Dr Mosi's Kraal

Vaishnav jan

2009-03-06T10:57:00.007Z

One of Gandhi-ji's favourite songs is called "Vaishnav jan." It's always associated with him because he loved the lyrics and tried to follow those ideals. He also wanted to instill those ideas in all he met. He was honoured with the title "Father of India," and I'm sure he would have wanted his children to follow them. The current crop of Indian leaders think that they are honouring Gandhi-ji's memory by bringing his glasses and slippers back to India. Perhaps if they were a little familiar with the Mahatma's favourite song, they may not have made that mistake. So I'm helping them along with the lyrics and meanings of the song. You can listen to the song here if you want to sing along.

Vaishnav jan to tene kahiye je, peed paraayi jaane re /
Par dukhe upkaar kare toye, man abhimaan na aane re//

The true devotee [of God] is one who understands the pain of those who are not their own,
Always ready to help those who are unhappy, and does not let arrogance enter his mind.

If the government was really interested in honouring Gandhi-ji's memory, they should be able to understand the problems that the people are facing. I would say the biggest problems are that people don't have enough opportunities to fulfill their potential. There are not enough places at institutions of higher learning, and not enough jobs for the few who do get a chance to study. I would say these things take just a little bit of priority over making a huge noise about Gandhi-ji's things that he gave away during his lifetime and nobody cared about for at least 60 years.

Sakal lok maan sahune vande, ninda na karen keni re /
Vaach kaach man nischal raakhe, dhan dhan janani teni re //
She bows to the whole world, does not criticise anybody,
Words, deeds, and mind are kept pure, blessed is the mother who has such a child.

Well, this first bit the Indian government does really well. Bows to practically the whole world. "Oho, you want to come and blow up people here? No problem, please go ahead... consequences to you? None, don't worry... we will strongly condemn the acts but words have never hurt anyone. Do you mind if we blame the previous government for your actions? That way you can seem to be victims too!" Their words are definitely pure... deeds and minds not so much. Mother India is not very blessed with some of the current leaders that we have.

Sam-drishti ne trishna tyaagi, parastree jene maat re /
Jivaa thake, asatya na bole, par dhan nava jhaale haath re //
All are looked upon as equals, desire is abandoned, and he treats women as if they were his mother,
His tongue tires if he attempts to lie, he does not want other people's wealth.

I really wish the government would have this attitude. Right now, men and women are not looked upon equally, different castes are not looked upon equally, hell, ministers seem to expect the public to defer to them. Violence against women is a huge problem and their opportunities are still restricted in much of the country. Lies are the bread and butter of politics and stealing the taxpayers' money... that's an Olympic sport in itself. If only the government would spend some energy and time on this.

Moh maaya vyape nahin jene, drudh vairaagya jena manmaa re /
Ram naam shu taali laagi, sakal theerth tena tan ma re //
Desire and illusion don't hold him, he has detached himself fromt he world,
The name of God is on his lips, all places of pilgrimage are in his body.

Government is very much attached to power, but not so much to the people who give them their power. They do use God to stay in power as much as possible... for some reason if God / religion is mentioned people forget rational thinking and hand over their brains. So instead of religion being something that unites, politicians use it to divide and the "we will protect you from them" seems to work better in the short term than "we'll get schools and electricity and water," of course the latter are much more difficult than the former, especially when there's nobody to protect against... other than goons who work for the politicians.

Vana lobhi ne kapat rachit chhe, kaam krodh nivaarya re /
Bhane narsaiyyon tenu darshan kartaa, kul ekoter tarya re //
He has no deceit, no greed, has given up lust and anger,
If Narsi [the poet] is in the presence of such a person, his whole family will get salvation.

Government's definitely failed on all this... the bad side is shown to the people of the country, they're really nice to foriegners as far as I can tell.
So, I'm asking those ministers who want to keep the memory of Mahatma Gandhi alive, take a page from his favourite poem and be that person... building statues, getting bits of memorabilia back won't keep his memory alive... as Gandhi-ji liked to say, "Be the change you want to see in the world," or at the very least, stop interfering with people who want to see change happen.

Gandhi-ji was a brilliant tactician, he knew what would work against the British and what would unite Indians at a time when India had not been united for at least 2500 years. For all his non-violence, he never backed down from a fight. The fight wasn't physical, it was one 'half-naked fakir,' in the words of Winston Churchill, versus the greatest empire the world has ever known... and the fakir won. He also knew the power of experimentation to test his beliefs and he went against the opinion of most of the country when he decided to test if he had truly conquered desire for women [the experiment showed him that he hadn't conquered it.] He had a backbone... and great bravery, which is desperately lacking in the Indian government.

