Some links

Old Cambridge Days by Leonard Roth, via a comment in The Wranglers.
Miracles from medical research Lessons from an Unexpected Life:A doctor, a patient, and a formerly fatal disease by David G. Nathan via 3quarksdaily

Puddle-Muddle of multilinguals: Amitava Kumar reviews Amit Chaudhuri's "The Immortals"; link in The Artist As Part-Genius Part-Householder. This leads to other articles:Amit Chaudhri's review of A.K. Ramanujam's Poems The twin-lobed brahmin with this comment:
"...the creative life of the modern Indian English poet or writer arises from his or her multilingual consciousness, and depends upon traffic, or commerce, between the official and the vernacular tongues."
and to a previous post Puddle-Muddle of Amitava Kumar, commenting on Mukul Kesavan's article Do anglophones paddle in the shadows?.
It may be interesting to recall Vikram Chandra's comment in the famous article The Cult of Authenticity:

"I will not presume to claim Maharashtra or even the entire city of Bombay as my region. I will only claim part of the western suburbs, let us say north from the highway junction at Mahim causeway, roughly an area containing Dharavi, Bandra West, Khar, Santa Cruz, Juhu, Andheri West, and Goregaon West. This is my region. I live in it, in the locality of Andheri, in the colony called Lokhandwalla.

My region is a hugely cosmopolitan place. Every single person who lives in my region is a cosmopolitan. I am of course a cosmopolitan; I travel away from my region every few months to make a living. My neighbors do also. There are the Gujarati diamond merchants who spend three weeks out of every four travelling from Africa to Belgium to Holland; flight attendants who fly to Beijing; businessmen who sell textiles in Australia; mechanics and welders and engineers who keep Saudi Arabia running; merchant navy sailors who carry cargo to Brazil; nurses who give care and nurture in Sharjah; and gangsters who shuttle between Bombay and Indonesia and Dubai as part of their everyday trade. But there are many other cosmopolitans in my regions. I mean the men who have left their homes in Muzzafarnagar and Patna to drive cabs in Bombay; the chauffeurs who send money home to Trivandrum; the road-laborers from Madhya Pradesh; the maids from the Konkan coast; the cooks from Sylhet in Bangladesh; the Tamil bakers; the struggling actresses from Ludhiana; the security guards from Bihar; the painters from Nashik who stand on roped lengths of bamboo three hundred feet in the air to color Bombay’s lofty skylines. They are all cosmopolitan. A woman born and bred in Dharavi, in the heart of the city, is a cosmopolitan because she lives and works in this city of many nationalities and languages, this city that has become a vatan or homeland for people who have travelled very far from their vatans.

Now, in this, my region, it is very very common for a person to speak one language at home, use another on the street, do business in a third, and make love in a fourth."

Change in Kashmir?

From Hindu temple, Muslim priests:
“We have guarded this place for the Hindus. It is their “amanat”. But now the situation has improved. We want that a Hindu priest should take over this holy place. Being Muslims, we tried to do whatever best we could to keep the temple functional, but it should ideally be run by a Hindu priest”.

David Warsh on Mark Thoma

From The Perpendicular:
"Traditional journalists sometimes assert that blogs are about opinion and interpretation rather than fact and reporting, when the truth is that a great deal of new and ultimately reliable material first appears on blogs.

Therein lies the significance of Thoma’s blog – and other sites like it, including those of Romenesko and David Johnson, the man behind the Russia List. The proprietors of each are essentially editors. They hue as best they understand it to the perpendicular. They seek to see whole the debate they cover, to present its raw files fairly to readers, to occupy the center ground and treat all comers fairly. They function more like referees on a stylized battlefield than (as Robert Wright distinguishes among bloggers) disc jockeys or musicians. It is no accident that in each of these cases the blogger’s ego is almost totally subordinated to the task, that the proprietors work long hours for little or nothing.
......
But demand for unifying narrative remains strong, at every level, including the version that newspapers traditionally have supplied. This itch for reading on the same page must begin to be satisfied, inevitably, with just the sort of daily record that Thoma and others of his ilk compile from all that fevered discourse in the public square."

