India Uncut

With bridges washed out, highways converted into canals, and power and communications lines inoperable, government officials ordered everyone still remaining out of the city. Officials began planning for the evacuation of the Superdome, where about 10,000 refugees huddled in increasingly grim conditions as water and food were running out and rising water threatened the generators.

[...]

Across the region, rescue workers were not even trying to gather up and count the dead, officials said, but pushed them aside for the time being as they tried to find the living.

Pigs are the most misunderstood animals. It’s (sic) not as detached as a cat, but neither will it slobber all over you like a dog, but the fact is that a pig is extremely loyal. I think they are ideal pets and look so very adorable. I don’t mind rolling in the muck like a pig.

Pigs symbolise pain and misery. They are dirty and it’s unpleasant to even have its picture at home. I don’t like the idea of Sushama collecting these things.

263 ARGUMENT FROM YOUTH GROUP MINISTER
(1) God is awesome!
(2) Like, totally, dude!
(3) Therefore, God, like, exists and stuff.

264 ARGUMENT FROM PERSONAL INABILITY
(1) The Bible says Jesus turned water into wine.
(2) Can you turn water into wine?
(3) No? Well there ya go.
(4) Therefore, God exists.

265 ARGUMENT FROM PERSONAL ABILITY
(1) I prayed to God, and then lifted a car off my trapped puppy.
(2) I couldn't have done that without God.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

[W]hat I've found as a general trend is that the dreams of political liberals tend to have more bizarre, fantastical kinds of elements: more flying, more dead people coming back to life, more weird sexual dreams.

Conservatives, by contrast, tend to have more dreams of everyday events, every day settings and interaction.

Consider the statistics about the Total Sanitation Campaign, the centrally sponsored scheme of the ministry of rural development. Of the 138 million rural households, only 23.7 per cent have own toilets. The coverage in a state like Bihar is as low as 6.5 per cent, with BPL (below poverty line) households accounting for a paltry 0.7 per cent! Even in a rich state like Maharashtra, the coverage is only 19 per cent. The percentage of schools having toilets is 43 per cent and many of them are of very poor standards.

Is there is a solution? Yes. It has three components: massive public and private investment in sanitation; major efficiency enhancement in the functioning of panchayats, municipal bodies, and government departments; and, above all, large-scale people’s participation through organised voluntary action and penalty for offenders.

If the children were "destined to be killed by their own mother," how is it not possible that the mother was destined to be prosecuted for murder?

For the greater part of the 20th century, Russia's population suffered from the nightmare of wars, repression and perpetual hunger. There was the famine of the Civil War, the famine of the years of collectivization, and the famine of the Second World War. It almost seems as if the relative prosperity of recent years has engendered a peculiar reaction of the flesh, something almost akin to gratitude. All across the country, a plethora of beautiful girls has sprung up.

Rahul in Kabul is like a bulbul: It flies away just when you think you’ve caught it.

Conversation between two mothers in a Saudi supermarket:

Mother 1: Oh hello, haven't seen you for ages*, how's little Abdullah?

Mother 2: Little Abdullah? He's really big now. He went off to Iraq to be a suicide bomber. And little Mohammad?

Mother 1: Same thing. No longer little either. He also went off to be a suicide bomber in Iraq

Mother 2: There you go. Don't children blow up quickly these days?

* (Ironic greeting exchanged between veiled ladies.)

Just as the painful ordeal of childbirth finally ended and Nesam Velankanni waited for a nurse to lay her squalling newborn on her chest, the maternity hospital's ritual of extortion began.

Before she even glimpsed her baby, she said, a nurse whisked the infant away and an attendant demanded a bribe. If you want to see your child, families are told, the price is $12 for a boy and $7 for a girl, a lot of money for slum dwellers scraping by on a dollar a day. The practice is common here in the city, surveys confirm.

Mrs. Velankanni was penniless, and her mother-in-law had to pawn gold earrings that had been a precious marriage gift so she could give the money to the attendant, or ayah. Mrs. Velankanni, a migrant to Bangalore who had been unprepared for the demand, wept in frustration.

BJP totally stands by reservations for women in parliament. The only thing it objects to is reservations on the basis of religion. In our country, everyone should be equal under the law. One should not encourage division on the basis of religion, region, caste or creed.

A report by The Indian Express this morning on a complaint against Inspector General of Police Sumedh Singh Saini to the state human rights commission brought the might of the Punjab cops to the reporter’s door.

Throwing all legal norms out of the window, a police team, reporting directly to IGP Saini, stormed into the residence of The Indian Express Principal Correspondent Gautam Dheer and took him away late tonight.

Giving no reason for the arrest, denying him access to a lawyer, police refused to even confirm where they had taken him.

A farmer chopped off both the legs of his wife while she slept, accusing her of being a spendthrift, reports our special correspondent.

Syed Fakruddin of Andhra Pradesh, who worked on a sheep farm in Kuwait, returned last week to find that his wife, Sadiquin Begam, had spent all the Rs 4 lakh that he had sent on jewellery and clothes.

A furious Fakruddin bought an axe on Wednesday, while returning to his home in Anantpur district and hacked the legs of his wife while she slept. Fakruddin then rushed Sadiquin to a government hospital, where the limbs had to be amputated.

The police dropped the case registered against the farmer when he surrendered the next day as Sadiquin did not want any action taken.

I fail to understand what the Public Prosecutor does in India. Isn't it his duty to file a case if some crime has happened? What if the lady got killed? In that case, she cannot take any action against her husband. Should, therefore, we not file any case against the criminal?

The fact is that politicians and novelists have a lot in common, even beyond the irresistibly cynical observation that they both lie for a living. Members of both camps seem to believe that they have a lot to say, after all, and both feel compelled to say it at great length. Anyone who has been on a book tour can tell you that it feels a little like a political campaign, if a losing one. Contrary to the image of the lonely artist forging his works in the smithy of his soul, the working novelist must be adept at marshaling the support of agents, editors, booksellers and any number of former and current spouses. And these days so many novelists need to teach writing to supplement their income that an aptitude for academic politics is almost part of the job description.

Both politics and fiction-writing depend heavily on public approval, which is why both are such essentially narcissistic lines of work. Members of these two egotistical tribes must also find the right balance between following their principles and giving the public what it wants. Each seeks prizes available only to a select few. And in both camps there is considerable fretting about money.

[T]he proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.

Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. "Smith's work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat," you say, misrepresenting Smith's work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: "See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms." And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.

William Dembski, one of the most vocal supporters of intelligent design, notes that he provoked Thomas Schneider, a biologist, into a response that Dr. Dembski characterizes as "some hair-splitting that could only look ridiculous to outsider observers." What looks to scientists - and is - a knockout objection by Dr. Schneider is portrayed to most everyone else as ridiculous hair-splitting.

A full-page ad issued by a Congress staff outfit welcoming party chief Sonia Gandhi to Kerala has turned out to be an embarrassment for the party on the day of her arrival.

The highlights:

• "It is a matter of pride that Soniaji heads the NDA Government at the Centre. Even the Left parties can share this pride."

[...]

• "At first, Vayalar Ravi may frown at you. Then he will be like a cow...He is a family member of 10 Janpath."

Rebels in India's north-eastern state of Tripura are making pornographic films to raise money for their separatist campaign, officials say.

The information has come from surrendered guerrillas of the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT), according to police.

They say the rebels are forcing captured tribal women, and some men, to take part in the films.

A CD called Ganpati Top 15, marketed by Krunal Music has tunes from Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Bunty aur Babli, other Hindi movies and some raunchy Telugu movie numbers. These CDs are flying off the shelves. Kajra re, for instance, has lyrics that go, “Morya re, morya re, Ganpati Bappa morya re.”

The fear of death is a powerful influence on our thinking, even if we are not often conscious of it. Our society, like all others before it, has a strong need to feel in control of death, even if we must embrace fairy tales and quack cures to gain that sense of control. The idea that we mostly do not understand and cannot control death is just not a message that people want to hear. The message that medical miracles can control death, in contrast, is a message that people do want to hear.

