Evil Celebration

Courtesy - fAmEnXt

Dear All,

On the moonless holy eve of Diwali, I have this gloomy feeling within my heart being unable to wish you a happy Diwali. Do you realize that all your celebrations lead to misery for others and all that you do to celebrate are nothing but acts of evil?

The crackers you burst are the cause for panic among dogs, birds, other animals and causes pain in the heart of animal-loving humans.

Often, children are employed and exploited in cracker manufacturing units and scores of such innocent children die before experiencing puberty in deadly accidents in the ill-equipped factories.

The sweet that you devour to add sweetness in your life are made of milk and sugar, both bitter causes of pain to cattles and humans alike. Production of milk is at the heart of all inhuman treatment of cattles, who are made to produce calves each year like machines, injected with chemicals to produce more and more milk, and finally butchered when no longer productive.

The sugar mills are famous for exploitation of sugar cane farmers paying them less and less for sugarcane and mill workers as well who work in near slavery conditions.

The fine new outfit you wear on festivals is made of cotton. The same cotton in pursuit of which thousands of farmers take loan each year dreaming of a bumper crop and finally end their lives drinking pesticides when they find themselves unable to pay back the loan.

And your fine new outfit is made in the sweat shops of Southern India or Bangladesh where men, women, and children work 16-hour shifts in congested textile mills in inhuman conditions, leading a life of slave.

The lights that you decorate your house with requires power. Power that is produced from hydroelectric projects by building dam on a river, submerging the whole forest, and destroying the ecology of the river or by burning fossil fuels injecting enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Your need for more power, more food, more clothes is leading to destruction of the environment, in turn causing catastrophic climate change endangering lives of billions of people living in the coastal area.

Do you understand now that your mere act of celebration is causing misery and death throughout the world. Would you please your celebrations for the sake of innocent childrens, poor farmers, animals, and to prevent the earth from doom's day.

Moral Lesson: Show middle finger to all those who preach their brand of cheap morality with only superficial if any understanding of the world. Tell them to fuck themselves who come and advise you on the righteous way of leading life.

Absence of Darkness

In wake of the brutal gang rape in Delhi and the consequent protests, the social media too flared up and we expressed our views on the matter and on all related matters. Once such meme circulating in the social media is:

"The problem is men... Men shouldn't be allowed to step out of the house after 9pm unless accompanied by his mother, sister or wife !!!" - henceforth to be referred as original phrase.

Many shared the post, some shared the thought as well though seemingly unlikely to be true. Some thought it's funny, some shared it out of concern for women, some seriously believed in it. I have something to say to those who considered this post worthy to any extent.

How would you react if I say "always satisfy your wife's jewellery needs, else she might fuck other men to get those", i.e., ALL WOMEN are potential whores. That's gross, disgusting, and would make no sense to anybody whatsoever. One might say that these words can come only from the minds of a psychopath.

Now, consider the original phrase. Doesn't that mean "ALL MEN are potential sex offenders." This too is equally gross, disgusting, in the same manner. And yet, I see morons liking and sharing this meme all over the social media. It is a proof that most people don't scratch beyond the surface when it comes to thinking and reasoning.

Both the sentences are absurd. The first one may sound funny but is equally sexist and gross as the second one. It is an irony that the same people who think this way also shout that racism is bad. What it is if not racism?

Opposite of darkness is not absence of darkness, but presence of light. There is no such thing as absence of darkness. We often fail to understand this fallacy in our logic. The irony of liberalism is that those who think they are liberal, go to such extent to oppose conservatism that they themselves become conservative of opposite color. Those who oppose superstition with blind faith in science are superstitious as well. Freedom to women doesn't mean curtailment of freedom of men.

Women who hate men are considered feminists  and the society projects an image of feminists as anti-men, men hater who vow to keep distance from men. That's an illogical perception. A women who hates men might not be interested in welfare of women (except self welfare) at all and a women interested in women's welfare might be in deep love with a man as well.

Our prejudiced society gives us molds and we try to put everybody around in one or other mold, and often end up putting ourselves in one such mold.

