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Week 26, 2004
THE REGULARS: Panne d'internet, donc pas de regulars cette semaine.

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1) The Calcutta Telegraph: French model for music carnival [La fête de la musique version indienne.]
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1040603/asp/calcutta/story_3320875.asp

French model for music carnival
SUBHRO SAHA

Strains of guitar and piano bars interspersed with lilting sax and thumping drums. Jazz and blues to rock ‘n’ roll, salsa to hip-hop and techno-trance… From the streets of Paris to pubs and coffee shops of Calcutta, it’s one grand carnival, and everyone is invited.

Alliance Francaise de Calcutta, in association with Calcutta School of Music, The Park and Royal Challenge, is tuning up to unleash World Music Day on the city.

The kaleidoscope of diverse forms lined up is a take-off on the Fete de la musique, launched in 1982 by the French ministry for culture, with the concept subsequently spreading to other major European cities like Berlin, Budapest, Barcelona, Istanbul, Liverpool and Rome.

The date picked was June 21, summer solstice on the Northern Hemisphere. The carnival is traditionally a showcase for new musical trends, which it introduces and expresses. It is a “free popular fete”, open to any participant (amateur or professional) who wants to perform.

“Calcutta is very much the cultural capital of India and people here are receptive to new ideas. So, we thought rolling out a multi-genre music festival to celebrate World Music Day would be appropriate for the city,” says Emmanuelle De Decker, deputy director, cultural affairs, Alliance Francaise de Calcutta.

So, for music buffs in town, June 21 will unveil itself in a riot of live performances all day long, spilling over to the early hours of the next day. While young rock outfit Cassini’s Division kicks off the action at the Atrium during lunchtime, Krosswindz, The Violin Brothers, Anjan Dutt, Orient Express and New Illusion will keep the music flowing till late in the evening.

The high point of the carnival comes when Ronald Tual, alias DJ Rom, from Paris, takes over the turntables at the Tantra from 10 pm, jamming with Bikram Ghosh on the tabla.

The French sultan of electro is an “improviser, musician on stage or in the studio and likes to play with sounds under different aesthetics”, either solo or accompanied.

The Fete de la musique provides a common platform for all styles of music and targets the entire population, giving the opportunity to the people to communicate with each other through the music. “The musicians perform for free in concert halls, on the streets, in cafes, parks and other public places,” explains Decker, who arrived from Paris just two months ago.

In the Calcutta version of World Music Day, which now involves 120 countries and 250 cities, French students at the Alliance will sing French songs to add to the myriad menu of music.

Paresh Sengupta and his group will try their hand at a fusion of Bengali and western jazz sounds, while Abraham Mazumder will conduct a session of western classical and popular songs at La Martiniere’s Lawrence Hall.

“If Calcuttans really warm up to the concept, we will surely make it an annual affair, and maybe, try and involve other embassies and cultural units, like Max Mueller Bhavan, to add inputs and greater variety to the carnival,” assures Decker.

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4) Miami Herald/Dave Barry: Give wedding advice a shot [Humour : alors que la saison des mariages commence, il faut suivre les bons conseils de Dave.]

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/dave_barry/8340618.htm
Posted on Sun, Apr. 04, 2004

Give wedding advice a shot
DAVE BARRY

It's wedding season again. You can tell because the average bridal magazine currently weighs more than the average bride.

Bridal magazines are massive because they carry enormous amounts of advertising designed to convince the bride-to-be that her wedding will be a hideous disaster if it costs less than a nuclear aircraft carrier. ''If your parents have any money left over for retirement, you have FAILED'' -- that is the message to brides from the U.S. wedding industry.

There are no magazines for grooms, of course. The groom's sole wedding responsibility is to arrive at the ceremony wearing pants and not actively throwing up. Everything else is up to the bride, who must make thousands of critical wedding decisions, such as: Should she invite all her relatives, or just the attractive ones? Where should the guests sit? Should they shoot firearms into the air?

On that last question, my advice is: No. I base this on an Associated Press story, sent in by many alert readers, concerning a wedding last October in Serbia, which, as you are no doubt aware, is a country located somewhere. The AP story, which I swear I am not making up, begins as follows:

''In an apparent first, wedding guests shooting off celebratory rounds in central Serbia brought down a small aircraft, local media reported Sunday.''

You read that correctly: Wedding guests shot down a plane. The AP states that, ''Shootings and fatalities are frequent at Serbian weddings because of the centuries-long tradition of blasting away with firearms in celebration.''