So we now spend 15% of our national income on medicine [US figures], even though half of that spending has been clearly demonstrated to be on average useless, and even though we have good reasons to doubt the value of most of the other half. Furthermore, we seem relatively uninterested in living longer by trying the things that our evidence suggests do work, like gaining high social status, exercising more, smoking less, and living in rural areas. Such apparently effective approaches to increasing lifespan just do not have the magic allure of conquering death via medical miracles.

Telecom operators using CDMA technology have written to the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, seeking intervention in policy matters relating to spectrum allocation, access deficit charge, and interconnection.

The operators have also asked the Government to allow market forces to determine the telephone tariffs.

Souad Massi is a North African city planner who lives now in France after she lost her job years ago when all things where up in the air in Algeria. The song title means [My Son]. It is written from the point of view of a mother who is telling her son he should wake up early, to go to school, learn to read and become someone important and later you will abandon us and you will destroy those will stand in your way, but you still have to wake up early.

I like to think of it as a funny song about people you support and encourage and then turn on you.

I should tell you that this song is not typical of the album, the rest has a folksier feel with lots of Andalusian influences. There is a song called [Yemma (Mother, I lie to you)] which will break your heart. It’s about a girl calling her mother back home telling her all is OK, I need no money and people don’t insult me on the street. [My link.]

Every day, stop writing just a short while before you really want to quit. The next day you will be very keen to get going again. For most mortals, your real enemy is the number of days when you get nothing written. Getting "not enough" done each day is a lesser problem.

"Since the dawn of rock, there have been individuals, usually young men, of argumentative tendencies who have lorded their encyclopedic musical knowledge over others." So states the introduction of the recent "Rock Snob's Dictionary", compiled by David Kamp and Steven Daly. I like to believe I'm not the insufferable dweeb suggested by this definition. Certainly, much of the dictionary's obscure trivia (former Television bassist Richard Hell is now a novelist; Norwegian death metal stars actually murder one another) is news to me. But I do place an unusual, perhaps irrational, value on rock music. I take considerable pride in my huge collection and carefully refined taste. And I consider bad rock taste--or, worse, no rock taste at all--clear evidence of a fallow soul. I am, in other words, a certified Rock Snob. But I fear that Rock Snobs are in grave danger. We are being ruined by the iPod.

Senior Police Inspector N V Nikam from the Special Branch, involved with keeping a watch on various Muslim sects in the city, was suspended on Tuesday for playing cards on duty. His colleagues said they played cards to kill time, as there was very little work in the department.

[...]

“The branch mainly collects information on Muslim sects in the city when they hold meetings or plan other activities. But when there are no meetings, we have nothing to do but play cards,” said a colleague.

If all goes according to plan, in May 2006, citizens will have the first quantifiable indication on just how the government is spending the money it collects in taxes.

In a first, Finance Minister P Chidambaram today tabled an "Outcome Budget" in Parliament that seeks to pinpoint scheme-wise targets, quarter-to-quarter, on each and every planned expenditure by Central ministries and departments in a financial year.

The annual document lists clearly-defined deliverables for each scheme/programme, its budgetary outlay, processes and timelines, as well as risk factors in meeting the target. Next May, when the second Outcome Budget will be tabled, there should be clear answers to which targets have been met - and those that have not.

Contrary to the assertions of many opponents of immigration, from Capitol Hill to CNN, the size of our foreign workforce is mainly determined by supply and demand, not Benedict Arnold CEOs or a corporate quest for "cheap" labor. As the nearby table shows, since the H-1B quota was first enacted in 1992 there have been several years amid a soft economy in which it hasn't been filled. When U.S. companies can find domestic workers to fill jobs, they prefer to hire them.

And let's not forget that these immigrant professionals create jobs, as the founders of Intel, Google, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Computer Associates, Yahoo and numerous other successful ventures can attest. The Public Policy Institute of California did a survey of immigrants to Silicon Valley in 2002 and found that 52% of "foreign-born scientists and engineers have been involved in founding or running a start-up company either full-time or part-time."

Moreover, the notion that Indian software writers are being hired by Microsoft at bargain-basement costs and driving down the wages of Americans is also refuted by the evidence. A Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta study conducted in 2003 found no negative impact on U.S. wages. Government fees and related expenses for hiring foreign nationals can exceed $6,000, and additional fees accrue if and when the H-1B status is renewed after three years. The law also requires companies to pay visa holders prevailing wages and benefits, and it forbids hiring them to replace striking Americans.

A central irony here is that opponents of lifting the H-1B cap also tend to be the biggest critics of outsourcing, which is fueled by the arbitrary cap.

The August Bank holiday welcomes an extra special exhibit to London Zoo as a flock of Homo sapiens gather on the world famous Bear Mountain.

Presented to the public with only fig leaves to protect their modesty, the humans will become an important feature of zoo life as they are cared for by our experienced keepers and kept entertained through various forms of enrichment.

The four day event aims to demonstrate the basic nature of man as an animal and examine the impact that Homo sapiens have on the rest of the animal kingdom.

Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee on Thursday turned down a privilege notice against The Pioneer newspaper for allegedly publishing an article casting aspersions on the Chair saying it was "beneath the dignity of this great institution to take further note of the motivated imputations in the impugned article."

While closing "this chapter," he added the caveat that "in future, reckless and contumacious conduct indulged in, by whosoever [it] may be, will be dealt with in the appropriate manner so as to preserve and enhance the dignity of the highest public forum in our country."

The animals in the city zoo, (Veermata Jijabai Bhonsale Garden), at Byculla, are being harassed by insensitive visitors.

The visitors pick stones from heaps of rubble and raw material left behind by the BMC contractor repairing the zoo roads, and pelt them at the animals.

Raj Thackeray, Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray’s nephew got director Deepak Balraj Vij to change the name of his forthcoming movie Bombay Godfather to Mumbai Godfather.

Said Raj, “You should love the city you live in. If you are in Mumbai, address it by its original name!” Bal Thackeray, incidentally, was instrumental in changing the name of Bombay to Mumbai.

There is a story of a prospective school teacher who was asked during an interview by the principal of a conservative religious school, "Is the earth flat or round?"

The hapless teacher looked around at the faces of the interviewers for hints and, not finding any, settled for: "I can teach it flat or round."

The trouble with a lot of our economic policy advisers is that they are like the school teacher.

They try to gauge what answers will make them popular with their political bosses and then give them the advice they seek.

This may be good for the advancement of their career but is not good for economics or for the country in question.

A widely respected principal of a private school spent Tuesday evening at a police station stripped down to his underclothes after he was arrested for allegedly taking nude pictures of a girl student and storing them in his personal computer.

The girl stated that Srinivasa Rao showed her his new digital camera and asked her if she would like her pictures taken. She smiled shyly and he clicked some pictures of her in her uniform.

Then suddenly he asked her to undress. She obliged uncertainly. He photographed her nude and went on to load the cartridge on his PC.

Mumbai alone suffered losses of around Rs 4,000 crore, including damage to property, in the recent floods due to choking of drains because of plastic bags, which also had its effect on public health.

Torrential rains have caused havoc across central and eastern Europe, killing up to 34 people.

Worst affected is Romania where at least seven elderly people were killed overnight - bringing the deaths to 25.

At least 11 people are reported dead or missing in Switzerland, Austria and Germany where emergency services are struggling to restore basic services

[S]uppose you paid $1000 in taxes, and got a line item bill of exactly what that was spent on. Say $100 on defense, $50 on poverty, $500 on politician's salaries, and so on.

Here's the thing: you aren't choosing how that money is spent. Some of the things on that list are things -- like food or health care -- that you could have chosen to buy for yourself. For many of those goods, you would get a better price and a better product than the one the government got you... because you know your situation, your tastes, and your needs.

In other words, if you got that tax bill, many people would compare it with the bills they voluntarily incur. And they would find that it was an inefficient use of resources... and if possible, they'd opt out of paying those taxes.

That's really the key point. There's a box on the tax form that you can fill in to send more $ to the government. At any time you have the choice of giving up any amount of your income to the government to spend as they see fit, hopefully on your behalf.

Most people don't fill in that box, because most people know that they will allocate that money more efficiently for their own benefit than some distant third party.

