03 July, 2008

A $100 Speedway Gas Card

I think this is a shocking story—on two levels.

One, two consenting adults get together in a room to make a transaction, and both are arrested because the state knows better than them how they should live their lives. Their mugshots end up on the website linked to above, as they are publicly humiliated for a private act that harmed nobody.

Two, part of the payment for the woman’s services was made “with a $100 Speedway gas card,” and that predictably becomes the headline for the story: “Sex for Gas.” Is that supposed to be funny?

The story says: “A local prosecutor noted that it was sad to see someone selling their body for gas, in this case about 25 gallons worth.”

Given that she chose that option over all others available to her, is it not even sadder that we condemn her to worse? It’s a disturbing story, for I do not see the difference between me and that woman, selling her services for a living, or that man, satisfying his needs peacefully without infringing anyone’s rights. Who are we to tower in judgement over them?

Some earlier pieces:
Don’t Punish Victimless Crimes (March 29, 2007)
A Choice to Sell Sex (September 11, 2007)
Laws Against Victimless Crimes Should Be Scrapped (May 4, 2008)

(Link via email from Srini Sitaraman.)

Posted at 8:15 AM by Amit Varma in Freedom | Journalism | Media | WTF

Horny Kya?

The Times of India informs us, with a suitable exclamation mark at the end of the headline: “Watermelon is nature’s Viagra!”

Now, lest you boys go rushing out to eat some healthy fruit, as your momma always told you to (naughty momma!), note that the article also says that “[w]atermelon may not be as organ specific as Viagra.” So don’t stare at your crotch in anger after every bite. And enjoy the taste, it isn’t medicine.

Posted at 7:15 AM by Amit Varma in Miscellaneous

The Exciting Life of Christopher Hitchens

First he gets waxed. Then he is waterboarded.

The picture in that first piece is horrifying, perhaps even a legitimate torture device by itself. (“If you do not make us your Facebook friends, we will hold your eyes open with calipers and make you look at this picture. Hoo ha ha ha hoo ha.”) And speaking of torture, here’s what Hitchens has to say in the second piece:

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

It’s a relief that both John McCain and Barack Obama agree with that view, with McCain having stuck to a principled stand against torture in the primaries despite that position being unpopular in his party’s base. Perhaps it helped that he had first-hand knowledge of the subject. And now Hitch has it as well, having been waterboarded and waxed. To think he volunteered for both…

(Links via email from Manish Vij.)

Posted at 4:04 AM by Amit Varma in Miscellaneous

Dear Indian Nationalists

Dear Indian nationalists

Is Shilpa Shetty correct? Is it true that kisses are against Indian culture but pecks on the cheek are not? If so, why? Saliva?

I request that you consider this matter carefully. Even the Kama Sutra does not mention pecks; no pecks are depicted in Khajuraho; pecks can damage the fabric of our nation.

Regards

Amit Varma

*

More open letters here.

Posted at 1:28 AM by Amit Varma in Arts and entertainment | News

Animals

For some reason, this story moves me:

Police: Woman Held Cat For Ransom After Losing Dog

I feel sorry for both the woman and the cat, actually. There’s sadness all around in the story, and there wouldn’t have been any if the blasted woman just got herself a teddy bear instead of a dog in the first place. You know what I mean. Still, we’re human…

(Link via email from The Not So Talkative Man.)

Posted at 12:50 AM by Amit Varma in Miscellaneous | WTF

02 July, 2008

Monster Trucks, Party Clocks and Chidiya Choo Choo

A believer would put it down to karma. On Saturday morning, as a bunch of friends and I were sitting in a cafe at Dadar about to head off to Pune, we devised a game inspired by P Sainath. The game went thus: pick up the newspaper and after every headline, add the words “while farmers die in Vidarbha.” So, for example, you’d have “India ready with climate action plan while farmers die in Vidarbha.” Or “Anne Hathaway’s love secrets, revealed, while farmers die in Vidarbha.”

