Is it just me

... or is the new Parle LMN ad featuring the two bushmen searching for water incredibly racist?

What's with the telecom scam?

Headlines Today have been going hammer and tongs with their expose for the last two or three days, while there's not a peep from the likes of The Hindu, Deccan Chronicle, and The Times of India. Isn't a tapped telephone conversation involving a minister -- in the central government, no less -- in which he discusses portfolio allocation with a corporate lobbyist ("My case is cleared?") worthy of at least a couple of centimeters of column space?

This government has to be the sleaziest one ever, by a long mile. What with doubts being raised about our voting machines, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that they came to power by rigging the EVMs. Having somebody like Manmohan Singh at the helm only makes it worse.

Are we alone?

Stephen Hawking has recently weighed in on the question of whether we are alone in the universe. His logic is that there are a hundred billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars, so it's unlikely that Earth is the only planet where life originated. Sounds plausible, but here's a counter-argument: suppose a phenomenon occurs once in 10^100 times. We know that there are 10^20 samples, which is a large enough number, and erroneously conclude that it is large enough for the phenomenon to occur more than once. The moot point here is the actual probability of the event, i.e., the 10^100 figure -- there's no reliable and/or scientific way to validate this.

Just throw the bums out

When the President of the United States cannot stay in office for more than two terms, there's no justification for these people to cling to their chairs.

Indian EVMs vulnerable to fraud

Well, all the folks patting themselves on their backs have some explaining to do. From a University of Michigan study:

Electronic voting machines in India, the world's largest democracy, are vulnerable to fraud, according to a collaborative study involving a University of Michigan computer scientist.

Even brief access to the paperless machines could allow criminals to alter election results, the seven-month investigation reveals.

Must read for Farmville affcionados

Well, 'afficionado' doesn't really reflect my opinion of those who play this game, but anyway, this article is a must read. A choice passage:

My mother began playing Farmville last fall, because her friend asked her to join and become her in-game neighbor. In Farmville, neighbors send you gifts, help tend your farm, post bonuses to their Facebook pages, and allow you to earn larger plots of land. Without at least eight in-game neighbors, in fact, it is almost impossible to advance in Farmville without spending real money. This frustrating reality led my mother—who was now obligated to play because of her friend—to convince my father, two of her sisters, my fiancée and (much to my dismay) myself to join Farmville. Soon, we were all scheduling our days around harvesting, sending each other gifts of trees and elephants, and posting ribbons on our Facebook walls. And we were convincing our own friends to join Farmville, too. Good times.

Another worthwhile quote, this from an RI forum post:

Here are some recent FB updates from my circle of friends:

"Big Ben to the Raiders? I think you need a little more than just a sexual harrassment claim for your steet cred before acceptance here, beyotch."

"So the President just gave an intro to American Idol where he said to the contestants: "You're all my dogs!". 2010 rules sometimes."

"Farmville neighbors - I need 3 eggs, 1 blanket, and 5 bottles. Thank you very much."

Bliss really is unaware...

Enough said.

Thoughts on the IPL Controversy

On one level, it's easy to dismiss the whole thing as a falling out between thieves and say no more, but certain facts stand out:

1. Not giving Modi the requested five days or so to prepare his response is very fishy. After all, the guy has busted his hump organizing a glitch-free tournament (here's a thought: with the preparations for the Commonwealth Games going as well as they are, asking him to have a look at things -- only for the logistics, not financial -- would work wonders), and denying him this time smacks of vendetta. All the more so when you regularly see the respondents of a show-cause notice given a whole month to, well, respond to allegations against them.


2. Sashi Tharoor did nothing that his colleagues (both in the ruling party and the opposition) don't indulge in on a daily basis; he only had the misfortune to get caught. The sheer hypocrisy of other politicians in baying for his blood is disgusting. Not holding a brief for him, but one needs to be fair.


3. If everybody claims to be in favour of transparency, why would Modi releasing the details of the ownership patterns of the teams (which, BTW, is already out in the open, so I don't know what is hidden here) "complicate matters" and should not be done in haste? Which leads me to my next point.
   


4. A fundamental issue is the transparency with respect to property rights. In India, it's practically impossible to figure out who owns what. It's not like in the States, for example, where any citizen can walk into the local administration's office and find out that the corner store is owned by so and so. Try doing this in India, and you'll be paid an unwelcome visit by unsavoury characters in the middle of the night. In fact, I'm not even sure this is legally possible here.


5. Why the fsck don't we ban all transactions originating from entities registered in places like Mauritius? It's a given that these are nothing but fronts for corrupt scumbags. I know, the stock market will lose something like 50% of its value if we do this, but screw it -- rooting out corruption is more important.