That hypocrite preaches that people should move away from materialism la dee da and he owns a 2.5-million-dollar home in La Jolla and drives a green Jaguar. Bah!

I'm sure the Skeptic's Dictionary has something on him.

[searches]

Why, yes!

There is half a truth to the maxim that when a position reflects consensus, it is probably a good reason to oppose it. But, more seriously, the kind of consensus we have suggests that the political space, for all the noise it generates, is relatively closed, ideologically. We often worry about various groups, defined by some criteria of ethnicity, being under-represented in Parliament: minorities, women and so forth. But we should worry more about lack of ideological variation in Parliament. It is amazing that a liberal democracy, with a liberalising economy, has no parliamentarians with a genuine liberal sensibility: a healthy scepticism about the scope of state activity, a reluctance to reproduce invidious group distinctions, a presumption in favour of the people against the paternalism of the state, and a genuine regard for individuality, speaking the truth as one sees it.

There is something close to an iron law of Indian politics. If government proposes spending on any programme, the only political criticism is that it is not spending more. The usual way a distinction between Left and Right is carved is as follows. The Left wants the government to spend more money, the Right opposes this in all matters — except in defence. In our case, the distinction is between who gets to come up with a spending proposal first and who gets to endorse. Or, if someone even so much as suggests that it might be time to think of a paradigm of justice beyond reservations, they are unlikely to find significant political space.

This is one cry of reform from Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee that is not going to please party chief Prakash Karat and the so-called hardliners in the CPM.

The Bengal chief minister would like “100 per cent privatisation” in the building of new ports and airports in India. His party is a known opponent of New Delhi’s attempts to privatise airports and hand them over to even domestic entrepreneurs. But Bhattacharjee struck a dramatically different note today.

He [Bhattacharjee] assured investors that they had nothing to fear from his government just because it was called the Left Front government.

You’ve got to know that for any regular guy from Ulhasnagar, getting good products at affordable prices is an index of the country being self-sufficient and empowered. The ideology of India has always been to create its own. Maybe we make cheaper versions of cars or mixies but we never look outside.

[...]

Things are wonderful in India. The economic structure is rising, technological advancements are making headlines and the social consciousness is also pretty encouraging. We’ve made progress in all spheres. Be it malls in Gurgaon, irrigation in Punjab or computer advancement in Hyderabad: greatness is happening every day. We’re unaware of it but we’re definitely not worse than what we were 50 years ago.

Disinvestment and the removal of Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) show that all this is an educated process. And we aren’t just following any monkey business. [...]

Personally, I’ve a problem with the power of information. I’m not an authority on it but I think somewhere down the line, information has been a huge downside. We can access information anytime but we don’t know what to do with it. So, information creates bottlenecks. We create a flyover to Nehru Place but forget to connect it to Surya Hotel.

Bloody shame about those high oil and gas prices.

They're causing billions of dollars to be invested in petroleum production, which will increase supply. They're discouraging unnecessary driving, encouraging use of public transit and fuel-efficient cars and cueing industry to cut fuel costs, which will decrease demand.

And they're triggering billions more to be invested in new technologies such as solar power and hybrid engines, which will offer alternatives.

I hate to say it, but if this keeps up we might avoid a 1970s-style energy crisis, with its shortages, gas lines, severe recession and petroleum prices a third higher than they are now, adjusted for inflation. We might even set the stage for a new era of low oil prices, like we had in the 1980s and 1990s, or at least new stability.

Maybe higher prices are part of an invisible hand creating economic order, as described by Adam Smith. Maybe $60 oil is beaming signals across the economy that will boost supply, cut demand and eventually lower prices, as described by Friedrich Hayek. Maybe we didn't need the energy bill Congress just passed.

What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.

Mainstream literary prize lists reveal a deep paranoia, a grand defence of the literary novel versus whatever oozing horror might try to slide through the gates.

Margaret Atwood would make the cut for a Booker shortlist with mediocre science fiction allied to tremendous literary skill, but Nancy Kress (Beggars in Spain), a brilliant writer who can ask classic SFs question with as much literary style as the most dessicated critic might desire—no, she’s out.

The ambitious, sprawling, cluttered epics of Don DeLillo or Salman Rushdie or Peter Carey qualify; but the far more ambitious epics of Neil Gaiman or Stephen King stay outside the gates.

It's just endless what you can learn from a single work of art. You can fill up the crevices of your life, the cracks of your life, the places where the mortar comes out and falls away--you can fill it up with the love of art.

Officials at JP Morgan Chase have apologized and promised to improve their screening policies, after a credit card solicitation letter sent to a 54-year-old naturalized American citizen came addressed to "Palestinian Bomber."

The form letter for a Visa Platinum card arrived earlier this month at the home of Sami Habbas, a grocery store manager from Corona, Calif. The words "Palestinian Bomber" appear above his address and the salutation reads, "Dear Palestinian Bomber." The document included the signature of Carter Franke, chief marketing officer for Chase Card Services.

Rural India is in acute distress, which is bound to turn to turmoil if its crisis is not addressed. It is not too late. There is a strong case for a universal employment guarantee and a universal Public Distribution System.

All right, so what is actually going on? Basically, Professor Patnaik has made the following assertions:

* Rural India is facing an employment crisis
* This is because of the economic policies pursued in the past fifteen years.
* The proof of this is that people are eating much less grain.
* The assertion that people are eating less grain is borne out by data from the National Sample Survey, which measures consumption and expenditure across India.

Okay. Let's take this up.

There is a decline in rice and wheat consumption, and also in the consumption of dal... But at the same time, the consumption of other stuff has risen- milk, vegetables of all sorts, meat of all sorts (though fish has shown the most dramatic rise), and most notably eggs- the consumption of those has doubled.

And this suggests something that you would expect a Professor of Economics to know- the consumption pattern looks suspiciously like that of Giffen goods.

Normal goods are the ones which you buy more of when you have more money. Giffen goods, on the other hand, are goods which you buy less of when you have less money- because you now cut down on your consumption of that good, and use the savings to buy more of something else.

What's the classical example of Giffen goods used in economics textbooks? That when your income rises, you buy less bread and more meat- exactly what we see happening in rural India from 1988 to 2000.

I'd say that this actually would have no effect on the Long Tail at all. Self-publishing and electronic publishing has been available to all for a while (see lulu.com) and all the services provide an ISBN number, which allows any writer to be available on Amazon. So nothing new there. And the authors Amazon picked are all Head writers, ie, those who have no trouble getting published.

I think the low pricing is quite interesting, however. It should certainly grow the market for short stories.

In February 1983, then as this newspaper’s correspondent in the North-East, I broke the story of the massacre of 3,500 people in the village of Nellie in Assam. On a visit to Delhi subsequently, I was taken by my editors then to meet Ramnathji. "You young fellow, you are doing a good job," said the old man, always parsimonious with praise. And then he added, "I liked that language in of your story...taking a walk across is an act of courage. Must have been tough looking at so many dead and injured?"

Looking back 22 years, yes, it was an act of courage. As it was to drive to Guwahati airport, in a blood-stained white shirt, to hand over the roll of film from my Minolta to a Delhi-bound Indian Airlines pilot and then finding a telex machine in a strike-hit telegraph office to file the story at a time when STD was a luxury and fax not yet invented.

But even today, nobody has been called to account. That massacre, entirely of poor Muslims, has gone un-investigated. Nobody remembers it, nobody complains that everybody got away. Today, if such a thing were to happen again, God Forbid, there is sufficient institutional and political awakening in India to ensure there will not be such an easy forget, if not forgive as this paper’s coverage of the 2002 Gujarat killings (for which it got the International Press Institute award) has shown.

The difference between 1983 and 2005 is, that then information like a Nellie massacre merely shocked you. Today, it empowers you to demand redressal, better governance, better quality of life.

[S]uppose I were to say, "We should abolish the minimum wage. That would increase employment and enable more people to climb out of poverty."

There are two types of arguments you might make in response. I call these Type C and Type M.

A hypothetical example of a Type C argument would be, "Well, Arnold, studies actually show that the minimum wage does not cost jobs. If you read the work of Krueger and Card, you would see that the minimum wage probably reduces poverty."