We amused ourselves in this pathetic way for a few minutes before one of us opened the page to Dr Mahinder Vatsa’s sex advice column in Mumbai Mirror. (My earlier posts on it: 1, 2.) We then modified our game to read out each question beginning with the words “I am a farmer dying in Vidarbha.” So, for example, you would have a question that went: “I am a farmer dying in Vidarbha. Whenever I get sexually excited, I experience an excruciating pain in my testicles...” Or: “I am a farmer dying in Vidarbha. I am 19 years old. My weight is 48 kilos. My problem is that I have small breasts.”

I don’t need to elaborate that what we were doing was very, very wrong. It was made even more wrong by the fact that farmers were probably dying in Vidarbha as we played this game. Punishment was due—and the wrath of the gods duly come our way.

*

When we were about 40 minutes outside Pune’s city limits, the cab I was in slowed down behind a truck. Gaspode and I were sitting in the back seat. Suddenly, there was a loud noise, something banged my head, and fragments of glass lay all around me. We turned around: a truck had hit the back of our car; the windscreen at the back was shattered; its frame had disappeared; and, to my immense relief, my book was fine. I’d kept a copy of Paul Auster’s “Timbuktu” behind me, and I retrieved that and tumbled out of the car.

I wish I could dramatize the moment, but there really was no great drama to it. By the time I realised I was in an accident, the accident was over and I was obviously fine, as was Gaspode. It could have been much worse had we been resting our heads against the seat and napping, as we had been a few minutes before this. We were also lucky that the windscreen was made of the kind of glass that, as a safety feature, crumbles into tiny, harmless bits—Gaspode was taking out some of them from his hair for more than an hour.

So now all we had to do was get to Pune. We thanked the great Omniscient Sainath for not punishing our blasphemy with something worse, and hailed down one of those large tempo-type autos. We cast a regretful last look at our cab, below which much petrol had leaked. Sadly, we were carrying no matches.

*

The tempo-type auto was empty when we got in, and offered to drop us to the outskirts of Pune. But once we were inside, it started picking up people. Two women and a baby; a young man who looked like Amitabh Bachchan in Deewar; three more women, all of whom looked like Nirupa Roy; two burly farmers, perhaps from Vidarbha; and a man with a goat.

Actually, I’m exaggerating about the goat. There was no goat that tried to give Gaspode a blowjob, so that part of the narrative must be omitted. But I don’t exaggerate one bit when I say that when all of the aforementioned people were in the vehicle—one of the ladies almost on my lap—we were overtaken by a bicycle. It was a surreal morning.

*

The afternoon was worse. We attended a quiz by Derek O’Brien and the questions, many of them multiple choice, were horrendous. A sample: “Which of these is better for fighting bad breath: mint or chewing gum?” You know the kind of quiz I like : this was worse than any monster truck.

*

Wait, it isn’t over. We took a cab back in the evening and almost got hustled off the road by a truck behind us. Our driver yelled something at the truck driver and made him stop on the side of the road. Then he got down, walked over to the truck, pulled the driver out and slapped him three times. Then he charged back in and gave us a smile.

“Boss, why did you have to do that?” I said in Hindi. “What if he comes after us and bangs his truck into the car?”

“Ha,” said the driver. “That never happens.”

*

The next day, I was in Bangalore to take part in a quiz conducted by the KQA as part of their 25th anniversary celebrations. (My team reached the final, ahead of some terrific quizzers, but we were outclassed there. This quiz was excellent.) In the evening, I was at a party at Madhu ‘MadMan’ Menon’s house, where I was spending the night. I was pooped after the traumatic events of the last two days, and drunk far more than I normally do. Then, at 10.30, I realised that the party was over and everyone had left.

“What’s up, why did everyone leave so early?” I asked Madhu.

“What’s the time?”

I looked over at his big wall clock. “It’s 10.30,” I said.

“No,” said Madhu. “It’s 1.30 in the morning. That’s my party clock. It always says 10.30. That way, nobody leaves. At 11.30 they look at the clock, think it’s only 10.30, and they hang on. Isn’t it brilliant?”

I had to agree it was brilliant.

