19 hours in flight

A search for randomness

At Heathrow Airport the police officers perform routine ‘random searches’ to prevent terrorist attacks. This ‘random’ search is basically a process where armed officers go around checking passports of non-whites. They looked at my documents too, and a smirk appeared on their lips when they found that I stay in the US. It was the same smirk many Londoners carry when they refer to USA or when their leading daily, ‘The Mirror’, comes out with an issue titled ‘How can 5 million people be so stupid?’ with a photo of Bush on the front cover. Obviously their sense of self-righteousness never allows them to remember that they were also equally stupid in electing Mr. Blair to office -the man who is often referred to as Bush’s pet dog by the US media. The verification process for my documents took some five minutes or so, and I realized that their so called ‘random’ search was based on a sort of a racial profiling in disguise. I do not mind even if these people were racist. Nor do I resent the fact that they wanted to see my passport; they actually helped me to kill five minutes of my six hour transit time, but what I do resent as a researcher is that they were using a sophisticated mathematical concept like ‘random’-ness so frivolously. I wanted to sit with them and teach them the probabilistic meaning of randomness but refrained from doing so as I feared an arrest.

The Qantas outside my window

As I sat at terminal 4, waiting for my next leg of a 10 hour flight to India, I watched the red and white Qantas Boeing Jumbo jet 747 standing outside the glass pane of the terminus. The jet stood proudly with ‘The spirit of Australia’ painted in black on the front part of the fuselage, just below the cockpit. The electronic display near the boarding gate informed that it was to fly from London to Australia via Singapore. Indeed this aircraft carried on its wings the onerous duty of keeping the island nation connected with the rest of the world. I sat watching it with admiration, exchanging silent glances with it. I had probably fallen in love with the plane. Yes, fallen in love with an inanimate object, and I will go on to say that it was perhaps the most purest form of love as it was most spontaneous and free from lust. I know that you are saying that I am weird, but I protest. I voluntarily distance myself from you all too humans. You, humans, try to define love in a very conservative way, and as a matter of fact you don’t even want to separate love from lust. And those who protest against it are branded by you all as weirdoes. It was perhaps those few hours of silent glances and a strange affection for that body of duralumin that made me a bit depressed when I heard the news that QF30 had suffered a minor accident on its way back from Melbourne to London. I hope that one day I will be able to get on board that flight and make a journey of a lifetime across the great oceans to the island continent.

Aubergine on British Airways

The British Airways is now serving pathetic aubergine curry and rice on its long distance flight to India!-what can be more fascinating than to have an allergic reaction and an itchy lip at thirty seven thousand feet above the sea level for some nine hours or so?!

I used to think that only food on domestic airlines sucked, but it turned out that food on British Airways flights between UK and India was even worse. To incease your exaspertation, you should contrast it with the food on the flight from US to UK, which is substantially better, and definitletymuch more edible. I guess that maybe the ‘first-world’ countries need to meet out different treatment when it comes to service on flights to ‘developing’ countries. Gate Gourmet, the official caterer for BA has angered me even in the past; the last time I cose BA in the fall of 2005, their workers went on an indefinite strike, forcing me to fly all the way from Calcutta to London on a breakfast of one samosa and a piece of sandwich. So my experience is that the food on British Airways is always substandard. They should start following the path laid out by their American counterparts where they literally serve peanuts on a 7 hour long flight from Philadelphia to Los Angeles.

Landing in Calcutta

The first thing you get to notice that the international terminal still doesn’t have the jet bridges to let people enter the airport premise directly from the aircraft. And the next thing I noticed was that my fellow traveler emerging out of the executive class of the BA flight was none other than Biman Bose, CPM leader party Secretary of West Bengal -a true patriot and the leader of the poor against Western imperialist powers, who divides his time wisely between denouncing the bourgeoise class and indulging in a little bit of luxury and a few yearly visits to the enemy lands.

Philadelphia diary, 4th July

Fireworks above Museum of Art, Independence Day celebrations, 10:30pm:



Some people have can't afford to take a break!
This is what I found outside my house at 11pm when I returned from the Fireworks show:
(Two cars were involved in an accident on one of the busiest roads and then the drivers started fighting)



The two things together make Philadelphia a proper city!

The burden of democracy

I have often wondered if democracy has ever been a very successful concept. Well it is certainly a great concept, much better than a totalitarian regime for sure, but my question is more about whether democracy has been able to evolve beyond simply enfranchising the masses to something closer to a system where an elected Government is really a Government "of the people, by the people, for the people". In addition we must not forget that this Government is also expected to be reasonable so that democracy does not lead to the "tyranny of the majority".

Aristotle's view of democracy was based on freedom and justice, which is reflected in his views:
"...one factor of liberty is to govern and be governed in turn; for the popular principle of justice is to have equality according to number, not worth, and if this is the principle of justice prevailing, the multitude must of necessity be sovereign and the decision of the majority must be final and must constitute justice, for they say that each of the citizens ought to have an equal share; so that it results that in democracies the poor are more powerful than the rich, because there are more of them and whatever is decided by the majority is sovereign."

Today different forms of democratic frameworks exist in many countries of the world, at least most pretend to have one in place. But have we fulfilled either of the major objectives of democracy? Have we been able to prevent "tyranny of the majority" or make the poor "more powerful than the rich"?

First of all my opinion is that in a democratic framework, "tyranny of the majority" is inevitable. In a democracy every party has a manifesto or ideals and priorities, and people expected to vote based on these issues. The minority by definition are those who did not agree with the ideals of the elected party, and therefore it is inevitable that the aspirations of the minorities will not be met.

Secondly we have not seen much instance of the 'poor' enjoying more power than the 'rich', even Communists also couldn't bring that to happen.

Thirdly I think democracy is a futile exercise unless people are able to make their choices judiciously, but for which they need to be educated and be substantially informed about the realities and be able to think through the possible consequences before making their choice. An average person is simply not capable of doing that; it has been proved time and again by the wrong choices that people have made, and sometimes they even make choices that go against their self interest without realizing it. In other words I do not think that a utopian concept like democracy can ever be in the safe hands of ignoramuses (which unfortunately includes not only a huge illiterate population but also many so-called educated ones). The problem with democracy is that we assume that all human beings are equal -an idea that sounds good but is simply untrue in real life- I will not talk much about that here. Human beings are never born equal in terms of their background, never get equal opportunities, and are never equal in their tastes, qualities, talents and merits. Therefore I opine that Democracy is a good, but a flawed concept and it is surely not a panacea for all social problems. Majority doesn't mean right necessarily, if we were to decide everything by some democratic methods then probably we would still be believing that the sun revolves around the earth.