A hypothetical example of a Type M argument would be, "People who want to get rid of the minimum wage are just trying to help the corporate plutocrats."

[...]

Do you see any differences between those two types of arguments?

I see differences, and to me they are important. Type C arguments are about the consequences of policies. Type M arguments are about the alleged motives of individuals who advocate policies.

In this example, the type C argument says that the consequences of eliminating the minimum wage would not be those that I expect and desire. We can have a constructive discussion of the Type C argument -- I can cite theory and evidence that contradicts Krueger and Card -- and eventually one of us could change his mind, based on the facts.

Type M arguments deny the legitimacy of one's opponents to even state their case. Type M arguments do not give rise to constructive discussion. They are almost impossible to test empirically. [Emphasis in the original.]

Whenever I speak of free markets, empowerment and liberalization to be the best solution to India's poverty problems, I am almost always told that it is easy for me make armchair arguments. Have I ever experienced life in a village, the hunger, the desperation? How can someone who has been an urbanite all his life ever know what is good for the rural poor? There are some basic flaws in this argument. The first one, I think it is somewhat presumptuous to merely go by my present attire and speech and lifestyle, and make conclusions about my economic history, especially for people who have known me for a few minutes, maybe a few months, or at the most a couple of years. The more important flaw in the argument is that these very people suggest that some wise, know-all bureaucrat and regulator who has exactly as much or less knowledge or experience of hunger or poverty or the rural struggle for survival should sit in Delhi, and decide on which district gets how much of the centrally planned monetary allocation for that year to spend on "his" subjects. The whole argument reeks of hypocrisy. In my armchair "solutions", at least I don't presume that I am more intelligent than the poor farmer. I don't underestimate his ingenuity to use his empowered mind to alleviate himself from his impoverished state.

The United States has expressed 'serious concern' over anti-Christian and anti-Jewish passages in Pakistani textbooks and termed them as "unacceptable and inciteful".

The issue is a matter of concern for the US even though Pakistan is in the process of reviewing the educational system, State Department spokesman Sean Mccormack said.

"These type of reports are of serious concern to us," he said referring to reports in a section of the US media that 'jihad' was still a part of school curricula in Pakistan.

Not long ago, I was a participant in a TV debate on the renaming of the new Hyderabad airport after Rajiv Gandhi. I argued that one should name this airport after a genuinely great figure, such as the composer Thyagaraja, a choice that would be applauded across party-political lines. In any case, it was time we went beyond remembering only one family. Somewhere along the line, in response to a term I had used, the other member of the panel, a still serving Union minister, said: “We are happy to be Congress chamchas.”

They were burning him as if playing a normal street game. A few kept him pinned down to the ground while others poured petrol on him. After kicking him to the content of their hearts they torched him. With a burning body, he ran here and there. Someone brought a burning tire and with the help of a long rod and put it around his neck, receiving a great round of applause. They clapped and they chatted. There was no sound coming from him. He just ran like a giant flame, aimlessly flailing his arms in order to capture something in the air. They playfully avoided him, giggling, joking. Then he fell on the ground, giving up the fight against the unknown demons. Some just danced around without purpose, clapping each others’ backs. None looked angry. None of them looked familiar. I watched this from my window. I knew that it was just a matter of someone pointing to our house. With bated breath I waited. Every second was like an hour. I knew they would move on looking for the next victim to kill, the next house or shop to loot and burn, but when? Would they discover our house before that? This thought redefined the way I think of home.

Sessions judge Laxmi Rao was transferred from a sessions court to a civil court on Thursday. According to the notification dated August 17 issued by the registrar of the city civil and sessions courts, Rao has been transferred from court room number 32 to court room number 2 where she will deal with suits between private parties.

Supreme Court on Thursday issued notices to the Centre, Press Council of India, the news agencies and major dailies on a public interest litigation seeking classification of newspapers on the basis of their content to denote whether these were fit to be read universally or by adults only [sic].

The Left thinks that throwing state money with good intentions is the solution to most problems. The Right on the other hand, seems to move from the plausible assumption that throwing money is not always a solution to the more dubious proposition that it is not a necessary part of a solution. The Left is enamoured of a certain kind of idealized statism, the Right of a knee-jerk cynical anti-statism. The Left argues that more spending on welfare is necessary, the Right cautions that almost all of it will go waste. The Right speaks of regulatory reform, freeing up the markets, protecting property rights, privatizing, removing labour market rigidities, balancing the budget as crucial ingredients of sound economic policy. The Left gives all of these things short shrift and argues instead for greater spending on social security, employment guarantees, welfare schemes, job security and so forth. The Right wants to remove the barriers that bind those who want to create wealth. The Left is interested in the fate of those who might not be able to. The Right wants reform of the state first; the left does not want the cause of justice to wait till the state puts its house in order.

Of course, these contrasts are stylized. In principle, few economists of the Right will deny that they are for more social welfare. They just disagree about the means and strategies that will make welfare programmes efficient and sustainable. It is often patently disingenuous of the Left to accuse those championing the cause of trade and privatization to be anti-poor. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As Burke said, those who yelp loudest on behalf of the poor do not always do the most to help them. But it has to be acknowledged that sometimes excessive attention to a particular class of issues relating to efficient markets can render some important welfare challenges invisible. It is more likely that economists on the Left will oppose some of the market discipline and regulatory sanity of their colleagues on the Right. But they have something of a point in bringing to attention the fact that India will, down the line, need not just pro-market reform but something like a genuine welfare state as well.

Recounting the massacre of Jews during the First Crusade in and around the German city of Cologne in 1096, the anonymous authors of the 12th century Solomon bar Simson chronicle asked plaintively, "Why did the heavens not darken and the skies withhold their radiance; why did not the sun and moon turn dark?" The historian, Arno Mayer, poses the same question in his treatise on the Holocaust and `answers' it with Walter Benjamin's assertion, made on the eve of Europe's tryst with genocide, that there is no philosophical basis for our "astonishment that the things we are currently experiencing should `still' be possible in the 20th century."

If many Indians were genuinely 'astonished' by the well-organised killing of Muslim fellow citizens in Gujarat in 2002 — by the fact that such evil was "still" possible in the 21st century — this was because they had chosen to forget November 1984, the one reference point which made that violence not just intelligible but possible as well.

[T]he scale of a man's evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical consequences. Men commit evil within the scope available to them. Some evil geniuses, of course, devote their lives to increasing that scope as widely as possible, but no such character has yet arisen in Britain, and most evildoers merely make the most of their opportunities. They do what they can get away with.

A rush to purchase ___ ___ ____ turned into a violent stampede Tuesday, with people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and nearly driven over. One woman went so far to wet herself rather than surrender her place in line.

"This is total, total chaos," said Latoya Jones, 19, who lost one of her flip-flops in the ordeal and later limped around on the sizzling blacktop with one foot bare.

[...]

People threw themselves forward, screaming and pushing each other. A little girl's stroller was crushed in the stampede. Witnesses said an elderly man was thrown to the pavement, and someone in a car tried to drive his way through the crowd.

[You are in a bedroom where a lady reclines languorously on the bed, dressed in a fetching silk negligee. Suddenly the phone rings. The lady picks it up.]

Lady: Hello.

Disembodied Voice with Indian Accent (DiVIA): Hello, am I speaking to Mrs So-and-So?

Lady: Yes, I'm Mrs So-and-So.

DiVIA: Hello Mrs So-and-So. I can't take your nagging anymore. I am sick of your whiny screeching voice. I'm the provider, and don't you forget it!

Lady: Wha... what the hell is this?

DiVIA: Yes, and I'm also sick of your self-pity and your obsession with cosmetics. Damn, a Madame Tussauds waxwork has more life than you. You're a superficial bxtch!

Lady: Hello? What's going on, who the hell are you?

DiVIA: Yeah, with me you act all frigid and "I've got a headache tonight" and "oh, I've got work to finish" and at parties you're all "dahlinks, I must tell you all about the, wink wink, toe massage I got last week. Zimply deevine!"

Lady: [Pinches herself] Am I dreaming? What's happening?

