The one who remembers the Supreme Being exclusively even while leaving the body at the time of death, attains the Supreme Abode; there is no doubt about it. (8.05)

Remembering whatever object one leaves the body at the end of life, one attains that object. Thought of whatever object prevails during one’s lifetime, one remembers only that object at the end of life and achieves it. (8.06)

Therefore, always remember Me and do your duty. You shall certainly attain Me if your mind and intellect are ever focused on Me. (8.07)

–Bhagavad-Gita

Phrases like “senseless tragedy” just never seem like enough.  Bagels 4ever sends us the type of tip we hope to never receive:

He began each morning with prayer and meditation before a small shrine in his southwest Houston apartment. During the workday, he might step outside for a moment of silence and calm, his friends and co-workers said. They believe the 28-year-old Hindu community leader was meditating in a park near his office when he was shot and killed Thursday. Chopra may have been so deeply concentrating that he did not notice his killer, said Ramesh Bhutada, president of Star Pipe Products, the company Chopra had worked for since 2002. “I think after lunch he went there for a moment of quietness,” Bhutada said. ”

… He probably didn’t hear it.” Star Pipe employees held a Friday morning memorial service for the young man many had come to view as family. The workers, some of whom talked of preparing feasts for his birthday and marveled at his commitment to faith and community service, placed yellow roses on the bench where Chopra died…

…Chopra had a gunshot wound to his left temple and a bullet appeared to have grazed his forehead. His wallet was missing and no gun was found at the scene, Torres said. At the time of his death, Chopra’s life in America had just started falling into place, friends said. [Link]

All my bindaas desis, both words just made the dictionary of record for the Queen’s English. U-S-S-A-A! This is the giant dictionary every would-bee spelling prince and princess lugged around as their sole form of exercise. It was the only one which had all the words in it, and at $50, nine inches thick and 30 lbs, it was a sizeable investment.

On Wednesday, the Oxford Dictionary of English… revealed its new cache of linguistic treasures, including ‘bindaas’, ‘tamasha’, ‘ mehndi’, ‘desi’ and ‘lehnga’. Lollywood… finds honorable mention. So does ‘kitty party’, the chaat-and-chatter mainstay of bored Indian housewives for decades.

It even includes feather-to-dot crossover:

The dictionary’s co-editor Catherine Soanes told TOI she was particularly pleased to have been able to include the Indianism ‘tom-tom‘, defined by the ODE as “verb (chiefly Indian) proclaim or boast about.” [Link]

The Statesman points out words still missing (hello, Mumbaikars? Bindaas sans jhakaas?)

“What’s your good name?”… “Let’s go have some chai-vai” (tea, obviously, with snacks thrown in) or, “There’s a lot of this fighting-witing happening here every day…” A proud mother announcing to all and sundry about her ladli beti getting “cent per cent” (meaning 100 per cent) marks in math or an executive having to “prepone” his meeting… “business-baazi” or “cheating-giri…” “freak out…” In Kolkata, “enthu” replacing enthusiasm is old hat as also “sentu” for sentimental… “Funda” for fundamental, “intro” or “appo” for appointment are freely used… “Tux” has no relation with the tuxedo — who wears it in our country, anyway? — but with a baldie which must have originated with the Hindi word “taklu”… “timepass” for whiling away the hours… “hawala” (illegal financial dealings), “badla” (revenge) or “eve-teasing”… [Link]

And those already added:

India-origin words have dotted the English language for a long time. Words like bungalow, cashmere (from Kashmîr), cheetah, coolie, cot, cummerbund, cushy (from the Hindi khush), dinghy, dungaree, juggernaut (from Lord Jagannath’s huge rath-yatra, perhaps?) jungle, khaki (dusty), loot, punch (the drink made from paanch or five ingredients), pajamas, shawl, verandah, etc. In the latest Oxford English Dictionary, words like Angrez (Englishman) and Badmash have already figured. Earlier, it had added adda, bundh, dal puri, bandobast, chutney, bandana, chamcha (aren’t we familiar with them!) neta and dhaba. [Link]

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I hate moving. I hate moving so much that when I left Manhattan in 2003, I hastily shoved everything in storage near Chelsea. ItÂ’s still there.

I think my reluctance to pack a suitcase might be related to the sheer panic and anxiety I experience whenever I have to move. Something about carefully folding and arranging items in boxes freaks me out, man.

