of providing higher education has gone up that much more compared to everything else?
Well, I understand that the increase in tuition is mostly to offset the decrease in state allocation, and not entirely because the total cost of providing the service has gone up.  But,
a. I wish the universities would make clear what that total cost is, and how much is being supported by taxpayers, and
b. More so because that total is not made clear, students and their families will know only how much they have to pay, which then will make it seem like tuition increases far outpace inflation.

(Note: the chart on the left is about overall national data)

More intriguing?  That attending WOU is more expensive than going to OSU or PSU, which are two of the research universities in the system: WOU is far more expensive than the other two teaching universities--EOU and SOU.  Wouldn't the normal taxpayer expectation be that a teaching university would be less expensive than a research university?

Oh boy! More data then to confirm my worries that cost control in higher education is not unlike cost issues in the other often talked about topic--health care.

"Are you journalists, or are you rushing a sorority?"

First, over to Glenn Greenwald, who is mighty pissed off at the cozy relationship between journalists and those in power (in the context of this SuperSoaker party!!!):

 The issue is the relationship between the press corps and political power which these events reveal (here's an example of the type of event the Bush White House would hold and the controversy created).  Along those lines, The Washington Post's Dana Milbank has a surprisingly decent column about Helen Thomas in which he writes:  

Yet the White House press corps will be diminished without Helen front and center, and not only because she was in that job before the current president was born. She brought a ferocity to her questioning that has eluded too many in subsequent generations. At a time when others were getting cozy with sources, her crabby, unrelenting hostility was refreshing. . . . Now that Helen is gone, there's more need than ever for others in the briefing room to share her opinion -- specifically, the opinion that anybody standing on that podium should be regarded with skepticism.

Her career-ending comments to the side, we need far more Helen Thomases in the press room and far fewer giggly, star-struck servants who are so grateful and honored to participate in circle squirts with White House officials and not even embarrassed to admit it.

 Ahem, the Jon Stewart commentary on this is darn good ...

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Word of the day? "Freegan"

I had no idea about the word "freegan" until I read this piece in the NY Times Magazine:

Freeganism is a bubbling stew of various ideologies, drawing on elements of communism, radical environmentalism, a zealous do-it-yourself work ethic and an old-fashioned frugality of the sock-darning sort. Freegans are not revolutionaries. Rather, they aim to challenge the status quo by their lifestyle choices. Above all, freegans are dedicated to salvaging what others waste and — when possible — living without the use of currency.

Hmmm ....

Eventually, Kit and I arrived at the house that he’d picked out for himself. It was a tall, narrow structure, with boarded-up windows and a front lawn in desperate need of mowing. There was no “for sale” sign, but that hardly mattered, because Kit simply planned to move in. Buffalo is fertile ground for squatting. Kit’s house was one of 10,000 such abandoned structures in the city. As far as Kit was concerned, this rust-belt city, hit hard by foreclosures, was a veritable Eden for freegans.
“People throw away houses,” he told me. “It’s ridiculous.”
As it turns out, a group of Kit’s friends have enjoyed great success as squatters in this same neighborhood. In 2005, they took over a palatial old home, and this was where Kit was temporarily living when we met. The property is a sprawling turn-of-the-century mansion with six fireplaces, a cavernous dining room, a library, several enormous bedrooms, servants’ quarters and an in-ground swimming pool. The place, it must be said, is in serious disrepair.

Wait a sec; using somebody else's property without .... And there is a probation system (what? no tenure system?!!!)

Most visitors are welcome to stay at the mansion for a day or two, but to stay longer, they have to help fix the place up. There is a “probationary period,” one longtime resident explained, in which newcomers must “bottom line” a project — that is, they must see it to completion. During my visit, the veterans were considering the candidacy of a young woman who’d bottom-lined a few projects. Her chances looked good. “She showed me a bunch of tricks on filling and masonry and how to best use Spackle so that you don’t waste it,” one veteran told me.

Like many, this too is a re-telling of history:

Freeganism is often described as a recent phenomenon, but its premises date back at least to Gerrard Winstanley, a 17th-century English cloth seller. In the 1640s, Winstanley’s business failed, and he resettled in the Surrey countryside, where he herded cattle. These were tough times in England, marked by violence, famine and low wages. Winstanley decided that the solution was to form a community without money. The poor would till the soil and fill communal warehouses with their crops, which would be distributed to all. Winstanley, who abhorred waste, eventually took over some uncultivated public lands along with his followers and founded what was known as a Digger colony.

There is always something crazy going on :) ht
BTW, I am reminded of this piece that I wrote sometime ago ...

Can't take my eyes off you :(

More here from the National Geographic

Karen Carpenter sings Abba's "Thank you for the music"

As much as I love the Carpenters' music, and Karen Carpenter's voice, I prefer Abba's original ... But, damn that anorexia :(

The most expensive "futbol" commercial ever

The end of men?