DiVIA: Yeah, and also, I never get my dinner on time. Lay the table right away, and nothing else, ok?

Lady: [Loses it and shouts] What is this rubbish? I don't even know you! Who the hell is this?

DiVIA: [Clears throat] Um, sorry. I'm calling from a call centre in Bangalore. Your husband outsourced his marital squabbles to us. In future, when he's angry with you, we'll call you. Have a good evening. [Hangs up.]

Lady: [Shrieks] Honeeeeeeeey!

Different people have differing notions of this whole university and academic research thing; but the fact that they are fed these notions by academics themselves should've tingled their spider senses. Indeed, the actual particulars of the rituals of this mystic cabal are known to few in the civilized world, other than that they are conducted in the musty dungeons of ivory towers.

This cabal has but a single tool; a tool that is startling in its simplicity.

News is increasingly becoming trivia, and trivia are being passed on as news.

Browsing through the August 15th issue of Time, I came across an insightful quotation from the brilliant Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker is quoted in Time’s cover story on the role of religion in schools. Pinker says, defending the theory of natural selection against the idea of "intelligent design," that

Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings.

Indeed so.

I don’t here write to enter my two-cents in the debate between Darwinians and creationists (although, for the record, I am solidly in the Darwinian camp). I write to record that Pinker’s insight applies to society no less than to biological beings. [Links in original.]

Social creationists are members of that species of juvenile thinkers who regard conscious, central direction by a wise and caring higher human authority as necessary for all social order – not only for the foundation, but for all, or much, of what the foundation supports.

Economic central planners are prime examples of social creationists.

The troposphere is where most of the air is found and where most of the weather occurs. Computer models predict that, if global warming is really happening, temperatures in the troposphere should rise along with those on the surface. Recorded surface temperatures are, indeed, rising. However, both data from weather balloons and observations made by satellites suggest that temperatures in the troposphere have remained constant since the 1970s. Over the tropics they may even have dropped. This counter-intuitive result has caused sceptics to question how much warming, if any, is actually going on.

[T]he "consensus" is ostensibly based upon the several assessment reports of the IPCC. One must bear in mind that the summary reports are political documents put together by government policy makers, who, to put it mildly, treat rather cavalierly the expressed uncertainties and caveats in the underlying scientific reports. Moreover, the IPCC was created to support a specific political goal. It is directed to support the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. In turn, the convention calls for an effective international response to deal with "the common concern of all mankind"--in short, to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases. Statements by the leaders of the IPCC have been uninhibitedly political.

Second, science is not a matter of consensus, as the histories of Galileo, Copernicus, Pasteur, Einstein and others will attest. Science depends not on speculation but on conclusions verified through experiment. Verification is more than computer simulations--whose conclusions mirror the assumptions built in the model. Irrespective of the repeated assertions regarding a "scientific consensus," there is neither a consensus nor is consensus science.

Because the global warming movement has now become a multi-billion dollar enterprise with thousands of jobs and millions in funding for NGOs and think-tanks, top jobs and prizes for scientists, and huge media coverage for predictions of disaster.

The vested interests in the global warming theory are now as strong, rich and politically influential as the biggest multinationals.

I’ve often been asked for my opinion on what the country’s sunrise sectors are. My response, at first tongue-in-cheek, but becoming more and more serious over the years, is that anybody who decides to compete against the government has a great chance of succeeding. Four activities come easily to mind.

Equipment for private supply of electricity—generators, inverters, and so on—are needed to compensate for the inadequacies of the larger system. Private security makes up for the perceived failure of the state security apparatus.

Private education at every level continues to surge, while public institutions sink. And, while access to publicly-provided drinking water eludes an increasingly large proportion of the population, the number of brands and the sales volumes of bottled water continue to climb.

[L]et’s remember that market competition in the private domain has its equivalent in the form of political competition in the public sphere. And, by any indication, political competition has intensified enormously during the decade of reforms. No party, at both the central and state levels, can take its tenure in government for granted.

So, the absence of competitive pressure cannot be cited as a reason for the failure of the public system to match the growth and productivity performance of the private sector.

Forget dangers from giant meteors: Earth is facing another threat from outer space. Scientists have come to the conclusion that two mysterious explosions in the 1990s were caused by bizarre cosmic missiles.

The two objects were picked up by earthquake detectors as they tore through Earth at up to 900,000 mph. According to scientists, the most plausible explanation is that they were "strangelets", clumps of matter that have so far defied detection but whose existence was posited 20 years ago.

Formed in the Big Bang and inside extremely dense stars, strangelets are thought to be made from quarks - the subatomic particles found inside protons and neutrons. Unlike ordinary matter, however, they also contain "strange quarks", particles normally only seen in high-energy accelerators.

Strangelets - sometimes also called strange-quark nuggets - are predicted to have many unusual properties, including a density about ten million million times greater than lead. Just a single pollen-size fragment is believed to weigh several tons.

The £6.5 million production, which is largely in English and which opened across Britain on Friday, accuses the [British East India] company of murdering civilians to further its interests and of flouting the Empire-wide ban on slavery.

In one scene an officer is shown bidding for a slave girl who is sent to a brothel for the exclusive use of British officers. Later, a fellow officer orders the destruction of a village and its defenceless inhabitants after they refuse to set aside land for opium production.

Saul David, the author of the acclaimed The Indian Mutiny: 1857, attacked the depictions as fabrication.

"I am no apologist for the British East India Company but I have never come across any evidence which supports either of these assertions," he said. "It is nonsense. Of course a certain amount of criticism is justified but this sounds like vilification of the British just for the sake of it."

Mr David is scathing about the film's central claim that the bloody events of 1857 were sparked by the company's insistence that Muslim and Hindu sepoys used bullet casings covered in beef and pork fat.

The historian says many sepoys who took part in the uprising wrongly assumed that they were being asked to use casings that contravened their religious beliefs. In reality, he insists, the company withdrew the cartridges in the light of the concerns and did not issue them to a single sepoy.

The film's version of events is rather different. Not only are the bullets issued but an officer threatens to slaughter reluctant sepoys with a cannon unless they agree to use them.

We live in a world where some companies try to exert as much influence over the world as possible and the film should be seen in that context. The idea of the slave trade being used to staff brothels is conjecture on our part.

The script questions the right of any superpower to move into another civilisation and control and loot it economically and socially try and change its norms. Which is also what's happening today, that's what America is doing all over the world. [...] I felt, arre, this happened in 1857 in India, it's happening today in Iraq and Afghanistan!

Small deeds of courage indulged in by the common folk have changed the complexion of battles all over the world. One such case of a civilian 19-year-old unsung hero, who laid down his life in the 1947 war, has come to light only now.

[...]

[Mohammad Maqbool] Sherwani was a gutsy boy of 19 who single-handedly thwarted the advance of thousands of raiders (Kabailis) from Baramulla, thereby giving valuable time to the Indian Army to land in Srinagar and prevent an ignominious defeat.

The nation may not remember his sacrifice, it may not even be aware of it, but the legend of Sherwani lives on in Baramulla.

His tactics to hold back the raiders were very simple, not the stuff case studies in military history are made of.

He went around on his bike telling the Kabailis, who stormed Baramulla on October 22, 1947, not to advance towards Srinagar as the Indian Army had reached the outskirts of Baramulla.

His bluff worked. [...] When the Kabailis came to know of Sherwani’s game plan, they shot him dead and crucified him.

It ought to be fascinating to Muslims everywhere to see how deeply their beloved book is a product of its place and time, and in how many ways it reflects the Prophet’s own experiences.

However, few Muslims have been permitted to study their religious book in this way. The insistence within Islam that the Quranic text is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical scholarly discourse all but impossible. Why would God be influenced by the socioeconomics of seventh century Arabia, after all? Why would the Messenger’s personal circumstances have anything to do with the Message?

The traditionalists’ refusal of history plays right into the hands of the literalist Islamofascists, allowing them to imprison Islam in their iron certainties and unchanging absolutes.

After toys and dolls, communist China — where there are strict curbs on religious practice — has flooded Indian markets with images of Hindu gods and goddesses. And the religious-minded are bowing before their superior quality.