*

The next evening, Madhu and I were hanging out with an extremely smart lady of tender years. She told us the latest Savita Bhabhi storyline and then gave us tips on how to search for porn on the net. I remarked:

“You know, I find this so strange. There are two men and one woman at this table, and it’s the woman who’s giving all the advice on surfing porn.”

“Amit, it’s not about which gender you belong to,” she said. “It’s about which generation you belong to.”

Madhu and I, 32 and 34 respectively, looked at each other with great nostalgia. I’m telling you, it felt like my life was over.

*

There is one memory of the trip I will always cherish, though. That came when Madhu, asked to sing opera, which he does exceedingly well, instead sang “Chidiya Choo Choo Karti Hai.” He said that he’d first seen the song when he was eight years old, and it was the first WTF moment of his life. Indeed, it is remarkable: Watch this!

My favourite bits are Jeetendra’s armpit sweat when he does “Happy Birthday to Me”, and the necking camels just after. But there is much to choose from. Such a masterpiece.

Posted at 10:11 PM by Amit Varma in Arts and entertainment | Personal | WTF

Quizzing is Not Just a Trivial Pursuit

This piece of mine was published on Sunday (June 29) in Mail Today.

It’s Sunday, and you’ve had enough of boring op-eds and opinion pieces all week. So let me start this piece with a quiz question about cards: In Texas Hold’em Poker, which hand is known as ‘six tits’? 

If you don’t know the answer, I encourage you not to shift your eyes to the end of the piece, where I reveal all. Just look at the question one more time: as the Beatles would say, you can work it out. 

Every two Sundays, a diverse group of people meet in an office in a Mumbai suburb and ask each other questions like this. They are the Bombay Quiz Club (BQC), a group I co-founded on April Fool’s Day, 2006. Most Indian cities have clubs with a much older pedigree – the Karnataka Quiz Association of Bangalore celebrates its 25th anniversary today, and the K Circle of Hyderabad predates that by a decade. But the kind of quizzing all these clubs do is rather different from what most Indians understand of the term.

Workoutable

To most Indians, quizzing is about knowledge. You are asked a question: you either know it or you don’t. If you don’t, the quiz is terribly boring. There might be drama about who is winning or losing, but beyond that narrative, your brain isn’t being made to work. You might as well watch a soap opera.

But attend a quiz by the BQC or by any of these other quizzing clubs and you’ll find a different dynamic at play. You will find that the quizzing they do is not so much about knowledge but about problem solving. Even if you don’t know a question, you can still work it out by clues given in the question. Sure, you still need to know things: but if you’re intelligent and have a basic interest in the world, you have a crack at solving any question. A 100-question quiz then becomes not a boring event where you know some things and are clueless about others, but a challenge in which you try to solve 100 brainteasers, often with the help of team-mates in a collaborative process that is immense fun.

For example, here’s a question I asked in a quiz last year: “X is a unit of hype. One kiloX is equal to 10.42 days. One MegaX is equal to 28.5 years. What is X, and why is it so called?”

When I asked this question, I also advised the teams to use their calculators. The team that cracked it was the one that figured out that X was equal to 15 minutes. The answer, then, was obviously Warhol, who had famously said: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Now think of what a boring question this would have been if I had simply asked: “What is the unit of hype?”

Eureka!

Every well-framed quiz question should lead to a Eureka moment. You are asked a question, you search it for clues, one teammate suggests one strand of thought, another suggests an alternative, you rack your brains and suddenly it all falls into place. My friend J Ramanand, the last man to win Mastermind India, expressed it beautifully when he wrote: “Working out answers is sometimes like tugging at the loose thread in a sweater. A decent yank & the whole thing unravels magically.”

To illustrate this, here’s a question framed by the quizzer Arun Simha: “H0H 0H0” is a postal code used by Canada Post for routing letters sent in Canada to which person?”

The question is bewildering – until one notices that H0H 0H0 can also be read as Ho Ho Ho. Yank that and you come to Santa Claus. (Jabba the Hutt is also associated with that laugh, but any reasonable quizzer would eliminate that option, for why would Canada Post care about Jabba the Hutt?)

