'People-work'

I sang Rudolf with 7 yr old Lola this Christmas Eve.  She knew the song, and i have a hunch, she knew the meaning, and the many meanings.  As she sang she kept looking at her brightly lit christmas tree in her cozy living room, maybe trying to fathom what the excluded Rudolf may have felt till Santa came to its rescue! Her dad looked on with pride an d sang along in reindeer tune ;-)

Dr Binayak Sen in police custody  Suddenly the word 'draconian' has come alive for me. Dictionary meaning 'of or relating to Draco, 7th-century Athenian statesman and lawmaker, or his code of laws, which prescribed  death  for almost every offence'.  Dr Binayak Sen meets Draco, in 21st century India. Are they discussing judicial reform? Does a bad judgement have no other reprimand than a better judgement on appeal in a higher court? In every job there are rewards and punishments, but seems like judges are beyond this framework!  A bad pilot can kill people and gets punished for it. A bad engineer can kill people and can be punished for it.  An incompetent judge (the competence of a judge includes his/her capaicty to maintain integrity) can kill people, can kill hope, can kill sanity, can kill justice, can kill dignity, can kill faith in human compassion, can kill the fundamental premise of democracy, can in fact waste everyone's time wit...

Dear friends, now Vienna is done and dusted. At the blog  http:// ippfaids2010.blogspot.com/2010/ 07/ time-to-pull-plug-on-internatio nal-aids.html?spref=fb My dear friend and mentor Kevin Osborne says 'whisper it, its time to pull the plug off the international conferences' - please read it when you have the time. Its a voice of reason and experience c oming from deep within the vicinity of the epdemic just as much as the voices of those who have returned from the conference, some with an extended holiday thrown in thereafter to recover from the fatigue.  Its likely that the next 'bigger spectacle' will be held (in Delhi?) with complete aplomb as though none of these comments ever traversed the HIV world's cacophony. But its time to stop repeating the conferences that have long ceased to yield in proportion to the spend. Anyone monitoring the 'returns on investements'? Anyone taking stock of whether these dollars can be better invested? I a...

Its the story of 4 people who got together and did what people do when they truly 'get together' - they transform, they surmount, they deepen the depths and they find without setting out to discover, they sway dangerously knowing there is somewhere to lean and they risk for magic, they make reaching somehwere seem like a waste of time coz they constantly kick up their goalposts, they remain manic and mysterious till they come together and feed off each other's hungry creative souls and finally, together, they make sterling music.  I watched this documentary film last week at the premeir of its theater release. Its a rare one, not to be missed, by those who like music and films and those who want to watch a slice of contempoary indian life. This documnetary is showing in theaters in several cities in India and in New York.  Watch whether or not you know Indian Ocean or their music; coz you will most certainly find yrself and yr yearnings in the film; watch the film c...