So, Gandhian legacy is... call a spade a spade, work for the good of humanity and not oneself... stand up for what you believe in... what do the politicians of today believe in, other than enriching themselves and making sure they get elected the next time... his legacy is not his eyeglasses and sandals. Seriously.

To the mujahideen from the government of India,

2008-09-20T08:01:00.008Z

Dear mujahideen,

As you may be aware, the Government of India has declared the years from 1990-2020 "Visit India." During this time we will do all in our power to help you succeed in your aims to eat your 72 raisins post-mortem. We have a lovely, big, open country where you can hide out in peace. We also have lots of local fanboys and girls who will provide you with all asisstance necessary in achieving your objectives. Room to stay, great places to shop at etc. We also have people who will sell you any sort of weaponry that you deem necessary. No need to bring in Chinese maal from Pakistan or Bangladesh, you can find it direct from China here. There are a lot of advantages to buying it in India. You will help in keeping the local gun/explosives runners in business. The mujahideen who are to come after you will also find a local source in case something happens to their arms cache.

We can offer lots of crowded marketplaces and hospitals for you to set bombs at. Not to mention, everyone here is fairly religious so they go to temples, churches, mosques etc. Those might also be good areas to strike. If you are lucky the victims' families will start blaming the people from other religions and start mini-civil wars. We also hope for this because it gives our upcoming party members a chance to show how they can protect their communities from the others, gain votes, get into power, and steal taxpayers money.

Don't be frightened when we publicly announce that 'befitting reply' will be given. This doesn't mean that your homes will be bombed and your cities annihilated and your chiefs arrested or tortured. This just means that we will have lots of chai and samosas with your bosses. Then we'll announce some sort of bilateral antiterrorism drive. We'll share data and such so that you guys know exactly what we're going to do next. We'll also pick up some people here or encounter them so that our public is happy.

We forgot to mention that with your acts of terrorism you will be doing a huge public good. Our people have not yet realised that there are too many of them. Our population control messages haven't quite worked very well. So the occasional bombing helps ease some of the pressure. Everyone forgets about the dead after 2 days and we'll be back in business. I think our rating in the world will improve if our population goes down. Otherwise that Bush of America is always accusing us of stealing all his petrol, that's why he has to raise prices over there. We have heard that before the elections petrol prices go down mysteriously over there. But that's not the subject of this letter.

I forgot to mention one more thing, the only place that you are not allowed to attack is parliament. You see, we want to be able to sleep at work without listening to loud explosions and firecracker-like noises. It's not good for our blood pressure. So if you try to attack parliament directly we will send some of our armed forces your way. Everything else you are welcome to.

So... namaste, welcome to India.

Yours invitingly,

K Nath,
Head Chaprasi,
Ministry of Useless Letters,
Sansad Marg
New Delhi

maal - originally, loot but means goods in this case

encounter - when the police shoot criminals instead of arresting them. Usually because the criminals are shooting back, sometimes because they're as much a danger inside jails as outside.

News and not news

2008-09-11T03:24:00.010Z

Jose told me the other day that Zambia was hardly ever in the news compared to our more illustrious neighbours such as Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo (ex Zaire). A quick look at the bbc africa page shows the words used in news articles on Africa most - least frequently (large font - small font):

(stats generated by wordle)

That's pretty interesting. Fighting and violence fairly prominent... dictators such as Mugabe being very popular. So bad, bad, bad bad...

Here's a similar analysis of the BBC Europe page:

(stats generated by wordle)

Again lots of fighting and wars and such. Nothing about the progress we're making with the large haldron collider coming alive and functioning like the scientists said. And the world NOT ending like the religious people said. Will this be the end of eschatology (aka religious ideas about the end of the world ?) - ever notice how similar eschatology is to scatology {study of #2 err crap err shit, or as GingaBoo would call it, poo (ok they would call it perfume)}?.

So then to get away from the mainstream media and their ideas that only bad things will sell, I went to Good News India, which reports positive stories. Unfortunately I couldn't find an RSS feed for their main articles. I found one for the project the webmaster is involved in currently, about going back to nature and such, so here's wordle's analysis of his articles in a happy white background :)

(stats generated by wordle)

Now that's more like it... farmers, solar, energy, power, windmill. More like the things I want to see in the news. (And you can't fault me for making this look happier than the other two - well, maybe you can - and then we can have a long fight about how marketing makes things more saleable).

So, mainstream media (Sorry I picked on the Beeb here), (and I know you're listening, the last couple of times I wrote about you here and here, there were hits from your domain,) pretty please, have 'positivity day' where a majority of the news is positive. The stuff that you don't consider news right now. For example, the President of Zambia died and there were no riots. Nobody got killed. No coup. Economy still going strong, growing about 5% per year. The funeral and mourning period went on well with minimum disruption to normal life. Lots of poor people can afford HIV treatment thanks to PEPFAR and CIDRZ. So... stuff like that, you know ? So that the rest of the world doesn't think that we live on trees and shoot each other. Thanks.