Here’s another question, framed by a BQC quizzer, Sumant Srivathsan: “If ‘three short - three long - three short’ (. . . - - - . . .) is Morse code for SOS, where would you be most likely to come across ‘three short - two long - three short’?”

The ‘three-shorts’ are the clue. Clearly the second code stands for S-something-S, and when you work that out, you start thinking of what the missing letter could be. M? SMS? And then you remember the default Nokia ringtone for incoming messages (“beep-beep-beep, beeeep-beeeep, beep-beep-beep”) and the answer falls into place.

Imagine how boring the question would be if it was framed thus: “In morse code, which letter does ‘two long’ stand for?” Or “What is the default Nokia ringtone for incoming messages inspired by?”

I was recently asked by a friend, whose only acquaintance with quizzing is via Kaun Banega Crorepati, how I prepare for a quiz. The answer, of course, is that one can’t prepare for this kind of quizzing. Schoolkids may buy Malayalam Manorama and learn capitals and currencies, but the best quizzers are simply people who live life fully. They show an interest in the world around them; they read a lot; they watch films and listen to music; they are culturally aware; they keep in touch with the news. And when quiz questions pop up that touch on any of those areas, they have a chance at cracking it, even if they don’t know the funda behind the question.

Ah, fundas! Quizzers use that term a lot. What does it mean? Loosely speaking, a funda is an interesting fact at the heart of a question. Every good question contains a little nugget that tells you something you didn’t know already. Sometimes this is trivial, sometimes not. But the net effect of a good quiz with solid fundas is that you end the quiz not just entertained by it, but also more knowledgeable about the world in a meaningful way.

Connect

A connect question in a quiz is one in which you are asked to find the common thread running between a few different elements: four visuals, say, or a video, an audio and a picture, and so on. But, in a way, all of quizzing is about connecting. We look for something in the question that we are asked that we can connect with the world we know. And when a funda is new to us, it expands that world. If it’s interesting, it might even increase out interest in a particular area of knowledge. We might finish a quiz wanting to see a certain film or read a particular book, or simply looking at something in an entirely new way. To extend Ramanand’s analogy, after we yank the thread and the sweater unravels, we find other uses for that wool. 

So the next time you’re playing poker on a Sunday and your opponent beats you with a hand that has three queens in it, congratulate him (or her) for holding six tits. Then walk right out and find a good quiz to take part in. It’ll be worth your while.

* * *

I’ve earlier written on this subject here: The Joys of Quizzing. Also check out this three part primer by J Ramanand and Niranjan Pednekar: 1, 2, 3.

More more essays and op-eds by me, click here.

Posted at 10:04 PM by Amit Varma in Essays and Op-Eds | Personal

01 July, 2008

Zombie Blogging Not Required

The rumours are partly true: a truck did crash into a car I was travelling in on Saturday; but that is not the cause of this hiatus in posts. I’ve been travelling, making sure Pune is doing okay, confirming reports that Bangalore is getting by, and I return to Mumbai this evening before despair floods the city. By tomorrow, I shall resume blogging at my usual pace and reveal all.

And even if, FSM forbid, the accident had taken me out, it wouldn’t have stopped me. I would have become India’s first Zombie Blogger. Some things just can’t be stopped. So be patient…

Teaser to tomorrow’s posts: Chidiya Choo Choo Karti Hai…

Posted at 11:25 AM by Amit Varma in Personal

28 June, 2008

It’s Not Just Migrants

This is the best headline in the history of headlines this week:

Thackerays can’t bear mosquito bites anymore

How it must hurt their ego, no? Marathi manoos helpless against Marathi machhar.

Posted at 6:33 AM by Amit Varma in India | News | Politics | WTF

“Are You Sitting in My Heart?”

The WTF quote of the day comes from Shoaib Malik, who, when asked about “Pakistan’s recent performances and whether morale is down,” says:

Are you sitting in my heart? The Pakistan team is famous for comebacks. My form if it wasn’t good, at least I am still the best allrounder as far as I know.

