From The News: Five Things We Learnt This Week

Serious readers of news and serious watchers of news television have had a busy week. When it came to a supply of fodder for serious thought, the proverbial problem of plenty reared its head: the Union Budget on Monday, a convenient moniker for the annual financial statement of the “estimated receipts and expenditure of the Government of India for that year”. Even before that could be read out (and the numbers chewed on), sleep had been stolen, nay murdered, early on Monday morning by the Oscars, the awards ceremony hosted by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to recognise cinematic excellence in the US film industry. In case you are one of the rare earthlings who thinks this has anything to do with good cheer or entertainment, think again: hosted by comedian Chris Rock, this year’s Oscars had more to with identity, race and the politics of representation than a library with shelves bursting with postcolonial angst.

But then away from the blockbuster coverage of big news, there were (as always) the tiny news items, hidden away along the creases of newspaper folds, teeming with irony and meaning and the import of the passage of time. We took a little time out to read them and found that:

2) The banality of evil: Power, or the desire for it through violent means, also brings attendant concerns: a part of the stash of documents acquired from the Abbottabad house after the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden was declassified this week. Apart from his desire that his fortune, worth millions of dollars, should be spent perpetuating jihad, Osama’s letters express concerns that an Iranian dentist might have planted a tracking device in his wife’s tooth. “The length of a grain of wheat and the width of a fine piece of vermicelli” is how he describes it, the phrase a testament to both the paranoia about a possible capture and the linguistic exactness even at such a moment.

4) Less hide, more seek: Anonymity is a near elusive commodity now, since tech that catches criminals (or vandals) can also reveal the identity of secretive artists. Courtesy ‘geographic profiling’ conducted by a group of scientists in London, the identity of the anonymous street artist Banksy has been traced (again) to one Robert Gunningham. The tools that let us stay connected can also be used to pry more but what is certain is that the raging philosophical debate of the twenty-first century will involve the way technology is changing age-old assumptions about human behaviour.