News of India, 12 June, 2020

2007-06-03T20:57:00.000Z

National:
Recent protests by the minority 'Brahmin' community in New Delhi have highlighted the need for reform of the national reservations policy. The Brahmins want to be included in the 'Harijan' or 'Untouchable' category, alleging widespread discrimination against them (Brahmins) in education and jobs. Originally one of the most educated groups in India, today the Brahmins cannot get into the school system after passing kindergarten due to 99.99% of places being reserved for Scheduled Castes and Tribes. They cite earlier incidents such as the 'Kshatriyas' succeeding in becoming Harijans after a depurification ceremony. Since Thursday, Brahmins have blocked major highways in the country by setting up fires. Police had to resort to firing in one or two places to contain the agitators. 2 members of Brahmin community died in the firing and government has announced the sum of Rs. 25 lakhs to their families. The community has rejected the monetary compensation, saying that 'it is not enough to even buy wood for their funeral pyre.' Brahmins have called for a bandh (shutdown) of New Delhi until their demands are met.

The RSS has gone to several people's homes and disrupted their morning showers. They said that taking showers was not part of ancient Indian traditions and warned that people should only take showers once every 5 years. A spokesperson of the RSS rejected allegations introduced in a book by a former member that the group was actually funded by a British society called 'Back to the 1700s.'

International:
Pakistani President General Hadji Omar Musharraf bin Laden-Dawood al Talibani has said that Islamic science of Pakistan from Holy Quran is ten times superior to western science of India and they would soon launch a joint manned mission to Pluto with China. He thundered, "We will have a Pluto shot, even if Pakistanis have to eat grass." Upon being told that all the grass was finished to pay for the nuclear programme, he revised his statement to include 'astroturf' instead. India had thus far only sent a manned mission to Mars, therefore the Pakistani space programme is far better. He added that the people of the disputed territory of North India wanted to be Pakistani and territorial disputes should be handled by talks. He said if India persisted in denying the Kashmiris, Gujaratis, Himachalis, Uttar Pradeshians and Bengalis their right to self-determination then more jihadis would target India and he would be unable to stop them. He also added that he needs 1 trillion Chinese Yuan from India in order to stop the Talibani army stationed in Afghanistan from overrunning Pakistan and stealing the Pakistani nuclear weapons. The Talibanis would definitely target major Indian cities with the nuclear weapons. The president insisted that he was 1000% sure of Talibani nuclear threat to India because his father in law heads the Taliban.

Sports:
Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly say that they have no problems with Coach Gilchrist and Gilchrist's controversial comments to blogger Dr. Mosi about 'old geezers ruining the team with their presence' were not directed towards them. Gilchrist was in fact talking about bowlers Piyush Chawla and Sreesanth. Nevertheless, mock funerals of Gilchrist were conducted throughout the country and even in places such as Dubai and Nairobi. Sachin and Sourav promised to end their spell of ducks in several matches with the next one, due to be played against Papua New Guinea in Chennai. They said that they were very disappointed at India not qualifying for the world cup in 2022 but Zambia had proved to be too tough to beat.

Entertainment:
Rahul Bachchan, son of Abhishek and Aishwarya Bachchan, will marry Kartika Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi's daughter. Kartika said, "It was the only way to keep the country in the family. Since Amitabh is President, and my dad is Prime Minister, our family wishes to raise the next generation to serve the people of this country. We have sacrificed a lot. Our family had given India, Pakistan and Bangladesh independence single-handedly. My grandmother made history by running India from Italy. My grandfather and his brother died for India. We will continue to make sacrifices in future also. By the way, this interview was brought to you by Boeing. Make sure your next flying car is a Boeing."

Salman Khan will be in court amidst allegations that he killed a protected bird, the vulture. The miniscule Zoroastrians in the country (all 10 of them) consider the vulture holy and have sued the actor for this breach of law. Rumour has it that Khan offered them 100 billion Yuan to drop the suit but the vulture is more important for the Zoroastrian people. The entire Bollywood industry has come out in support of Khan, while Maneka Gandhi has called for the death sentence. There are only 500 birds remaining in the whole of India, and only 50 of these are vultures.

Sanjay Dutt asked for an extension from the court for the gun-owning case of 1993, in which he was convicted of possession of illegal arms. He had been sentenced to 5 years in jail, but since then has not served his term as he repeatedly argued that he is the only breadwinner in his family and the public will not let him stop working on the next 'Munnabhai,' entitled, "Munnabhai and Cleopatra," to be shot entirely in Belgium.

