Saul Steinberg and the global economic crisis

Just noticed that Christoph Niemann new post on his blog on the New York Times titled I Lego NY. Someone in one of the comments compared it to Saul Steinberg's art.

So had a look at the Saul Steinberg Foundation page and got this off it: "Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) was one of America’s most beloved artists, renowned for the covers and drawings that appeared in The New Yorker for nearly six decades and for the drawings, paintings, prints, collages, and sculptures exhibited internationally in galleries and museums." Take a look at some of his art in the gallery here

On the foundation's website, I found this one piece particularly fascinating - pretty representative of the current economic crisis in my opinion. Greed, achievement and more greed. And then Kaput.

(click on the image to go to its original source)

Calling all Pakistanis

I'm no admirer of Thomas Friedman, but he does have a way of dramatizing situations with simplified analogies. Whether its 'The World is Flat' or 'Calling all Pakistanis', as in this article.

After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son — purely because they were Sunni Muslims — where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.

Is this the reaction we're seeing from India today? Have we all gone back to being Buddhists?