I want Freddie Flintoff to visit Malik someday and sit on his head. Malik should then ask him: “Why are you sitting on my head?” And Freddie should reply: “So should I sit in your heart then? Huh? Best allrounder?”

Posted at 6:13 AM by Amit Varma in Sport | WTF

27 June, 2008

Prada isn’t Divine Enough

The WTF clarification of the day comes from L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper:

The pope, therefore, does not wear Prada, but Christ.

Well, he’s certainly picked the more powerful brand.

(Link via email from Sanjeev.)

Posted at 6:40 AM by Amit Varma in News | WTF

26 June, 2008

The Versatile Corpses of Middle-Class India

The WTF generalisation of the month comes from the formidable Malavika Sanghhvi, who writes that “if one goes by present trends ... [t]oday’s India is indicating that the best way to end an affair is murder!”

Everyone seems to be doing it: MBA students, BPO employees, private airline crew, TV actors, defence personnel, politicians, middle class housewives… I can’t remember a time when we have woken up each morning to so many crimes of passion.

[...]

Today, urban murder for matters of the heart seems to be one more facet of reform India — like multiplexes and caramelised pop corn.

And there are corpses strewn everywhere. Attractive, upwardly mobile, Japanese car-driving, Macdonald’s burger-eating, mobile phone-using corpses, who all lived the middle class Indian dream… until an ex-lover’s ire caught up with them.

The emphasis is mine, because I’m super-impressed that corpses can drive Japanese cars and use mobile phones. The next time you’re at McDonald’s and the gentleman besides you seems to be walking stiffly, watch out. And if the attractive lady besides him behaves coldly with you, well, there you go.

I really hope P Sainath writes an article responding to Sanghhvi’s piece. There are two approaches he could take: One, he could agree with her wholeheartedly and blame it on India’s liberalisation, because of which rich corpses use Japanese cars and mobile phones while corpses of farmers committing suicide in Vidarbha do not have access to such facilities. Two, he could berate her for writing about deaths in the city and ignoring rural affairs, like the rest of our middle-class obsessed media. Either way, fun would come.

PS: While on Sainath…

Posted at 9:20 AM by Amit Varma in India | Journalism | Media | WTF

Deep Blue Skies

The Times of India reports the WTF news of the day:

An Air India Jaipur-Mumbai flight flew well past its destination with both its pilots fatigued and fast asleep in the cockpit. When the pilots were finally woken up by anxious Mumbai air traffic controllers, the plane was about half way to Goa.

Well, I suppose the pilots in question did need a holiday.

Posted at 9:12 AM by Amit Varma in India | News | WTF

25 June, 2008

If Raj Thackeray Doesn’t Want Migrants in Mumbai…

... then his own family should catch the first train out from Mumbai Central. After all, as a scholar in Pune has revealed, the Thackerays “are not original inhabitants of Mumbai, [and] came to this city in search of livelihood.”

So there.

(Link via email from Sumant.)

Posted at 4:27 PM by Amit Varma in Politics

Kicking Creationist Ass

This is an awesome exchange. Such delight comes.

(Link via email from Gautam.)

PS: I especially love the PSs!

Posted at 3:16 PM by Amit Varma in Science and Technology

Offending Dalits

Regular readers of India Uncut will know that I keep ranting about how giving offense has effectively become a crime in India because of some of our silly laws. Well, Rediff informs us:

Amid high drama, the editor and two journalists of a leading Telugu daily Andhra Jyothi were arrested on Tuesday night for publishing an allegedly offensive story on Dalit organisations and its leaders.

[...]

The police said the arrests were made by invoking the provisions of the stringent Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act following publication of a lead story in the second largest circulated daily of Andhra Pradesh last month that criticised unnamed Dalit leaders and their organisations.

While I’ve often written about section 295(a) of the Indian Penal Code, (Don’t Insult Pasta, for example), this law is new to me. For your reading pleasure, here’s the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

The only part of that law that could have been applied in this case, as far as I can tell, is put forth in section 1 (3) (x) of the act, which recommends punishment for “[w]hoever, not being a member of a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe, intentionally insults or intimidates with intent to humiliate a member of a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe in any place within public view.”