The end

Extremist gobbledegook

2007-04-24T23:41:00.000Z

Everyone has opinions. Some people want others to join them in having similar opinions. To get people's attention these days some graphic imagery and headlines that force people to read more are in use these days. This causes those holding rival opinions to present their case as well as they can. So from watching these battles, I have learnt the following things.

1. People who are for abortion are baby killers who will go to hell.
2. People who are against abortion think that women should be pregnant, barefoot, in the kitchen and seen but not heard.

3. Anybody who voted for Bush and Republicans in general is uneducated, married to close cousins and hate non-white people. Or they are filthy rich and want to keep everyone else poor.
4. Anybody who voted for the Democrats wants the US to be unsafe, wants the 'terrorists' to take over Iraq and Afghanistan, and in general is a traitor of the highest magnitude.

5. Religious belief only leads to terrorism and other people getting hurt/killed/having their ability to think independently taken away. Some religious people who spend their lives not interacting with anyone may do some good but that's about the end of it.
6. Religion is the best thing on the planet. It is the truth and nobody who follows it is involved in any sort of bad activities. If everyone believed in the same religion, everyone would be in a state of bliss on earth and post-life enter heaven. Atheism is the worst thing on the planet and atheists will have a bad life and afterlife.

7. Anyone who commits acts of violence has played too many violent video games. That is the sole reason for their actions.
8. It's OK for kids to watch people beating each other up and killing other people but not to see a female breast on TV (about half the world has breasts that would be banned on TV - what's the big deal?)

9. USA is the most important country on the Earth. They have a right to most of the world's resources. Anything they do to keep this status quo is good. Anything any other country does to give their own people a greater share of world resources is being anti-USA. Anything bad that happens in any country is due to the involvement of the CIA / American agents.
10. USA being the richest country has a responsibility to bring security, freedom and democracy to everybody else. They spend a lot of money on other countries and the UN / WHO to make sure of this. Everybody should love them as much as they love themselves.

Ah well I think I'll just stop believing in everything. Sab maya hai. "Everything is illusion."

An affair with freedom

2007-04-12T02:25:00.000Z

I needed a change. Middle-aged men have the luxury of having an affair and buying a sports car when they get into that mood. Unfortunately I am neither middle-aged, married, or have the money to buy a sports car. So I did the next best thing - window shopping.

Now normally I use Windows on whichever computer I have. This is mainly a function of windows coming bundled with the computer.* I have XP set up to work how I like it. But the time has come for a change. Probably not a divorce, more like an affair. So now I have an African mistress on the side, young, pretty, and living in an apartment away from the house.** The mistress is called Kubuntu Feisty Fawn, and what makes her so cool is that she lets me do whatever I want... and doesn't cost anything. She's very pretty because she comes with something called "beryl" which you can check out here. Beryl makes the operating system look like a girl in a hindi movie song. Windows "wobble" when you move them around, they disappear and appear with fiery or genie effects. You can even make it rain or snow on screen. Brilliant! There are also other useful things such as 'the cube' which lets you keep track of 4 affairs at once. Maybe that's a story for another day.

Unfortunately there does come a time when the affair has to end and I have to go back to the wife for the very simple reason that there are some things that only the wife can do. She may not do them prettily, but she is able to do them. So my affair is relegated to when I don't have to work on the thesis. And maybe someday the affair will have the ability to manage references... and then the affair shall take the wife's place.

For the more technically minded, I was amazed with Kubuntu Feisty Herd 5. This was the first linux distro I tried that found my wireless card and set up wpa just like windows would. If only there was a proper reference manager for it, I could move it to the main HD and forget about Windows for a bit. The open source, free parts are extremely attractive as well. With Microsoft engaging in more and more snooping, computer companies installing all sorts of trialware junk on the computer, it probably won't be long before I bid adieu to Windows. It's heartening that linux is getting so good for non-computer geek users like me. I did have some questions on setup but they were answered with a couple of mouse clicks on the ubuntu fora. There are some ways to work around the lack of a reference manager for openoffice, the most direct one being just to run endnote on wine. Something called Latex has been doing the rounds too, but the moment I have to mess with configuration files, I run. The lack of a citation (reference, bibliography) manager is probably what is stopping large-scale adoption of linux by universities.

