May 2012
7 posts
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How religions cycle
Some time in the not-so-far future, someone would get really pissed off with all existing religions and ask the same stupid question, “Why can’t we all just get along?” After trying some twenty three times to rephrase that question in order to get an answer that makes sense, he will decide to set things right by starting his own religion.
He would specify tolerance and peaceful co-existence as...
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“We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and...”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
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The nature of evil
First you acknowledge the existence of evil. Then you start assigning the quality to others. Then you show pity and try, rather self-righteously, to bring them over to the good side (your side). They refuse of course. So you, for ‘the greater good’, start killing and destroying.
I would rather not believe in evil at all, thank you very much! Evil is an idea. It turns you by making you...
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Neil Gaiman Offers Graduates 10 Essential Tips for... →
September 2011
138 posts
Cyber Warfare – The New Battlefield →
Ulrik McKnight throws some light on the presence of a cyber battlefront that India seems to be underestimating (at the very least) or ignoring. In particular, he draws attention to continued security breaches being made by China into sensitive Indian installations.
China has repeatedly been found to use its expertise as a cyber-power to access highly confidential information relating to the...
Was Godhra 2002 the "worst ever" communal violence... →
The answer to the above question becomes a tricky affair when you realise that history-writers in India can be very selective about what they choose to term history and what they don’t. A friend pointed out last night that perhaps the reason the Godhra riots continue to occupy so much space in Indian public discourse is that it was the first ever instance of communal violence televised by...
The Hindu op-ed on UPA2 mishandling of media... →
Over the last year, the UPA and the Congress have handled the financial scandals relating to 2G and the Commonwealth Games, and the public protests against corruption led by yoga expert Baba Ramdev and activist Anna Hazare in a — to put it mildly — ham-handed manner.
Chennai teen kills herself after teacher raps her... →
V Ramya, a class 9 student of Emmanuel Methodist Higher Secondary Matriculation School in Pudur near Padi, came back home weeping from school around 5pm. Ramya’s mother V Sudha (30) said, “She told me that the teacher twisted her ears and told her not to show off like Silk Smitha. The teacher is notorious among students and always rude.” … Ramya’s father D Vijayakumar...
Watchdesipundit:
A Video Letter from Birar (by Global Video Letters)
Youth in a village in Rajasthan, India get video cameras so they can film their everyday lives. They film and show their village, their culture, their two religions, things they do in their spare time and what they are working with or studying.
Towards the end they tell us about the challenges they face in a small village amongst...
Rahul-flation is the problem →
In which R Jagannathan wonders if the Indian government’s inability to rope in inflation is somehow related to populist spending directed at helping elect Rahul Gandhi as the prime minister in 2014.
India’s China diplomacy gets muscular | Firstpost →
Venky Vembu makes a point about India’s foreign policy tone changing towards China.
For long, Indian diplomacy towards China has had only one aim: to avoid saying or doing anything that would provoke a repeat of the 1962 war. Former National Security Adviser MK Narayanan said as much in his interactions with US diplomats, noting that India had concerns about China’s high military spending....
Modi proves his critics wrong →
Swapan Dasgupta unloads a hard-hitting pile of words on Modi detractors in his column in the Pioneer. According to this band of people, Modi can not only affect the police and judiciary of his own state, he can also manufacture mass-consent, force people into voting for him, and coerce the highest court of law in India to deliver judgments in his favour. Democratic mandate be damned, legal process...
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Ravanayan: A new comic book epic →
A comic series that takes an imaginative new look at Ravana, one of Hindu mythology’s most feared villains. Order online / subscribe.
“A Woman obsessed with the reduction of her flesh may be revealing the fact that...”
– Kim Chernin, Womansize. (via shes-still-here)
Google Predicts Explosive Internet Growth in India... →
In an interview, Google’s country head in India, Rajan Anandan, said the Web giant expects India to reach at least 300 million Internet users by 2014, up from about 100 million now, as telecom carriers invest in high-speed wireless infrastructure and smartphones become cheaper. Even without those technology advancements, India is already the third-largest Internet market by users, behind...
Parents, teachers want caning back in UK... →
Corporal punishment was banned in the UK in 1986, but increasing instances of disciplinary lapses are causing people there to rethink the matter and perhaps bring back caning. Personally, I think this is a matter of culture. In general, schools in the west suffer because of a certain disregard for education. The nerd-jock divide isn’t as prevalent in a country like ours because of societal...
Aditya Sinha: Ambika Soni’s adventures in... →
This government just keeps getting better and better. Following its coverage of the Anna Hazare agitation, the ad-sales department of DNA found that the flow of ads to their newspaper had been stopped… to teach them a lesson. DNA’s editor-in-chief Aditya Sinha writes:
As for being critical of the ruling party, isn’t that what being the “watchdog of democracy” is all about? And which...
Why do people share?
cortexapp:
Research by Paul Adams, UX researcher at Facebook, indicates that people have four primary reasons for sharing: * To shape how others perceive them * To maintain and grow relationships * To share content that others might find valuable * To source information
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Amazon.com: Ramayana 2.0 eBook →
Modern fables from an ancient epic. Download the ebook to your Kindle for less than a dollar. Delivery charges extra.