6. To think that all this is came out in the open because of a single intemperate 140-character web post is to dwell upon the delicious strokes of fate that the universe engineers for us mortals from time to time, irrespective of whether we are clueless celebrities addicted to Twitter or one of the 200,000 followers of these celebrities looking on with awe and wonder. Almost makes me believe in the Big Bang Theory.
   

Quote of the day

In baseball terms, the Contagion Team is at bat. Portugal is in the batter's box and Spain is on deck. Greece is on second base in scoring position. The EU is on the mound lobbing softballs while the IMF is in the bullpen warming up. Germany plays for team EU but refused to dress for the game.
-- Mish Shedlock

Obligatory IPL Post

1. The level of commercial crassness has gone up (c.f. the middle-of-the-over ad intrusion). No surprises there.


2. The slipping in of sponsors' names at the drop of a hat continues to irritate -- Citi moment of success, Karbonn Kamaal Catch (or is it 'Katch'?), and the worst of them all: the fricking MRF blimp that serves no purpose other than for the camera to be aimed at it and the commentators reading from the script ("do you know that MRF makes motorcycle tires too? MRF Pace Foundation blah blah Dennis Lillee blah blah 20 years blah de blah").


3. What the hell is Mukesh Ambani's wife doing, sitting in the players' dugout with a bored yet stoic expression on her face? It's not like she's in the same boat as Preity Zinta, with a need to grab whatever chance she gets to be in the limelight -- she's got enough money to take out full page ads for a year with her portrait on them, for heaven's sake.


4. Testing the patience of the viewers eager to know the third umpires' decision by delaying the result with animations of flying jets is not a Good Thing. In fact, empirical studies have shown that such practices may result in an 8% drop in airline passenger revenues. To be fair, the Kingfisher ad featuring the singing players is almost as good as the zoozoos.


5. What's up with Indian spectators? All you have to do is train a camera on them, and they faithfully prove Darwin's theory over and over again.
   

One-line question; 8000-page reply

From The Hindu:

It was quite literally a bundle of a reply that left its recipient flummoxed. Choudhary Rakesh Singh Chaturvedi, Deputy Leader of the Congress Legislature Party in Madhya Pradesh, received a reply running into 8,000 to 10,000 pages to a one-line question he had asked in the State Assembly. The bundles of paper were sent to his home through an autorickshaw.

Mr. Chaturvedi called it a “cruel joke.”

“During the monsoon session on July 7, I had asked a question to which the State Housing and Environment Ministry last week sent me a reply in the form of number of huge bundles,” he said. The reply came early this month.

Mr. Chaturvedi said he had asked Housing and Environment Minister Jayant Malaiyya to state the names of industrial units which were issued No Objection Certificates from January 2006 to December 2008 regarding permissible emission limits.

“I was astonished when eight to 10 bundles containing the answer were delivered at my residence,” he said

Technology provides a way to deal with such intransigent babus: ask them for the documents in soft copy, host the entire thing in a server, and let the crowds pick them apart. Oh, and by the way, ten years' hard labour for any bureaucrat exposed because of this scrutiny (twenty years for the smartypants who came up with the 'let's send them an autorickshaw full of documents' idea).

The world's first green legislature building

Instead of shouting from the rooftops about the world's first green legislature building -- a singularly worthless distinction -- how about spending similar effort on taking care of the people's problems for a change? Making sure that commuters are not put to hardship because Mount Road was shut down for three fricking hours so that the Security Liabilities can whiz by in their cavalcades would be a good start.

Let it go

To all the people bemoaning the step-motherly treatment being meted out to hockey and writing letters to newspaper editors in anguish: let it go. Face it, hockey's heydays are over; people have voted with their feet and wallets, and the -- ahem -- national game lost its deposit. The best thing to do would be to strip the game of this meaningless title and allow it to claim its rightful place, which I surmise would be somewhere between kabaddi and kho-kho.

The reasons for hockey's demise are quite obvious: the resources needed to play this game are beyond the grasp of most people (as opposed to cricket, where all you need is a rubber ball, a plank of the right size, and some chalk to draw the stumps on a gully wall). Also, maybe it's just me, but watching a hockey game is pretty much an exercise in frustration: compared to a football game, there is very little scope for a good rhythm or flow to build up -- the referee's whistle blows with a much higher frequency than football ("Did the ball touch your feet? Sorry. Oh, did you touch the ball with the wrong side of your stick? Oops." You get the picture).

Ahem

About the tracks displayed on the right: no, I haven't branched out to the nursery rhymes genre -- it's my daughter's Amarok playlist.