* Yes, I asked them to send it without but they refused. I then asked if they could partition the hard drive into 2 for when windows needs a reinstall so I don't lose any data - no dice on that either so had to do it manually

** Why exactly can't windows be installed on an external hard drive? Such a silly restriction।

Edit: I've now spent about a week with Feisty. Thanks to StyleyGeek's input in the comments I looked around for an opensource endnote/reference manager/procite replacement and found Bibus. It does "cite while you write" for both ms word and openoffice. I've tested Bibus/MS word on xp and Bibus/Openoffice on Kubuntu. The advantage of using open source software is that it's portable to different OSes. So if tomorrow I'm stuck working on PC / Linux / Mac, whatever, it doesn't matter as the same files may be used. With the commercial software I'm stuck with either Windows or Mac. The disadvantage of Bibus is that I had to create my own style file for my journal of choice (this took about 5 minutes). It's worth noting that I had to modify the styles in reference manager for Windows as well for my favourite journals because the ones that came with the program were wrong. If you do work with Bibus and create your own style, please upload to the wiki here so that others can benefit from it.

The state within

2007-02-25T03:43:00.000Z

Internement of UK citizens in Virginia, evidence suggesting the secretary of state of the USA collaborated with corporate elements to start a war in a -stan country, gay men kissing, lots of death, general mayhem, and a morally bankrupt leadership. A wag the dog style indictment of the US administration. And, did I mention Lucius Malfoy (Jason Isaacs) is the main character?

The acting in this BBC series is brilliant, the writers did not have to be very imaginative because the material is ready-made. Anybody who's been following geopolitics will understand the references... so it's a great watch. US citizens of a right-wing mentality may be very angry at the show, but I think it is useful for Americans to see how the rest of the world perceives the driving force behind US foriegn policy.

Americans are taught that their nation stands for freedom, free thought, free expression, and democracy. They are also taught that their country tries to promote these values in foriegn lands. Several actions the US government has taken does not add up to these values:

1. Coup that removed Patrice Lumumba from power in Zaire in the 60s. Led to Mobutu Sese Seko taking dictatorial control and the assasination of Lumumba.

2. Overthrow of Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran in the 50s. This lead to dictatorship of Reza Shah Pahlavi. He could not find any support among the population and was overthrown. The Iranians blamed the US government for Reza Shah, leading to the hostage crisis.

3. Support to various Pakistani dictators. The USA sold weapons to Pakistan in the 60s which led them to start a war against India in 1965. They also had help from the Joradian air force in that war, again using US weapons. In 1971, using US weapons again, the Pakistani army massacred about 3 million civilians in Bangladesh. India tried to help the Bangladeshis while the US sent an aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India.

4. Saddam and Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.

I'm sure there are other things I'm missing. So the credibility of the USA to export democratic values has been tarnished by the USA itself. Now, I'm not saying that any other country would have behaved any differently in the same position. Bloody hell, I'm not even saying that I would have done anything else if faced with the ability to make those decisions. I'm just saying that the blinkers US citizens have about their government should maybe... be taken off. It's only what citizens should expect from a democracy.

No Vista for You

2007-01-30T02:21:00.000Z

Windows Vista upgrade advisor encountered an error while scanning your system.

The helpful program that purports to advise users if their computers are ready for Vista totally failed on my machine. Interestingly it asked to go on the internet not once but 3 times and carried huge advertisements for Vista. It took about 10 minutes to run before it came up with this error. So, basically, a program which is supposed to tell the user if their computer can run Vista takes 10 minutes to scan the computer, wants to send all the information to Microsoft, and then crashes at the end. I have desktop widgets that can check my system specifications in a few milliseconds, and keep updating them as they change... shoddy job designing a front to data mine information from computers Mr MicroSoft.

Sunita Williams poops in space!

2006-12-18T04:15:00.000Z

The Indian media coverage of Sunita Williams is getting a little over the top. Every turn she makes on the space shuttle and the ISS is covered in excruciating detail. Now I agree that it's a great moment for humanity that people are up in space doing all sorts of wonderful things. I think the media should focus on that and all of the astronauts instead of just one because her daddy happens to be born in India. I can understand being proud of an Indian in space, but Sunita's achievements owe nothing to the Indian space programme. If her dad had stayed in India she would not have been in space today.

I wish the media would talk about the importance of having a space programme and try to motivate the citizenry to start thinking in a scientific manner. That is the sole difference between first world countries and everyone else - the citizenry in first world countries believes that there are practical solutions to every problem - not "I cannot poop because God wills it" but "I cannot poop... maybe I should invent a laxative." The right to a scientific mindset should be one of the fundamental rights of every human.

I do have to admit that I have a hidden agenda for writing this. The post was partially motivated by my jealousy of all the astronauts... the moment I have the money I'm going to space... and I'm taking Ginga with me. Hey, maybe that will help my marriage prospects.

