I am reading the complete stories of Lydia Davis, and most of them are no more than a page or two long. Some, in fact, last only a few lines, like this one:

In a house besieged lived a man and a woman. From where they cowered in the kitchen the man and woman heard small explosions. “The wind,” said the woman. “Hunters,” said the man. “The rain,” said the woman. “The army,” said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged.

Or:

People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

I can’t say about you, but I have discovered a new pleasure in such small stories, also called shorts. The Internet has spawned a great interest in the short, with sundry forums devoted to this tiny art form. Often, short story writers are derided for not possessing the talent to write full-length novels, a charge that has been levelled against even someone of the calibre of Alice Munro. But short stories and shorts allow writers to showcase a slice of life in a crisp, emotionally hard-hitting way that is, the word is, anonymous. Davis’ stories, for instance, rarely name the characters, preferring to use the general pronoun “he” or “she”. This lets the reader imagine entire backgrounds for the characters and perhaps, therefore, connect better with them. A novel lays the outline pretty solidly, with the reader forced to carry along with the writer’s framework. Not that that is not appreciated, but stories have their own charm, and the long format must not be looked upon as necessarily better.

An article written by a Chinese demagogue for a “patriotic” website has received surprisingly scant attention in India. Zhan Lue (a pseudonym for ‘strategy’) of the Institute for International Strategic Studies has written a widely circulated article that advocates China should work at splitting India into 30 states and take the help of Pakistan and other neighbours to bring this about.

The squeamishness of the Indian media is shocking. This should be headline stuff. Rarely does policy intent emerge with such forthrightness and the last thing we can do is to tide over the matter and brush it under the carpet by invoking peace and goodwill.

India and China met recently for border talks and in spite of the diplomatic noises emanating from that meeting, it is common knowledge that China has long harboured designs on India’s north-east. But Zhan Lue takes it to the next ghastly level: “China can dismember the so-called ‘Indian Union’ with one little move! China should join forces with ‘different nationalities’ such as Tamil and Kashmiri people so that they can establish independent nation states of their own.”

If that’s not language that closely mirrors the Pakistani Army’s stated intention to bleed India through a thousand cuts, I can’t say what is. Interestingly, the article was posted around the same time as the two countries met for border talks.

In a nasty dig at the concept of ‘Chindia’ (coined by Jairam Ramesh to denote the economic rise of the emerging economic giants), Zhan Lue says there can’t be two suns in the sky, and that “China and India cannot really deal with each other harmoniously.”

While there has been no word from the Chinese government on the matter, India has, unbelievably, offered the olive branch by saying that relations between the two countries are stable. “The Chinese side has conveyed to us that in approaching India-China relations, China abides by the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. One of these principles stresses respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty,” a foreign ministry spokesman said.

This, when the article could not have been posted on a well-known site and then freely disseminated without the consent of the Chinese authorities. At the very least, the government should have released a stronger statement denouncing the article and asking the Chinese government to do the same.

The economic miracle that has allowed China to have its way in the international geostrategic stakes is likely to tilt the balance in its favour in international forums. America, especially in the post-September 2008 world, cannot afford to annoy China. Irrespective of what the international community might say about the Dalai Lama/Tibet/human rights abuses, China does what it wants to, as happened recently in Xinjiang. India must treat with caution any suggestions that our partnership with the US is “natural” and must brace itself for all eventualities.

The Emraan Hashmi episode — where the actor alleged that he was denied an apartment in a Pali Hill society because he is Muslim — has generated understandable outrage, with the media, the ever-present electronic media in particular, latching on to the case to once again bolster its secular (?) credentials. However, the case, at first glance, does not look so simple as a Hindu-versus-Muslim debate.

First, every individual has the right to decide who he wants to sell his house to, regardless of his reasons for making that choice. Courts do not and cannot exercise jurisdiction over people’s prejudices in a personal domain such as this. Try looking for a house in New Delhi’s Chittaranjan Park, and if you are not a Bengali, chances are your offers will be turned down. This is truer for Mumbai than for any other city in India, where Marathis, Muslims, South Indians all hold fast to their spaces. Hashmi’s plea that he was denied the house because of his religion is open to question, since discrimination in India begins at home — caste, whether one is veg/non-veg, single/married etc all play a role.

