Is Kiran Bedi a cheat?

Is Kiran Bedi guilty of cheating children as well as donors? Has she fraudulently converted funds earmarked for providing free education for the children of police and para-military officers?
It scarcely seems likely. As with her air-line ticket scam, where wealthy NGOs were charged for Business Class tickets though Madamji herself travelled Economy, all Dr. Bedi may be guilty off is diverting money to  to her own Charities, and here too the ex-police officer's moral culpability is much diminished by the fact that her entire professional life was spent in a sewer of corruption, stupidity, accounting irregularity and blissful ignorance of due process or correct procedure.
Furthermore, she has a Phd in Social Science. How on earth is she expected to understand the difference between right and wrong?
Did she shoot any of the donors in a fake encounter? Did she actually rape or kill any of the children she is supposed to have cheated under the excuse of providing them with free computer training?
If she is a cheat, then the only person she has cheated is Swami Agnivesh. You will remember, this wonderful wizard made Child Labour disappear in India, which is why he has so much free time to devote to other things. Why couldn't she have simply applied the ghotna to his testicles under the pretence of consulting with him on the Lok Pal bill? Why couldn't she have absent mindedly lathi charged the gruesome fellow now and again, just as a form of aerobic exercise?
The truth is Kiran Bedi was never temperamentally fit to wear the uniform of an Indian Police officer of the best sort. I know, I know. There are thousands of very good and honest officers- many with higher degrees and so on- but my stricture applies to them as well.
What is the point of having Police officers, retired or otherwise, involved in Civil Society if they don't get drunk and shoot Swami Agnivesh from time to time? Can't they at least do a cavity search of that Holier-than-Thou asshole if someone in the vicinity loses their mobile or biro pen or something?
Frankly, the British managed things better.

Ghalib- ghazal 60

{60,7}*

bik jāte haiñ ham āp matāʿ-e suḳhan ke sāth
lekin ʿayār-e t̤abʿ-e ḳharīdār dekh kar

1) we ourself are sold along with the merchandise/goods of poetry
2) but [only after] having seen the measure of quality/temperament of the buyer

{60,8}*

zunnār bāñdh subḥah-e ṣad-dānah toṛ ḍāl
rahrau chale hai rāh ko hamvār dekh kar

1a) tie on a sacred thread, rip apart the hundred-beaded prayer-beads!
1b) having tied on a sacred thread, having ripped apart the hundred-beaded prayer-beads

2) the traveler moves along, having seen the road smooth

{60,10}

kyā bad-gumāñ hai mujh se kih āʾīne meñ mire
t̤ūt̤ī kā ʿaks samjhe hai zangār dekh kar

1) how suspicious {you are / she is} of me! --that in my mirror
2) having seen the verdigris, {you consider / she considers} it [to be] the reflection of a parrot

{60,11}*

girnī thī ham pah barq-e tajallī nah t̤ūr par
dete haiñ bādah z̤arf-e qadaḥ-ḳhvār dekh kar

1) the lightning of glory/manifestation should have fallen on us, not on [Mount] Tur
2) they give wine [only after] having seen the capacity of the cup-drinker

This is ghazal from 1833- by which time Ghalib would have been firmly established in his Farsi scholarship and familiar with the canonical treatment of the various conceits.

Precisely because I think it isn't an adolescent poem, I don't find much of interest in it.

Still, I don't think the commentators do it justice either.

With regard to the first couplet, I suppose sukhan as poetry, simply, is okay. Still, remembering Sheikh Galip, why not dignify it as Logos-as-poetry? In that case you get a mystical meaning, or even a Confucian meaning. One can still keep the existential meaning, which I've done in the second line.

With the second couplet there is this strange idea that zunnar refers to the Brahmin 'janeo' rather than the Zoroastrian girdle. Both Brahmins and pious Muslims are forbidden wine (at least in Ghalib's part of the world) whereas wine is considered a good thing in Zoroastrianism (or Xtianity or Judaism, for that matter) and the mugh-e-mahood, the elderly Magian Tavern keeper is a stock symbol of wisdom in Farsi poetry. 

The next couplet refers to a very well known, indeed a key, element in Rumi's philosophy of Love.The parrot is shown its own image in a mirror and then taught words which it assumes are addressed to it by its image and which it learns to mimic so as to reciprocate the ardent sentiments expressed to it. Similarly, God teaches us Love by putting such delusive images in front of us. Through spiritual practices one can sublate these delusive images and come to understand that the words we repeat have an origin both hidden and higher. Among the commentators, Bekhud Mohani understands the idiom but doesn't see its relevance.  But this is easily done by making the God of the mystics a jealous Lord, or rather doing so by a self-deprecatory 'majzoob' imputation.