Now, I have been to some exuberant wedding receptions, including one where a good friend of mine -- whom, out of respect for his privacy, I will identify here only as ''Joseph DiGiacinto, 235 Main St., White Plains, N.Y., 10601'' -- waded into a large fountain and attempted to overthrow, via hand-to-hand combat, a religious statue. But as an expression of joy at the union of a man and a woman, this pales by comparison with shooting down aircraft.

Fortunately, the two people in the plane survived. But this should serve as a reminder to brides of the importance of discouraging reception guests from discharging their firearms unless they have a good reason, such as that the band vocalist is attempting to perform I Will Always Love You in the official Whitney Houston Diarrhea of the Vowels version (''And IIIIIIIeeeeeIIIIIIIII, will alwaaaaays love yoooooeeeeeeeeoooooo oooooooouuuuuuueeeeeee eeoooooo'' BANG)

Speaking of things going bang: We need to straighten out a common wedding misconception concerning rice. Somehow, a rumor got started that you should not throw rice at the bride and groom, because if birds eat the rice, it swells up in their stomachs, and they (the birds) explode.

Well, guess what? According to the Internet -- and if we can't trust the Internet, who the hell can we trust? -- birds do NOT explode from eating rice. Avocados, yes; that is exactly why we do not throw avocados at the bride and groom. But rice is fine, except of course for the carbohydrates.

Unfortunately, many brides believe the exploding-bird myth, and so, as an alternative to throwing rice, they have come up with a new, and truly alarming, tradition: Releasing live butterflies at weddings. I am not making this trend up. There are butterfly-breeding farms that ship boxes of butterflies, at about $10 per head of butterfly, to weddings all over the country. That's correct: We have reached the point, in this once-great nation, where people are paying to have insects at their weddings. What's next? Colorful snakes?

I have here an e-mail from an alert reader who actually participated in a wedding butterfly release. This reader, who asked to remain nameless, offers this chilling account:

' ... It was undoubtedly the creepiest thing I have ever done. The butterflies were kept in tiny, tiny boxes and we had to stand there looking cheerful as they frantically tried to escape those tiny, tiny boxes, practically flying away (box and all) in the process. Some, tragically, did not survive the attempt. And let me tell you, nothing says 'I love you' like a dead butterfly.''

On behalf of wedding guests everywhere, I beg of you brides: Stop this insanity! It's only a matter of time before a rogue bull Monarch butterfly, driven insane by his ordeal in captivity, lunges from his box at a wedding reception and, in a blind rage of fury, brings down an airplane.

In conclusion, wedding season is a magical time. To the brides out there, I say: May you have the most wonderful, most special, most expensive, most gunfire-free wedding ever. And to you grooms, I say: Your pants are on backward.

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7) The Economist: Management education [Un livre critique sur l'enseignement fourni par les programmes MBA.]

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2668151

Management education: No More Boring Analysis?
May 13th 2004
From The Economist print edition

Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development
By Henry Mintzberg

HOW do you teach managers to manage? Henry Mintzberg, a professor of management at McGill University in Montreal, has long held a contrary view to that proposed by most business schools. In this constantly stimulating book he divides his answer into two parts: first, he argues that the traditional qualification, the Masters of Business Administration (MBA), is the wrong way—he says it “prepares people to manage nothing”. Then he expounds what he believes is the right way: an imprecise mix of personal reflection and the sharing of experience.

Mr Mintzberg finds fault with the emphasis that many MBA programmes place on frenetic case studies which encourage students to come up with rapid answers based on meagre data. But more than that, he criticises them for their concentration on dry analysis. Such courses, he says, enable their graduates to “speak convincingly in a group of 40 to 90 people”, and make them believe they can leapfrog over experience. That, though, is not the sum total of what is required to manage a complex commercial organisation.

Synthesis, not analysis, argues Mr Mintzberg, “is the very essence of management”. On several occasions he cites Robert McNamara, once president of the Ford Motor Company and a United States secretary of defence in the 1960s, as the archetypal MBA, a man who thought that even in Vietnam “generic analysis could substitute for situational knowledge”. More recently, the qualification has been thrown into deeper disrepute by the heavy dependence of companies such as Enron on MBA recruits. Its former chief executive Jeffrey Skilling, currently awaiting trial on 36 charges of fraud and insider trading, liked to boast that he came in the top 5% of his MBA class at the Harvard Business School.