Second, Hashmi and his uncle Mahesh Bhatt made the customary rounds of news channels’ offices to speak, no shriek, their minds. Acting suitably wronged, Hashmi screamed bloody murder: “It’s not that I can’t get a house anywhere else. If I want, I can get 10. But this is not about that. It’s about what sort of India we want to develop.” Very noble sentiments, those, but somehow, their poignancy was lost when just behind Hashmi, one could spot a gigantic poster of his latest film occupying pride of place. Hard as one may try, it’s impossible not to take this thought bubble to its logical conclusion.

But take him at his word, there still remains the slightly ungainly task of placing Hashmi in the same league as Shabana Azmi. Sure, both are actors — but it takes real dilution of one’s love for cinema to place on the same pedestal the person who gave us Arth and Masoom and one whose cinematic output limits the audience to keep separating Emraan Hashmi, the man from Emraan Hashmi, the lips.

Well, what can one say? He has been wronged, apparently, and the best way to make up to him is go watch his latest unforgivable movie, whenever it’s out. Kiss and make up, eh?

In an article published in November 2007, Christopher Booker wrote in the Telegraph that the coverage of climate trends “carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level - not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.”

And in a blog on USA Today this week, Doyle Rice quoted an article in Natural Geoscience which claims that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Further:

Right from childhood, in school and outside, we are told that the climate is changing, to ominous effects. Industry is pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, leading to the greenhouse effect and a general rise in global temperatures. There are several problems with this premise. One, it assumes that carbon dioxide is the sole contributor to global warming. Second, it takes climate to be a calculable entity that can be estimated by ever-complex models. As events in the real world keep reminding us, the only thing that can be said with certainty is that there is no certainty to the way the world moves.

As governments meet again in Copenhagen later this year and argue about the levels of emissions they must accept for the world to be a safer place for our future generations, perhaps we must probe and question whether there is really a need for carbon dioxide emissions to be cut. What if developing countries like India agreed to a compromise formula under which they cut their emissions against some quid pro quo with the West, and in the end of it all, some new model said a completely new agent is responsible for global warming?

Will we then go looking for new Kyotos and Copenhagens like chickens with their heads cut off?

In the euphoria surrounding the Delhi High Court judgment that decriminalised homosexuality, an important point — one that has some relevance with homosexuality’s wider acceptance in society — is being ignored: homosexuality is not just about gay sex.

The law will come to accept “sexual acts against the order of nature” but what about “emotional acts against the order of nature”? Isn’t discussing and accepting the latter more ground-shifting than the former?

I was listening to a panel on CNN-IBN debating the issue when, provoked by the aggressive sermonising of the religious leaders on the panel (“they can do what they want in private; just don’t expect my God to defend it”), Sunil Gupta, out-gay photographer, threatened to walk out if they (the religionists) kept referring to gay people as “them”. “I am not them. I am us—look into the mirror and you’ll see me,” he exhorted.

Mr. Gupta’s anguished cry goes some way in demonstrating what a sexual revolution should ideally constitute. The debate, unfortunately, has centred on the letter of the law and gives little credence to the genuine emotional needs of certain men to love other men. If it was framed in that context, and within the larger framework of family and stable relationships, the call for acceptance will find many more takers.

Mr Gupta said as much, when he hailed the verdict for allowing him and his partner to present themselves as a couple to Mr Gupta’s family. “We are very much like you,” he told his more conservative relatives, “we are a family.”

The trouble with a movement that lays too much emphasis on the details of the sexual act to drive home the very valid demand for greater acceptance is that it risks running afoul of the vast majority, not all of whom may be bigoted. If an ordinary conservative housewife were asked her views on the verdict, she may smile slyly and then, all-aglitter, denounce it for purporting to kill the family as that institution is known. “It’s unnatural for two men to do it,” she may say.

However, if she were told about a long-term stable relationship such as Mr Gupta’s and that the verdict is only the first step towards greater legal representation for people who happen to love their own sex, she may have her doubts.

Equality for LGBTs ought to be predicated within the confines of the family, so that the definition of a couple can be broadened to include two husbands, two wives, or, of course, a husband and a wife. Re-framing the debate in these terms will remove some of its rancour because most people have an image of the gay community that, justifiably or not, revolves around terms like promiscuity, wanton sex, and ruined lives. Popular movies such as the recent Brokeback Mountain only reinforce such stereotypes — of lonely men passing their time in wait of redemption.