One can either go with those predefined molds, think, talk, and do what everybody else is doing or think for herself/himself and decide. Those who liked, shared, and loved the original post had given no thought to what it actually means.

We love outsourcing, but don't do it with "thinking."

It All Goes Back In The Box

I first learned it from my grandmother. Now, my grandmother was a wonderful person. She taught me how to play the game monopoly. She understood that the name of the game is to acquire. She would accumulate everything she could and eventually she became the master of the board. And then she would always say the same thing to me. She'd look at me and she'd say, "One day, you'll learn to play the game."


One summer, I played monopoly almost everyday, all day long and that summer, I learned to play the game. I came to understand the only way to win is to make a total commitment to acquisition. I came to understand that money and possessions, that's the way that you keep score. And by the end of that summer, I was more ruthless than my grandmother. I was ready to bend the rules, if I had to, to win that game.


And I sat down with her to play that fall. I took everything she had. I watched her give her last dollar and quit in utter defeat. And then she had one more thing to teach me. Then she said, "Now it all goes back in the box – all those houses and hotels, all the rail roads and utility companies, all that property and all that wonderful money–now it all goes back in the box. None of it was really yours. You got all heated up about it for a while, but it was around a long time before you sat down at the board, and it will be here after you're gone. Players come and players go. Houses and cars, titles and clothes, bulging portfolios, even your body. Because the fact is that everything I clutch and consume and hoard is going to go back in the box and I’m going to lose it all.


So you have to ask yourself when you finally get the ultimate promotion, when you have made the ultimate purchase, when you buy the ultimate home, when you have stored up financial security, and climbed the ladder of success to the highest rung you can possibly climb it, and the thrill wears off - and it will wear off - Then what? How far do you have to walk down that road before you see where it leads? Surely you understand it will never be enough. So you have to ask yourself the question: What matters?


- A transcript of the film "Zeitgeist: Moving Forward" penned by John Ortberg

Pride of Inheritance

Living with pride of inheritance is akin to driving with alcohol in blood. Both are fatal, to self and to others.

Explanation: Inheritance refers to values we inherit by our birth, by allegiance to a community and not earn. Nationality, religion, castism are such. If we take pride in these, if we get high on these, we risk not just self but others as well.

Enslaved in Pride

There was a most revealing rule: slaves were to remain illiterate. In the antebellum South, whites who taught a slave to read were severely punished. '[To] make a contented slave,' Bailey later wrote, 'it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.' This is why the slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think. This is why reading and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subversive, in an unjust society.

Source: The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan

Human History

The entire human history is about demonification of losers and glorification of the winners.

Prejudiced You - How to test your biases

Courtesy: commons.wikimedia.org

We hate apartheid. We hate racism. We hate slavery. Or do we? We have laws in the books categorizing such behavior as illegal. This may ensure eradication of biased behavior from the social scene. However, if the seeds of discrimination are stored in our thoughts, they may grow the poisonous fruits as the rain of hatred pours.

We, the pseudo-intellectual, the so-called liberals, more often than not claim to have surpassed the boundaries of discrimination, discrimination based on gender, race, color, caste, or even nationality. We say not to have preferred one over the other under the influence of our irrational biases. It feels good to know oneself as unbiased, rational, free of prejudice. But that's the description of a super-human and very unlike us. A beautiful self deception.

On The Safe Side Of Wild - How to ensure safety on a trek

Courtesy: torturedsquid.tabulas.com

The loving, caring image of mother nature and its intoxicating beauty conceals the dangers that lie in its lap. "Dangers" may not be the right word here because nature is not in conflict with humans, its merely indifferent to our feelings. Wilderness is as unconcerned to our pleasures as it is to our miseries. On one side lies the fragrance of life, on the other entrapments of death. Painting nature in dark and bright is purely subjective depending on where we stand in comparison to other constituents. Death of an organism may be horrifying for it, but life saving for other starving organisms. Perplexed in its attraction, our mind often ignore this indifference towards us and if we do not watch our steps, we might fall prey to the traps that lie in darkness.

Cause of Misery

 
The cause of all misery in human life is that it asks for answers where there exists none. Optimistically, it provides lucrative opportunity for those in the business manufacturing answers.