“Containers are landing in Mumbai by the dozens every month. Not a single idol goes unsold; there’s a mad scramble for them. I’m struggling to cope with the demand,” said Balwant Singh, who runs a gift shop in Mohali.

A new law ‘Licensing and Controlling of Public Entertainment (Bangalore City) Order, 2005,’ originally introduced to curb the unregulated growth of dance bars/cabarets, or ‘live-band joints’ as they are known in Bangalore, has pulled the shutters on night life in the city.

The law which came into force on June 24 is seeing owners of not just cabarets but also lounge bars, restaurants and discotheques struggling to meet stringent licensing conditions.

[...]

"You can be arrested for dancing. You also cannot play music that provokes dancing. We have had to put sofas and fill spaces to prevent customers from dancing," says Amardipta Biswas, owner of Taika and Cosmo Village, two of the city’s in-vogue lounge bars and restaurants.

"A lot of the live music in hotels in the city was real good clean fun. The politicians have now taken this to an absurd level and the controls imposed are beyond commonsense," says writer and food critic Ajit Saldanha.

"DJs have been prevented from playing music at nightspots as they incite people to dance. Night clubs have been told to play classical music, so people do not dance," says Biswas.

[T]hose of us who covered the riots, and many more who carried out relief or citizens’ investigations subsequently, generally believe that what we saw over those murderous 72 hours were not Hindu-Sikh riots but Congress-Sikh riots. Or, rather, Delhi Congress-Sikh riots. Too many small time Congress politicians, who had built their careers organising crowds for Sanjay and then Indira Gandhi, decided revenge was naturally expected of them. So what is the difference between collecting an Emergency-type crowd to chant slogans in support of the 20-point programme, or a pogrom of the Sikhs which also brought the promise of loot.

If there is one thing that has emerged with the Nanavati Report and its aftermath, it is that political parties have to accept their past will continue to come back and haunt them.

On the premiere of her last film Dus at the E-Square multiplex in Pune, Esha [Deol] slapped a boy who tried to misbehave with her. The guy taking advantage of the crowd on the scene tried to grab Esha’s hand. And as soon as Esha grasped the situation she slapped the boy so hard that he literally fell away five feet. [Many sics.]

Society proceeds like the ocean. After a disaster, it resumes its wonted level and rhythms; its devouring interests efface all traces of damage.

For the first time in the country’s legislative history, the Orissa assembly on Thursday imposed a penalty of Rs 20,000 each on three opposition MLAs for damaging the speaker’s microphones during Wednesday’s proccedings.

[...]

The house also passed a censure motion against the three. The microphones were damaged on Wednesday when the opposition members tried to storm into the speaker’s podium to disrupt assembly proceedings.

I have no hesitation in apologising not only to the Sikh community but the whole nation because what took place in 1984 is the negation of the concept of nationhood and what’s enshrined in our Constitution.

So I am not standing on any false prestige. On behalf of our government, on behalf of the entire people of this country, I bow my head in shame that such a thing took place.

But, Sir, there are ebbs, there are tides in the affairs of the nation. The past is with us. We cannot rewrite the past. But as human beings, we have the will power and we have the ability to write a better future for all of us.

Up there, right at the top, one of the objectives of our finance minister is to get unaccounted black money into the mainstream and plug tax leakages. With the number of property transactions rising like the Sensex, I wonder how he and his department are unable to see that apartments selling for Rs 50 lakh are being shown as being sold for Rs 15 lakh — an extreme, but real-life situation — how a system where 40-50 per cent of the transacted value is unaccounted for continues to thrive. Right in the capital. The income tax department is looking to collect hundreds and thousands when there are lakhs and crores circulating unabatedly, unabashedly, unchecked.

Here’s a scheme — far simpler than Chidambaram’s 1997 VDIS (Voluntary Disclosure Income Scheme) — to unearth this income. Take the real estate classified “for sale” pages of leading newspapers and put them up on a board. Get five children to throw darts on that paper. Put a team of three IT sleuths and get them to pretend they are buyers of those properties. When the person asks for cash, pay cash. Catch them red-handed and then let the law take its course. Do this in four metros and all state capitals regularly, diligently, sincerely.

Publicise the effort and the outcomes (people caught).

I know it is the practice of journalists to put the end of the story at the beginning and call it a headline. I know that journalism largely consists of saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive. Your present correspondent thinks that this, like many other journalistic customs, is bad journalism...

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully. I thought if I didn't have this resource of nonfiction I would have dried up perhaps. I'd have come to the end of my material, and would have done what a writer like Graham Greene did. You know, he took the Graham Greene figure to the Congo, took him to Argentina, took him to Haiti, for no rhyme or reason.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account. If you're a romantic writer, you write novels about men and women falling in love, etc., give a little narrative here and there. But again, it's of no account.

While 10-15 people came to the editorial office on the first floor, the rest which numbered about 50 shouted slogans on the ground floor.

The group that came to the first floor roughed up the watchman, broke open the door and charged in shouting on the top of their voices.

This group broke computer keyboards, yanked out phone wires and one of them had even held up a chair to throw at the publisher’s glass cabin.

Ironically, other press had also arrived at the Mid Day office with the Congress persons, giving the indication that the ruling party had called the media in advance to flaunt their cowardly act.

Parmaram Sharan (27) was convicted of rape and kidnapping on Monday and sentenced to 10 years’ rigorous imprisonment. But Sharan—he was also told by the Sessions court to pay Rs 50,000 to the victim as compensation—will not be going to jail.

“The court has given Sharan a probation of three years on personal bond of Rs 10,000 on the ground that he is the sole earning member of his family and he has dependents—two young children and ailing parents,” said public prosecutor Lata Cheda.

Classes are held between seven and ten every morning, chiefly during the marriage months. A batch has an average of twenty girls who diligently note down lessons that include how to brush the teeth in the in-law's house, how to cook and how to eat. The girls also learn that they have to control their sex drive because in a joint family situation where there is not enough space, the girls should know that they cannot have their men all the time. The course even educates them on how to sleep in the in-laws house. "You just can't wear any clothes in your in-law's house. And you can't lie in any way you want," Hemnani says. "Your husband's home is not your father's house. Good manners are a must."

[Husband and wife lying on a mat besides a massive four-foot clock, where the time is 2.59 am.]

Husband: Uh, uh, uh, uh!

Wife: Ooh! Aah! Aaa-oooh! Mmm! Eeeeh! Ohhhh!

Husband: Uh, uh, uh, uh!

Wife: Oooooh! Ah! Mmmmmm! Faaaa-haaaster! Oh! Aaaaaah!

Husband: Uh, uh, uh, uh!

Wife: Oooooooooooh!

[Suddenly, the alarm clock rings, loudly enough to wake up Mumbai. The wife's delicate sweaty hand crawls up and smashed the button on top of it. It stops.]

Wife: We must stop now, it's 3 am, time to sing bhajans, according to my institute.

Husband: Uh? But you can also fu... I mean, please your husband until 3 am, is it not? I'm sure 3 am is inclusive.

Wife: But I also have to sing bhajans.

Husband: I'm sure you can manage both.

Wife: Um, ok, let's try.

Husband: Ok. Uh, uh, uh, uh!

Wife: [Sings] Vaishnav jana to, oooh!

Husband: Uh, uh, uh, uh!

Wife: Tene, aaah, kahiye je...

Husband: Uh, ah, oh!

Train rattling along at 70 an hour; green fields and ugly slushy towns; rain once an hour or so; a high wind whistling through the coach; many brown rivers in spate; a fat egg paratha made by mother waiting for lunch -- wish you guys were here to enjoy all this.

While this sort of behavior is often described as remarkable, it is actually what researchers have come to expect. Studies of civilians' intense experiences in the London Blitz; the cities of Japan and Germany in World War II; the 1947 smallpox outbreak in New York; the earthquake in Kobe, Japan, in 1995; and even fires have found that people, however stressed, almost always keep their wits and elevate their humanity.

Indeed, the critical first responders in almost any crisis are ordinary citizens whom fate has brought together. As Kathleen Tierney, head of the University of Colorado's Natural Hazards Center, has noted, "The vast majority of live rescues are carried out by community residents who are at the scene of disasters, not by official response agencies or outside search and rescue teams."