Make love, not war

2006-12-06T05:01:00.000Z

A kissing scene in the movie Dhoom 2 between Aishwarya Rai (of Miss world and Revlon fame) and Hrithik Roshan (beloved of the damsels) has caused a gentleman in India to believe that it caused offence to women and "promoted vulgarity in society, especially among youth," leading to the actors being sued in court.

Well buddy if there were more kissing in the world there would probably be less violence. Also, newsflash - there's a lot more of what you would describe as 'vulgarity' going on in Indian schools than a hundred years ago when you were a student. It's more likely that men felt offended that Ash did not kiss them rather than women being offended. So... take some classes on the meaning of gender chauvanism, stop wasting the court's time, and let them get on with real problems (why does it take 13 years for judgement in the 1993 WTC bombings case?)

Are such people unique to Asia or are they found in Europe / USA as well?

Arabic proverb

2006-11-09T22:08:00.000Z

quwatu l- 'insani fi 'aqlihi wa lisanihi

The strength of a person is in his intelligence and his tongue.

That is so true... have to work smart and present it well to people so that they appreciate it. Hard work will get you places, intelligence and a good presentation skills will let you rule those places.

Why is the world afraid of muslims?

2006-10-06T00:14:00.000Z

By:Tashbih Sayyed, Ph. D.
A number of recent apologies made to the Muslims by non-Muslim leaders clearly indicate that the world has grown increasingly fearful of Muslim rage. Political Islam, as is obvious...

Good article. To non-muslims increasingly the face of muslims and by extension Islam has been dominated by bin Laden and gang, especially to those non-muslims who do not interact with many muslims (or may not even know that some of their friends are muslim).

Other good religious stuff on the net:
Fatwa on Pope
Anonymously Insightful

Gita fell

2006-07-18T22:07:00.000Z

Edit: The internet service providers are to blame for the blocking of blogspot blogs and not the government of India, so much of the rant below is unwarranted, but I'll leave it on anyway until the ISPs sort their problems out...

Gita was playing in the park. She fell down and hurt her leg. Gita’s mother did not admit it was her negligence that caused the accident, but she slapped Meena and Rekha and Rakhi who were playing somewhere else in the playground to make it look like to her friends that she was doing something about it. Then she stopped Gita from going to school and grounded her saying that it was her fault that she fell. The other children complained but since they had no say in the running of Gita’s house their voices went unheard. Gita’s mother said, “So she’ll miss a few days of school, tell me how that affects you.” Gita also wanted to go back to school so her friends threw the assignments and homework that she had missed into her room in the evening and Gita would throw back the finished assignments in the morning. So net result of the ban was that Gita’s mom got lied to and other kids and Gita had to spend more time to get the same things done. It also fueled Gita’s resentment against her mom and she thought that when she becomes independent, she would show her mom a thing or two about bans on schools.

As you may have guessed I am ranting about the Indian Government pulling a China and inadvertently blocking the whole of blogspot.com where this blog is hosted as well as hundreds of thousands of others in response to the Mumbai blasts. This is in direct contravention to Article 19 of the Indian constitution which the government has sworn to defend. You can read about the whole sordid affair here and here and a very funny take on the situation here.

If these guys had to block something they should have blocked splogs or that annoying doubleclick.net that keeps popping up everywhere. Don’t block my blog… bad government, no votes for you! (To give the government some credit, they thought that they were blocking 12 individual websites but the ISPs did not have the technology to do that so they blocked the whole of blogspot, typepad and geocities). When will these guys realise that blocks like these are easily circumvented? The only way to ban some websites is to block the entire internet, or to make like the Great Firewall of China and have a huge censor department to filter out specific content from websites.

I would like to thank my government for ensuring that my country remains safe from the mental terrorism caused by free speech and blogspot.com and the constitution. I only wish they had first decided to stop the physical torture that the real terrorists caused.

My favourite conspiracy theory - the govt. wants google to monitor blogs and block the terrorism supporting ones and will try to block .blogspot.com until google agrees. Anyway, here's an easy way that works to access blocked sites:
add .nyud:8080 to the end of the website. For instance if you wanted to access the dog blog you would type
http://mosilager.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8080 instead of the normal http://mosilager.blogspot.com

Here are some links for help about the issue, what you can do etc.
Blogger's Collective
List of angry bloggers who posted about the problem
Press Coverage

This was cross-posted on:
Let us speak.

Heroism

2006-07-11T20:59:00.000Z

When we were young we had heroes to look up to, Superman, Spiderman, Batman, even Hanuman... as we grow up we realise that heroism is about ordinary people going out of their way to do extraordinary things when the situation calls for it.

