What excites?

What excites the senses? That that is visible or that that is hidden. [Inception: NegarKhan - TOI]

Gudiya

She was married to a soldier named Arif who didn't return from the battlefield. It was assumed that the soldier had become a victim of war. She was remarried to Taufeeq. Five years passed and Arif returned. He had not been killed but had become a prisoner of war. What should Gudia do now? Does she stay with Taufeeq or does she go back to Arif? What happens to the child in her womb which was part Taufeeq? No, I am not asking for answers because the only one who can answer the above questions is Gudia. Was Gudia allowed to answer the above questions? Well, no she was not. The panchayat (village governing body) thought that she should go back to Arif. Not sure what was the reasoning. Anyway, Gudia and her unborn are no more. It is said she died due to complications in her pregnancy. I wonder how relieved she would have been having left a world that didn't allow her some very fundamental rights. A world that treated her like an object and continues to treat women like objects. Gudiya and how the media exploited her! I guess she didn't want to lead a doll's life.

Heathrow

Three planes hover over the runway. Well there are four. Four that I can see. All four at seemingly different heights eager to make it to the ground. As I await the first landing two planes take off. I had not accounted for these planes that were waiting to reach the skies. Everything moves from motion to rest or vice-versa but for the workaholic Radar that keeps rotating tirelessly. The skies are cloudy but only at the horizons. The runway is wet. It must have rained earlier. Has not rained since I landed at Heathrow which was around seven hours ago. As the place recedes into darkness, the Sun is replaced by the thousands of stars that stick to the galaxies of planes that move in and out of my bird'’s eye view. A Boeing 777 is dragged to the hanger. It does no’t get bigger than this! All others without the humps look a tad emaciated.

Black? White? Wheatish? Brown? Yellow?

"I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man" - Morgan Freeman [Link – Got via Link]. My views on Color! Also, the darn thing responsible for it!

Fox5News and the thuggish transit workers

The Fox5News has been calling the transit workers strike as illegal transit workers strike (By the way, it is illegal by law). What other options do these workers have? Not that they are on strike every now and then. It is after 25 years that they are on a strike. Will the MTA listen otherwise? Now what the Mayor had to say was funny indeed.

"New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg lashed out at union leaders for "thuggishly" turning their backs on the city [ link]"

Thuggishly! What is he trying to do? Get the commoner against the transit workers. The commoner can any day be in the shoes of the transit worker. But for all the inconvenience the commoner needs to stay in support of the strike.

How Intelligent Design Works

HowStuffWorks discusses without any bias the concept of Intelligent Design. A few interesting snippets from the article. The main grouse that the scientific community supporting natural selection has against the proponents of intelligent design is that much of intelligent design is proof by elimination. That means, at the risk of being too simplistic (but then you can read the article), if a certain process cannot be explained by current science there is intelligent design behind the process. I wonder what the world would have looked like had we explained everything by intelligent design. We would be inhabiting the jungles and I guess I wouldn't have been blogging this from home!

Intelligent design (ID) states that the universe and its inhabitants could not have evolved by the "blind chance" set forth in Darwinism. Its arguments are mostly concerned with what it considers to be holes in the theory of evolution, and it claims that these holes scientifically prove the presence of an "intelligent designer" in nature.

Unlike creationism, ID does not state that God is the intelligent designer. It only says that there is clear evidence in nature of intelligent design. The designer in ID could be God, but it could also be an extraterrestrial race or some other supernatural force. Also, ID does not draw its arguments directly from the Christian Bible.

The scientific community sees this argument as inherently flawed. It points out that Dembski sets forth a negative hypothesis: Anything not created by chance or law must be designed. But scientists claim that chance, law and design are not mutually exclusive, and they are not the only possibilities. So the process of elimination cannot be applied. And in any event, they say, science does not accept the process of elimination as proof of anything. The scientific method requires a positive hypotheses -- you cannot prove one thing simply by disproving another.

There are also widespread claims that the majority of the Discovery Institute's funding comes from Christian fundamentalist organizations and individuals, noting especially the millions of dollars donated by philanthropist Howard Ahmanson, an evangelical Christian, and hundreds of thousands of dollars provided by the Maclellan Foundation, which seeks to "serve strategic international and national organizations committed to furthering the Kingdom of Christ ... by providing financial and leadership resources to extend the Kingdom of God to every tribe, nation, people, and tongue"

Anyway, I was quite happy to read about this court ruling.

