Sifting through old papers, I ended up riffling through my thesis. Back to front. Perhaps I wanted to know how the story ended. Or perhaps in its opacity - 18 years down the road - it seems to be written in a truly foreign language, like Persian. Whatever the reason, when further paper shuffling - avoiding work is an avocation - yielded the following poem by Nissim Ezekiel, I had to laugh. It was just too appropriate to the laboriousness of my own forays in writing. (I am on week 3 stuck in a supposedly straightforward technical report...)

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* The post title is the headline of a September 1988 article in India Today about college slang. Ulti, here a contraction of ultimate, carries a double meaning. The identically spelled Hindi word means upside down.

My non-agenda for this blog, I told myself, was to write about whatever interested me. And, like most people, I have convinced myself of my impressively wide range of interests. Imagine my surprise then, when I looked at the "word cloud" generated by the ultra-cool web site Wordle. Click on it to see the full-size picture:


I'm political! Who knew!!

Professionally, 2008 was indeterminate. Muddy. My experience starting a new venture is hard to compare with others’, especially given the amorphousness of consulting. But I confess that the ghosts of (regular) paychecks past have visited me more than once. I described the ups and downs of being self-employed to a childhood friend. Tridib put my ambivalence in stark relief by recalling our shared petite bourgeoisie upbringing in India. “Let’s face it,” he said, “you are basically a government servant type, as am I.” Ah, the bracing bluntness of old friends. Nevertheless, I remain determined to fight the entrepreneurial fight!

On the personal front, 2008 has been a year of highs. Chief among them was the opportunity to deepen and broaden my flying logbook. I flew two near-transcontinental trips – from California to Duluth, MN, thence to Springfield, IL and back, and a few weeks later, from California to Appleton, WI and back for that incomparable fly-in, Airventure. Each trip consumed an entire day, with actual flying time being in the 10+ hour range. The autopilot engaged and the plane purring contentedly, the long flight legs provided a great opportunity to observe and reflect.

Flying, as has been oft-observed, is humanity’s second-oldest collective dream, up there with immortality. To be above it all, to “slip the surly bonds of earth”, is divine sensation indeed. But flying is only partly sensual or spiritual. What it provides is a rarity in our circumscribed modern existence: a truly existential experience. No other enterprise places one so actively in the moment: existence precedes essence. The pilot’s actions determine the lived reality.

This connection is far more visceral than people who only fly commercial realize. In the few moments of take-off in a small place, you feel the earth’s slipping grasp as you as you escape her embrace. Within a few minutes, you feel her below you change from protective habitation to an incomprehensibly alien desolation wilderness.

And then, there is the magical experience of being in charge. A trained private pilot, in a well-maintained aircraft, is unambiguously in command. Not the air traffic controller. Not his boss or boss’s boss. Not even – for once – his wife! Before the flight, he decides on the route and stops. During the flight, he decides how to address the vicissitudes of weather and circumstance. After the flight, he decides what he takes from that particular flight by how he analyzes and logs it. Very little in life is so purpose-driven.

After all that analysis though, I return to the notion that the attraction of flight is elemental. Purely child’s play. The Kiwi poet Allen Curnow expresses it beautifully in A Time of Day:

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A small charge for admission. Believers only.
Who present their tickets where a five-
barred farm gate grapes on its chain

and will file on to the thinly grassed paddock.
Out of the afternoon pearl-dipped light the
dung-green biplane descended

and will return later, and later, late as
already it is. We are all born
of cloud again, in a caul

of linen lashed to the air-frame of the age
smelling of the scorched raw castor oil
nine whirling cylinders pelt

up-country-smelling senses with, narcotic
joyrides, these helmeted barnstormers
heavier scented than hay,

harnesses, horsepiss, fleeces, phosphates and milk
under the fingernails. I’m pulling at
my father’s hand Would the little

boy for selling the tickets? One helmet smiles
bending over yes, please let me,
my father hesitates, I

pull and I don’t let go.

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Happy 2009!

I have been following the 2008 US electoral cycle with keen interest, chortling pleasure, and an occasional prickling of concern.

Interest, because the world is clearly at an inflection point - the old order changeth, giving way to the new, etc. How Americans choose to deal with the changing reality is reflected in their political choices. And who is elected to lead America will undoubtedly have a major impact on history.

