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No, it's not a story about call centres, far from it. This New York Times article is about the astonishing reverse-migration of US-born men and women of Indian extraction migrating "back" to India in search of their fortunes, or just a more comfortable or exciting way to make a living. There are some fascinating insights and great quotes in this short article:
Prior to living in India:
My parents married in India and then embarked to America on a lonely, thrilling adventure. They learned together to drive, shop in malls, paint a house. They decided who and how to be. ... It was extraordinary, and ordinary: This is what America did to people, what it always has done.
My parents brought us to India every few years as children. I relished time with relatives; but India always felt alien, impenetrable, frozen. ... Perhaps it was the bureaucracy, the need to know someone to do anything. Or the culture shock of servitude: a child’s horror at reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in an American middle school, then seeing servants slapped and degraded in India. My firsthand impression of India seemed to confirm the rearview immigrant myth of it: a land of impossibilities. But history bends and swerves, and sometimes swivels fully around. Living in India today: At first we felt confused by India’s formalities and hierarchies, by British phraseology even the British had jettisoned, by the ubiquity of acronyms. Working in offices, some of us were perplexed to be invited to “S&M conferences,” only to discover that this denoted sales and marketing. Several found to their chagrin that it is acceptable for another man to touch your inner thigh when you crack a joke in a meeting. We learned new expressions: “He is on tour” (Means: He is traveling. Doesn’t mean: He has joined U2.); “What is your native place?” (Means: Where did your ancestors live? Doesn’t mean: What hospital delivered you?); “Two minutes” (Means: An hour. Doesn’t mean: Two minutes.).
Countries like India once fretted about a “brain drain.” We are learning now that “brain circulation,” as some call it, may be more apt. India did not export brains; it invested them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future.
Deborama's Wednesday Website of the Week returns for a one-off engagement.
An online friend who is almost diametrically opposed to me politically (but a decent guy) (I could say the same about my sister except for the guy part, obviously) sent me this link : Politifact.com. It includes the invaluable Flip-o-meter and also the Truth-o-meter. It also includes the Attack files and the special Chain E-mails files, with truthometer readings for each item. I am very impressed! How on earth did we do anything before the internet? (We didn't have chain e-mails influencing elections, true enough.)
 I have taken to looking at the main page of Wikipedia every day, just for the serendipity of learning something new and unexpected. Today one of the pages featured was that of a graffiti artist from the seminal NYC 1970s scene, who went by the name of Phase2. He is "generally credited" with the invention of the "bubble letter" or "softies" style which is now quite ubiquitous in the urban and even suburban and rural environment.
As one does on the web, I surfed from link to link, learning about wheatpasting, which led in turn to Obey Giant (which started out as Andre the Giant has a posse.) I remember Andre from the wonderful film The Princess Bride, which due to my kids, children of the early 1980s, loving it so much, I have seen many times and pretty much know by heart.) Obey Giant also has an "official" website.
 Getting back to the subject of graffiti, I see some on my way to work every day (two trains, a little over an hour on a good day, through Narborough, South Wigston, Leicester, Loughborough, Attenborough, Beeston and ending in Nottingham, which has a thriving graffiti culture. And a fair number of anarchists too.) In the rural category, just across from the Ratcliff-on-Soar coal-fired power plant, there is a graffiti (a graffitus? a graffito?) on a little hump-backed bridge that the sheep like to shelter under that says, in very crude simple letters, "Peak Power". And on the approach to Nottingham, a graffiti attributed to a group called ALF, says "Devaste to Liberate". I am pretty sure they meant to say "Devastate to Liberate" and it is a real blot on the landscape, to my mind, to have grossly misspelled graffiti. And anyway, I have never signed up to that belief anyway, despite being an anarchist. In fact, I have even come up with a minor witticism to take the piss out of such philosophy: Fuck omelettes, I just like breaking eggs.©
The New York Times has this interesting story about yet another Japanese social phenomenon little-known in the west: stay-at-home wives of affluent Japanese businessmen have been gradually gaining clout in international currency markets and margin trading. Trading exclusively online, with a subculture that includes best-sellers, TV interviews, clubs and blogs, they use their own or sometimes their husband's money as a stake and try (often successfully) to build up independent wealth to shield themselves from divorce or excessive control by their husbands. The current shakeup in international markets has brought chaos to their powerful little market, and professional traders consider them a wild card.
I am still very new at this, but I got turned on to this site by the same guy (from the BBC) who forced me to join Facebook. (OK, to be fair, Facebook forced me to join Facebook, he just gave me a link on it.) This week's Wednesday Website of the Week is for music lovers. It's called last.fm and it is yet another possibility for the future of music distribution, consumption and production. Check it out and let me know what you think.
