An Indecisive Indian

  I wrote about the Corona pandemic in in April 2020 and tried to decode the statistics. http://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2020/04/coronavirus-and-labyrinth-of-statistics.html I was way off the mark, I have some mud on my face certainly, but then I wrote as a rookie whereas nearly all the experts have mud on their faces too and a copious helping at that. Be that as it may, as the French would say, les carottes sont cuites , or those carrots are cooked, so be it. Worse than that, I followed up with a rather smug programme on YouTube channel, thepublic.india in early March of this year:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5rjvGJmMQs   The underlying theme in the programme was that India had done well, or at least much better than other big countries, and if it did generate some feel good about our country, there was no need to be sheepish about it. I did add that it was not the time to drop our guard; we had to make sure that this second wave was also subdue...

Part One (Let Ghalib help you speak colourfully) Readers may please recall my blog post on Shakespeare at; http://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2021/03/shakespeare-for-laymen-like-me.html and on Ghalib at: http://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2020/12/remembering-ghalib-on-his-birth.html Having checked out how the bard influenced and elevated English language by inventing phrases and idioms, we can seek to do the same for Ghalib in continuation of the nuances that we looked at in the second blog post . Finding this influence was not so easy as Ghalib practically invented a genre of poetry and a style of prose but it is not easy to assign to him invention of idioms and phrases. On the other hand, his poetry lives on our tongues, springing out at opportune moments in everyday life. Innumerable misras from his ghazals have found usages for which they were hardly intended; there is a commonplace employment of these beautiful lines in a simplistic manner, keeping aside the idi...