It looks like disappointing sequels are a thing of the past. There was a time when I wouldn’t have bothered with a sequel. But that was a time. Ice Age 2 brings back the world’s favourite mismatched prehistoric herd with a splash. It’s ‘meltdown’ time!

The last dinosaur is long gone and Manny the mammoth is wondering if he is the last of his kind too. Sid the sloth would be wondering the same if he wasn’t getting increasingly hassled by the lack of respect he gets from everyone. Diego the sabretooth tiger is getting a load of the other two and… well… he’s being sane. But he does have a slight hydrophobia thing.

I was never good at math. I still wake up in the middle of the night sometimes after nightmares involving my many math tests. But perhaps advocating Maharashtra government’s decision to make mathematics optional after standard 8 for the reasons above will make me look vain. So I will seek some more educated answers.

The average high-school goer in India is a curious mix of conflicting ambitions. He even likes (gasp!) school sometimes. This is because most of the horror stories he was told as a pre-schooler about schools being torture houses and teachers being demons (who spreads these things I wonder) have proven themselves wrong by this time. He has favourite subjects (sometimes one of them is even math), and many a time nurses fond dreams of making a career out of them.

Hear one, hear all! All ye who read this blog (yes, all three of you)… it is that time of the month again.

A bloggers’ meet is coming. It falls this Saturday, that is on April 29, at 4 pm at the Regal Barista on Colaba Causeway.

If you are a wannabe like me and wish to suck up to the likes of Amit Varma and Yazad Jal, be there. It will be good to see other wannabes.

Update: Dang! Couldn’t make it.

Ursula Le Guin makes a spirited case for virtuous words. Few have put it this magically. Very inspiring. The uninitiated can start by reading The Dispossesed.

To misuse language is to use it the way politicians and advertisers do, for profit, without taking responsibility for what the words mean. Language used as a means to get power or make money goes wrong: it lies. Language used as an end in itself, to sing a poem or tell a story, goes right, goes towards the truth.

Ursula K. Le Guin: A Few Words to a Young Writer

I wouldn’t say kids actually aspire to ‘be’ them. There are no kids as stupid as that. At five, one may be taken by the muscles and the gadgets and the colours that define superheroism, but man is born sane and faith in the super only comes after the ‘real world’ beats you to squishy pulp.

There is something in a super that kids really appreciate. I think I speak for all kids when I say that Superman wouldn’t be half as super if there was no Clark Kent. Superman is a lot of things (truth, justice, freedom, blah blah blah…) but what is Clark Kent? Just a clever disguise?

There are only so many ways in which you can say ‘old man’. None of them entirely inoffensive. Alezor had an extremely eventful century and a half behind him. He had stood up for truth and justice and things like that. He had battled whatever forces had appeared evil to him in their time. He was an inspiration to good beings in his world and beyond (or so he liked to believe).