The malaise remains as suicides continue

A moving coverage of farmer suicides in Vidharba [link, written by Sonia Faleiro] . There are many reasons for the plight of the people. Govt. apathy, policies etc. This [link], at the Indian Economy Blog, discusses various possible solutions to the problem in the comments section. What shocks me most is the mention of wedding expenses of Rs 60,000 and dowry of Rs 100000 in the article by Sonia Faleiro. Even in such desperate circumstances the society hangs on to the malaise of dowry. There is no letting go on what in the first place shouldn't exist. The 1,60,000 could be used for betterment of the family and may prevent a suicide or two had our society been a bit more mature. I guess over a period of time female foeticide will rise in the region. Not sure whether it has already started.

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:
--------------------
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!

The Great Indian Attitude

We who boast about our great culture and high morals when compared to the rest of the world. This incident is a testimony to the delusion many God-fearing cultured Indians love and are very proud of. I am sure a plethora of such incidents occur every other day, just that nobody writes about them. How morally depraved we have become and how used to being depraved are we?

"The young man crossed. He ran across. All it took was a fraction of a second. I could've imagined it, but, I saw a bike actually speeding up as he ran across the road. The bike hit him. The young man was lying on the road. Blood was pouring out of what seemed like a huge yawning hole on his left temple. We all saw it. We watched shocked. A second later a bus slightly to the right of the young man decided it had to move. It did. It ran over him. Over his arm and the right side of his body. It then stopped later. It was a DTC.

I wanted to help. So I asked. Was anyone going to take him to hospital? Then I shut up, because I heard people talking about how much money they could make out of this. One man said no-one should move him, because if he died there then they all could make more money. I was bewildered. It was like I had got transported to someplace barbaric. To a place in the dark ages.

Then I said something. I called an auto- asked the driver if he would take me and the man to hospital. The auto driver thought... and thought and thought. Finally he demanded a hundred and fifty rupees, I didn't have time to bargain. The distance was worth thirty. Amongst a lot of abuses, threats and such I managed to hoist the man into the auto. In the auto I searched his pockets to find a number I could call--only to find his pockets ripped off and empty. His money had been stolen. People had searched his pockets before I got there.

We reached Safdarjung Hospital. At nine the trauma care centre was devoid of any patients. The man and lady at the reception made me wait for a half-hour while they completed some paper work, despite my protests. They then brought out a sheaf of papers. Asked me if I was a relative, because only then would they allow surgery. I called him Senthil and signed as his sister. They brought him in on a stretcher. Then they left him there in the lobby with me for forty-five minutes, I timed it. When I asked why they were taking so long-- they said they had sent someone to stamp the papers and couldn't begin till they arrived. At long last the took him into the OT.

I took an auto back to Yusuf Sarai. I had missed the first three classes of the day. There were two more to go. The crowd had largely disappeared. The bus, its driver, conductor, a couple of touts, the bike owner and a large beefy policeman stood in a small circle pointing to the blood stains. From a distance, I imagined that justice just might be on its way. I went up to the policeman saying I was an eyewitness and would be happy to give a statement.

He looked at me curiously. I looked at the bus driver and the bike owner holding two five hundred rupee notes each in their hands. The police man had already collected a thousand. He tore the complaint notice in half in front of me. I asked what he was doing. He told me not to worry. He said the matter had been resolved. The bus driver, conductor and policeman left for Chai together. The bike owner drove off nervously."

Krishna, where are you?

Goa lifts bars on beaches!

For once the government makes the right move! God knows why hard drinks were not legal on the beaches till now!

A Ferrari is still always a Ferrari

Anand Vasu on the return of the God. Sachin Tendulkar is back!

Read entire article here.

Choose your own holiday

Wow! Finally, religious holidays will not be mandatory for one and all [link]. People get to select from a fixed number of holidays rather than rest on holidays that they don't celebrate anyways. In fact the proposal speaks of conversion of religious holidays into "restricted holidays". I would suggest that there should be a certain fixed number of holidays that people should be allowed to use as they will. There is no reason why a secular state should have anything to do with religious festivals. Religious festivals that may lead to congestion in areas they are celebrated due to any associated processions etc should have the need to get special permission for celebration at hours which don't cause any difficulties to the work routines of those not celebrating.

Necessity is the mother of invention?

Inventions seem to foster necessity here (The new Ipod!).

I feel a severe urge to buy this one but don't find the need. Guess, I will have to resolve the need soon.

When God called Bush

Link

"President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did, and then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq... And I did.

"'And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East. And by God I'm gonna do it.'"

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who attended the meeting in June 2003 too, also appears on the documentary series to recount how Mr Bush told him: "I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state."

God bless Bush!