News Round Up

Well I was wrong (wasn’t the first time , wont be the last time). The mid-day has indeed published a know your candidates half pager. One bit about the hutments and slum , Priya Dutt supports protection of all hutments before 2000, Sarpotdar(who is shiv sena and not BJP as I thought, but there really isn’t that much difference I guess) all hutments before 1995. I wonder why the justifications of these mostly illegal dwellings stops at a particular date?. What next , all criminals with crimes committed before 2000 go scot free?. It is perhaps harsh to equate the people living in the illegal slums with criminals, but allowing them to essentially get away with it is not the answer. India needs a more balanced form of development where places like Mumbai etc do not grow disproportionately. And of course we have to do something about our population.
And Mr Thackeray wants to get back to cartooning. Its fortunate that hes built his fortune (I can still laugh at him when he says he is honest he only has Matoshri) using other means. Otherwise he’d starve.
And Jyoti Randhawa and Arjun Atwal are intent on shooting themselves in the foot. They have just run themselves out of the reckoning on the last day of the golf world cup after starting 1 stroke behind leaders. Typical Indian sport behaviour!
And heres hoping that the Indians win in Bangalore. South Africa are on the verge of breaking the Aussie record for unbeaten one day victories. So the law of averages and The choke factor should catch up with them. But India does have the better team I think (and the pitches ofcourse)
And now I can regularly solve SuDoKu. Wonder if theres any algorithm to solve it other than brute force. I remember the days when I tried to solve the Knights problem by recursion and almost cried when the program spat out an overflow after recursing12 times.
  

The wedding bells toll

ISchmuck is married (read the man from mars, or marsboy)
I wasnt there to witness the proceedings though XSchmuck was . Read it in his own words
Oh and i thought cigars were for when the kid is born , not on the marriage day!
I wish the couple Happiness and a Long Life Together

Votes

It was so easy when you were in school. There were rights and there were duties. The consitution gave every citizen the right to vote and it was every citizens duty to exercise it. You were taught the importance of voting in a democracy and as a student deprived of voting rights due to age constraints you looked forward to the day when you would be able to vote.
Fast forward to , your name is on the electoral rolls , the election is on saturday. Hmm who are the candidates. Uh well one's this lady who is asking votes in the name of her departed father, ably assisted by her brother who is under suspicion for possessing arms during the times of the blast. Atleast Ms Priya Dutt seems clean , though people say she does as she is told by the other MLA Baba Siddique. It would have been so much better if she could have said whats shes done and what her qualifications are rather than allowing her to continue to do the work her father started. On the other side we have Madhukar Sarpotdar, whose party disqualifies him from being considered by me, not because of their communal stance( all parties in India are either communal or casteist) but because of a certain Mr Murli Manohar Joshi who insisted on screwing with the educational system. Its one thing to incite grown men to riot, who are adults and must take responsibility for what they do, its quite another to force your version of history down an unsuspecting childs throat.
And should you vote for a person or for the party?
Who else are the candidates no one knows. Our esteemed newspapers would rather carry page after page of various society parties than publish these details. Who would read this after all?
I think id vote for Priya Dutt. If nothing else atleast the proportion of women in legislature would increase. Our parties who actively champion reservation seem to shudder when it comes to reservation of seats for women. Not that i support this form of reservation.
I remember this Busybee article of him going to vote. He made this list up of who/what qualities he would not vote. And concluded that if anyone remained after these eliminations he'd vote for him/her. I suspect that he probably didnt exercise his right.
I think it should be mandatory to have a I dont think anyone is worthy of my vote option in any democrarcy. I think politics should be made a profession where some minimum education / training is required. As long as this education/training is made freely available to all, it doesnt violate anyones right/. Its too much seeing uneducated thugs with no experience whatsoever being ministers. You wouldnt hire these guys as employees in any company, why do we feel they are fit to run our country.

Gender Inequality

In The Argumentative Indian , there is a chapter about gender inequality which reveals some highly upsetting figures. These figures concern the natal inequality present in India , i.e. the fact that foetus’ whose sex has been determined to be female are sometimes aborted , an act which cannot be appropriately described without using the choicest four letter words available in the vocabularies of multiple languages. There exists a South-East v/s North – West divide. With the north – west coming decidedly worse as ardent followers of this abhorrent act. Maharashtra unfortunately comes in the North West region. It should also be noted that this natal inequality may also be evidenced in the south particularly Tamil Nadu. What is equally shocking is that the average females born per 100 males is lesser in the urban areas than the rural (This is probably because the urban areas have the technology). And more so that is sometimes the mothers themselves who are responsible.
Yesterday was childrens day.  

Dev

Watched the end of Dev , and again the feeling that this could have been a great movie, but that in the end you come out feeling dissatisfied with the movie. Here’s what I would change.
The dialog between Om Puri and Amitabh has to be better. The scenes between them should be similar to Pacino- DeNiro in Heat. Or something like that. There has to be an underlying tension, which is only kept together by their friendship. There must be enough to make the audience think with whom they stand.
Om puri’s motivations and actions should be changed so that he isn’t an out and out villain. In the current script he is too much of a villain for you to feel any sympathy.
Replace Fardeen Khan with someone who can act and look vulnerable, not look drunk.
The realization that the Big B considers Fardeen his son , should come to Om puri gradually and by himself , for his suicide to make sense. Otherwise the suicide seems out of place. The end drinking scene is amazing and has to be kept.
The pace of the movie isn’t present in all places. That needs to be improved as well.

Intelligent Design

There is a recent ruling in Kansas to allow the theory of Intelligent Design to be taught in the classrooms, not just Darwins Theory of evolution. The theory is along lines the lines that Darwin’s theory does not adequately explain how a universe as complex as ours could have evolved and therefore needs an intelligent designer.
At first glance it looks like a victory for the Creationists, but it isn’t.
Science demands alternate theories to be considered and either proven or disproved. No theory is sacrosanct (e.g. darwins) and debate is good. Too often scientists fall for the trap of laughing at the alternatives suggested instead of simply producing proofs and letting people draw their own conclusions. This is of course not to say that I believe Intelligent Design is right. I don’t think so (and certainly the term intelligent shouldn’t be applied to any theories describing humans)
Carl Sagan had the same views when it was suggested that humanity was given birth by Alien races who intermingled with the whatever native species there were on earth(Highly liberal races I must say), and examples of old Indian tribes knowing stellar constellations. Sagan said most scientists simply laughed instead of proving that this theory was flawed(Broca’s brain is the book I think)
There were some funny cartoons though -God to a creationist, I gave you a brain , now use it!
On a related point I believe Stephen Hawking once said it didn’t interest him whether god created the universe or not, its only whether there was a choice. Could life have happened under any other circumstances (creator or no creator). Or if there was a god did he create gravity or is he bound to work within the boundaries of gravity?
Id say let the theory be taught so long as the alternatives are taught as well!. Otherwise we run the risk of becoming like the creationists!

Im Back!

So after a long hiatus, the internet connectivity is there and i have time on my hands to resume my quest to write 100 paragraphs. Does this count?
I think the last time i wrote was just before the floods hit mumbai. Speaking of which , everyone blamed the current government for the way it handled the floods, they seem to have forgotten we live in a democracy. we deserve the governments we get. And the newspapers gushed about the spirit of the average mumbaikar(As opposed to say a new orleans resident). I was stuck out during the floods and got to see 2.5 examples of goodness and 1.5 examples of harshness. Still its good enough i guess.
And the Indian team is back in everyones good books, though one lost game and the questions are already being asked again!
And it is ironical to wait and buy the special extended dvd edition of all three lord of the rings and fast forward to just see the war sequences.