I tortured myself with the Govinda-Salman starrer Partner this Saturday. Govinda is wasted and Salman can’t act even if someone held a gun to his head. Feeling violated, I walked weakly out of the theatre in Andheri. The one who took us there denied it was his idea.

I considered settling down at a coffee shop or something with my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows but my phone rings and my evening plans are set. I took my leave from one disillusioned group of friends to join another, somewhere in Bandra.

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. –Noam Chomsky

When I was in the ninth standard, I created a superhero called Destroyer of Troubles and affectionately called him DoT. The details are fuzzy now but I really liked him. I dropped the idea following the events of this past week. Turns out there already is a DoT. And mighty particular about trouble too. DoT wants no trouble. DoT wouldn’t even consider the possibility of it. Trouble is, DoT also defines trouble. And that’s where the trouble starts.

I link to herothings again. This time, its a nice piece on Superman written by Neil Gaiman and Adam Rogers. It also addresses some of the questions I found when reading this thread.

He has evolved into a folk hero, a fable, and the public feels like it has a stake in who Superman really is. Schwartz quit writing Superman because his bosses were telling him to put in things that he thought were out of character. That was admirable, but really, the specific stories we tell about Superman - the what-happened and what-he-did - don’t matter that much. Superman transcends plot. We retell his tales because we wish he were here, real, to keep us safe.

Long ago, when I small, tiny, miniscule, microscopic (you get the idea), I used to tuck a twig in the back of my shirt and climb some place high (two or three stairs for example) and cry, “Wha wha whaaah wha wha wha!” holding the twig aloft.

Much later, I figured it was actually, “By the power of Grayskull!” I watched He-Man on Sundays and thought about it for the rest of the week. That was the time when there was little else on TV by way of kiddie entertainment. So I was really nice to read this piece by Sam Anderson on Slate.

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.

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