You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2010.
There has been no dearth of topics to write about, but things have kept me busy.
Things such as a couple of days back, there was a conference in San Francisco for budding writers. There is a block near Town Hall in San Francisco where many amateur writers live, organize regular writing sessions, exchange ideas and critique each others’ works. It’s a small community. This conference was scheduled in their block. Many famous writers were invited and had agreed to be part of the conference. I was supposed to be present at 9 a.m. for the keynote address by V.S. Naipaul, but I was running late that day. I reached the location at 9.15 a.m. Parking is always difficult to find in the city. After 10 mins. of scouting, I found a spot, parked and sprinted towards my destination.
There it was in front of me, the writers’ block.
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Don’t kill me, unless you have in triplicate, a valid fatwa attested by an eminent cleric.
Pakistanis learnt about the evil side of Facebook recently. Not the pictures of the prophet, but that it can be banned at will by the government.
Therefore, an alternative was born : www.millatfacebook.com It would’ve been sued to death in the U.S. for plagiarism, but it should be safe for now.
Its tagline is precious: MillatFacebook helps you connect and share with more than 1.57 Billion Muslims and Sweet people from other Religions.
So if you follow Islam, walk right in. If you follow any other religion, grab a knife, pierce it into your flesh — Arms, thighs are good options for those with a good physique; belly for Indians. Scrape some flesh and eat it. If it tastes sweet, walk right in.
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I know that was gross, or as some would say — in bad taste.
Among new-age sports, I’m sure you’ve heard of Parkour (which, I’d argue, is more art than sport).
Another one I came across is called Liquid Mountaineering. That’s a misnomer; it’s Running on Water.
How is it possible, you ask?
Evidently, by running fast enough!
Jesus only managed to walk on water; these guys just pwned Jesus.
A recent study says: Racial bias kills natural tendency to pity.
Why only race? I’d take it further — religion, gender, nationality — indeed, any characteristic of a person makes him/her self-select themselves into a bucket. From there, it’s always an Us vs. Them view.
As a corollary, I guess humans are inherently racist.
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Looks like even evolution is racist, which would naturally make it a Republican. And that, dear readers, is how irony is done.
The censor board in India is a mess. It is routine for the board to give an ‘A’ certificate to a film after recommending cuts. The same happened with Rajneet : One love-making scene and one expletive ridden scene. Interestingly, the board had a problem with the F-word, but was okay with Hindi expletives. Go figure.
It is alleged that Rajneeti is inspired by Sonia Gandhi’s life, so in addition to the censor board, it had to be screened to Congressmen (which includes, of all people, Tom Vadakkan, who in all probability still believes that Tweet is a Very Lonely Man). They suggested further changes, since they are adept at the art of filmmaking.
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If you are a director with an impending release, and if the film includes any love-making scene (i.e. a kiss or suggestive nudity, the kind that is rated PG-13 in U.S.), then every interview will contain one question about “the scene”. After all, it’s just 2010. This is too early to be progressive.
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It is interesting to see the way BJP and Congress react to objectionable material. The Congress, in most cases, has adopted a top-down approach — The Family or their minions negotiate. The BJP and other right-wingers prefer a bottom-up approach, where loonies damage public and private property.
Given a strict choice between the two, I’d take the first one any day.
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In what can only be called irony, Arun Jaitley of the BJP writes a piece for The Indian Express on how Congress is a “national censor”.
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Meanwhile, we must be thankful to the board who looks out for us, and makes sure we don’t see any sinful material on screen. Else we would’ve gone straight to hell, where they show reruns of Himesh movies, I hear.
Another day; another cartoon; another controversy:
A cartoon by award-winning satirist Jonathan Shapiro in The Mail and The Guardian weekly newspaper on Friday shows the Prophet grumbling to a psychiatrist about the furore in the Muslim world created by a Facebook page called Everybody draw Muhammad Day.
“Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour!” the turbaned, bearded figure, who is stretched out on the psychiatrist’s couch, complains.
The newspaper editor defends his decision to publish the cartoon in what is a wonderful quote:
My view is no cartoon is as insulting to Islam as the assumption Muslims will react with violence.
To me, this assumption seems more insulting — but hardly anything offends me, so I’m not the right person to compare. So I make this question open: What do you think is less insulting?
1. Portraying Muhammad in a cartoon.
2. Not portraying Muhammad, but replacing it with the South Park style “Censored for fear of extremist Muslims”.
Yes?
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I don’t want to bring in Everybody Draw Muhammad Day here. I maintain it is in bad taste, but I will defend its right to exist.
It’s almost certain : Facebook has deleted the Everybody Draw Mohammad Day page. But another page has surfaced with 13,000 members.
At the other extreme is a group called Against Everybody Draw Mohammad Day, which is not banned, has 40,000 members, and has equally insane commenters as the original page — from doing jihad against Facebookers, to saying that Islam is the ‘best’ religion. Well guest what, it’s not. And while everyone would love to believe that theirs is truly the best religion, it is silly to claim any religion is the ‘best’.
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I wonder : Now that there are a few thousand blasphemous images on the interwebs, it will be awfully hard to even find each creator.
More on the Foxconn undercover report I mentioned yesterday : TechCrunch has an unusual post that makes sense. [To recall, TechCrunch was the tabloid king of technology websites; until it was recently overtaken by Gizmodo.] John Biggs writes:
Don’t cry for the workers at Foxconn
I’ve been interested in gadget manufacturing for a while now and, as I reported a few months ago, things are pretty bad but they’ve been worse. Now, however, we’re seeing clusters of suicides at Foxconn as well as an undercover “report” from Foxconn’s “Hell Factory.” I’m calling bull.
First, consider that Foxconn has 400,000 employees in Shenzhen alone. Cleveland, Ohio has 478,403 residents as of the 2000 census and I suspect that’s gone down. You’re not amazed by the number of suicides in Cleveland, right? It’s par for the course. People go nuts in Cleveland, even though they have a great meat market and the Cleveland Clinic is really nice. People don’t want to live, sometimes, right?
I came across this amusing — and possibly gross — story of A. Muruganantham, christened India’s tampon king:
After a failed attempt with his wife and sisters and a cockeyed do-it-yourself effort with a football bladder full of goat’s blood, he’d finally hit upon a surefire way to test the low-cost sanitary napkin he was developing for India’s poor. He was passing out free pads to college girls and collecting their used napkins for study. And he had a storeroom full of them. When his mother saw it, she burst into tears and packed her things to move in with his sister.
Currently he is fighting an impending government subsidy to multi-national companies that manufacture sanitary napkins. Given how subsidies work, the government has no incentive to subsidize his product. But more power to him.
The outrage .. and outage in Pakistan continues. Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia are all banned. Had they stopped at that, I would have no issues. But they’ve gone too far this time. Xeb writes, from behind the firewall:
I can’t access WordPress (Deepak’s blog is currently being denied)
Not cool, Pakistan, not cool! You will have to pay with your blood for every hit I don’t get.
I’ll accept cash too.
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When you don’t get a hit, is it called a miss?
