The kneejerk reactions have begun

A PIL has been filed in India asking to get Google Earth banned. Apparently the terrorists used Google images to plot their attacks. Considering that the terrorists also used buses, trains, cellphones and a fishing boat, perhaps we should ban those as well. And while we are at it, we should make sure that there [...]

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The Mumbai terror attack

The terrorists killed over a hundred innocent people yesterday. This wasn’t an act that took place in some distant part of the world. It happened in a city I care about, one that I have spent four summers in and where many of my friends live or have family. The attack was astounding in its [...]

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Jailed for collecting insects

The Telegraph reports: Czech scientist Petr Svacha, accused of illegally collecting insects from Singalila National Park, was let off with a fine of Rs 20,000 today after the chief judicial magistrate of Darjeeling took note of his reputation as a renowned entomologist and said he was a “victim of circumstances”. However, his associate Emil Kucera, [...]

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Indian government plays moral police again

Watch the ad first. It’s yummy. The Ministry of Information & Broadcasting of India has written to the Indian Broadcasting Federation (IBF) asking it to make sure this advertisement is not broadcast any more, terming it indecent, vulgar and repulsive. I have long believed that of all the useless appendages of the Indian government, the one [...]

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Parallel terrors

At least thirty-seven people are dead in a series of horrific blasts in Ahmedabad, India. Iran is going to hang thirty people tomorrow. At first sight, the situations look dissimilar. The people dead in Ahmedabad are innocent victims of terror, their lives snuffed out brutally and callously by vengeful terrorists. The Iranians who will die tomorrow [...]

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Indian toon porn

In case you haven’t done so yet, do check out Savita Bhabhi, India’s first online pornographic cartoon strip. The stories are fairly standard and the art-work good though not top-class. It is appealing nonetheless. In fact, barely two months after its launch, it’s traffic rank in India — according to Alexa — is currently an astounding 66. Which, [...]

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How dare Indians think of privacy?

The Indian government wants to be able to read all emails and messages sent by citizens. (Privacy, you say? Don’t be silly. We live in an age of terrorism. Hehe, those naive libertarian notions.) However it discovers it is unable to decrypt the ones sent by Blackberry devices. Pissed, it asks the parent company, RIM, to help it snoop. Hard luck, [...]

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Obama masala video

Bollywood-ishtyle.

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Reservations are here to stay

The Supreme Court judgement on the OBC reservation issue should not surprise anyone. After all, the Supreme Court’s job isn’t to make laws but merely to ascertain whether existing laws were broken. And in the present case, the Supreme Court decided that nothing in the Indian Constitution prevents Arjun Singh from adding a 27% quota [...]

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Self-preservation over self-respect

Amit Varma nails the sad truth in his choice of post header.

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The ban game

The headline of this DNA report reads: Tamil movies to be banned in Karnataka. However, the first sentence of the report merely says To protest against Tamil Nadu going ahead with Hogenakal project on Karnataka border, the Kannada Rakshana Vedike (KRV), a pro-Kannada organisation will be prevent (sic) Tamil movies from being screened in theatres and television [...]

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Jodha Akbar ban overturned by Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of India has once again put its weight behind freedom of expression, overruling the ban on the film “Jodha Akbar” by three state governments. It is a sad matter that in India people think they have a moral right to ban things they don’t like. And the ludicrous loopholes in our constitution (think “free-speech [...]

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Minimum wage, maximum irony

India is introducing a new rule stipulating that unskilled workers planning to take up a job in the Middle East cannot do so unless they are going to be paid a minimum wage (the exact amount is being fixed by the Indian Government for each Gulf country). DNA reports (emphasis mine): In a move that [...]

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Soumya Bhattacharya on racism

Soumya Bhattacharya in a Cricinfo article says that Indians are racist. I broadly agree with the contention, however I find his examples rather weak. There are several issues that interplay here and it is disappointing to see them mussed up haphazardly - an aesthetic preference for lighter skin tones cannot, for instance, be equated with a moral belief in white supremacy.  He also [...]

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Democracy and the Indian Constitution

I was a young lad once and like most kids was susceptible to the perceived infallibility of the written word. To give a relevant example, it wasn’t apparent to me that our civics text-books were less fact and more a bunch of Nehruvian platitudes. But even then, I often wondered about the role of the [...]

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