The onus lies on both sides. Gay people need to do more to celebrate acceptance not by organizing wild parties that only bolster pre-conceived ideas (city supplements foolishly portray these parties as progress). Instead, they need to enlarge the canvas and welcome the shy, quiet, maybe even asexual members within their lot who don’t care two hoots about what all one can get up to in the bedroom, only that they be allowed to live in peace with someone of their own gender.

That is, if a more delicate engagement were allowed would religionists have a tough time explaining their bigotry.

I found myself grappling with the age-old debate about university education versus work experience when a friend, who could not complete a political science degree with an Australian university (no relation to the recent race attacks there), met me over dinner. The issue was financial, with a hoped-for grant not coming through and his finances having stretched real thin. Since this was a post-graduate program and not PhD, he had no option but to discontinue. He is now looking for work, and I found myself ill-informed to advise him on where he should try.

His dilemma reminded me of what the former book editor of an American newspaper once said to me. He had been to university but harboured very poor views on it. Most of his real eduction had come from the work he did — and not just learning the details of the job. He found that just to keep up with the demands of his job, he became an auto-didact, educating himself all that he needed to succeed as an arts journalist. That, and not college, was the most glorious phase of his life, as the security of a job and the absence of  hierarchical pedagogy were a blooming push for freedom.

While university can and does give you the centre around which to draw your life, many people find that their work is at great odds to what they have learnt in school, and by the end of the first decade of passing out, they have forgotten most of what seemed terribly important back then. In my case, for instance, I can probably help you with the construction of a very basic electrical circuit, which is not bad, considering I have no need for such knowledge in my current job as editor/writer. Even my friends who continued with engineering jobs have moved to writing code, which was learnt on the job and not at engineering school. And no, we did not learn Java at school. It was handed down during those six furious months of training at TCS, IBM, Infosys etc.

To succeed on the job requires us to so completely remap our college-addled brain that we are hard-pressed to recognise our former selves one year into the job. The backslapping has given way to a quiet self-awareness. Financial concerns have replaced more mundane ones. And conflicts suddenly seem more grave than the past taught us.

So why go to university then? Well, networking, for one. Being a Stephanian is a badge for life and will open doors for you long after you have forgotten the college and what it taught you. That’s true also for the IITs, IIMs, AIIMS and others. Plus the financial benefits. You are suddenly in another terrain.

But there are thousands of smart young men and women, like my Australia-returned friend, who have not gone to one of these five-star institutes, yet are devoted to improving their lot by some self-learning on the job. The question is, does the system give them a chance to make a decent living?

The gory, frightening and distressful pictures of Indian students in Australia being brutally beaten up is a shameful and disgusting outcome of Indian universities’ inability to provide quality education and absorb discerning Indian students, compelling them to seek admission abroad and set the ball rolling for hurt and abuse.

It speaks of the sad development of human resources in our country that the best known institutes in India—the IIMs— do not figure anywhere in the world’s top 100 MBA schools (as per the FT’s rankings, the only Indian school to make the cut is ISB). There is an urgent need to revamp our entire education edifice so that we are in a position to create world-class universities of the highest standards.

In fact, education should be beyond the control of government authority and its concomitant rules and regulations. Even in the case of the IITs/IIMs, HRD ministers from Murli Manohar Joshi to Arjun Singh to now Kapil Sibal have seen much merit in pronouncing their views on what these institutes need to do, no sooner these ministers assumed power. That is hardly the way to go if one has autonomy as a desirable goal in mind.

Besides, there is much regional disparity when it comes to the quality of educational institutes in India. My city Gwalior has all sorts of institutes—engineering (both government-funded and private), medicine, graduate schools of arts—but their quality is so poor that no one passing out of them can hope to reach anywhere respectable on the dint of his/her  academic credentials.

If a university’s place in the rankings is determined by the quality of its teaching staff, why can’t the government work at establishing at least 10 world-class universities in each discipline and demand higher fees from students to run these places? The salaries that the university pays its staff will not be a constraint then. When people can mortgage their properties and what not to send their children abroad, there is no reason they would not pay a premium to let their wards attend an Indian school which had the likes of Noam Chomsky and Amartya Sen as guest faculty.

That would go some way in preventing students from studying in countries where they have no security of life or limb.

When Sudhir Venkatesh, professor of sociology at Columbia University, wrote about the life of Chicago drug lords in Gang Leader for a Day, media everywhere lauded his courage at daring to chronicle a positively gritty side of American street life. Well, if Venkatesh was courageous, Roberto Saviano can only be called crazy.

