I have been linked

Sandeep has put me on his bloglist.

My first thought, to paraphrase Marx (Groucho, not Karl) were "How can I esteem someone, who esteems me".

But seriously, it is always good to be mentioned by fella like Sandeep, better however is forming opinions through education and which Sandeep does with a flourish. That is the beauty of net.
So, thanks Sandeep for what I do not deserve, and if you choose to venture on this blog inspite of atrocious typos and poor grammar, why I warned you, but may force be with you.

Well "doubting gaurav" is quite awkward I admit and hardly cool, but the bright side is that it is not "peeping gaurav", which I thought initially.What is more as "DG" I am just one vowel short man's best friend.

I am posting it here, because for some reason I am not able to post my comments at Sandeep's place (I have changed URL, mail ID but Gods are angry on me)

The bug has been fixed

The title is apparently the way Microsoft will announce dooms-day to its customers.

Now it is a well known that Bangalore has , well problems.

Formerly know as garden city, Bangalore is groaning under the the "Cheap indian labour rush" of phoren MNC's as well as coming of age of Indian software firms which is resulting in large number of firms as well as immigration from rest of India and its infrastructure is incapable of meeting the requirement.
The result is traffic jams, high real estate rates and what not, it has already been dissected, analyzed, satirazed , scandalized and other -ed.

So what is the solution ? Lesser mortals will suggest improving infrastructure, developing other cities. Huh, such naives. Mr Dharam Singh CM of Karnataka has in a stunning move eliminated any present and future problems by this,

Bangalore to be re-named Bengaluru.

It was so easy, no Bangalore = no problem.

And since no one can say Bengaluru without laughing and choking to death, there will not be any mention of the problem.

Out of box thing is the way to go, preferably with no connection to reality or relevance.

Taking inspiration from this I am thinking of changing my project objective to keep me in employment instead of doing any real work.

Writing a good post

This is why Jaffna is a good blogger, and I am not even a wannabe.

In his place, I would have used snark at best, insult or sarcasm at worst, which ofcourse defeats the purpose for which I am blogging, which is exploration of ideas and expansion of intellect.
Unfortunately my rage makes my efforts useless.

Evils of Capitalism

Via Instapundit ,

"Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've *worked* in the private sector. They expect *results*."

If there is something evil about capitalism it is that you are expected to work.
This can be very inconvenient for people like me whose motto in life is to avidly avoid perusance of any effort.
Fortunately one of the benefits of working in software industry is that you can pretending you are working while wasting your time blogging surfing chatting or launching malacious codes.

As far as deadlines are concerned, they always expire. It is pointless to bother about something as arbitrary as deadlines

This also tells why objectivism is a monstrosity, it places work as the greatest virtue man is capable of.

Bangladesh : Clear and present concern

Originally posted as a comment here, turned out good so reposting it.

The recent spate of bombings in Bangladesh has awoken world and India to the situation in Bangladesh. I think as dastardly as these blasts are, one consequence ironically is that world is becoming increasingly concerned. The security concerns for India are most grave, and yet, I am afraid that our approach to this will be short sighted as well as hamhanded.

Nitin and Jaffna have posted about this. In my view the perception about secularism and tolerance of Bangladesh are a bit misplaced or exaggerated.

Soon after coup in which Sheik Mujib -Ur- Rehman was butchered along with his family, Bangladesh was declared Islamic Republic, to this date that is what it is.
In fact, Bangladesh (Former East Bengal) has been slowly islamisized since turn of century.It is not a well known fact that British had tried to push a cleft between Muslims and Hindu in Bengal by diving that state on religious basis, what is more it encouraged Muslims to assert a different and often antagonistic position against Hindus. The manifesto of Bengali muslims was circulated by maulvis and in the process raised muslim peasantory against Hindu landlords, this process was to ultimately result in Partition.

Partition saw the worst instances of violence in Bengal. Suprisingly while there are lots of books and movies about division of Punjab, there is hardly any work on division of bengal.(In my opinion it can be due to difference of bengali and punjabi mindset).

After Partition this process got stalled and even reversed (to some extent) due to resentment against punjabi discrimination.Punjabi Muslims considered Bengali Muslims to be inferior (Dark, Small and Rice Eaters).This resentment ofcourse resulted in creation of Bangladesh in 1971.At that time it was secular republic but as I wrote before this state changed after coup.

In the intervening decade the process of islamization continued and the hindus were marginalised.However the reasons it was not realized in India were ,apart from apathy of elites/chattering classes for anything hindu, The medium of radicalism was still to a large extent Bengali which defeated the very purpose and terror was not considered exportable commodity.

However in the last decade large number of Madrassas with Wahabi money have been established whose medium of instruction is arabic and the only subject that is covered is theology. This is no different on Indian side.

This is radicalizing the populace at a rate much greater than previous decades, effectively alienating them from their Bengali Culture (To understand how the people are "arabised" , effectively erasing their traditional identity, it is instructive to read "Among the believers" by V.S. Naipaul ).