This is the explanation I gave my long-suffering Mummy last week when I was at home in California. I was scheduled to leave for the airport at 7pm and I hadnÂ’t packed as of 6:15. Of course, I ended up hastily tossing everything in, cringing at how my clothes were getting abused, how my jewelry would be a tangled mess by the time I got back to DC, how I would surely forget something. I threw everything on my bathroom counter in my cosmetics bag, zipped it and hoped for the best.

8pm. Security. IÂ’ve padded through the gate barefoot and I’m trying not to think about what sorts of germs IÂ’m walking on while I wait for my bag to leave the X-rayÂ…

“Ma’am? Would you mind coming with me?”

Nope. I donÂ’t mind at all. IÂ’m brown, but I have nothing to hide. It’s been years. I know to just expect this routine. I grab my prrrecious iBook and follow him to a table. HeÂ’s poking my carry-on gingerly, a worried look distorting his face. Continue reading →

Nwo thye wnat ot renmae Delhi (via PPP):

The Indian capital should be renamed Dehli to correct a 150-year-old mistake, according to historians in India. They have launched a campaign to correct the “mis-spelling”, which they say happened during British rule because the colonialists could not pronounce Hindi names.

K M L Misra, a former head of history at Agra College, said: “For 800 years Delhi was called Dehli but the British couldn’t manage the breathy sound of Hindi and the spelling of the city later came to reflect this.”

I presume the city would be called Newer Dehli. It isn’t a new idea:

What the British knew as Cawnpore is now Kanpur, the northern city of Muttra is Mathura, and the Ganges is known once more as Ganga… In 1995, Bombay became Mumbai after pressure from Hindu-nationalists to reinstate the original Marathi name. Contrary to popular belief, this was not a corruption of the British name but almost certainly derives from the Portuguese Bom Bahia, meaning Good Bay.

A year later, the southern city of Madras – possibly a corruption of the Portuguese Madre di Dios – reverted to Chennai, the name that had been used by Tamils throughout the British period. Then, in 2000, the spelling of Calcutta was officially changed to Kolkata after pressure from the Communist state government to revert to a spelling that more closely reflected the Bangla pronunciation.

I’ve got no fondness for badly Anglicized names. Even old New York was once Nieuw Amsterdam. But the new name wouldn’t be entirely accurate either:

… even Dehli was a corrupted word. The pre-Mughal name was Dilli, which was derived from Dhillika, a Rajput name for the area which dates back to the 8th century.

I have the rename to trump all renames: let’s call everything Gondwanaland. It’s an Indian name after all. Problem solved.

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From fliping through the AP pool photographs of the British Airways catering employees strike (which just ended), you’d think that it was the Salt March or something.  What gives?  And talk about girl power.  Yahoo News reports (thanks to several tipsters):

BA baggage handlers and loaders represented by the same union as the catering staff — the Transport and General Workers Union — stopped work in sympathy with their colleagues.

Some Gate Gourmet staff were astounded at the scale of disruption.

“I didn’t expect the BA staff to join us, but we are very happy about it,” said Gary Mullins, 37, a loader for the company.

“We don’t wish to cause them any more (aggravation) than we have to,” he said of the passengers. “But it’s something that has to be done.”

Wait a minute.  From that sea of brown they picked a guy named “Gary Mullins” to get a quote from? CNN International has more:

The Transport and General Workers Union [TGWU] said it went on strike because Gate Gourmet, a firm that caters meals for British Airways, had fired workers.

Tony Woodley, TGWU’s general secretary, issued a statement Thursday saying he had contacted Gate Gourmet in an effort to reinstate workers and “restart talks without prejudice.”

“Unfortunately, the management of Gate Gourmet has responded intransigently. They are preventing employees reporting for work. This is causing chaos at one of the world’s biggest airports at the busiest time of year,” the statement said.

“The company has told us that ‘this is a community we cannot work with.’ The employees concerned are almost all low-paid, Asian workers, and such an approach is utterly unacceptable.”

The union’s national officer, Brendan Gold, told PA he was continuing to seek legal advice over the “sackings,” which he added had left workers feeling “angry, confused and in a state of shock.”

Great.  Now even more people will be pissed off at Britain’s South Asian population. Continue reading →