We know how The Godfather came to symbolize a certain method to Italian crime — an almost corporate aloofness. Continuing in that spirit, Italian journalist Roberto Saviano decided to write about the Camorra (a play on Gomorrah, with all its attendant notions of hell). The resultant book is called Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System. To the uninitiated, the Camorra is one of Naples’ most dangerous mafia setups, running the region of Campania like a personal fief. Street crime is rife, even as drug lords move around in swish Mercedeses.

In terms of its economy, Campania is an image of prosperity. Saviano elaborates how the lucrative drug trade has led many former down-and-out crime syndicates to regroup. Not permanently, mind you. Internecine conflicts force members to change loyalties with laughable frequency, and it’s a wonder the “system”, as it is called, works at all. Saviano’s indictment of the violent machismo of the mafia is striking. His portrait of widows who take over syndicates and come to lord over islands of ill-gotten wealth is spot-on.

So powerful is the Camorra in the region that in the mid-1990s, the mafia appropriated the city’s garbage disposal. As was expected, heavy metals, chemicals and personal waste were mixed together, and left to rot on the streets. This led to a precipitous decline in the health of the local populace. The situation continues, thanks to the complicity of local officials with the Camorra.

The most blatant condemnation in the book, then, falls not on the mafia but on the politicians, who operate hand-in-glove with the syndicates and oversee their protection. In some ways, Saviano explains, the cycle is a vicious one, with a new entrant to government merely a pawn in the hands of an unbreakable chain that connects crime with politics.

A literary sensation in Italy, Gomorrah has become the bane of Saviano’s life. Since the book’s publication in 2006, its author has lived under constant police protection—threats to his life are routine. In writing a book that harshly criticizes a way of life that’s ostensibly glamorous for its crime and monies, Saviano has taken an uncalculated risk indeed.

Suicide, it is said, is the last remaining unresolved philosophical challenge. This week, Nicholas Hughes, the son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, hanged himself at his home in Alaska. He had been battling depression for a long time. Nicholas was unmarried and without children. Some call it the curse of the Plaths. Sylvia put her head inside an oven in 1963, when Nicholas was barely one. The woman her husband was having an affair with at the time of Sylvia’s death also committed suicide in exactly the same way, six years later.

As 2005 drew to a close, a shocking case of group suicide emerged in Japan. Three men and a woman were found dead on Christmas day in a car parked on the side of a forest road in Tokigawa, Saitama Prefecture. The bodies of seven young people had been discovered in a van in the Saitama mountains to the west of Tokyo on October 12 the previous year.

Both incidents are believed to have been triggered by the meeting of lonely hearts on websites that assist group suicides. Wikipedia informs that the most common method of suicide in such cases is carbon monoxide poisoning achieved by burning charcoal briquettes in grills or stoves within an enclosed area, such as a small sealed room, tent, or car.

Group/mass suicides are not a new phenomenon. The most publicized case in recent memory is of thirty nine people who killed themselves in a hilltop mansion near San Diego, California back in 1997. They believed an alien spaceship was hiding behind the Comet Hale-Bopp and drugged themselves in order to reach it. The victims were self-drugged and then suffocated by other members in a series of suicides over a period of three days. Marshall Applewhite was the leader of the gang, which called itself the Heaven’s Gate cult. He died alongwith the others.

The deliberate, planned suicide has long been lauded in literature. Japanese playwright Yukio Mishima painstakingly prepared for his suicide for over a year — an act that was arguably connected to his political motives.

In literary fiction, the pull of suicide is celebrated as a gentle force that calls to its adherents in moments of epiphany. When Mrs. Dalloway walks down Bond Street one morning, the sight of people doing normal things–buying flowers, jaywalking, taking kids to school–overwhelms her. What if all this were to carry on without me, she ponders. The world will keep moving, and this realization, in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, is no less than a shock to her. A little later, her thoughts leading naturally to their final destination, she says to herself, simply, without irony: “It is possible to die.”

Years later, when Laura Brown (from The Hours) is reading Mrs Dalloway and comes across this passage, the glassy clarity of the words pierces her, and she succumbs to their spooky pull–leading to unintended consequences that will play out over many decades.