Be Wolf

Make a sheep of yourself and you will soon find a wolf nearby.
- Old Russian proverb.

Feeding The Fucklings

Amongst the glitter of Commonwealth Games, a piece of news that received media attention was India's 67th rank on Global Hunger Index. In its atypical ways, the media, be it print or electronic, dedicated most of its time and energy on finding where India stands compared to its peer. "India ranks below Pak, China on hunger index" dictated Times of India. Catchy headlines are not the complete information. We got to dig deeper to unearth the truth.

How To Be A Rich Nation - Ways to eradicate hunger and poverty effectively

"Poverty-stricken hungry people of the motherland should look at the Forbes List of Richest and be proud of the 49 Bhindians out there, whose personal wealth account for 31% of Bhindia's GDP."

The "would be" Prime Minister of Bhindia took a long pause with a grin and then continued further. "They should feel proud that the motherland has produced such riches. The pride would suppress their hunger. The pride would turn their skin tolerant to the rain drops dripping through the torn tarpaulin. The pride would come as divine knowledge for their pot-bellied, malnourished children, even in the absence of primary education."

Another long pause and then he concluded, "Eradication of the hungry and poor, is the motto of our party." Roaring claps by hired men (for a packet of biryani) reverberated the sky, clouds of dust covered the midday sun as the men rush to collect their biryani packets.

Freedom For The Soul - fighting mind control

Courtesy: Ram Morrison 

13th August 2010 - I see a herd of children, innocent minds, as blank as the sheet of paper waiting to be written on, as blank as the white shirts on their shoulders, with blue shorts, with ties tied unkempt. Their steps mimicking each others, falling on the drumbeats; left, right, left, right, round, round around the ground. Some took the liberty to look at the moving traffic or the crow perched atop the fence. Some sought the pleasure of scratching their itchy scalp. The middle-aged teachers, adorned in sari and cane, were quick enough to obedient the wandering souls to fall in line, to look straight, to mimic the robotic movements choreographed to the beat of the drum.

Proud to be Slave

The punchline of Puducherry Tourism Department's advertisement says "The closest you'll get to visiting the French without a passport." It seems they cherish the French culture the colonist left behind more than their own. To me, it smells of proud feelings of being ruled by French, of being enslaved.

It is not just Puducherry, but the whole of Indian subcontinent which not only refuses to get rid of colonial heritage but is boastful of it. We love our foreign connections even if they are slavish in nature. We sing of kings who ruled the land though they were totalitarian and often barbaric. To be slave of a great master is better than being independent. We trade self independence with the egoistic feeling of being associated (rather oppressed) with prodigious lords.

Monuments of Ego

I see not the magnificence of architecture of bygone era, of temples, of forts, of mausoleum, of monuments, but the enormous human effort and lives lost to pamper the egos of the emperors.

Variation of Values - A study of behavioral psychology

Symbol of Contention

They say "it would contribute to India's economic growth internationally." I know not how it would do so, but I know that "it would also contribute to India's social divide nationally."

Falling in line with all the other big economic power houses, India adopts a symbol for Indian Rupee after a publisized competition to design it. The design is inspired by the letter "Ra" of Devanagari script. In fact, it IS the letter "Ra" with a horizontal line added up. But why not get inspired by a letter from Tamil or Malayalam or ...

In my view, the choice of a Devanagari letter to represent the national currency depicts the central government's well-known favoritism of Hindi over other language/scripts. I find no reason for the non-Hindi-speaking states to bear this cultural onslaught and lingual monopoly of Hindi. The news papers are full with opinions that this symbol symbolizes Indian's multicultural ethos. If a single thought was given for it, then an element of Dravidian script should have been included. Alas, it is Hindi from which the New Delhi derives pride and not from the mythological animal called multiculturalism. Hindi has always been given a special status while other languages get step-motherly treatment. And the Hindi-speaking babus and sahebs in the capital have no idea that good and evil, beauty and ugly have different meaning in different parts of this humongous nation.

