Tom Friedman of the NYT shills his new book on The Daily Show. He talks about his visit to ‘Bahn-galore’ and how the chairman of Infosys laid the smack down on lazy Americans.
Friedman’s big thesis is that Americans need to churn out more scientists and engineers, a good moonshot-like project would be energy independence from the Saudis, and wouldn’t it be nice if the President drove a hybrid car.
He’s a surprisingly fluid, comfortable public speaker with good message discipline: his opening schtick is lifted straight from his column and probably even from the book jacket. Conversely, Friedman has a line, ‘Have you ever met a 12-year-old who said, “I want to be an engineer?” ‘ Hello, ever met any desi American kids?
I’m not sure what he’s gesturing about here, but let’s hope it has nothing to do with threading.
Afternoon TV is so funky sometimes. Today, the Christian channel was not showing a silver-haired white guy with expansive hand gestures, clad in a shiny double-breasted suit. Instead, it was showing a desi couple, the guy with those huge uncle glasses, singing a ghazal in Hindi, interleaved with clips of folk dancing.
Pardon my parochialness, but I’ve never seen this before. Fusion? Talvin and Karsh got nothin’ on the church. Similarly, I’ve always been fascinated by how omnivorously religious many Hindus are. They practice it like metareligion where other ‘one-and-only’ deities are merely slotted into the pantheon. I often see Bollywood philms where a Hindu protagonist’s idea of the holy trinity is to pray at a temple, a church and a gurudwara all in the same day. And many Punjabi Hindus attend their local gurudwara instead of temple. I’d imagine it all drives hardcore monotheists crazy.
