Monthly Archives: June 2008

Waiting

We praise those who do, who seem in con­trol. And we should praise them — that’s what praise is for. How­ever: even I tend to for­get just what a priv­i­lege it is to be able to do more. There has to be a way to rec­on­cile patience with activ­ity, a way to know one is jus­ti­fied …

June 30, 2008 – 5:33 pm | By ashok | Posted in personal | Tagged | Comments (0)

Updating an Amazon Wishlist: Useful or a Waste of Time?

As I was buy­ing a book or two for the dis­ser­ta­tion, I real­ized I still tend to buy books I can’t pos­si­bly get full use of, and that there are books that could make me that much smarter which I have failed to get over the years. I really do regret the money and space …

June 28, 2008 – 1:30 pm | By ashok | Posted in personal | Tagged , | Comments (1)

On Political Change

Part of me wants to scream at every­one that they know noth­ing about pol­i­tics. Not because, mind you, that I know any­thing about pol­i­tics. I know very lit­tle. The impor­tant thing is that I know I know very lit­tle, and am con­stantly ask­ing ques­tions and won­der­ing how things work. I’m will­ing to con­cede to experts …

June 27, 2008 – 4:29 pm | By ashok | Posted in politics | Tagged | Comments (12)

476 AD

Blogs can be dif­fer­en­ti­ated from the rest of the media by their empha­sis on con­ver­sa­tion, but let’s not get car­ried away.The land­scape of blog­ging: torched houses and cities, peas­ants wear­ing cheap trin­kets and car­ry­ing heads in bags while claim­ing to be Cae­sar. Occa­sion­ally one comes across an encamp­ment among the the gray, the brown, the …

June 25, 2008 – 10:33 am | By ashok | Posted in blogging | Comments (4)

On Reading Slowly

Just a thought, noth­ing more: I won­der if all the intel­lec­tual virtues can be had merely through read­ing care­fully. Usu­ally we encour­age stu­dents to get books done so we can start dis­cussing the whole. But that quite obvi­ously serves the end of reread­ing, of get­ting more out of the book the sec­ond time. Reread­ing is one way …

June 23, 2008 – 4:15 pm | By ashok | Posted in education | Tagged , | Comments (0)