Talk about a stupid idea

An advocacy group is bringing out a zero rupee note that is meant to shame those who demand bribes:

Vijay Anand, from the lobby group 5th Pillar, says they began distributing the worthless note because of a lack of practical solutions for tackling corruption.

"The topic of corruption have never been on the surface," he said.

"Everybody was practising it, paying bribes, getting their jobs done. We thought that the fundamental reason was there was lack of alternatives - there was no practical solutions, no alternatives.

"So we thought we should come up with something. One of our volunteers came up with the idea of the zero-rupee note and we then launched it on a wide scale."

The note, similar to a real 50-rupee note, carries 5th Pillar's email address and phone number.

You may have the occasional success with such a gimmick, but if you think this is going to do anything significant to tackle corruption in our country, you've got another think coming. The odds are better than even that a government employee, on seeing the note, would get incensed, and either a) increase his 'price' or b) make things so miserable for the note profferer ("I'm sorry, but is that your signature? Doesn't look so to me. Can you get a notarized affidavit in triplicate that says this is really your signature?" -- alright, I was kidding, a government employee would never say "I'm sorry") that he wishes he'd never heard of the note.

Any plan that exposes the public before they get their job done and get the hell out of the government office is doomed to fail, given the extent of the corruption in our country.

American Divided Family

A letter to Mish Shedlock, through his blog:

My Dad, now 88 years old, sold out of everything, bonds, mutual funds and even his house a few years ago, right before the crash and has kept it all in laddered CDs. Thank-you for helping to inform our decision there, it helped preserve $150k or more.

Interest payments covered most of his expenses while he was getting 4-5%, but that isn’t happening now and, at 88, he certainly is in no position to go chasing yield elsewhere.

We have hit on what we think is a good alternative. I have seven years left on my mortgage at 6%. Better he should get it than Midland Mortgage Co. so Dad will soon be my new mortgage holder. He gets a monthly check, I get a little break on the rate (5%) and we keep the money in the family.

Can you imagine something like this happening in India? Let me count the number of reasons why not:

1. An 88 year old person managing his finances independently


2. Said 88 year old person also living independently


3. The person loaning money at interest to his own son

Can you say ADF?

The end is the beginning is the end

I think I've used this title already, but here goes, anyway.

I have not been affected by the demise of Worldspace India -- the prime reason being that I had stopped listening to it for nearly three years (can't really fathom what triggered this, hint, hint).

But can't say this of my wife, who, incidentally, is the creator of an advocacy group in Facebook to keep the music alive.

When Worldspace came on the scene in 2000 (or was it 2001?), it filled a big void for me: having gotten used to a staple diet of music from K-Rock (No, not the 'World Famous' one from LA; this is from New York) during my time in the States, I was making do with streaming radio on the Net with a lousy dialup connection after my return. Worldspace was therefore something of a godsend for me (trivia: "Machinehead" by Bush was the first song I heard on WS).

I checked whether K-Rock was streaming online now (they weren't circa 1997), and sure enough, they do. Ergo the title of this post.

Speaking of three idiots

... here's what I think actually happened vis-a-vis the three escaped terrorists, take your pick:

1. They were finished off in an encounter to do away with the inconvenience of a trial (Update: Turns out they had already finished serving their sentences. Why couldn't they then be simply deported to Pakistan?).


2. They escaped from some other place, and the guilty parties are trying to shift the blame.


3. Secret deal with Pakistan to release these persons in exchange for undisclosed favours (alright, this sounds too far-fetched)

I think the universe just winked at me

Call it karma, call it tricksterism, what the heck, maybe it's just a stupid publicity stunt for the movie, but aren't Aamir Khan, Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Chetan Bhagat the three idiots?

Pay attention to the other hand

At first glance, the central government's raking up of the Telengana issue seems to be an act of monumental stupidity: what was the need for the resolution, when a simple face-saving promise to set up a commission to study the issue in detail (and bury it quietly) would have sufficed? Three things:

1. Food prices are up by about 20%


2. Uncomfortable questions are being raised about how the intelligence agencies have dropped the ball on the David Headley affair


3. The 123 nuclear deal is close to fruition, with the government, going by past form, likely to give the American negotiators what they want.

Can you say 'diversion'?

Are you kidding me?

Xymphora, referring to the Climategate emails:

You really have to be illiterate, retarded, or paid off by Exxon to see even the slightest evidence in any of the emails of the slightest wrongdoing.

I'm not illiterate or retarded, and last time I checked, there sure weren't any credits to my bank account from Exxon. Yet, considering just one fact -- the attempted circumventing of the FOI regulations by the scientists, yes, you bet your ass I see evidence of wrongdoing. Why is so much hatred and venom being heaped on anyone who is skeptical about man-made climate change?