Category: Relationships

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Albanese should realise not everyone can second-guess his intentions

It is more than a little surprising that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has got so much blowback for his announcements at the Canberra women’s rally against domestic violence.

Albanese has never made any secret about his goals during his first term: everything would be aimed at getting re-elected and all that he promised to do during the election campaign would be done. He said that on day one.

That’s why he went ahead with his Voice referendum, even though it became patently clear well before the referendum that he would lose and lose badly. The only change he has made to any of his pre-election promises was to tweak the third-stage tax cuts in a way that he was sure would not have any impact on his poll numbers. Continue reading “Albanese should realise not everyone can second-guess his intentions”

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Lehrmann’s Channel 7 interview does not show him in a good light

Ever since former Liberal Party adviser Brittany Higgins alleged, in an interview with the news.com.au website on 15 February 2021, that she had been raped in Parliament House by a colleague in early 2019, the story has rarely been out of the news. The colleague, who was later revealed to be one Bruce Lehrmann, has always denied the charge.

Image by helen35 from PixabayThe case went to a jury trial in 2022 but a juror was caught in possession of material that compromised his/her status as a jury member and a mistrial was declared. The prosecutor said later that a second trial would not be held as it would be detrimental to Higgins’ mental health.

Since then, there has been a ding-dong battle in the media, with Higgins’ supporters and Lehrmann’s supporters trading barbs. Lehrmann refused to testify in court during the trial, but suddenly decided to give an interview to Channel Seven on 5 June. Continue reading “Lehrmann’s Channel 7 interview does not show him in a good light”

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Managing a relationship is hard work

For many years, Australia has been trading with China, apparently in the belief that one can do business with a country for yonks without expecting the development of some sense of obligation. The attitude has been that China needs Australian resources and the relationship needs to go no further than the transfer of sand dug out of Australia and sent to China.

Those in Beijing, obviously, haven’t seen the exchange this way. There has been an expectation that there would be some obligation for the relationship to go further than just the impersonal exchange of goods for money. Australia, in true colonial fashion, has expected China to know its place and keep its distance.

This is similar to the attitude the Americans took when they pushed for China’s admission to the World Trade Organisation: all they wanted was a means of getting rid of their manufacturing so their industries could grow richer and an understanding that China would agree to go along with the American diktat to change as needed to keep the US on top of the trading world.
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The village experience

India may be a world power in some respects today, but the majority of its citizens still live in the villages that make up some 75% of the country. Despite the growth of industry, agriculture is still India’s mainstay when it comes to occupation.

Few city-bred kids opt to go and work in villages unless they are forced to. I opted to do so back in 1980, giving up a short stint as a journalist and taking up a job as a rural development extension officer with a Bangalore-based company known as Myrada. (It was originally known as Mysore Resettlement and Development Agency, a name that it had due to being originally set up to resettle Tibetans who had fled the Chinese invasion in 1959.)

By the time I joined Myrada in April 1980, the company had a number of projects in operation. The modus operandi was to do a project report for a certain area which had development potential, approach a foreign funding agency and get the necessary money to implement the project.
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They do things differently in China – and it seems to work

Towards the latter stages of his life, Charles Darwin noted that he could not read serious texts any more; the only thing that grabbed his attention was a book on romance. One of the greatest scientific minds we have known could only enjoy a book about the mating game.

One would not liken oneself to the great man, but over the last nine months one has been similarly drawn away from serious work to become a regular viewer of a Chinese dating show that goes by the name If You Are The One.

The show is a record-breaker; it has about 60 million tuning in for every episode and has been running for seven years. The presenter, Meng Fei, is a national celebrity.
Continue reading “They do things differently in China – and it seems to work”

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The time has arrived for a literary fraud to resurface

One of the many big-noters in India has announced her return to the literary scene with a novel about the uprising in Kashmir. Coming 20 years after her only other effort, Arundhati Roy’s 2017 publication has already received enough hype to make one puke.

Since her book The God of Small Things was surprisingly awarded the Man Booker Prize in 1997, Roy has been involved in activism, written essays and numerous articles.

One has to be grateful that she did not attempt a second novel. Her first effort was terrible; author Carmen Callil, chair of the 1996 Booker jury, pronounced Roy’s work “execrable”, and said it should never have reached the shortlist.
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Lara Bingle says Michael Clarke could not ‘stimulate’ her

“But I require more for myself. I need to be stimulated more than that, you know?” – Lara Bingle on her relationship with Michael Clarke Source

LARA Bingle is the Paris Hilton of Australia. She is a silly empty-headed woman who uses her looks to get from A to B and has done nothing to merit any kind of publicity – apart from periodically ensuring that she bares a bit in public.

However, when she hooked up with the Australian cricketer Michael Clarke in 2007, she got a good deal of the spotlight. Clarke was the captain-in-waiting at the time and that post is the second most important in the country after the prime minister.

Hence Bingle was often in the public gaze. She made the most of it.
Continue reading “Lara Bingle says Michael Clarke could not ‘stimulate’ her”

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Breaking up is harder to do for some…

WHEN a heterosexual relationship breaks up, the man generally takes much longer to get over it than the woman. This may not be true in all cases but in a majority it certainly is. Why is this so?

I have a theory. Traditional relationships between men and women had men doing the task of earning a livelihood for the whole family while women were the ones who played the role of home-maker.

Thus in those days, it was more difficult for a woman to consider getting out of a relationship, even if she was getting the short end of the stick. She had to stick on, as she had no means of support. Even today, when many women are employed, it is very difficult for them to manage alone and bring up children while supporting them.

If women had also to cope with a massive emotional fallout from a broken relationship, it would make things even harder. I think it is nature’s way of compensating for the disadvantage – women take much less time to recover from a broken relationship and get together with someone else.

Men take a long time to get over a broken relationship and at times go through their whole lives unable to get over a particular woman, but then they generally do not have the problem of not having a job and having to raise children as well as courts generally give custody of the kids to the women.

One more example of how nature compensates people for natural inadequacies.