Where Amardeep brings the old topic of arranged marriage into the Sepia Mutiny Chowk, and sets off a comments riot. And into such meele I enter, chucking my mask of obscurity, and throw the following stone.

Ah yes, this is an old whipping horse that I have ridden quite often. So much so that recently I seemed to have morphed into an apologist for arranged marriages, especially when older 'firangis' associated with an international students & locals friendship organization in this city, smirkingly ask me, 'So Mr. S, are you going to have an arranged marriage too?" when the issue of marriage comes up. Then I am almost tempted to turn racist/ sarcastic, and riposte, "Madames & Sirs, unless any your progney mates with me, an exotic animal, yes, I will have to resort to such strange rites." I also half tempted to recite this poem to them in order to explain such irrationality of the natives.

That said, I think Ms. James's article, if not exactly revelatory, was superior to this other recent article on the same subject that was recently sent to me by a friend. And if you want to read, here lies my rejoinder to that latter article.

Late last night before bed, after an evening of wading in mathematics, to take my mind off that stuff I was sniffing photos in a Time Life Book on the Resistance in Europe during World War II, a period of history for which I have endless fascination. I suppose this is because boys never grow up, and will always harbour romantic notions about distant wars.

Some of episodes described in this book were already familiar to me such as the daring sabotage attack on the German Heavy Water Plant in Norway via an book excerpt in the Indian version of Reader's Digest many years ago, or the assasinations of German Military officers carried out by the French Resistance, as shown in that old movie The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. However what caught my attention last night was this small section in the book that described the sterling work done by thousands of women in the Resistance. In particular, this photograph of a lady called Noor Inayat Khan caught my eye, and I was off on a chase in cyber-ia.

Noor had had a storied life. She was born to an Indian father (who was a descendant of Tipu Sultan) and an American mother in Moscow, and grew up in Tzarist Russia before the family was displaced to first England, from where poverty and prejudice caused a move to France. She went to Sorbonne, where she studied music and languages, and later became a freelance writer, who wrote stories for children. Then the war broke out, and she and her family evacuated to England, where she studied to become a nurse.

Subsequently she was recruited by the British SOE, and was parachuted into France to be a wireless operator codenamed "Madeliene". She was subsequently captured by the Gestapo, taken to Dachu, and executed by the German SS. This is a more detailed version of these events.

Obviously, since a life as intruiging as Noor's can't be kept away from the grubby hands of fiction, a novel losely based on her life called 'The Tiger Claw' by Shauna Singh Baldwin was recently published. Dammit! Why did I get to this story before! A more well known, i.e., best selling novel with similar thematic material is 'Charlotte Gray' by Sebastian Faulks. This novel is supposedly based on the life of another inspiring SOE agent, Nancy Wake. I actually picked up this novel for real cheap at a sale a few months ago.So now I think, it is time for me to unearth it from my book stacks and read it.

He sits here with a coffe cup in hand, attemtping to break out of groginess, playing Bach's Cantantas on the stereo, messages in German that he doesn't really decipher. But then music is about swimming beyond the tyranny of the Word into some space that is alight with grace.

He sits, drinks coffee, and scans a book title on bullshit, titled "On Bullshit". And after reading

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

&

"On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared to fake the context as well, so far as need requires. This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with mare spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the “bullshit artist.” "

related questions begin to pop up in his mind, such as the distinctions on whether he recently bullshitted or more simply lied to? And such questions are soon enough dismissed by recalling a line of Homer Simpson, “It takes two to lie, Marge, one to lie and one to listen."

Also for further discussion on bullshit, look at this article from the New Yorker.