And in other news...

Guatemala farmers release police
Guatemalan farmers disarmed 29 police officers inside a police station and took them by boat to a remote jungle village, where they held them hostage for two days. The helpless hostages included a police station head, a police district head and four other commanders. The farmers wanted the release of a "farm leader", whatever that means, arrested for robbery and illegally occupying land. Apparently they've got what they wanted. A police spokesman said: "They told us they are going to kill them one by one."


The Japanese invented a DangerBomb
It’s an alarm clock that looks like a bomb, sounds like a bomb and forces you to work like a keen-eyed Hollywood bomb squad before you're even awake. You can turn it off only by detaching the right coloured wire – which is determined randomly every day. If you get it wrong, it will explode in your ear. If you're likely to be in a US airport at the same time as a flight coming in from Japan, expect to take at least a day to get through security.

If I'm laughing, it must be two weeks.

I had the strangest few minutes this morning. I made my coffee, opened the balcony door, took a deep breath of the morning air, then casually put my cup down and started to walk about – first in the direction of the side tables, then the shelf my music system sits on, then to my dining table, not impatient yet, just puzzled at something unaccountably missing from the place it should be. I suddenly stopped the automaton-like wandering and laughed. I was looking for my cigarettes. Without conscious thought. So this is why they say not to have any cigarettes stashed away anywhere. The relapse can happen involuntarily. How fascinating.

IQ vs BMI

One of my friends is super-fit (she drops casually into a spilt like a rag doll), with the flattest stomach I've seen outside of Baywatch. She's also blessed with considerable height and real curves. As you can imagine, she is stunning. But she hides herself away most of the time because she thinks she's fat.

This is not a unique story. Slim girls who weigh themselves every day seem to look in the mirror and see only the extra half-pound of negligible water weight. Fat girls like me, who use the weighing scale as a doorstop, look in the mirror and see the body as it would have been if they had shed five pounds by doing the "bikini ready in four weeks" thing they'd cut from a magazine and put on the fridge a month ago.

It may sound like delusion, but it's actually just the joy of potential.

I did become bikini-skinny one time, through great toil and trouble. After the novelty of it wore off (about a week) it became apparent that I had not magically transformed into anything else. Not an elegant social butterfly, nor a brilliant, extrovert scientist. I still couldn't remember any jokes, let alone tell them. It had not lessened my workload, lengthened my weekend or helped me pass the slope test, not matter how easily I did it when practising with my driving instructor.

Basically, I was still me – but an unhappy, malnourished, uptight, weighing-scale-junkie version. The "unsuitable" clothes that I wear with exuberant pleasure in my overweight state were impossible to buy when skinny, because all I saw in the mirror was the extra half-pound of negligible water weight.

In other ways it didn't make a blinding bit of difference. I don't think my friends even noticed beyond the first few days. (In fact I expect one of them, reading this, to wonder when it happened though he was present at the time). The only one it mattered to – too much – was the boyfriend. This mercifully annoyed me enough to force me off the wagon.

So I was free again to take pleasure in being me. To enjoy the places I went, the people I met, the food I ate, the sun, sea and sand, without worrying about what I looked like doing it.

Years later, I let myself to be talked into joining a celebrated weight-loss centre. For two hours every day I was judged and found wanting by strangers that I did not respect or like. Day by miserable day, they picked and tore at my self-esteem (apparently your existing confidence needs to be destroyed before they can build their version in its place as promised). I have looked forward to dentist visits with more girlish enthusiasm.

The mental self-defence system kicked in 10 days later and I ditched the whole thing. Someone else I know tried it and reacted exactly the same way. This kind of "slimming centre" – its lying refrain of wellness, beauty, confidence, in equal parts hypnotic and nauseating – represents everything that is wrong with the world. The reason why millions of young girls are seduced by anorexia. Why my proficient, intelligent, extremely level-headed friend has inexplicably allowed a pretender called "body image" to get under her guard.

Fat, winged pests

A most spirited friend chose to make this her Facebook profile picture for the "season". (The original is from here). It's my favourite Valentine. A shining beacon of truth and beauty – or at least soothing defiance – in the vast headachy sea of artificially scented red roses and heart-shaped candles. The local papers have devoted millions of serious column inches to the "day of true love", as one of them courted grievous bodily harm by putting it. All I can say is, once you've crossed 22 (if you missed the boat at 18), you should at least have grown up enough to pretend that your celebration is ironic.

Ashes to ashes

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn the passing of a friend.