Virginia Woolf isn’t the only writer who induces suicidal feelings in readers. Sample this from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas:

The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors. A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, “Suicide is Selfishness.” Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what’s selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends and enemies a bit of soul-searching…

…Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools and states, you find indelible truths at one’s core. Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortes’ll lay Tenochititlan to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian’ll be blown to pieces again, you and I’ll sleep under Corsican stars again, I’ll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you’ll read this letter again, the sun’ll grow cold again. Nietzsche’s gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternity.

-Robert Frobisher, Letters from Zedelghem

I completed my engineering in Gwalior but attended the first year at Indore’s SGSITS. This was 2001, the first time that I had stepped outside home. I used to stay in an apartment with two other first-year students. All of us, as unwritten rules demanded, wore to college white shirts whose third button was blue. This was so the seniors could spot us and do with us what they liked.

I stayed not far from the college, so used a bicycle to and fro. One day, when I was returning home, a group of seniors stopped me 200 m short of the apartment and ordered me to reach some place in half an hour. The way it was said left no possibility of discussion. I went home, quickly changed and started on what would become a deeply scarring experience.

The apartment where I was called was located on the seventh floor of a building in a residential area. When I rang the bell, a gaggle of boys –clearly tipsy–opened the door. There, in front of me, was a first-year student, in complete undress. My heart began pounding rapidly, and for a split second, I wanted to dash for the door and escape. But that would have only exacerbated matters.

The first thing I was asked was the full form of SGSITS. When I answered, I was slapped really hard–twice–on the face. “Be louder,” said one of the boys. I did as told. Two more slaps. “Not so loud!”

Then, weirdly, I was asked the names of national newsmagazines. One of the seniors said, “Who is the editor of ‘India Today’?” “Aroon Purie,” I said. Another slap. “It’s Prabhu Chawla, you dumbass.”

I was now asked to take off my shirt. I must have looked like I had seen a ghost, because one of them said, “Don’t worry, we won’t do anything.” It was so vague it was scary. I looked at the other first-year student. He was beyond the stage of reacting. He just looked at me–at us–with dead eyes and an expressionless face.

I took off my shirt. My hands were trembling and I felt sick to the stomach. One of the guys offered me a bottle that very clearly contained some form of liquor. Stupidly, I refused. “Don’t be so uptight,” this guy said, and placed the bottle at my lips, making me take a couple of swigs. I could not believe this was happening to me. I, this person who was happy in his room cocooned with a few books, was at the centre of a ragging party that was going from bad to worse.

“Come on, relax. Tell us how many times a day you do it.” I could sense this was turning towards some murky sexual territory, so I kept quiet. One tight slap. “Didn’t you hear him?” another said. I mouthed something–indecipherable even to me. Another slap. All of them started laughing. What followed was a barrage of expletives in Hindi, which I was made to repeat. There were some other questions along the way which I will refrain from mentioning.

I couldn’t keep track of the time. My mind was simultaneously racing and in a deep slumber, like all this was happening to some other notion of me–an idea, not a person. In the middle of enacting lewd gestures, getting slapped, and repeating Hindi terms for all manner of sexual positions, I could sense watching myself from a distance–a character in a play that was going horribly off-script.

After what must have been an hour-and-a-half, one of them took me to a roadside stall and bought me a samosa. Seeing I was badly shaken up, he said, “Hey, it’s just to break the ice. How else would you guys open up?” His remark was so meaningless, I had half a mind to smash his face. But I was beyond the point of caring. I just nodded, and he then dropped me home on his bike.

This incident defined the remainder of my stay in Indore. I turned completely quiet, walking in college with my head bowed. Once or twice, I saw the other first-year student who was present at the seniors’ that day. We nodded to each other, but the shame and pointlessness of that evening precluded the possibility of anything else. We were brothers-in-arms, in a way, having shared an intense, private experience. If only it had been pleasant! Needless to say, I avoided like a plague the seniors from that evening. Some ice breaking!

Still unable to get back to normal six months into that incident, I sought a transfer to the engineering college at Gwalior. It was a time-consuming, bureaucratic process, and my father made several trips to Bhopal to get it done.

To this day, the weird repercussions of that day keep me company. I do not like getting into confrontations, even I am in the right. I would give up on a stressful situation even if it means also giving up on an opportunity of a lifetime. And I will not read news reports of ragging for fear they will be too close to the bone for comfort.

Even though I am gratefully alive, unlike one Mr. Aman Kuchroo.