Pleasure, or more accurately - schadenfreude - because while presidential politics is the highest stakes game there is, its principals are so nakedly trying to learn as they go along, slipping and sliding to political perdition along the way. Not just John "My Friends" McCain, but also Carly "Not Qualified to Run HP" Fiorina, Jeremiah "My Kingdom for a Mic" Wright, the "monstrous" Samantha Powers, the ever-hapless Tucker Bounds, and many more.

And finally, concern, because if these "leaders" don't know what they are doing, who does? I feel a bit like Sherman McCoy in Bonfire of the Vanities:


But the most interesting phenomenon has bloomed following the Sarah Palin selection as McCain's running mate. This breathtakingly stupid decision has split right-leaning opinionators into two stark camps: those trying to deal with it analytically, and those attempting to trans-subtantiate a lipsticked pig into a silk purse.

David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and a few other pundits are currently marvelous exemplars in a slow-mo "five stages of grief" type of enlightenment. (David Frum is the only pundit who instantly recognized the light at the end of the Rupublican Convention as that of a freight train.) These folks started off rah-rah-ing Palin. Since then, they've been talking themselves and their readers back off the ledge.

(Parenthetically, it's hard enough being a journalist and committing your judgments to forever-Googleable bits. Add to that the pressure of having to opine in real-time, on television and blogs, and you have a logorrheic masochist's dream profession.)

Others - sad to say they're the majority - doggedly continue to ascribe the relentlessly unfolding messiness of the Palin selection on the ever-convenient "liberal media". (Parenthetically, it remains surprisingly common for American commentators, even many who have traveled the world and theoretically gained perspective on the domestic US scene, to fail to understand the fundamental conservativeness of mainstream American media.) My Facebook friend and Forbes Online editor Rich Karlgaard is in the latter camp. Rich has even resorted to selectively quoting from the firebrand narcissist Camille Paglia's Salon column on Palin's supposed ur-feminism to bolster his repeated contention that Palin is a "good thing" for McCain and (scarily) for the country.

Until recently, I would have rolled my eyes at attempts to square the circle by an otherwise intelligent man. But I was reminded of something another lifelong Republican friend (the improbably named Pierre Redmond) once told me - "Sanjay, to do anything meaningful you have to pick a team. You can't go through life evaluating everything everytime." (That's a rough paraphrase.) I believe that a misplaced "team affiliation" lies at the root of the wilful-seeming analytical blindness displayed by Palin-boosters.

To begin with, you pick a team - in Rich's case "free-market conservativism" - that has an internally consistent analytical framework. Should the framework be resilient enough, it allows you to build on previous analysis without having to revert to first principles. That is all to the good. But what happens when your team decides to change games? Alert observes figure this out quickly. It's not difficult. But what is difficult is deciding what to do next. Should you switch teams? Should you attempt to influence your team to reset the game? I figure that the more closely you emphasize with your team's "brand", the easier it is to go along with the new game. And it's human nature to rely on brands rather than the reality behind them.

Breaking with one's team is wrenching at best, unthinkable for most. It isn't having to reexamine ideological underpinnings that's the worst. It's the Solomonic cleaving of social assumptions - old friends who now disapprove of your views, your freakish and presumptive new fellow travelers, etc. - that present the greatest disruption risk. Only the boldest, the true free-thinkers, are thus capable.

I've long found there to be a structural inverse correlation between free thought and modern conservatism. The finest counter-example to that notion was William F Buckley Jr. I've also been impressed by Andrew Sullivan, a prolific blogger at The Atlantic, even though his book The Conservative Soul: How we Lost it, How to Get it Back, is ultimately unpersuasive in its attempt to redirect the current of American conservatism.

Today I read a remarkable article by Wick Allison, the former editor of National Review (another WFB connection!) titled A Conservative for Obama. Its defense of conservatism and its rationale for a break with the Bush-McCain brand is remarkably cogent. (Its dour description of liberalism, not so much. But that's a quibble.) Here's Allison's core argument for ditching his team:

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

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Wick Allison now joins my (very short but growing) list informally titled "a thinking-man's conservatives".