For ten years, we shared the joys and sorrows, the wakeful nights, the happy mornings, the contented hours and the disturbed ones. We celebrated and mourned together. Travelled, moved house, worked, partied, grew up.

We were together for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer. A daydream believer and a homecoming queen.

There is a lot of hearty, strident stuff spoken about quitting the habit, mostly because, like marriage, it's incomprehensible from the outside – you need to be in it to understand it. Someone described it as a magic wand that changes everything and quitting is hard because there isn't another one to replace it. Actually it is the closest companion, the truest love and the fairy godmother wielding the magic wand, all rolled into one.

A ten-year relationship is a hard one to end, but I did. As Hugh Grant says in Love Actually, "I fear this has become a bad relationship and from now on I am prepared to be much stronger". I finally got tired of the tyranny of this habit, angry about feeling helpless, dragged along in the wake of yet another compulsion. Tired enough, once more, to walk away from this sort of thing.

And now I need to go out to find creatures smaller than me and kill them just to watch them die. And I hope that you, dearly beloved who are reading this, will get fleas.

The quit-smoking programme said I'll stop feeling homicidal in two weeks. It also warned that heavy smokers would experience real feelings of bereavement.

An uneasy valentine

A side-effect of researching the history of Indian Railways is an involuntary feeling of respect, in spite of yourself, for an empire that fully earned the word mighty. And a fresh disdain for the lesser version being attempted now.

The old invader was ruthlessly feudal, magnificently arrogant and calmly self-centered. The new one wears its power clumsily, still in awe of its own brute force. So no railway system will be bequeathed to Iraq, no snob schools will be built in Afghanistan nor clubs in Kosovo, no courts, cathedrals or civil service.

They will be left nothing to tear down in a gesture of independence or appropriate with ceremony or simply build on. Nothing will be stolen from them that can be demanded back in indignation as "closure". It will have been a rape, as opposed to an unequal relationship.

The great Indian railway journey

It began at 3:35pm on April 16th, 1853. 14 coaches carrying 400 passengers steamed out of Bombay's Bori Bunder to a 21-gun salute. They were hauled by three engines picturesquely called Sindh, Sultan and Sahib. It was an hour and fifteen minutes to the destination, Thane.

Of course two freight trains were already operating somewhere a few years before this, but they weren't nice enough for the memsahibs to sit in and didn't get any dress-uniform recognition. So the glamour date (as one might see in a Merchant-Ivory movie) is the Bori Bunder-Thane passenger.

In the first 25 years of Indian Railways, more than 6500 kilometers of track were laid. They moved from narrow gauge to meter gauge, built the Darjeeling Hill Railway, upgraded the coaches at least five times, published a railway timetable, laid emergency lines for famine relief and started construction of the Victoria Terminus. Routes emerged almost simultaneously to the North, East and South. Bombay, Ahmedabad, Ajmer, Delhi, Calcutta, Bangalore, Chennai, Salem and Hyderabad were just a few of the places connected rapidly, without the benefit of sixteen-wheeler trucks, cranes or telephones.

The Bangalore Metro, on the other hand, has been 25 years in the making and is still three years from completion (at the last estimate).

But in spite of that (and others like it), Indian Railways remains an awe-inspiring phenomenon, noticeably so even in a country where you're likely to find one around any random corner. 108,805 kilometres of track connect the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, the Arabian sea to the Bay of Bengal. Across the vast spaces, signals rise and fall, points click and move, the little piece of paper with your name on it appears by magic on the reserved coach.

For me, like for many others, the life and times of the railways are caught up in my own, from a child who kept falling off the top berth to a lawless adult hanging out the doorway of a speeding express. Like everyone else I’ve resisted the temptation to pull that chain just once, just to see if it works. Cut dangerously across the rails from one platform to another, rather than climb the stairs. Still believe that even the most questionable food tastes great in the train.

In the first 25 years of my life, my local station went from a single-rail ghost stop to a seven-platform junction. The railways form India's only living, breathing, evolving historical monument. The Bangalore-Chennai Mail that I know so well has been running for 145 years.

I've stopped looking bewildered by choice when would-be tourists ask me where they can see the "real India". Now I tell them: just ride the trains. (One of them took my advice and so I discovered that there's an Indrail pass, modeled on the Eurail one.)

Perhaps one day the Shatabdi will be a bullet train and the commuter trains will run on elevated rail. Meanwhile, Indian Railways functions, through flood, famine, fire, riots, strikes, accidents, budget cuts – all the hazards of being the national carrier to a large and unwieldy democracy – almost always against the odds. If the trains stopped, so would the country.