These radicals have a significant vote share resulting in their participation (Jamat- e-Islami)in present regime headed by Begum Khalida Jia ,widow of slain army dictator Jia- Ur-Rehman, making any concrete step against going radicalism impossible.
It is not unusual to hear cries of "We are taliban, and we will make Bangladesh Afganistan" in rallies of fundamentalist.

Apart from political compulsion, there is economic incentive in form of petro dollars as well as territorial ambition by inclusion of districts of Assam and Bengal , (whose demography has been changed by Bengladeshi influx) in Bangladesh.All this, especially the last demands immediate attention from India.
Sadly, our elites/chattering classes retain the same indifferecne.

All this is courtsey Arun Shourie's latest book .

Rethinking Morality - A fractional visit.

Thinking about morality.

What has struck me before and which was pointed by JK in his comments (here )that our perceptions of what constitutes decency have never been same thorough out the time and in all places .
In some places it is minimalist, in other it is more conservative.
I have never understood what could be the reason behind it.
What is more from an neutral point of view what purpose does decency serve?
First it is a man made construct in the sense no other species shows any need for it.
But even for human society what is the it's requirement.
I could think of this,

Religous emphasis on sex as a sin or females as temptation which is best avoided.
This view was held in Christianity as well as Ascetic Traditions.

But even this doesnt explain, why should religion view sex as taboo.

One of the explainations could be that as society became mongamous, social norms sought to regulate the sex, since there is nothing in human biology which encourage monogamy quite the opposite in fact,overemphasis on sex must have been frowned upon and it was thought fit to limit sex to bedrooms.
Sex existed in public ofcourse, but in form of art, dance, poetry and literature, it was not the raw animal urging but something on an elevated platform.
However like all things relating to rule , as the civilization proceeded, people forgot the reason and started applying these rules mechanically, which must have caused sex to be thought as a sin.

The other view is somewhat related to what Dan Brown said in Da Vinci Code, that an increasingly pateriarchal society marginalised female and hence sex.

These are ofcourse tentative ideas.

Further on this path , I can guess the need for morality. It could have been that in order to establish society it was thought neccessary to regulate sexual activites, and this is quite possible , considering that unlike many mammals humans do not have a specific mating period , which makes humans much more sexually active than other mammals. This might possess challenge to establishing an order.

And that might be the reason I feel slight discomfort with ongoing sexual liberation.
It seeks to liberate sex and turn it back into raw animal urge. The ironical part may be that by doing it it may be harming the sectino (i.e females) it professes to liberate.

What is the difference between notion of vitrue and chastity and notion of scoring up, both are peer pressure and a need to confirm. One is based on "sex is evil", whereas other is based "promiscuous is vitrue". What is the use ,as some feminists have pointed out, if sexual liberation causes barbification, depression and bulimia.

Here it can be argued that freedom is not the cause, it is uninformed choice. I think the problem is freedom is not useful unless accompanied by the right idea, indeed one of the benefits of freedom is that it allows development of right idea.
However mindless adherence to dogma, whether religious or sexual emanicpation , renders freedom meaningless.

The far easier explaination is ofcourse that I am a peeved off loser , which may not be wrong at all.

The Rising : A review cum rant

This rant was long pending,

I have been a long time fan of Amir Khan. Part of this was his histrionic ability as well as his unassuming persona insharp contrast to maverick Shahrukh Khan or downright criminal Salman Khan. On the other hand Ketan Mehta is a equally capable director having been at the helm of such movies like Bhavani Bhavai and Mirch Masala.

What is more Indian cinema (or atleast Bambayya cinema) doesnt have a tradition of historical narratives, almost all the films which came earlier were more in line of epics and story telling,
I had enjoyed many of them in childhood and found the dramatics appealing.
However I wanted to see how Aamir and Ketan balance historical narrative with dramatics that our films require.

This ofcourse is not easy. Hardly anything is known about Mangal Pandey and his ideas.
Most of books about him have been sketchy and based on much speculation.

To cut a long story short I was eagerly awaiting for this movie.

Well the movie was worse than disappointment.

It had the usual shortcoming that a typical hindi movie is supposed to have.

In order to add more flesh to Mangal's character his love life was invented.
Now there are two problems in this , it is ok to reinterpret and add on mythological stories.
However if working on historical character (which Mangal Pandey is), it is best to stay true to the real, since their was not much concrete to begin with I could understand ifa bit of romance was added, but making a parallel story of it seemed a bad idea.

The worst infraction, however was using Mangal Pandey as a symbol against liberalization and free market.

Many times in the movie Toby Stephens in explaination of colonial system referred to it as free market.

I am not an economist but even I can see distinction between free market which essentially is based on choice of buyers and sellers to trade on mutually acceptable terms and price and Colonialism which involves forcing others to buy at high prices or sell at low prices.

This slant was with doubt a cheap shot at current globalization, which is the favourite strwamen of our intellectuals, they are living in a decreipt utopia dreaming of rotten ideologies. They feel that globalization is a monster which must be opposed.

I think this comes from unnatural fetish with idealogies and intellectual sloth. One of the charges against religon is that it sets false ideals, I don't see how is secular version any better.