Lazy, nothing much happening kind of day — which means you have time to read.
1. So read this — a Wired story on what it takes to really disappear.
2. The Acorn blog throws up the fallacy in FinMin Pranab Mukherjee’s recent grandstanding on the subject of accommodations for Shashi Tharoor and SM Krishna. On the face of it, Mukherjee is looking out for the interests of the Indian taxpayer when he suggests the Foreign Minister and his MoS should move out of five star hotel suites. In other words, the FinMin’s definition of austerity is to ask his colleagues to move out of accommodations they are paying for out of their own pocket, and into accommodations paid for by the government taxpayer?
3. Back to book bans [yeah, I’m kind of obsessive on the subject: previous posts here, here and here] — we don’t realize it at the time, but silence and apathy when a book is banned or one of our other freedoms is casually snatched from us has far-reaching repercussions. As will be apparent from Nilanjana’s meticulous history of bans. Additional: on her Twitter stream, Nila has been throwing up links to various books that have been banned [the relevant hashtag] in recent times.
4. Meet the original Mohandas.
More later.
Smoke Signals 
Didn’t read the whole thing, cause work was staring at me impatiently, and had to get back to it, but the disappearance story reminded me of “The Moon and Six Pence” by Maugham.
I do sometimes wonder if the suffocating angst of being inextricably trapped in a life that is not to our wanting or choosing, is something that is singular to me, or is human nature in general? Only the price to take that road, which is setting everything, that was accumulated in life up to that point, to naught, is what usually counsels them back into submission to ‘normal’ life.
Okay, may be not everyone perceives their life that way.
It did surprise me, however, to note the high number of people who consciously want out, and actually go the whole hog with it.
Not singular to you, definitely. I’ve felt that, and continue to. Yeah, one problem is giving up all that has been accumulated — I’m not so worried about the material accumulations as I am of say the track record in a particular line of work, et cetera.
The other aspect is that domesticity ties you down. There is a wife to provide for — and when the thought of rebellion kicks in, there’s the sane you sitting on the rebel’s shoulder asking, hey, she didn’t know you were going to be like this when you signed on, so is this fair to her? Invariably, the answer is no, so that is another thing that shackles you to routine.
I think though that increasingly, people are more willing to take that wild leap of faith. Classic case in point, Amit Varma — who had a great job with a rock solid institution, and chose to give it up and chase the dream of writing books, which right from the get go you know is never going to pay you enough. The codicil I guess is that you can take risks at 30 you think twice about at 50. 🙂 But yeah, you are not alone in that angst.