While having "the end of .." in the title is a great selling strategy, I am not sure that such prognostications stand the test of time; right, Professor Fukuyama? :)
But, that aside, this essay in the Atlantic raises a number of issues that I have often brought to my students' attention--BTW, most of the students are female--and have also blogged about here.

What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men? For a long time, evolutionary psychologists have claimed that we are all imprinted with adaptive imperatives from a distant past: men are faster and stronger and hardwired to fight for scarce resources, and that shows up now as a drive to win on Wall Street; women are programmed to find good providers and to care for their offspring, and that is manifested in more- nurturing and more-flexible behavior, ordaining them to domesticity. This kind of thinking frames our sense of the natural order. But what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?

As I have even mentioned in this blog quite a few times, my reality from the time I was growing up was one in which I didn't know that men were "supposed" to be the dominant gender.  (I prefer "gender" to "sex" ... pedantic, I suppose!)  I think the biggest reason for this was Indira Gandhi.  Ever since I knew how to say "prime minister", well, it was Indira Gandhi.  Then the 1971 war with Pakistan when I was a kid and people--politicians and regulars alike--were comparing her with Durga and Kali.  One politico went as far as to rephrase the famous Louis XIV statement when he said "India is Indira, and Indira is India"

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The trend that I see as an educator is all the more about female students simply kicking butt.  In my second year at WOU, one fantastic female student, who later went on to a prestigious law school, commented that she didn't have a boyfriend because up and down the Valley she hadn't run into any guy who could stand up to her intellect!!!
Anyway, read this from that same Atlantic essay:

Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs. The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions. Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women. Indeed, the U.S. economy is in some ways becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill.
The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true. Women in poor parts of India are learning English faster than men to meet the demands of new global call centers. Women own more than 40 percent of private businesses in China, where a red Ferrari is the new status symbol for female entrepreneurs.

The Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin aspects of the last campaign, and their continuing presence on national and international politics, is all the more the beginning of a trend of women showing up in places where they were previously not allowed.  Good for 'em, and us, I say!  I am guessing that the coming decade will be the decade of women in American politics--it will be transformational.  (Even though I don't care much for Meg Whitman's politics, and even though I am not a California resident, I am cheering her on because I am convinced she will be way better than Jerry Brown, who is trying to relive the past.  It is that kind of transformation I am looking for)

I still stand by my semi-serious joke that once scientists figure out how to make easy the biological reproduction without the sperm from men, well, that will be truly the end of men ... And that day of reproduction will come sooner than we think.

Donate to clean up in the Gulf

Thank You, South Carolina, Helen Thomas :)

Boy, the world of politics keeps on giving ... and Jon Stewart and his team are in heaven, I assume ... and, ... I can't stop hysterically laughing :)

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When temples outnumber schools and hospitals ...

The constant presence of religion--mostly Hinduism--kind of freaks me out when I visit India.  But, because I do not want to stir serious debates on such a sensitive issue for a short duration that I am typically there ....
"mum is the word" as Jack Tripper once put in Three's Company!

I am not sure whether the rapidly growing India's middle class ever pauses to think about this, for instance:

India now has 2.5 million places of worship, but only 1.5 million schools and barely seventy-five thousand hospitals. Pilgrimages now account for more than 50 percent of all package tours, while the bigger pilgrimage sites now vie with the Taj Mahal for the title of most visited in the country: the Balaji Temple in Tirupati had 23 million visitors last year, while 17.25 million trekked to the mountain shrine of the goddess Vaishno Devi, one of India’s holiest sites. Such is the appetite for rituals by this newly religious middle class that there has recently been a severe shortfall in English- and Sanskrit-speaking priests with the qualifications to perform Vedic rituals. When it comes to religion in the new India, demand has completely outstripped supply.

More about religion in India, and in Pakistan too, here in an essay by William Dalrymple, who is the author of Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India 

The "Gulf"s in American politics

In India, when people refer to "the Gulf", it is the Persian Gulf they have in mind.  Because of the hundreds of thousands of Indians who work in the countries by that Gulf--with the exception of Iran. 
Now, with the BP oil gusher, here in the US when we say "the Gulf" we are, of course, referring to the Gulf of Mexico.
I told my freshman class, as the catastrophe started unfolding, that 30 years ago our attention was on the Persian Gulf, and now it is on the Gulf of Mexico.  And that it is only a matter of time before we are, once again, fixated on the Persian Gulf. 

There’s quite a story in the non-story at the spelling bee

(For The Register-Guard, Appeared in print: Tuesday, Jun 8, 2010)

It is almost a non-story anymore when an Indian- American kid wins the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Last Friday, for the third year in a row and the eighth time in the past 12 years, an Indian-American student won it all. This year’s champion, Anamika Veeramani, won after out-dueling another Indian-American, Shantanu Srivatsa.