Upon finishing J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,"10-year-old Ben C. listlessly moped around his house for three days. He picked at his food and was short-tempered with his sister. His alarmed mother took his temperature, inquired about problems with friends and probed into the nature of his malady. All Ben could say was that he was feeling a "deep sense of loss." Across town, Francis M. drifted through two days in a daze, taking little interest in her usual activities.

Doctors at St. Mungos Hospital are asserting that Ben and Francis are two of the earliest cases of "Post Potter Syndrome." All indications are that PPS will become a full-blown epidemic by late August. [...]

Dr. Glenn M. Bookjoy, a researcher of the history of literary maladies, said that the symptoms of PPS are severe but they typically only last for three to seven days. "Although PPS is a modern disease, it falls under the broad category of Acute Post Literary Trauma (APLT) or the less severe Post Literary Malaise (PLM). Historically, children have suffered similar effects after reading classics such as J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Hobbit,' and 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy; C.S. Lewis' 'The Chronicles of Narnia'; and the 'Little House' series by Laura Ingalls Wilder," commented Dr. Bookjoy.

[He spends] the greater part of the day writing in his room. I suppose he thinks he is shaking the world, but I can perceive very little of the motion so far.

In the decade before de-colonization, it was the first five years, from the provincial elections of 1937 to the Quit India movement of 1942, that saw the creation and consolidation of a separatist Muslim politics at an all-India level. At the end of these five years, the Congress could no longer seek political consolation in the thought that if the Congress didn’t represent the Muslims no Muslim party could plausibly claim to represent them either. A re-invented, populist All-India Muslim League, ruthlessly stewarded by Jinnah, stood centre-stage in Indian politics, its claim to represent India’s Muslims increasingly seconded by the raj.

How did this come to pass?

There is much majesty in all our lands & people, obscured by all our modernity. This is why many personal & intellectual revolutions happen during journeys without destinations.

Given this, how is it that so few of us travel through India, abandoning the trappings of our status in life, catching up on what India really is? How is it that few expressions in our cinema and literature are of these journeys of real people?

Why is India's matinee icon an angry young man, not an adventurous young idealist?

Why do our actors sing around trees rather than standing still for the singing of trees?

[T]he great capital cattle rush lasted only a single day and traffic to the pound was down to a trickle this morning.

The reason: the city fathers would not hand the catchers the cash they wanted but only a receipt.

“Show me the money,” cried Khalid, a B.Sc student at Aurobindo College, who had caught a cow at Malviya Nagar on Friday. He had torn his trousers and lost his slippers in the effort. He now wanted hard cash, not a scrap of paper with something scribbled on it.

“It was two hours of hard work. I chased it so hard. It even stamped on my foot and tore my slippers. I have bruises all over,” Khalid was inconsolable. “Yet all I got was a receipt. There was no money.”

[...]

Civic officials said an advertisement will be published soon explaining that cattle-catchers must prove they are residents of the area where they found the cow. They must produce a voter identity card or a similar document and a note from the local resident welfare association.

Adding to its reputation as the most sexually liberal nation in the world, Sweden has just legalized looking up ladies' skirts!

In a nearly unanimous vote in the Swedish Parliament, the motion was carried 332 to 17. To celebrate the new law, the Parliament's second floor was replaced with a see-through glass floor, and women were invited to stand on the floor, wearing their loosest, widest skirts, with or without underwear. Men were invited to bring their cameras, stand on the floor below and look up.

I'm not sure if more newspapers are resulting in better journalism in Mumbai. For one thing, the pool of journalists all the newspapers have to choose from has remained more or less the same, even if better paid. So the talent is simply more thinly spread. Secondly, one would have expected newspapers to try and improve their quality of journalism in areas such as hard reporting, but instead other papers are trying to outdo the Times of India in their celebrity and glam coverage, assuming, perhaps correctly, that those are the things that keep readers happy. Journalism in India needs a change in values, and that will not happen with more local newspapers, but with the full and unhindered entry of foreign media, which will raise the benchmarks here. Until then, it's all just more of the same.

Let me stick my neck out and say it -- Bunty and Babli Rule. Readers and viewers have never had it so good.

The Bollywoodisation of the media is finally complete. Let the dhadak dhadak begin.

The meteorology experts, who had failed to predict last week’s deluge in Mumbai, today said they haven’t yet found out why it happened.

Still, at a post-mortem of the record 944 mm rain that traumatised the city on July 26, weather scientists tried to come up with a theory before science and technology minister Kapil Sibal. They said they suspect a meteorological condition called a “vortex” caused the freak rain.

They admitted they had no evidence for this.

[Akhilesh] Gupta [a scientist] said the UK weather office did manage to predict 800 mm rain over Mumbai when it ran a computer model; but it could do this only after the event, using weather parameters after the downpour. “It could not predict the Mumbai rain in real time,” Gupta said. [My emphasis.]

Money can even buy madness. For Rs 5,000 only, you can put away anyone you dislike/hate/just-want-to-get-rid-of in the Thane Mental Asylum. No doctor's certificate needed, no court order, no identification procedure, why, not even proof of your address.

We are not being crazy. Mumbai Mirror correspondents Bhupen Patel, Rimona Ellis and Naveeta D Singh checked out the Asylum's corrupt ways themselves. Bhupen, posing as Deepak Sonawane, succeeded with the help of his "sister" Naveeta in getting papers for his "mentally unstable wife" Rimona's admission cleared by the Asylum superintendent Dr A R Nakalgaonkar by shelling out Rs 5,000.

Of course the correspondents had to go through a 'network' of contacts, starting from the asylum's peon, to get to Dr Nakalgaonkar, and initially the superintendent did make some queries. But all of them were quick and cursory, and once Sonawane told him he was going through hell because of his wife's illness and was willing to do anything to get his wife admitted, the superintendent softened up and politely told him that the admission would "cost Rs 5,000."

The importance of good looks rose “dramatically” for both men and women from 1939 to 1989, the period of the study, according to David M. Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas. On a scale of 1 to 3, the importance men gave to good looks rose from 1.50 to 2.11. But for women, the importance of good looks in men rose from 0.94 to 1.67. In other words, women in 1989 considered a man’s looks even more important than men considered women’s looks 50 years earlier. Since the 1930s, Buss writes, “physical appearance has gone up in importance for men and women about equally, corresponding with the rise in television, fashion magazines, advertising, and other media depictions of attractive models.”

In all likelihood this trend will continue, driven by social and technological changes that are unlikely to be reversed anytime soon—changes such as the new ubiquity of media images, the growing financial independence of women, and the worldwide weakening of the institution of marriage. For better or worse, we live now in an age of appearances. It looks like looks are here to stay.

If you have ever been to [the] IIT Powai campus, one things you may notice is that there are many stray cows. These cows are not domesticated, but "junglee" (wild). There are enough shrubs for them to feed on their own. These cows are not fat but quite skinny, probably because they are quite active.

Rumor has it that when the owner of the Powai land handed it over to the IIT, he requested that cows never be moved from the campus.

A test conducted on 84 water samples from different parts of the city on July 29 at the BMC laboratory at Dadar (W) revealed that 58 samples in the lot was unfit for human consumption. [Sic.] Some samples were found to be contaminated by dangerous Ecoli bacteria.

Said hydraulic engineer T V Shah, “Underground water tanks get contaminated during the rains when dirty water enters the tanks during flooding. The tanks should be chlorinated thoroughly.”

Adds a source within the BMC, “At some places sewage water was found to have leaked into drinking water tanks, making the water absolutely unfit for drinking.”

The rains may have broken lives, limbs and and homes but they’ve made not the slightest dent in the great bureaucratic machine.

The Thane tehsildar’s office is demanding that the Sheikhs, a poor couple from Mumbra who lost their two-moth-old baby to the deluge, should exhume the body and conduct a post-mortem in order to claim the Rs 50,000 compensation.

This despite a receipt from the kabrastaan affirming the burial and any number of witnesses who watched the shivering, drenched baby die.