War on error

Occasionally there is a quiet voice of reason that says coincidence has been an acceptable form of human error since time immemorial. Or a calmly informed comment about perfectly natural prevailing conditions of wind and water. But these are ignored even by readers who were thinking much the same thing themselves. Conspiracy theories about the cut cables are far more exciting.

Discussion among bloggers ranges from the obvious and unimaginative "terrorist attack" to the equally so NATO/CIA/NAVY axis of evil-bashers to the hysterically amusing "Russia is starting a cold war again" to the highly entertaining "I sent a large file to my friend, maybe it was too much". It's also interesting to note that several US bloggers and their readers seem to believe that the cutting off of Iran is the most serious consequence, forgetting, perhaps never knowing, about the others. India, for example, and the very real seriousness of that. The links are so many, I can't provide them here. I suggest a Google search. It's well worth the time.

Meanwhile, my internet access in Dubai continues uninterrupted, as you can see. I seem to have fallen within the correct 60%, in an entirely unprecedented move by the universe. Maybe it's been taken over by aliens.

The two-ply Indian

The dualism begins with language. Most of us in a certain socio-economic class are fluent in at least two languages – English and one other – though the reality is usually three or four. Each of these languages brings it's own cultural references, literature, folklore and behaviour systems. My Little Pony and paccha kudhira* share the same paddock peaceably. See? The Indian is already two-ply and not yet old enough to go to school.

As he or she grows, this is only reinforced by the greater exposure – books, music, movies, clothes, jokes. We speak one language to our friends and another to family. And again, one language to our cousins and another to our grandparents, and we enjoy being with both. Neither is a false front. They're both real and they live comfortably side by side, except for a few rough bits in the teenage years.

The two plies replicate themselves into subsets, permeating every little part of our psyche. It becomes (literally) second nature and so it's hard to answer questions from non-Indians about large matters of "conservatism and liberality in Indian society". Giving absolute answers to anything about India is a nightmare anyway – the minute you make a firm statement – even as you're making it – you remember fifty things that contradict it.

This is especially difficult in Dubai, where the non-Indians you meet are by and large throwbacks to Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad or life members of the Stereotype Or Die Society. One mad friend used to enliven Friday brunches by insisting aggressively: "My traditional Sunday breakfast is the same as yours – eggs, bacon, hash browns and toast". But the hash browns may have been called aloo tikkis and he would have added dosa to the mix, whenever on offer – and without it being in any way out of place.

(This particular friend headed West to spread the word, most recently heard telling Torontonians: "I am not East Indian, I am Indian. There's only one kind. Columbus could not read a map and neither can you." A few months earlier he made a visit to New York more interesting by contending that "the term doesn't even make sense. Africa is a continent, with 53 countries, not a concept for you to adopt. You're American." He survived. We expect to see his name in the Birthday Honours list any day now. Or some list, for sure.)

Anyway. Reading about India's protocol problems with Sarkozy and his girlfriend, I grinned and thought about the quaintest manifestation of them all. When you invite your girlfriend or boyfriend to stay at your parents' house, you will sleep in separate rooms, because the alternative is unthinkable. Yet, you will go on holiday together and send back photographs – which your parents will naturally, happily add to the family album.

How thin and sparse our lives would be without this duality, like a warp without a weft.

*Green horse. A very long and involved Malayalam fairy tale a nanny used to tell us. Never completed, ever.

Aquarius

Sleep was elusive all night. I stayed quietly awake in some vigil that I seemed to be required to keep.

When I got the message in the morning that my sister-in-law had gone into labour in the night, it was not a surprise, merely a confirmation. It’s not even surprising that my mind chose to keep the vigil, untold – this is merely the same instinct that makes my brother call me unerringly when I really need to talk, whether I want to or not.

Our family unit of five is now six. That’s not surprising either – it’s always been flexible, taking on any number from two to two hundred at any given point in space or time. What is surprising is that my small brother is suddenly a father. And that this wonder-child is real, here.

The first photographs brought a rush of entirely new emotion. Perhaps this is unconditional love. It was so unfamiliar and so strong that I had no idea what to do with it. My actions seemed strange but were probably just a response called up from my genes – I visited my locker to check on my diamonds.

Two years ago, as the jeweller handed me the case, he told me fulsomely I had bought an heirloom that I would hand down to other generations. My friend and I were too busy gloating over my new possession to care. Well, the heir to it was born this afternoon. The sense of continuity that gave me was most surprising of all.