The linkage between the spelling bee and Indian- Americans started back in 1985 when Balu Natarajan won the event. That “kid” is now Dr. Natarajan, a physician with a specialty in sports medicine, who notes on his Web site that “winning the ‘bee’ was definitely an important experience,” and adds that he is more proud of being a good doctor and the work he does with his patients.

Given Natarajan’s profession, and the career choices of quite of a few other past winners, it is not a surprise that this year’s champion also plans to go into medicine. Anamika wants to be a cardiovascular surgeon.

It is far more intriguing that these champion spellers do not seem to be keen on careers in English literature. It is not that these contestants lack an interest in literature, either — one, who is not even a teenager yet, lists “Gone With the Wind” as a favorite book.

Despite the rather jaded reaction to yet another Indian- American winning the bee, the champion’s first and last names caught my attention. There was a fantastic message in her first name being Anamika, a Sanskrit name that literally translates to “without a name.” Like “anonymous.”

One might wonder then why parents would name a child “anonymous.” Well, it’s because there is a much more profound and philosophical meaning behind that name. “Anamika” means that there are not enough words to describe the value, beauty and importance — the equivalent in English is when we say something like “there are no words to describe it.”

Thus, it is quite a linguistic irony that the Spelling Bee recognizes kids who are talented with words, while this year’s winner has a name that means there aren’t enough words to describe her preciousness!

The champion’s last name, Veeramani, suggested an origin in Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India. Tamil Nadu, or the “land of the Tamils,” is where most of India’s Tamil-speaking population is concentrated. A significant minority of neighboring Sri Lanka’s population is also Tamil.

Having been raised a Tamil, with immediate and extended families still living in Tamil Nadu, I naturally was curious about Anamika’s parents. I even checked with my father to find out whether we might know them, and was a tad disappointed at being unable to bridge the degrees of separation. But that’s understandable, given that there are an estimated 75 million Tamils worldwide.

Anamika’s parents’ names turn out to be equally cinematic of sorts. The father’s name is Alagaiya and the mother is Malar. In the Tamil language, “malar,” as a noun, means a flower. The same word also can be used as a verb to mean “to bloom.” The father’s name is derived from a Tamil word for beauty — “Alagu.”

Typically it is only in fictional worlds that someone named “flower” would marry one named “beauty” and then together they would have a child named “anonymous,” who would go on to win a championship that is all about words. Real life, yet again, is more exciting and dramatic than fiction.

The Indian-American dimension of the spelling bee is as much a story of immigration to the United States as it is a reflection of a common heritage of having been British colonies, which is the reason English is the lingua franca. America and India were once a part of the British Empire, where the sun never set.

One particular connection is quite poignant. Lord Cornwallis, who was the governor-general of British India from 1786 to 1793, previously had served the crown as an army officer during the American War of Independence. It is strange that after surrendering to George Washington and returning to England with Benedict Arnold, Cornwallis was rewarded with a powerful and influential posting in India.

To paraphrase Paul Harvey, now you know “the rest of the story” behind the non-story of yet another Indian-American winning the spelling bee.

Score this for the mashed potatoes :)

The economic value (?) of a college degree

A long time ago, back in graduate school, Martin Krieger remarked that often in the public policy arena, it is not what you say, but who says it.  It made a damn fine impression on me :)
So, when I write about public policy issues, well, nobody listens ... if the same point is made by, ... oh crap, here is the deal: at least two of my op-eds on the diminishing value of college degree have made it to print, and have generated discussions.  But, I am not the only one.  Here is an excerpt from this piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The standard argument is that “college graduates are more productive persons, and the income differential associated with four year degrees has risen over time.” That argument’s validity is increasingly questionable, again I think a consequence of college degrees losing their distinctiveness. ...

We are engaging in massive credential inflation. Whereas in 1940 it was perfectly respectable for persons with less than a high school education to deliver the mail and unknown for college graduates to do the same, by 2010 almost all mail carriers had a least a high school education and probably close to one in five has a four year degree (we are awaiting the 2010 Census data for the exact figure). Moreover, as more go to college, standards inevitably suffer, as the results of the National Literacy Survey conducted roughly decennially indicate.

We are spending ever larger amounts of money as a nation trying to demonstrate that we are good, bright, disciplined, and hard working -- qualities traditionally associated with college graduation. The costs are becoming so large that entrepreneurs and others may look for alternative ways of certifying competence and skills.