I thought I was the one who had discovered that there was a subgenre of novels concerning school-based mass murder. On one of my other blogs, Deborama's Book Reviews and Store, I reviewed Vernon God Little (DBC Pierre ) and Hey Nostradamus (Douglas Coupland) simultaneously. But now I find out that Lionel Shriver, author of yet another of that genre, We Need To Talk About Kevin, was fully aware that she was writing in this subgenre, and now, of course, I think she feels a little guilty about the Virginia Tech shootings. This is from her comment piece in G2 of the Guardian. (The Guardian, by the way, has already got a dedicated Special Reports page on the shooting, in addition to yet another comment piece from Jon Ronson, which I found strangely moving (strangely because I usually don't think of Ronson as being deep and philosophical, just weird, but this article is really good.)
You may have read about it; now see it for yourself - cheddarvision.tv is a webcam focused on a grand cheddar cheese in a darkened cave just getting older. It's far more pure an experience than watching paint dry - for one thing, it's slower. There is also a myspace page for it, if you prefer. No, it's not that exciting either.
Answerbag is a wiki or wiki-like site that often comes up if you do a lot of quirky searches (as I do.) It's free to sign up, and members can post a question on literally any topic in the world, not matter how serious or how frivolous. Other members then scan the questions and, if they know the answer, they answer it. I found Answerbag twice. The first time, I was frustrated by the total lack of leaf wipes in all the shops (having been supplanted by Christmas tat) and was looking for a home-made leaf-wipe formula. The second time I was looking for natural remedies to correct a home hair-colouring experiment gone slightly awry. (I can see you thinking Deborama is really too old for such silliness, and you would be right.) Like most participatory web experiences, Answerbag is growing luxuriously and sprouting widgets, gadgets and special interest groups.
So, the Arctic Monkeys came from nowhere to number one due to their clever self-promotion on a lifestyle website called MySpace.com? Right? Wrong. The truth is, as ever, far more interesting.
The Guardian Education section has this article about the old proverb "You can't judge a book by its cover". According to recent research, apparently you can. Well, at least, 77% of the time you can. Piters and Stokmans's unabashedly bookish study, called Genre Categorization and Its Effect on Preference for Fiction Books, was published just a few years ago, in the journal Empirical Studies of the Arts. Their experiment builds on a pilot study Piters conducted in the mid-1990s. There, he found evidence that a book cover "has to visually represent what the book is about since that might be an important cue in identifying a book as belonging to a specific genre". Of course, I couldn't help thinking, that's a pretty old proverb, and probably when it first started, book covers looked like this:- 
First, a jab to the nose! Then a hook to the temple! Next, knight takes bishop on D5! Testing both brains and brawn, it is supposedly the ultimate alpha-male sport. Yes, it's . . . chess boxing! Deborama is absolutely fascinated by this new international sport that started out life as a very subtle performance art piece and now nets its artist-founder a tidy little income.
: " 
Powerful. Intimidating. Trivia Nazi. President Bartlet is all of these and more. A super-nerd who's into chess, National Parks, and rambling off things in Latin, POTUS is the 'real thing.' Not being completely upfront with the American people may cause him re-election headaches, though...
:: Which West Wing character are you? :: "
The Brain Sex Quiz will tell you how female your brain is. This is related to a series on the Beeb called Secrets of the Sexes. It's better than the usual dumbed-down science fare on TV. At this site you can also read about the accuracy (or not) of intelligence tests, which celebrities have high IQs and the latest thinking on - um - thinking.
Another rural Minnesota high school in the news, not for a mass shooting this time, but for a good old-fashioned pro-American free speech protest. In the best tradition of Minnesota liberals and feminists, two high school girls were sent home from school for wearing "offensive" T-shirts from the "Vagina Monologues". This came after a rally was held outside the school with numerous students wearing similar T-shirts in support of one of the girls, who had been threatened with expulsion for wearing a button purchased at the show that read simply "I [heart] my vagina". At the rally, girls wore T-shirts with the same slogan and boys wore T-shirts proclaiming "I support your vagina". Most of the students turned their T-shirts inside out to hide the slogans before returning to school, but two girls who wore theirs the right way were sent home for a day. "We consider public education to be the backbone of America. And we have to draw the line. If you let this in, what's next?" said the principal of the school.
Sorry Everbody is a hoot! A website features a huge gallery of mostly young arty types with their graphic apologies to the rest of the world for the fact that their country has re-elected Bush. You can participate if you wish - all you need is a camera (or photo-enabled mobile phone) and maybe a sheet of paper and a pen.
Today was another great day in my spam mailbox. I got "Microshit Money 2004 clearance" and "Lexy ladies waiting for you mushy". No kidding.
This priceless gem via Firebrand:
Ladies and gentlemen, Drop your borders Now that George W. Bush has been officially elected, single, sexy, American liberals - already a threatened species - will be desperate to escape.
These lonely, afraid (did we mention really hot?) progressives will need a safe haven.
You can help. Open your heart, and your home. Marry an American. Legions of Canadians have already pledged to sacrifice their singlehood to save our southern neighbours from four more years of cowboy conservatism.
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