The speech delivered by Justice Markandey Katju, chief justice of the High Court of Madras, on the first anniversary of the inauguration of the Madurai Bench (July 24) was like a breath of fresh air. He said that it was a fundamental principle in democracy that the people are supreme, and that all authorities — judges, legislators, ministers, bureaucrats, and so on — were servants of the people, and should be proud to be servants of the people. He did not stop there. Since the people are our masters, he went on, and we are their servants, surely the masters have a right to criticise us and take us to task if we do not function properly; so we should not take offence when the people criticise us; our authority rests on public confidence, and not on the power of contempt.

A friend of mine at work went skydiving yesterday somewhere in central Illinois which is famous for cornfields, more cornfields and cows. When my friend was up there hanging upside down enjoying the view, he apparently saw this jersey cow down below peacefully grazing in one of the cornfields. Our man, a cow hater, anticipating such a situation had stratregically left the zipper of one of his trouser pockets open. So as he was flying over this unfortunate cow, his rental car keys (would have weighed 5 lbs) fell out of his pocket and after executing a perfect aerodynamic free fall, hit the cow killing it instantly. Our victorious man then spent a good 14 hours in 95 degree heat gloating over the murder until the locksmith arrived to open his rental car. What do you think is the ideal punishment for such men?

Village council candidates in India should be allowed to stand for election only if they have a toilet at home, the rural development minister says.

In a letter to all chief ministers, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh said the toilet rule should be set out in law.

He said too many elected members "do not have toilet facilities in their own houses and defecate in the open".

[Sound of vigorous knocking in Lota Singh Kabootar's house. Lota Singh Kabootar opens the door. Raghuvansh Prasad Singh is standing outside.]

Lota: Yes. What do you want?

Raghuvansh: I have seen your name on the electoral rolls. I am the mural demolishment, I mean, rural development minister. I want to inspect if you have a toilet at home.

Lota: Of course I have a toilet at home, minister saab. Come and have a look.

[The two walk inside to a small extension of the house, where Lota Singh Kabootar opens the door, and switches on a light. I there is a sparkling white commode. Raghuvansh Prasad Singh walks up to it and inspects it..]

Raghuvansh: Hmmm. This is indeed a spiny commune, I mean, a shiny commode. It looks brand new to me. [He takes out a vial and squeezes out some drops into the commode.]

Lota: What are you doing, minister saab?

Raghuvansh: [Peering inside.] Just as I thought. Your commode has failed the litmus test. It has never, ever been used. No Xmas tree, I mean, no excrement has ever ventured inside. You don't use this commode.

Lota: [Worried now] No, no, minister saab, we use it all the time. We even did a puja with it. Om namah shivaya. Ho ho. Ha ha.

[Raghuvansh Prasad Singh sniffs in the air, and walks purposefully out of the toilet, through the kitchen, and out the back door. Lota Singh Kabootar follows him. Raghuvansh Prasad Singh goes and peers behind a tree. He does not like what he sees.]

Raghuvansh: Ah, so there is where you screw your dumpling, I mean, do your dumping!

Lota: Sir, minister saab, the regulation only said that we had to have a toilet in the house. It did not mention anywhere that I had to use it.

Raghuvansh: Hmm. Well, I feel like winking at your daughter, I mean, drinking your water. Go and get some water for me.

Lota: Yes, minister saab. Instantly.

[Lota Singh Kabootar goes off to get some water. Raghuvansh Prasad Singh looks all around, and on finding that the coal is near, I mean, the coast is clear, lifts up his dhoti. And ...]

Knowledge has advanced not because of the state but despite its presence. The state has a natural propensity to regulate, to monitor and to control. The pursuit of knowledge strives to free itself from shackles of any kind. These are irreconcilable positions. But in India the belief persists that the state can directly participate in the advancement of knowledge. This participation goes far beyond the funding of educational and research establishments. The attempt to control these institutions is common to all governments in India, irrespective of their ideological orientation.

Amit, I don't understand your love of cows. They cause smog. They step on geese. They fall on farmers. They're running wild in Bhopal. Madness, I say. [Links in original.]

If the floods had happened 5 years back, when BSES was a state-owned company, no politician would have dared talk of arrests. But now that it is a private company, they casually throw around ideas of placing the Reliance Energy [officials] behind bars.

A lot of consumers and politicians have asked why Tata Power did not face any such problems. Firstly, Tata Power mainly supplies energy in South Mumbai, where the rains were 15 times milder. Secondly, Tata Power has always been a private company. They set up their own infrastructure, including transformers and lines. They thus made the infrastructure adhere to their standards, which would obviously be stricter than a government owned company.

However Reliance Energy inherited the infrastructure from BSES. They did not install these transformers in low-lying areas. The infrastructure was of a shoddy public sector level.

When I treat rape victims, I tell the girls not to go to the police. Because if she goes to the police, the police will rape her.

In some ways, that reinvention is already under way. As Edward Jay Epstein explains in his new book about the economics of Hollywood, “The Big Picture,” in 1947 box-office receipts accounted for ninety-five per cent of the studios’ revenue; today, they account for less than a fifth. The key to this transformation is the DVD, one of the most lucrative innovations in Hollywood since the introduction of sound. Unlike videotapes, their predecessors, DVDs have remarkably high profit margins—they’re cheap to make, and people buy them rather than just renting them. The DVD, then, has changed the way the studios make money. But it has only started to change the movies they make.

Hollywood’s basic strategy is a familiar one: invest a huge amount of money in films that have the potential to be blockbusters, target teen-agers as a core audience, and spend enormous amounts of energy and money trying to get people to the theatre on the first weekend. This is a high-risk, high-reward strategy, and it can work, but it makes less sense in a world in which DVDs are the main source of revenue.

The CPI(M) in Kerala has sacked a photographer with its newspaper, Desabhimani, for allegedly making a comment on party General Secretary Prakash Karat. When Padmakumar, staff photographer of Desabhimani for over 15 years, noticed Karat’s face on the new screen-savers installed in the newspaper’s computers, his colleagues say, he quipped that the party could do without such idolising.

But word got around and within a week, the CPI(M) state secretariat itself had mulled over this act of "grave indiscipline," formed a committee and conducted an official probe.

The internet is one of the most virtual of concepts. With news like this, one is reminded that however virtual it may be, most things are grounded in reality and physicality.

AIDS is no respecter of morals: it affects babies as they are born, children as they are orphaned, nurses as they are accidentally pricked by a dirty needle, patients of any kind as they receive a transfusion of contaminated blood. Indeed, it affects the entire society in which its victims live and die.

It also affects the faithful wife of the unfaithful husband. That is why the ABC slogan so beloved by the Bush administration—Abstinence, Be faithful and Condoms—is, in practice, a slap in the face to many people. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief commits at least a third of its promised $15 billion to “abstinence until marriage” as the main way of stopping the spread of AIDS. It also urges that the use of condoms be confined to people who engage in “risky behaviour”—prostitutes or couples with one member who is HIV-positive. Many groups are reported to be ending or reducing their condom-promotion schemes to qualify for American money.

That might not matter if condoms did not matter, but they do.

The benchmark Sensex shimmied up 91 points in the first 30 minutes of trading last Friday when Indian stockmarkets re-opened for trading after the biggest deluge in history crippled India’s commercial capital and its largest listed company suffered extensive damage due to a massive fire at Bombay High.

Is this a sign of bullishness, irrational exuberance, or worse, the sign of sinister manipulation of stock prices to ensure that the National Stock Exchange’s (NSE) Nifty remains at a high on Friday, which was expiry day for Futures & Options contracts.

You know what really gets my goat about the public sector entities? Not that they're inefficient. Not that they waste taxpayer's money. Not that they infringe on areas best left for private initiative and free market. All these things get my goat too, but what REALLY gets my goat about the public sector is the sheer hypocrisy. [Emphasis in the original.]

Singapore has solved this problem, with a little assistance from satellite technology. Imagine Walrasian taxi markets. The taxi driver receives a satellite message on his little thingie, specifying where the customer wishes to be picked up and where he wishes to go. The cabbie, if interested, then enters a bid for how much he will charge. The customer is matched with the cabbie who enters the lowest bid. [Link in the original.]