And yet, if the MBA is so bad at teaching management, how come America has far more successful businesses than Europe and Japan, areas of the world that are significantly less enthusiastic about such methods of learning? Leaving aside the unprovable rejoinder that American firms would have done even better without the MBA, Mr Mintzberg argues that any list of America's most admired corporate leaders is heavily loaded with people who don't have the qualification: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jack Welch, Michael Dell and Andy Grove, to name but a few. The fact that some 40% of the bosses of America's biggest companies today have an MBA is, he claims, largely due to the fact that the system is self-perpetuating. “Enabling Harvard to place so many people at the top is the fact that Harvard already has so many people at the top.”

Mr Mintzberg is not alone these days in questioning the value of the traditional MBA. Leading consultants such as McKinsey and Mercer are spreading their recruitment net much more widely. Mercer's London office says that one year's in-house training enables young graduates to “run circles round newly minted MBAs”. In its February issue, the Harvard Business Review (no less) said that “an arts degree is now perhaps the hottest credential in the world of business”, with corporate recruiters trawling places such as the Rhode Island School of Design.

“Managers not MBAs” throws a stone into the often complacent world of management education. It should be required reading for anyone who has the qualification, wants one, or just wonders what all the fuss is about.

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http://slate.msn.com/id/2099763/

explainer: Where Did We Get Our Oath?
The origin of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
By Brendan I. Koerner
Posted Friday, April 30, 2004, at 2:52 PM PT

When President Bush and Vice President Cheney testified before the 9/11 Commission yesterday, they were not required to raise their right hands and swear "to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." When National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared before the commission earlier this month, however, she was compelled to testify under oath. How and when did the oath originate?

The tradition of requiring witnesses to swear an honesty oath likely traces back to Roman times. Urban legend contends that male Romans had to squeeze their testicles while vowing to tell the truth, which is why the Latin word for witness is testis. Latin scholars have debunked this colorful claim, pointing out that testis more likely comes from the Ancient Greek for "three"—a witness being a third observer of events. Still, the orator Cicero alluded to the importance of legally binding oaths in De Officiis, and the Law of the Twelve Tables, the earliest of codification of Roman law, stresses that perjurers "shall be hurled down from the Tarpeian Rock."

The word "oath," however, comes not from Latin, but rather Anglo-Saxon. The Anglo-Saxons used oaths not only to swear fealty to feudal lords, but also to ensure honesty during legal proceedings and transactions. When the Anglo-Saxon king Athelstan codified Britain's laws around A.D. 930, he included a section requiring that the sale of chattel be witnessed by a neutral third party, who would take an oath to act truthfully and in the law's best interest. The phrase "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" is believed to have initially been coined in Old English, and to have become a staple of English trials by approximately the 13th century.

Despite the early addition of witness oaths to the English common law tradition, witnesses faced no codified penalties for perjury until the mid-16th century. Prior to that, it was believed that the specter of God's vengeance alone was enough to coax witnesses into telling the unvarnished truth.

The earliest English settlers in America brought over the tradition of the witness oath; Noah Webster, for example, refers to the "whole truth" oath in a 1787 essay. The 1856 edition of Bouvier's Law Dictionary notes that, after swearing the oath, witnesses were expected to kiss the Bible.

Courts are no longer so strict about ensuring that oaths contain a religious element. Early Quakers were the first Americans to object to the witness oath, citing a prohibition in James 5:12 against any form of swearing. ("But above all things, my brethren, swear not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any other oath.") More recently, some atheists have voiced discomfort at the prospect of having to swear on a Bible or mention God. As a result, a witness can request to affirm, rather than swear. A typical affirmation used in U.S. District Courts goes:

You do affirm that all the testimony you are about to give in the case now before the court will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; this you do affirm under the pains and penalties of perjury?

Witnesses of non-Judeo-Christian faiths can also ask to substitute an alternate text for the Bible. And atheists can ask to affirm atop a plain black book.

The most curious challenge to the oath in recent years occurred in U.S. v. Ward, a tax-evasion case involving a Las Vegas publisher named Wallace Ward. For reasons known only to him, Ward insisted on replacing the word "truth" with the phrase "fully integrated honesty." The initial court refused to let him testify, but on appeal in 1992, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that Ward had aptly demonstrated "a moral or ethical sense of right and wrong" with his proposed words.

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