Selection of this symbol for Indian currency just increases the symbolic divide between north and south India. In a country like ours where pride of a region is shame for another, it is wise to not to invoke the feelings of pride of some if you risk hurting the egos of others. Being neutral is the way to protect egos on both sides. However, it is not the way to protect votes.

Confession and Conclusion: Hindi is the language close to my heart, speaking which I grew up, reading which I felt home. Now I'm swimming in the sambhar cup of Bangalore, "aste." I do not have any hard feelings for Hindi. What I object to is not Hindi, but the favoritism of Hindi over other languages. To generalize, I object to the notion of supremacy of one language over another.

Edit: Some readers found it difficult to understand why a non-person like me would have a problem with such symbol if the creator, Udaya Kumar, himself is an Tamilian. If the designer himself had risen above the languages, who am I to question his integrity. Indeed the designer is broad minded. However, my dear readers could not comprehend the fine divide between the integrity of an individual and the integrity of a government. I'm not criticizing the designer, but the selector.

Being the ruler of a multicultural country like ours, the government should have the sensibility to gauge the prevailing sentiments across the country and act accordingly. When they know that selecting a language specific symbol might give rise to resentments in some parts of the country, then why go ahead with it. Shouldn't we expect the government to take the responsibility of creating a harmonious environment in the society. Unfortunately, thats the last thing our political parties wish.

Games Octopuses Play

What is more astonishing, an ugly octopus predicting all 6 games of Germany in FIFA, 2010 or me dying of ulnar hernia?

Courtesy Naim

Paul, the octopus with psychic powers, has become a celebrity after accurately predicting the results of matches involving Germany, all 6 of them. The question that arises is whether this phenomenon was worth the media attention it has got. Say, we flip a coin and it lands heads up. Will it cause hoards of mediamen coming running down with their machines? Certainly not. Its a matter of pure chance, one would say. With that insight, lets examine the odds of octopus phenomenon occurring purely out of chance.

In a match of football, there are exactly two probable outcomes, i.e., “team A wins and team B loses” OR “team B wins and team A loses.” So, the probability of predicting the outcome of a match accurately is ½ (probability equals 1/number of outcomes).

I. Probability of predicting result of Match 1 = ½

II. Probability of predicting result of Match 2 = ½

Hence, probability of correctly predicting results of Match 1 and Match 2 = I x II = ½ x ½ = ¼ (multiplication of probabilities of independent events).

So, probability of correctly predicting results of 6 matches = ½ x ½ x ½ x ½ x ½ x ½ = ¹/₆₄.

In other words, if there are 64 equally smart octopuses trying their hands at predicting all 6 matches in a row, one would eventually predict it correctly just by random chance. In yet other words, if there are 64 men/women predicting results of the games by flipping coin, one out of them would get all the 6 results correctly.

Now, lets examine the probability of me dying. According to US Social Security, the probability of death for a 16-year-old is ¹/₁₃₀₇. Compare that with the rather high probability of ¹/_64. So, it is far more improbable that I would die compared to Paul predicting all the German games.

According to common wisdom, the more improbable an event is the more attention it should harness. However, I (and you too) can be pretty sure that it is highly unlikely that even a line would be printed in the local daily on the auspicious occasion of my departure from this planet. Seems like its better to be an  ugly octopus now a days than a human.

Hope I made you think about the validity of news that we consume each day. Don't forget to carry a pinch of skepticism along.

By the way, you are not predicting the probability of me being a 16-year-old. Are you?

Cut-Paste Society

Aimlessness in life sometimes makes me feel down especially when all around are chasing their goals in life, the goals to be big, aiming higher and higher. Sometimes I feel the emptiness. I feel the uneasiness of being left out. Was the choice to avoid run of the mill wrong after all? And then, the ever mysterious question "what is the meaning of life" creeps in at its ease, wherever, whenever it wills. All this and much flutter inside.

The calmness restores soon when I examine the lives of all who say they set goals, who say they achieve. All I see is the circle they are running on with expensive horse blinds to boasts for. I have no goals to achieve because what I see beyond those goals is the place where I stand now.

All the achievers remind me of a beautiful piece of music penned by Malvina Reynolds and much popularized by Pete Seeger.