The heroism that common Mumbaikars have shown today to help victims of the terror attack is astounding. They have organised themselves to help the overwhelmed authorities with care of the wounded and dead. As phone lines are jammed a local group has been making efforts to help people all over the world find out about their Mumbai relatives. They have not lashed out in their sorrow at their neighbours and others' property, which was apparently the intention of these terrorists.

Hope the injuries will heal soon and condolences to the victims' families. The whole world is with Mumbai today.

Shiv Sena protests in Mumbai

2006-07-09T15:06:00.000Z

Shiv Sena protests in Mumbai

OK so somebody threw mud on a statue of the departed wife of the leader of this political party (the Shiv Sena). In a misguided attempt to earn favours from their dear leader, these guys are running around disrupting traffic, burning a bus, trying to enforce a shutdown of Mumbai / Bombay (or maybe I should call it Chhatrapati Shivajipuri).

What about the birds that throw excrement from the air on their beloved statue? That seems to me to be a more serious offense. All the birds of Chhatrapati Shivajipuri should henceforth be told to observe a no-fly zone around Bal Thakerey's wife's statue or the Shiv Sainiks will disrupt more city traffic. How much does a shutdown cost us in economic / developmental terms? If these worthies have so much time, they should use it in cleaning up the streets and slums and trying to educate themselves. Idiots!

Luckily it looks like the police are on it this time and hopefully can prevent loss of life / property.

morbid thought of the day

2006-06-30T00:35:00.000Z

We will never have peace in the world. Never. Ever. Unless each of us has a whole planet to ourselves. Even then we'll make spaceships to try to take over our neighbours' planets. The reason is that our desires will always be greater than the world's capability to supply them. There will always be somebody else who wants the same thing and will break laws, conventions to get it. Religion, laws, constitutions try to curb our potential to act to fulfill our desires in exchange for having them fulfilled after the end of our lives. Although it should be decency and not laws and fear of punishment or hope of reward that curbs our actions. At the end of the day all we can hope for is that the gun does not point in our direction, or even if it does, we are superman and the bullets will bounce off. Personally I prefer that we be Neo and dodge the bullets or make like the X-man Nightcrawler and teleport to another location.
What set this off? This article (but only click on it if you have a strong constitution - graphic images, description of mind-bending torture et al. for no other reason than being on the wrong side of the gun).

Race and the world cup

2006-06-14T01:50:00.000Z

OK it might be my imagination and I only watched 20 minutes of it but it seemed that whenever an Argentinian took a dive (and they went down often) anyone wearing the Ivory Coast colours who happened to be close by got yellow-carded and a free kick went to the Argentinian. I also saw fouls committed by the Argentinians on the Ivory Coast-ians that went unacknowledged or unpunished. What the hell! I heard similar things about the Italy-Ghana game. Now I'm not accusing anyone of anything, but whatever I watched looked highly suspicious. Maybe it's my jaundiced eyes...

Luckily GreatKalu is on the board that watches each match and decides the player of the match and also what they can do to improve future games and so on and hopefully he'll be able to sort out any such concerns that anyone else has. More about this here.

Stupid reason for visa rejection and Vikram Buddhi (u)

2006-04-20T15:14:00.000Z

Studpidest reason for rejection of a tourist visa to the United States - New York is too far from Denver to visit if your base is in Denver. Apparently the consulate officer who came up with that gem is unaware that the united states has roads, automobiles and aeroplanes. He or she has missed out on the last 150 or so years.

In an unrelated story, an Indian maths student from Purdue has been arrested for telling other people to threaten the lives of the US president and veep and family and assorted "anglo-saxons" and their institutions. Apparently he did this way back in November on a site about xm satellite radio (?), got a talking to by the secret service who told him to cease and desist, which he did. They also asked him if he was insane and he said no. Then they left him alone to continue his studies and teaching. However that was not enough and now he's in jail until he gets charges brought against him next week as he's a flight risk. I think he needs a psychiatrist, not a judge. Anyway, the guy's name is Vikram Buddhi ... Buddhi means intelligence... in this case he might be forever known on campus as Vikram Buddhu ... Buddhu... which means idiot.

I didn't know that the US could arrest people for saying things online. I better watch it around here, free speech has basically gone to hell... what next, somebody gets arrested for suggesting that the Prez should step down at the end of his term? Already happens in several banana republics.

Update 30 April - Vikram's being held in some undisclosed prison in Indiana, he pleaded not guilty to the charges and is being held without access to bail. Seriously, this guy is no threat to the U.S. otherwise the secret service wouldn't have waited for a few months before arresting him. Well at least the law will take its course and hopefully he'll get the psychiatric help that he needs.

Update 29 June 2007 - Buddhi's been found guilty of 11 counts. Sentencing later this year. His lawyer tried to use the defense that other people on the internet have said similar things as well as Ann Coulter the other day. Didn't work. I thought he could legitimately use an insanity plea but maybe he was in his senses at the time.