Interesting site

I enjoy music but my knowledge of music is confined to a few film songs (mostly Telugu, Hindi) and what I pick up from YouTube. One of my favourites is Laphak Japhak from Boot Polish. I was amazed to find this discussion inspired by that song The 'semblance' of râga, rasa, and hâsya (links to the song and many more links).

Writing a book!

For a long time, I wanted to write a book for beginners on Algebraic Topology, which was my first love in things academic. Now that I have retired for a few years, it seems to be good time to recall the elementary and nice topics which I still remember and indicate the flavour of the topics that fascinated me. It is coming back and apart from visualization of things in the small, what I still like is the power of general nonsense (my term for abstract thinking). But writing is a pain, too much latex symbols, diagrams going back and forth, changing the earlier chapters when progressing with the later chapters. It seems that it be a quite a mess. Once completed, it will be available online to see whether it will be useful to some. My experience with Rahul Banerjee's "Recovering the Lost Tongue: The Saga of Environmental Struggles in Central India" was that it was easier to read the published book than the online material. May be, it will be different with mathematics.

Quote of the day

From Marry for What? Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India by Abhjit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Maitreesh Ghatak, Jean Lafortune:
"So the institution that the economic forces are not able to destroy may be endangered by love"

Mindhacks recommends

a few science articles from Newsweek in A neurobiology of the disordered mind: . The articles Beyond the Book of Life on epigenetics and A Biology of Mind by Eric Kandel are very readable as well as the Mindhacks article itself with links to some of the concepts used.

The Age investigations on foreign students in Australia

From Foreign student death details suppressed:
"DETAILS of the deaths of more than 50 overseas students have been suppressed by Australian coroners amid evidence the death toll is higher than the Federal Government has admitted.

State and territory coroners, under the National Coroners Information System, have refused an application by The Age for data on the deaths of overseas students in the year to November 2008.
.....
A leading expert on international education, Monash University business professor Chris Nyland, said he was concerned that a drive to protect Australia's lucrative $15.5 billion higher education export market was masking the suffering of foreign students.

"All countries that compete for the education market should be reporting that information," he said. "And … it would be wonderful if we had good data saying that it was not the case they are harmed at any greater rate than domestic students."

Professor Nyland said there was a need for a federal advisory body on student safety, made up of independent members free from "vested interests in seeing this thing dampened down and going away quietly". He called for mandatory statistical reporting of international student deaths.

National Union of Students president David Barrow said the Government faced losing billions in revenue if it failed to protect overseas students. "The time has come for a full-scale inquiry," he said. "Australian society and government needs to see all the facts."

Currently, if an overseas student dies here, the education provider is not required to give a cause of death when it reports the matter to the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. Under the law, a college needs to report a death within a fortnight of early "termination" of studies. But it is left up to the college how thoroughly it reacts.

A spokeswoman for Education Minister Julia Gillard said the law would be reviewed this year and next.

Opposition Immigration spokeswoman Sharman Stone said she sought the data in February because foreign-student organisations suspected under-reporting of deaths. "To have 34 cited as unknown is an extraordinary statistic," she said.

"It will no doubt be raising further anxiety and alarm, particularly in the Indian student community and their parents and relatives and friends."

At least three overseas students died in the 12-month period after violent attacks, including an 18-year-old Chinese woman who was allegedly sexual assaulted by a knife-wielding assailant before she and her boyfriend fell from a balcony at Waterloo in Sydney.

Although the number of these deaths was well below homicide rates for the Australian population, it raises questions about reporting procedures from the booming private education providers."
The age also queries 'How did he die?' asks Indian family.

In the early 90's 'The Age' ran a sustained campaign against racism in Austrian Rules Football both among spectators and players. There seems to be a general improvement since then.