Firstly, doing a story on Dalit organisations and their leaders obviously should not fall within the purview of this clause. Secondly, should insulting someone be a criminal matter at all? Should the state get involved if some random person calls me names? If your answer is ‘no’, does that answer change if I happen to be a Dalit? Why?

Most of the other clauses in that act seem perfectly fair to me. But those things—taking away somebody’s land, coercing someone into forced labour etc—are criminal acts regardless of the caste of the victim. What does it say about our country, the state of our legal machinery and our politics that we have a separate act to protect Dalits from things that all of us should be protected from anyway?

Update: Krishna Prasad has more details and analysis.

And BV Harish Kumar writes in:

This law is (ab)used a lot in Government offices where people keep threatening their bosses and other colleagues with this Act. IIRC all one needs to do is send a postcard to the SC or someone that ‘atrocities’ are being committed and there will be an enquiry and I think the person in question (the offender) can be suspended from duty till the completion of the enquiry.

(Churumuri link via email from Gautam.)

Update 2: Elaborating on Harish’s letter, quoted above, Harish’s dad, B Phani Babu, writes in:

I know one such case—When a charge sheet was filed against a person on charges of forgery and tampering of records, he (he belonged to the Reserved Category) took an offensive step of complaining to the SC/ST commissioner that he was being harassed. It was my signature and my documents that were tampered with and we almost became the defendants in the case. Fortunately we had a written statement from this person admitting his guilt. Otherwise our heads would have rolled!

It took almost two years to sentence the chap. It was a very mild punishment - just an increment down. He continued ‘serving’ and enjoying all monetary benefits like Overtime etc.

This is the most powerful weapon for an ‘SC/ST’ employee in Government Service. He can get away with anything! I can vouch for the above incident as I myself almost became an affected party!

Posted at 2:43 AM by Amit Varma in Freedom | India | Journalism | Media | News | Politics

24 June, 2008

Brave New World

We helpless men are always being treated as nothing but chunks of meat by the women out there. Just check out this headline:

College girls banned from whistling at builders

There’s a Savita Bhabhi storyline in there.

(Link via email from Tony.)

Posted at 5:48 PM by Amit Varma in News | WTF

You are Free!

But do read the small print first.

(Link via email from Gautam John.)

Posted at 2:54 PM by Amit Varma in Freedom

Look Who’s Unclean Now

Now that Mayawati runs the state, upper castes in UP have trouble getting water.

What worries me is that a couple of generations from now, upper caste leaders will demand that a large percentage of the water supply be reserved for them to compensate for past inequities. This will never end.

(Link via email from Arun John.)

Posted at 7:30 AM by Amit Varma in India | News | Politics | WTF

23 June, 2008

‘The Sun and Versatile Mercury in Leo’

Astrologer Bejan Daruwala has some advice for Roger Federer:

He should come more often to the net, because he has the reach, the agility, and the dexterity to volley for an outright winner, or to make a strong opening for it, and with the next volley, finish it. The Sun and versatile Mercury in Leo, is the key to it.

I dispute Daruwala’s contention that Mercury is versatile: it cannot play guitar. It’s mercurial, that’s all.

More Daruwala on India Uncut: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Posted at 12:04 AM by Amit Varma in Old memes | Astrology etc | Sport | WTF

22 June, 2008

The Balls of West Indians

In a conversation with Rajdeep Sardesai, Sandeep Patil remembers being Sunil Gavaskar’s roommate in 1983:

I asked him if would be able to even see the balls of West Indians. He asked me what do you mean by ‘the balls of the West Indians?’ I told him the cricket balls that will be bowled by Marshall. I had not faced West Indians then and Sunil told me that you have faced Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thompson; you will be able to see the balls. I saw the ball and I hit a six.

My favourite bit in the interview, though, is when Sardesai asks what Kapil Dev said to his team in the dressing room after India was dismissed for 183 in the final. Kapil replies:

I just said c’mon Jawaano, let’s fight it out.

Through a nostalgia-tented lens, of all this seems charmingly uncomplicated. But in my view, the politics is less today and our cricket is much better. (Not the West Indies’s, sadly.) Still, it’s good to remember.

