The forest is a striated band of light, Cloak dark razzing at the root, Oxidized copper at the sunlit top.

A solitary ginkgo stands sentinel At the forest path that begins at The meadow’s edge,

Sloughing its last yellow flames Into a wind-combed air, before Iced jawed frosts make landfall.

Blue broncos whinny in the sky Flouncing their white manes In corrals hatched by airplanes.

And even though it is not That season yet, I feel the Death’s Head hawkmoths' grey shrouds

Opening in the night that Has long since fallen In my veined interiors.

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.