I have pretty much the same things in the latest op-ed here, and in this op-ed, and in a number of blog posts.  Listen up, people! :)

Now, I do want to reiterate that I am not arguing in favor of gutting liberal education and the liberal arts.  I am a huge fan of it. I have made it a conscious decision to be in the very profession--after ditching electrical engineering!  But, we ought to recognize what we are doing, admit that we are already in a crisis, and begin to work towards a better future for the young and the talented. 
BTW, I wish David Brooks had done a better job at defending the liberal arts than the one he has--he is way more capable than this ... maybe he is wondering why Krugman is on vacation in Europe, while he is still toiling away :)

What was Helen Thomas thinking? :(

It sounded way too unreal to listen to the news report on NPR ... but then to watch her say those things on YouTube makes it surreal ... I mean, coming from Helen Thomas????

Jack Shafer noted in this piece from 2003, which Slate has "recycled" for the occasion, that when she questioned President Bush about the Iraq War, for instance:

As the child of Lebanese immigrants, Thomas knows exactly which religious button she's pushing when she repeatedly condemns Bush's plans for war on Iraq as a "crusade."

It will bizarre for anybody to say what Thomas said.  Even more for a seasoned White House corresponded to say that.  And it gets infinitely complicated against her own Lebanese background ...

If I had a vote in this election in China ...

Watch the videos and you too will wish you had a vote.  See how many times you catch yourself smiling, or tearing up ...
This is Part 1 ... you need to watch this first to understand the rest ...

Having a tough time with these images from the Gulf :(

It is simply awful ... more here

On literature: how universities kill them?

After a long, long time, last summer I picked up a full-length fiction piece to read.  I mean, I read short stories all the time.  But, it had been years since I read one that is a lengthy tale.  I re-read Gabriel Garcia Maquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.  I got way more from it this second time.  Then, I was back to short stories.  Over the spring break, it was a potboiler of sorts--Sacred Games.  I am now on to a third in a year: Zadie Smith's White Teeth...

Whether in the short or long form, well told stories typically are more than the simple story itself.  They help me (us?) understand the world, and somehow make order of the chaos that is outside.  As I have noted before, I found so much of valuable insights into what it means to be human from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Dickens, Narayan, Saroyan, Maugham, ...

But, as I have often remarked in this blog, the academic departments in universities present such a distorted approach to literature that I am, in more ways than one, glad that I never read in a classroom context any of the great works that I admire.
So, back to the book that I am reading, and its author ... The talented and accomplished Zadie Smith says:

I spent three years in college and wrote three and a half stories but I read everything I could get my hands on. White Teeth is really the product of that time; it's like the regurgitation of the kind of beautiful, antiquated, left-side-of-the-brain liberal arts education which is dying a death even as I write this. Generally, an English Lit degree trains you to be a useless member of the modern world

Yes, a "useless member of the modern world" ... boy, these writers have such a wonderful way with words :)  And, yes, I criticize universities for what we do now because I value liberal education way too much, and perhaps idealize it a tad ... oh well ....

The day after tomorrow ... are we ready?

First, an excerpt:

Has the contribution of the modern world of finance to economic growth become so critical as to support remuneration to its participants beyond any earlier experience and expectations? Does the past profitability of and the value added by the financial industry really now justify profits amounting to as much as 35 to 40 percent of all profits by all US corporations? Can the truly enormous rise in the use of derivatives, complicated options, and highly structured financial instruments really have made a parallel contribution to economic efficiency? If so, does analysis of economic growth and productivity over the past decade or so indicate visible acceleration of growth or benefits flowing down to the average American worker who even before the crisis had enjoyed no increase in real income?

Reading this, you might think that I excerpted it from an essay in The Nation ... Well, it is not.  It is from Paul Volcker's piece in the NY Review of Books.
Rightly, Volcker reminds us about the crisis that is more than merely about banking and finance:

We are not a small country highly vulnerable to speculative attack. In an uncertain world, our currency and credit are well established. But there are serious questions, most immediately about the sustainability of our commitment to growing entitlement programs. Looking only a little further ahead, there are even larger questions of critical importance for those of less advanced age than I. The need to achieve a consensus for effective action against global warming, for energy independence, and for protecting the environment is not going to go away. Are we really prepared to meet those problems, and the related fiscal implications? If not, today’s concerns may soon become tomorrow’s existential crises.

Why the interest in Tina (Munim) Ambani?

Every time I look at the data on visitors to this blog, it turns out that my post on Tina Ambani (Tina Munim) is the most visited page, as I have noted once before.  What is the deal?  Why are so many people interested in that?  And, why do they come to my page for info on Tina Munim?
Of course, the web traffic data says that they reached the page by searching for it, and overwhelmingly it was a Google search.  The top five countries from where this search was done--from where I got these visitors--are:

India, US, UK, Canada, UAE.

The traffic data for India and the US are not significantly different.  The visitors from Canada + UAE exceed those from India ...
Here is Tina Munim (with Rishi Kapoor) in Karz


Btw, you folks reading this, will you throw me some details on how you ended up here ... about your interest in Tina Munim?  Am just damn curious :)

Cartoon of the day: D-Day