Oops

Is 'ou812' that common?

Lawyers, MBAs and Engineers

From an interview with the president of the China Investment Corporation in The Atlantic:

The best and brightest minds go to lawyering, go to M.B.A.s. And that affects our country, too! Many of the brightest youngsters come to me and say, “Okay, I want to go to the U.S. and get into business school, or law school.” I say, “Why? Why not science and engineering?” They say, “Look at some of my primary-school classmates. Their IQ is half of mine, but they’re in finance and now they’re making all this money.”

Nothing new in this, except that the part in italics is a near-verbatim quote of what someone said to me yesterday, after meeting one such MBA.

Well

...now the Videocon offer doesn't sound so bad, does it?

With the handset unit continuing to bleed cash, Motorola was planning to spin the division off into a separate company and focus on its remaining two businesses, which focus on home entertainment and emergency-response communications. Those plans have been scrapped for now given the lack of interest by investors.

It's All Very Well

... doing macho stuff like sinking pirate mother ships and capturing pirates, but it would also be nice if the Indian Navy could turn their attention to protecting the Indian coastline once in a while.

Pop Quiz

What do these words and phrases have in common:

puissant, rascally, indolence, diabolical, instrumentality, Kilkenny cat functionalism, nocent, pachydermic

Option A: They were all taken from the Reading Comprehension section of the most recent edition of the GRE.
Option B: They are all from V R Krishna Iyer's article in yesterday's Hindu.

There is a lot of sense in what the retired judge has to say, but this gets buried (should I say 'interred') in the pompous verbiage. To be fair, I get a sort of perverse pleasure watching these words jostle for space before making an uneasy peace with their cohabitants whom they would rather die than share a sentence with normally -- it's almost like reading bad poetry -- but the message gets lost. Some sample sentences:

Are our expensive defence systems so goofy and gullible that hostiles in guile, with brute objectives, can reach a busy city, march inside a seven-star hotel and indulge in diabolical destruction with vindictive terrorism?

Even where Ministers and bureaucrats wine and dine, nocent neglect is writ large

The perspective of the executive at the State and Central levels is bureaucratic and pachydermic; pomp and power of office is the focus.

I wanted to add a few more examples, but for some reason, I seem to have developed a headache all of a sudden.

Somebody please tell her

... that no, it's not OK for her to start prescribing medicine:

"When I started to play tennis, I wanted to be a doctor. I had to choose between tennis and being a doctor and I chose tennis. Now, thanks to MGR University, both my dreams have come true," said tennis star Dr Sania Mirza, HDFTBU

(Alright, I added the prefix and degree to her name. Readers who figure out what HDFTBU stands for will win an honorary doctorate from... never mind)