The last couplet refers to 2 Quranic verses 7.143 and 33.72. God had offered his 'amaanah' (Trust/REsponsibility/Viceregency/Free Will) to the mountains and so on, but only man agreed to take it, but this was done rashly. Later, God tells Moses that he will not see Him, but should gaze at the mountain. If it remains steady, then Moses can bear the theophany, otherwise not. However, Mt. Tur is levelled as it can not bear the glory of the Lord's theophany.

Ghalib here is affirming Man's worthiness of amaanah and khilafat but emphasizes Man's highest goal is to seek and yearn for Union with the Divine, even if this means utter obliteration. Just as strong wine, such as might render a callow youth senseless, serves but to invogorate a seasoned warrior- so too God's trust in man can make him worthy of closer communion with his maker.

To assay its purchasers, essays the Logos poetry

Tho' with the wares I purvey what's sold is me!

Ah, let girdled Magians bring wine for my ode!

Prayer beads string but bumps in the road.

'Tis verdigris in my mirror, not a parrot green

Taught Love's tort by an athwart Unseen

Mount Tur lies level like a drunkard in the dust

I alone am that drinker athirst for Thy Trust.

edit-
Thanks Anon for the tip re the ornamental, highly polished, zarf.

This gives a completely different meaning so I'll change the last couplet to-

Mt.Tur's crater, Musa's drunk dumb-waiter, bit yet the dust .

I'm a toper of class & deep looking glass, fit for Thy Trust

Are we killing Mahatma Gandhi all over again?

An anguished soul, who directed my attention to this article, asks me 'when we receive or give black money- thick wads of currency notes with Mahatma Gandhi's face upon them- are we not guilty of killing him all over again?'

I have thought about the matter and now give my judgement.
1) No. You say you killed the guy. I've checked. He really is dead. So you aren't killing him all over again even if you are paying or receiving a lot of Rupees to do it. In legal terms, such an action falls under the category of impossible attempt.
2) I forget whether you and your chums claimed credit for raping Gandhi while killing him last time round. The truth is I tend to let my mind wander when the topic of the Mahatma comes up. Still, it is not unreasonable for me to proceed on the assumption that you chaps both raped and killed Gandhi and now are seeking information from me as to whether you are succeeding once again in perpetrating the same faux pas.
On reflection, no- I think that what you are guilty of is necrophilia, gross indecency and mutilating a corpse.

I hope this answers your question.

Writing degree zero, residual entropy and geometrical frustration.

"Feeling permanently guilty of its own solitute, it [literary writing] is none the less an imagination eagerly desiring a felicity [bonheur] of words, it hastens towards a dreamed-of language whose freshness, by a kind of ideal anticipation, might portray the perfection of some Adamic world where language would no longer be alienated." (Barthes)

I think the ubiquity and appeal of this notion, found for example in James Woods, arises from an intuition of something else- what we might call the residual entropy of the reading mind. Clearly, to read is to be as stupid as possible. 'Only very stupid people read'. It represents the lowest possible energy state, yet its residual entropy turns out to be infinite.

What of style, of everything that coruscates or is crystalline? It is a stone or a piling on of stones as part of reading's peine forte et dure, except if abstracted from as a form of geometrical frustration

Beenaker's boundary

Reflecting on Hempel's dilemma, Carlo Beenakker has proposed a new boundary to demarcate physics from metaphysics- viz. what is computable within the age of the Universe.
A short essay of his on this theme can be read here.

We are familiar with computational constraints on computers e.g those arising from physical constants like the speed of light, Boltzmann's constant and Planck's constant-

Beenaker argues that if the Universe is a computer and if constants, like those above, don't evolve in an inflationary manner, and if the Universe has an end in time, then certain problems- such as the question of the immortality of the soul- will always remain metaphysical because there isn't enough time to do the necessary computations to reduce the question to one of physics.

I suppose someone has stated the dual to this proposition- viz. the metaphysics/ physics boundary arises from evolved diachronicity (otherwise Hempel's dilemma is meaningless) and thus Computability theory exists only in the vanishing present of its P versus NP problem.

For which I, personally, blame David Cameron. That boy aint right.

Eclairs are racist.

This evening, I stopped off  at the bakery on my way home and bought a box of chocolate eclairs to hand round at work tomorrow.

Imagine my horror when, opening the box, one of the damned things attacked me in a manner wholly vicious and unprovoked! I swear, it was as though it wanted to bite my face off! I am a strict Gandhian, but this was a case of eat or be eaten.  

Clearly this was an example of a new type of racism targeting middle aged Hindutva intellectuals, like myself, who are trying to diet. I tried establishing a dialogue with the rest of the eclairs, but they simply wouldn't listen to reason. Each and every one of them hurled itself at me like a kamikaze pilot or a jihadi suicide bomber!

When will this madness end? Why can't we all just get along?

Another tragic victim of racist food items.

'Not so, Madam Merkel. It is my milk-shake brings all the boys to the yard.'