A note on the Nobel Peace Prize, 2012

Across six decades, the European Union has stressed repeatedly on the importance of democracy and human rights. In the process, it set up a system that offered great humanitarian, and therefore popular, benefits to nations willing to join it. In return, it asked for the nations to stop warring, start talking, and get voting.

Today, the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2012 for its continent-wide efforts.

At the end of the Second World War, Europe’s largest economies emerged greatly diminished. The divides between the ruling and the ruled, between the rich and the poor, and between the war-monger and the negotiator were at their most gaping. Germany and France were the most wounded.

Today, conflict between Germany and France is unthinkable. They reside at the heart of the European Union, in mind and in body, and are largely responsible for maintaining order in the region. Their commitment to the cause of peace is vital to Europe’s commitment to the cause of peace. And because they have held on for so long, the smaller Central European nations and the Balkan states are now eyeing prosperity.

The Nobel Peace Prize, at the same time, comes at a crucial juncture. A grave economic crisis is prevalent across the region. Social inequality, as a result, is on the rise. Austerity measures are the order of the day, and industrial slowdown the mantra on the lips of many – both the employed and the jobless, in fact.

The Prize reaffirms the Union’s decision to abide by peace and unity, by its decision to pursue a common justice for all violators, by its assumption of democracy as the best mode of governance. However, this is also a time that has questioned the validity of a unified government that has to work with significantly different rates of growth and policy-perspectives from region to region.

These are not decisions that are influenced by any prize.

Essentially, the Nobel Prize does not address the seeming invalidity of the Union based on social issues and economic equality, but awards it only in recognition of historical work, work that was humanitarian in a bold break from tradition. What the Prize should have done is specified the Union's particular roles instead of seemingly reaffirming the Union's decision to stay united and rule united today.

Thus, only time will tell. Until then, one of the most significant developments of the 21st century will have been the bringing of peace to Europe. For this, the European Union deserves all consideration and congratulations.

Font Fables

Times New Roman was my first and longest-serving font of choice. Always called back into action when the overconfident newbie fails to live up to his promises, Times New Roman takes on the challenge without the slightest of murmurs and gets things done. It can’t fly, it can’t see through walls, it can’t halt speeding trucks in their tracks. What it can do is make things happen. There is not a hint of arrogance about the apertures and the ligatures, and you can feel the humility boring into you. Times' rewards are its moments – the wilful verification of its veracity, the surrender you must enact unto it. Times speaks not much, and when it does, it does so beautifully and with commensurate elegance. Times compliments the blandiloquence of your imagery, equivocally denigrating the stunted and the deformed.

Times New Roman was born in 1932, the daughter of Plantin and the ideas of Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent. Times (the newspaper) was once criticized by Morison himself earlier in the same year, and the administration let him supervise the designing of the new font along with Lardent, who was an established typographer. The outcome of this oft-forgotten project was one of the most ubiquitous fonts of all time, a font that stayed with the Times for over 40 years. A daughter font, Georgia, is also very popular.

Over the years, with the advent of digital typography threatening to phase out Times New Roman and its cousins, people began to regard the font as a symbol of the times past: it survived hundreds of wars, two of them devastating most of Europe and Asia, plagues, climactic crescendos and devastating denouements.

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There was something about it that people found hard to resist, a placid nonchalance that also sometimes disturbed the reader with an air of neutrality. Whether it was Marx, Fawkes, Stalin, Hitler, Truman or Gandhi, the speaker of the war-torn parliament that is this world was always Times New Roman: stories from all corners, about all kinds of things, quotations uttered by men from splintered political factions – all of them found no favouritism with the font. It would always be the same distance between the letters, between the words, between the sentences, between the eye that read them and the mind that interpreted them. Tell me, have you ever heard of any such thing as a Communist or a capitalist font? Although that sounds absurd, the designs imbued in the behaviour of Times New Roman answer the question without hesitation: Times New Roman is both, if not more.

Why I pay this tribute is because of two things. First, the digital age has enhanced productivity possible; a craftsman does not have to sit at his board for hours on end and design each letter. There is the computer that performs all those millions of calculations in a second, and voila! ‘A’ has been sculpted. Times itself changed its font in the 1970s because of this typographic revolution. The second reason is that Microsoft, whose Office Word has long been a close associate of Times New Roman (a relationship advertised by having it as the default font), has now introduced a new default, Calibri. Given a hundred more years, Calibri may perhaps prove its mettle. But it can never do what Times New Roman has done.

Love,

A writer.