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Vimoh's Fables: Kindle ebook →
A collection of 5 inspirational short stories by me. Download the ebook to your Kindle for less than a dollar. Delivery charges extra.
The real issue with journalism today - Views -... →
R Sukumar raises some pertinent points regarding the limits to which professional journalists may take their connections with the government. He says there are 60 journalists in New Delhi who live in houses provided for by the government. These might also be journalists who, for all practical purposes, are in the government’s employ. There has to be a law against this.
“Central flood rview team will come to Odisha on the 20th, i.e. 14 days after the...”
– BJD MP Jay Panda tweets about the step-motherly treatment of Odisha by the centre.
WatchTalent is hard work. There is no magic. You stick to something for years, study it, work it, explore it in as many ways as possible, and you become talented.
Why Twitter doesn’t care what your real name is →
While Facebook and Google Plus insist on you using your real name on their networks, Twitter doesn’t seem to care much about that. The short explanation is that Twitter is not playing the identity game, it is playing the influence game. There is indeed some amount of identity attached to a Twitter persona. GigaOm explains in more detail.
What Journalists Are Losing Out On By Not Taking... →
In the second part of his series on the future of journalism, Apurv points out how Indian journalism schools, media houses, and media persons are all rather behind in their understanding of how ways of digital storytelling can work for news reporting. One of the most telling points he makes is about “new media” courses still teaching Dreamweaver. It’s true! I’ve been...
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On sleeping in villages at night
After having patented the Rahul Gandhi method of grassroots reform (going to villages and spending nights in poor people’s homes) the Congress is now all set to propagate the exercise by open sourcing it. Home Minister P Chidambaram recently suggested that chief ministers of naxal-hit states should go spend a night in Naxal-affected villages:
Terming Naxal menace and not terrorism as the...
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How stories affect history and vice versa
Here is a fun illustration of how storytelling affects the course of civilisation. Here is a passage from the preface to Lawrence Lessig’s book on the changing face of copyright — Remix.
In early 2007, I was at dinner with some friends in Berlin. We were talking about global warming. After an increasingly intense exchange about the threats from climate change, one overeager American...
Adventures With E-Books, Kindle Single Edition |... →
We’re still in the very early days of micropayments for books, but my gut feeling is that people are increasingly willing to pay small sums for shorter pieces in the 5,000 to 30,000 word range — much as they’re increasingly willing to pay small sums for apps. And the pricing models are, of course, still very much in flux.
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BBC Knowledge magazine: First Impressions
Magazines are some of the few remaining artifacts of print media that have any kind of promise left. They don’t compete against real time news outlets but nevertheless manage to be neat little capsules of curated information. They are qualitatively on a different plane than newspapers, which focus on what has happened in a given cycle of time (a typical 24-hour news day). Most non-news...
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On the future of print media
We live in an age when newspapers are posting videos on their websites and TV news channel websites are publishing articles and long-form editorials. They are turning into each other and what they are becoming is something entirely different from what either used to be. What is missing from the equation is words on paper.
Newspapers seem to have lost the race for breaking news. Where they...
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Seth Godin on Blogging, Business Books, and... →
Audio show of Seth Godin and Brian Clark (of Copyblogger.com) discussing marketing, virality, writing, and change.
This is not war →
Smita Prakash reminds the prime minister of India that what we are fighting is not a war (unless you call getting repeatedly buggered by your enemy a war). This also goes out to all dunderheads out there who mouth phrases like, “give peace a chance”. Newsflash donkeys: We have given peace plenty of chances. You can’t make peace with an enemy who doesn’t want it. They want...
Saleem Shahzad’s Murder, Pakistan, and the ISI :... →
And then Admiral Nazir made a remark so bizarre that Shahzad said he had thought about it every day since. “We want the world to believe that Osama is dead,” Nazir said.
The Economist is wrong, print media is declining... →
On why some western commentators’ optimism about India being the next promised land for the newspaper business may be less than justified. The so-called “newspaper crisis” is pretty much universal in my opinion. It exists, not because of local market pressures, but because of a more pervasive change in the way we talk to each other. Understanding this now will make the transition...
M J Akbar on Rahul Gandhi's attempts to counter... →
What happened when Rahul Gandhi addressed a gathering of Gujarati students in Ahmedabad? The media wasn’t allowed in on the back and forth, but here is an account anyway.
Why Journalism Education In India Isn’t Creating... →
Apurv writes down why Indian journalism schools don’t produce professional journalists. One reason is that, with a few notable exceptions, most of these institutions are floated by media organisations with the explicit intention of creating future employees. Secondly, as Apurv points out, not much of journalism training is actually about the shape of media. Young people in media...
Modi-baiters Stand Unmasked →
Sandeep B writes about how a “section of the media” and sundry defenders of secularism have been lying and encouraging lies in service of their unabashed desire to bring the Gujarat government down. He makes special mention of two particular wolves — Teesta Setalvad and Sanjiv Bhatt.