Shakti - John McLaughlin-lead fusion circus - makes me happy, if not sublime, every time I play its records; how can one not be happy given the jazz-like drive these musicians bring to what can be quite staid Indian classical music, and given the infectious enjoyment with which they make this music? Here is a drumming-jam "le danse du bonheur" from the original team:

Oi ma! How young Zakir Hussian is in this recording! Also the same track from a Shakti revival tour with a much older Zakir, as well their fab retake of the staple of Carnatic classical circuit, St. Thayagaraja's kirthi "Giriras Sudha".

This NYT story points to a large scale Gallup poll, first published in Foreign Policy, which showed that there is no marked difference between the Islamic "radicals" and "moderates", and if anything "radicals" (people who tend to end up as suicide bombers) are better educated and more prosperous than the "moderates". Assuming the methodology of the poll is right, the obvious explanation for this would be that education in these nine Islamic countries is acting as an enabler in Islamic radicaliztion; not a hard conclusion to comprehend given that most "revolutionary" movements in the last century have been lead by disaffected college students.

This story on Cingular's moronic attempt to teach adults "text speak" in order to bond better with their teenagers makes my inner "social conservative" go ballastic. Time to take down Robert Bly's "The Sibling Society" to immunize myself against what a historian in that story observed: "“we see this return to this earlier world where kids are not trained to be adults, but where adults and kids mingle and where kids are precocious and adults are childish.”.

This story on prostate cancer is one among the slew of troubling stories (here is the one from yesterday concerning dialysis treatments) that I have read in the recent days, all of which raise issues that lay at the intersection of medical ethics and capitalism. The questions I want answered or to be able to answer are: To what extent should doctors be allowed to be profit-maximizing capitalists when it comes to treating medical conditions that have multiple treatment regimes with similar outcomes but highly variant payoff structure? Are these questions even discussed and debated within the medical community and in medical education, or has it simply become a bleating herd following the money? These issue also tie in with the pervasive marketing practises (soft emotional TV ads, "Mongol horde" sale force tactics etc) of pharam companies, which operate under even severe market imperative of bringing new, and thus even more profitable drugs to market even if the older (and generic) drug regimes are as good if not better. Hard questions to answer, I know, in an economy where disease or illness easily swamps health as a market sector in size.

This is the animal that never was. Not knowing that, they loved it anyway; its bearing, its stride, its high, clear whinny, right down to the still light of its gaze.

It never was. And yet such was their love the beast arose, where they had cleared the space; and in the stable of its nothingness it shook its white mane out and stamped its hoof.

And so they fed it, not with hay or corn but with the chance that it might come to pass. All this gave the creature such a power

its brow put out a horn; one single horn. It grew inside a young girl’s looking glass, then one day walked out and passed into her.

Don Paterson was all over the pages of the Guardian recently, getting a standing ovation from Mark Doty for his versions of Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus". While there is little of his poetry to be had for eating in cyber-ia, the ones I found read like those written by a more edgy Philip Larkin; not a bad comparison given that Larkin was an jazz critic and Paterson made his living as a jazz musician before he rumbled into the British poetry scene.