In the land of the blind...

2006-04-15T21:50:00.000Z

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King."

Knowing human nature that statement is completely false. In the land of the blind the one-eyed man will either have his eye put out or will have to believe that what he sees is a result of smoking too much of his favourite hallucinogen.

Liberté, Equalité, Fraternité

2006-03-25T13:51:00.000Z

Bad France #1

French President Jacques Chirac showed his temper at the EU summit when a French business leader addressed delegates in English.

He's crazy. English is the language to use when there is a pan-European audience and anywhere else. The French seriously have to get over this mentality that their language has to be imposed everywhere. What if the Chinese started something like that? They have a right to, with 1/6th of the world speaking Chinese as a 1st language. Or how about hindi, with 1/12th of the world speaking it as a 1st language? Seriously... there was a time when French could have been the language of choice in the international arena... that time has gone. Now it's english, they should live with it. He he he English is the 'lingua franca.' Hey at some point it was sanskrit, then greek, then latin, arabic... it changes. Just live with it. Wonder if Chirac would have got as mad if it was somebody from Togo addressing the audience in English? Probably would not have been politically correct.

Bad France #2
This whole law of banning religious symbols that kids wear to school. As much as I dislike it, people take religion seriously. They want to show off their religious symbols and get angry enough to start wars if they are not allowed to express themselves. I understand that the law is meant to target muslim girls from being forced to wear the hijab, but what if it is their choice? In a multicultural society you cannot marginalise one group. Doesn't work. I think the education should be geared towards producing adults with a scientific mentality, that at least they think about something that people tell them before blindly believing it. Nobody likes being forced to change their basic belief system, and they will fight against it.

Good France

French law could break iTunes, Microsoft DRM

A proposed French law ostensibly designed to fight piracy and promote legal music downloads could force Apple and Microsoft to open their respective DRM standards to competitors -- or allow consumers to break the DRM if they don't.

If they do enact this - and I'm sure they are under a lot of pressure from companies to not - then vive la France because this is a great victory for consumers. If I buy music, I would like to use it where, when and how I want to use it, not how the company I buy it from wants me to use it. Is that so difficult for the major music sellers to understand? These companies are basically restricting what people can do with the music they buy because they feel that the same customers will steal the music otherwise. Since when does buying a hammer mean that I'm going to hit the head of sony with it? That's actually funny, the companies want you to buy the music, but if you actually buy the music then you are treated with suspicion of copying and uploading to the internet. Therefore, customer = suspicious person. I hope France does enact this law, maybe then the companies will realise that criminalising their customers is not quite the way to go.

Polygamy is OK

2006-03-14T02:47:00.000Z

Ha ha shocked you didn't I? Apparently there are a bunch of US citizens living in the state of Utah who believe that the Flat-Earth society 1950 years ago gave them the right to marry multiple wives. And they use that right, with the authorities unwilling to counter it. Polygamy is also sanctioned in Islam, but there are strict rules for when it is possible, which are practically impossible to enforce and are often NOT. To keep such an unequal system in place, most of the women who participate in it are kept away from a modern education, told all sorts of lies about a woman's place and power in society, and basically are treated like second class citizens. Now I am no authority on any of these religions, but I can report that an Islamic scholar told me that polygamy was allowed in his religion because in a healthy society, there are always more women than men. (Of course this was before the sex of the baby was known prior to birth). It was a system devised to keep the extra women from being lonely and "sinning". Mmm... sure my friend. Islam allows 1:4 man:woman whereas in the population it's 1:1.1 or so. Somebody got their mathematics wrong. Well, maybe not, if about 10-20% of the men are polygamists, there will be no lonely women. Except of course in China and parts of northern India, where there are actually less women than men in the population.

I am of course all for polygamy, as long as androgamy is also freely practised. Why should only a guy be able to have multiple wives? Why can't a woman also have multiple husbands? Now I do come from a country which has in the past practiced both forms, right now it is one man one wife officially for about 75% of the population. (Muslims are exempt from this and go by shariah.) Now I have no idea why someone would sign up to take care of even one wife or husband, according to me you would run out of things to talk about in approximately 1 month, but, hey, people do it for many many years so they probably do not get bored of each other. That is one mystery that I have not cracked yet, but if my parents have their say I'll have to find a solution as soon as I have a job.

This is one of those sad issues where I feel that the women involved should speak up and kick the rear ends of the guys who polygamise them. Unfortunately in many cases the women themselves perpetuate the system by teaching their children that it is fine. Again, I think that this is due to a lack of knowledge about women's rights and religious indoctrination. "God wants me to do it" syndrome.