Little Boxes

Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,

Little boxes, little boxes,

Little boxes, all the same.

There's a green one and a pink one

And a blue one and a yellow one

And they're all made out of ticky-tacky

And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses

All go to the university,

And they all get put in boxes,

Little boxes, all the same.

And there's doctors and there's lawyers

And business executives,

And they're all made out of ticky-tacky

And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf-course,

And drink their Martini dry,

And they all have pretty children,

And the children go to school.

And the children go to summer camp

And then to the university,

And they all get put in boxes

And they all come out the same.

And the boys go into business,

And marry, and raise a family,

And they all get put in boxes,

Little boxes, all the same.

There's a green one and a pink one

And a blue one and a yellow one

And they're all made out of ticky-tacky

And they all look just the same.

Malvina Reynolds

Pete Seeger

Rockified by Rise Against

Sex on the Grass

Until recently glamor in cricket meant the model/actress wives of the star cricketers present during the game. And the occasional bikini-clad fans attracting the camera. I remember the incidents when after-match discussions were centered around appearance of such beauties on the screen. Incarnation of Indian Premier League has totally changed the scene. There is glamor everywhere, from the corporate offices of the teams to the grassy grounds. One can see heartthrobs from entertainment fraternity entertaining the crowd by their mere presence.

And then there are cheerleaders, giggling, hip shaking, pretty girls. Its nice relief to see some semi-nude female bodies after your eyes have gone sore tracking the tiny ball. Seems like the IPL organizers understood the human psyche pretty well. Even if you don't understand and enjoy cricket much, you can keep yourself busy looking at the pretty faces and gulping down alcohol.

The organizers of the game have made great efforts to handpick the prettiest of them around. All of them slim with flexible bodies. All of them professionals in the business of hip shaking. And all of them with shinny and fair skin. Err, I'm bit wrong here. To call them fair would be unfair. After all, they are all white-skinned Caucasian. This turns a little mysterious here. In an event which is highly Indianized and world class when it comes to the players, none of the cheerleaders are of Indian origin. What made the organizers select only white-skinned cheerleaders? They have not offered any explanations, but here are few hypotheses:

Explanation 1: There are no professional cheerleaders in India.
Justification: Is it a high-skill job that needs specific technological know how? Ain't it possible for the professional dancers and wannabe item girls to morph into cheerleaders? India has a long tradition of item girls (in cinema) and dancers. It would be difficult to believe that the IPL organizers could not find a single such dancer who could shake her hip on tunes of the ball.

Explanation 2: Indian girls would not like the skimpy outfits which are essential for cheerleaders.
Justification: Well, you gotta take a look at some Bollywood movies and music videos to verify the validity of this claim. Given the kind of skin show we encounter on television and silver screen, it is hard to accept that modesty of Indian lads would come in way of them getting into revealing clothes.

Explanation 3: TV-viewing middle class of Indian diaspora will get a punch on their morality after seeing the seduction of the brown skins.
Justification: Had that been the case, we would have been seeing exodus of middle class from multiplexes and of television radio waves from the sky. However, media viewership has increased over the years with increased nudity in contents. Nobody complains about it. In fact, the masses are saying "yeh dil mange more."

Explanation 4: Saffron politics might tag the IPL as an attack on the pavitrata of Bharatiya nari.
Justification: Now, this logic holds some value. One can never predict what can be considered as anti-national and anti-cultural (that too antient culture). Influence of a one such saffron party on the IPL head is well known. Strangely they don't have any issue with skin show on television and movies. And neither they have a problem with skin show on IPL as long as the skin is not brown.

In the end, the logic seems to circle back to the Indian preference for white skin. We are obsessed with the Caucasian race. Its the same old infatuation that started with Vasco da Gama hitting the Indian shores, long before even Indian existed.

Clarification: People with white skin might think that I've written about them or that I have some reservations about foreigners being employed in IPL. Absolutely wrong! What I'm trying to hit here is that part of Indian psyche which is boastful of their culture and at the same time, can't hide the jaw-dropping desire for everything phoren. I'm trying to hit that part of my psyche that forces me to write this in a phoren language.

Related Post: Indian Fascination About Foreign