Boycott - 1

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"Once a visitor from a far-off country called on me. When I asked her what I could do for her, she replied, 'I would love to take Indian coffee in Indian style.' This was an understandable request in this part of the country. After coffee she said, 'Now I want to see the caste system. May I see it in your house?' I blinked for a while and then told her that caste system was not a curio in a glass case to be displayed on request."

....RKN in Castes: Old and New in A Writer's Nightmare

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Well, when I opened that RKN's book for that Quote I saw the dedication:

"To Sir, With Love, Aniket Basu, June 19, 1999"

There are too many 9s and a couple of 1s in that date...must be a pleasure for a number theorist if not a numerologist. Talking of numbers, I recall another book gifted to me by KK titled: "e: The Story of a Number" by Eli Maor. As expected, there is no dedication by KK so I had to do it myself. It is dated: 23-11-2001. I strongly recommend this book for all readers of this blog. It is just superb. Chapter 13 titled:

"e^ix: The Most Famous of All Formulas"

has this blurb:

"There is a famous formula---perhaps the most compact and famous of all formulas---developed by Euler from a discovery of De Moivre: e^i pi + 1 = 0...It appeals equally to the mystic, the scientist, the philosopher, the mathematician"...Edward Kasner and James Newman, Mathematics and Imagination (1940).

Eli writes: "..(it is a) formula that connects the five most important constants of mathematics..."

Oh, well, to Aniket I can say that I have given him a Return Gift of about 10 times the Bulk Reading Material he gifted me, through my blog...and he does read it. To KK, it doesn't matter...he is so focused on Physics that he has no time for anything else. But we do call and talk for hours once in a while about Queens & Cauliflowers.

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That was too much of a digression from Boycott...

There was this piquant news item that there is a proposal that India should boycott the London Olympics. Because, one of their chief sponsors is a Megalith Firm that bought over another Teralith firm that refused to suitably compensate the victims of the infamous Bhopal Gas Tragedy; and pleads complete innocence of the entire affair.

I strongly support the case of BGT victims. It is one of those inhuman faces of Corporate Evil...'Evil' is another nuanced term I learned from an earlier US President, by name Bush Jr, but failed to acknowledge in my yesterday's post...shows there is no end of learning for a die-hard learner like me ;-)

But boycotting London Olympics? It is as laughable as sitting on the toilet seat of a BA airplane for a good ten minutes and then noticing that their toilet roll is manufactured by a Company you don't like...and then boycotting its product.

It is indeed worse than that...any boycott to be effective should at least be noticed.

Well, of all historical boycotts, I guess, Boston Tea Party (no denying Freud...that came out as Boston Teat Party) takes the cake...we had to mug up a para on it in our school because it was leaked out that a question on it is there in the Board Exam Social Studies Paper...it wasn't there though.

And then there was this most effective boycott of British Mill Cloth by Gandhijee. Its replacement by the hand-spun native khaddar became so popular that in the 1950s, after 3 decades or so, my granpa had a spinning wheel in his home and used to work it for at least half an hour every morning religiously after his retirement. And, we in our school's Craft Classes had to pass a practical exam on it. That Spinning Wheel became the center piece of the Congress Flag. And Gandhijee became the unlikely hero of the ruthlessly exploited workers of the Lancashire Cloth Mills:


"...One of Darwen's biggest claims to fame is that it hosted a visit from Mohandas K. Gandhi in 1931. He had accepted the invitation from Corder Catchpool, owner of Greenfield Mill, to see the effects of India's boycott of cotton goods. The unemployed mill workers greeted the man with great affection even when they were out of work, as they understood it was not India but greedy and irresponsible mill owners who were responsible for their situation..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwen

If you think that Sebastian Coe is going to stop whatever he is doing and run to India to plead with our Bosses: " PULLLEASE don't boycott us! We are innocent of BGT", I think you are on one of those Heights of Optimism so popular during our youth at IIT KGP...say, two homo-paths haggling over a second-hand pram.

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