... And the 30th is Nearing...

India is going to host its first Formula One race ever, and all I see is grid girls on ads?

I was playing some online games the other time. (Yes, so what? There is no shame in admitting it, I suppose.) While I was waiting for the game to load, it immediately sensed that I'm from India, and played me an ad showing a grid girl doing, well, what a grid girl is supposed to do.

And all this while, there has been nothing on television; no publicity that should be garnered before the first-ever race occurs (or else I'm just watching all the wrong sorts of channels). And on the other side of the quadrant we have a new movie release of a prominent actor. I went to McDonald's today and the Happy Meal toys were centred around that movie's prime character, when in fact they should have started with the F1 car toys!

Damn it, I want an F1 car scale model.

I didn't even know about the track! Nor did I know what it had been named. So I Googled it, and sure enough, quicker than waiting for an informative ad to pop up on television:

So this is it.

And apparently, it's one of the shortest tracks. So we'll be looking at an excess of 60 laps. (In fact, I just looked it up, and it'll indeed be 60.)

This will be the stuff of awe for India. Although we have produced professional racers, F1 has never been promoted as a large-scale event in a cricket-crazy nation. I believe our last contact with it was when David Coulthard had come over to Mumbai to drive his Red Bull car over the newly built sealink.

Will Vettel continue his high-flying streak? Does it really matter, now that he and Red Bull have already won the Championship?

But this is what I really want to see first in the Qualifying Session on the 29th:

Wish Kimi Raikkonen were here.

I Endorse the Serial Comma

Plain and simply, that means I use a comma before 'and' in a list.

This means I'd rather write a sentence this way:

'Rhino horns, orangutan hair, and french fries are all rather delicious.'

instead of eliminating the comma after 'orangutan hair.'

We've all been taught in school that this is wrong, and that it's possible we'll die a gruesome, elephant dropping-related death if we do use it. But personally, I love the serial comma. It's the saviour in a bucket of mud.

Here are the technical bits now. 'and' used between two words can signify a group. If we talk about bread and butter, or the famous fish and chips of England, it's a group -- bread and butter go together (even though you can have it with jam and mayo and what have you). It's a tradition.

So you won't write 'I had milk, bread, butter, and cornflakes for breakfast.'
In this case, you'll group up the bread and butter and write 'I had milk, bread and butter, and cornflakes.'

But that isn't the only reason. It's not just the matter of how confusing 
'France, England, Bosnia and Herzegovina'

sounds to the layman. Without the serial comma after 'Bosnia', it's impossible to deduce if someone is writing about today's collective 'Bosnia and Herzegovina' country, or whether they're referring to the pre-World War times, when Bosnia and Herzegovina were two separate provinces.

No, the main power of the comma is in the organisation. The multiple commas in the first few elements prepare us for a list, and getting a cold 'and' with no comma is very heartless.

Now examine the aesthetic value of these two sentences:

The dog ate my homework, shorts, catapult, computer, remote-control and spectacles.

                                                VS

The dog ate my homework, shorts, catapult, computer, remote-control, and spectacles.

Not only does the latter avoid the grouping up of the remote-control and spectacles (they aren't even similar objects), but it also looks more in control of the traumatic situation. (If you disagree, may the heavens help you.)

Commas are not always pleasing to spot, especially in the case of three-line long sentences, where the sentence is so long you lose track, and ultimately, tired, you attempt a slow step-by-step breakdown until you come to terms with its meaning, implications, and sheer cleverness.

But you can't deny that the comma after 'implications' gave you an aesthetic pleasure that can only be brought about once a sentence ends.

The serial comma, ladies and gentlemen, is the hero of the day.

Of course, semicolons are a bit better than commas, but unfortunately there is not much opportunity to use them; they're a slightly complex punctuation.