Freedom of Speech

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" -- Voltaire

Excellent quote at [link]. Got it via [ link].

Left? Libertarian? Right? Authoritarian?

Who are u? A simple test at [link - courtesy Rahul].

Here are my results:
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Economic Left/Right: 2.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.36

I cannot gaurantee the efficacy of the test. So check out for your own self.

No analogies please

High time the criminals are booked. These demented politicians need to go. They keep playing the blame game and in the process no one is convicted.

Madrid Masters spices up!

Nice.

India Funding Pakistani Jihadi Groups

Atanu Dey on How India may have contributed to its own travails! The comments are interesting too. I liked his perspective on the donations India made. I guess there is very little sincerity in all the donation that was made. The Indian govt couldn't be worried of calamities that occur in India leave alone neighbours. All these acts can only impress naive people and may help India put up a nice face in the world community much of which could care less about the welfare of Kashmir. They are interested in hearing truce along the LOC for their own reasons.

The one reason that wouldn't stop me from making a donation to Pakistan is that the same money could be used for the good of impoverished India. Now that is one thing that doesn't happen. But yes the terrorists should not get succor for killing innocents!

Mother of the Civil Rights Movement

Rosa Parks. RIP

ThankYou for your courage. We need many more like you in this world.

From fighting objectification to seeking it!

I am appalled by the objectification of women that is so common now a days. The sad part is that women seem to be biggest perpetrators of the same. It is rather unfortunate that the objectification is taking place in the garb of espousing equality of the sexes. Most men should be happy though! What better than a world of sluts? A very good article on the NYTimes that elaborates how the feminists of the 70s may have been wrong and how the women of today are doing no better. I have pasted a few snippets below though I would suggest the article be given a full read at "What's a Mordern Girl to do?". [Reached the link via IndiaUncut]

On "Courtship"

"Decades after the feminist movement promised equality with men, it was becoming increasingly apparent that many women would have to brush up on the venerable tricks of the trade: an absurdly charming little laugh, a pert toss of the head, an air of saucy triumph, dewy eyes and a full knowledge of music, drawing, elegant note writing and geography. It would once more be considered captivating to lie on a chaise longue, pass a lacy handkerchief across the eyelids and complain of a case of springtime giddiness.

Today, women have gone back to hunting their quarry - in person and in cyberspace - with elaborate schemes designed to allow the deluded creatures to think they are the hunters. "Men like hunting, and we shouldn't deprive them of their chance to do their hunting and mating rituals," my 26-year-old friend Julie Bosman, a New York Times reporter, says. "As my mom says, Men don't like to be chased." Or as the Marvelettes sang, "The hunter gets captured by the game.""

"Power Dynamics" [The paragraphs not necessarily in succession in the actual article]

He had hit on a primal fear of single successful women: that the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men. It took women a few decades to realize that everything they were doing to advance themselves in the boardroom could be sabotaging their chances in the bedroom, that evolution was lagging behind equality.

A lot of women now want to be Maxim babes as much as men want Maxim babes. So women have moved from fighting objectification to seeking it. "I have been surprised," Maxim's editor, Ed Needham, confessed to me, "to find that a lot of women would want to be somehow validated as a Maxim girl type, that they'd like to be thought of as hot and would like their boyfriends to take pictures of them or make comments about them that mirror the Maxim representation of a woman, the Pamela Anderson sort of brand. That, to me, is kind of extraordinary."

It was naïve and misguided for the early feminists to tendentiously demonize Barbie and Cosmo girl, to disdain such female proclivities as shopping, applying makeup and hunting for sexy shoes and cute boyfriends and to prognosticate a world where men and women dressed alike and worked alike in navy suits and were equal in every way.

But it is equally naïve and misguided for young women now to fritter away all their time shopping for boudoirish clothes and text-messaging about guys while they disdainfully ignore gender politics and the seismic shifts on the Supreme Court that will affect women's rights for a generation.

What I didn't like at the start of the feminist movement was that young women were dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. They were supposed to be liberated, but it just seemed like stifling conformity.

What I don't like now is that the young women rejecting the feminist movement are dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. The plumage is more colorful, the shapes are more curvy, the look is more plastic, the message is diametrically opposite - before it was don't be a sex object; now it's be a sex object - but the conformity is just as stifling.

Hoping for a truly equal (where merit will be synonymous with individual intellect) future!