*

Many readers of this blog, shameless young kids all, were born after that 1983 World Cup. Those of us born before it are often asked where we were when the final was won. I was nine at the time, and hadn’t yet begun following cricket. I vaguely remember being in a room with many family members, all of them rather excited. When they began jumping up and down at the fall of the tenth West Indian wicket, I looked at the screen and sagely remarked: “But they still have one batsman left.”

(Link via email from Sanjeev.)

Posted at 1:40 PM by Amit Varma in India | Personal | Sport

Fatherly Concern

In all my time of blogging about WTFness, I have never come across such audacity:

A Malaysian of Indian origin, who was sentenced to 36 years in jail four years ago for repeatedly raping his minor daughter, wants his jail term reduced because he used a condom while committing the crime.

[...]

[The rapist’s lawyer SI] Rajah told the court the sentence should be reduced since “the accused used a condom every time he committed the offence”, the New Straits Times reported Saturday.

I think the man should be forced to wear a condom for the rest of his stay in prison. At all times. The same one.

I could add to that, but never mind.

PS: Remember Fritzl?

(Link via email from Mahendra Shikaripur.)

Posted at 2:52 AM by Amit Varma in News | WTF

21 June, 2008

Robot Girlfriend 2.0

I love Chris Albrecht’s response to the news that “Sega is rolling out a line of 15-inch robot girlfriends that will kiss on command”:

I never like to buy the first generation of any tech product, so I’ll wait for EMA 2.0, which replicates the girlfriend experience even more by giving you a kiss, then pausing and looking at you. You ask her what’s wrong, she says, “Nothing.” You ask if it was something you did but she just sits there, crosses her robot arms and says, “It’s fine.” You say obviously she’s not fine, to which she responds with, “I’m fine. Whatever. Nothing’s wrong. Let’s just go.” And you say no, let’s talk about it, and she says, “We’re late, let’s just go this party and we can talk about it later,” ruining your whole evening as you try to figure out what exactly you said and — oh. Wait.

In other words, men will find themselves in a position where they can figure out neither their women nor their gadgets. What’s left to do then?

(Link via email from Ajay Bhat.)

Update: Heh.

(Link via email from Satyen Kale.)

Posted at 4:12 PM by Amit Varma in Science and Technology

Contact the Love Doctor

People keep talking about how mobile phones are as much entertainment devices as they are communication devices—I agree. No, I’m not talking about listening to music or watching videos or playing games on the phone—I’m referring to the remarkable spam SMSs I keep getting. Just see this sample from the last few days, represented with spelling and punctuation as in the original:

Sender: 53131

Message: Aap jyada haste hai, sochte hai ya Gussa karte hai? Ab janiye apne baare mein. SMS DOB Birth date and month (DD/MM) to 53131. For eg: DOB 0508 to 53131 Rs 3/SMS

*

Sender: 54545

Message: Love is gentle, Love is blind! Are you in LOVE? Check with our Love Doctor to know if you are in Love. SMS LD to 54545 and answer few simple questions. Rs3/SMS

*

Sender: 51515

Message: Is ur personality as precious as a pearl to u? Use ur name to find out more about ur personality. Sms NAME (ur name) to 51515. Eg: NAME Preeti to 51515. Rs3/sms

*

Sender: Just Talk

Message: Kaash kabhi aisa hota ki koi apna hota jisse karta sari baat call 55365. Rs 9/min aur kahein apni dil ki baat.

*

Sender: Voice Chat

Message: Friendship is a promise spoken by the heart and Voice Chat will help you do it. Call 55121, chat with ur desired partner. Just Rs2/min. Subscribe now Rs30/month

Needless to say, I haven’t tried any of these services, though I’m tempted to find out if my personality is like a pearl, as I’ve always suspected. But clearly there is a massive market for all these studies, and if I was a sociologist, I’d be going through the SMSs I get very carefully. There’s a picture of India here that is as true as any other.

PS: You were about to crack a joke about Rediff message boards, weren’t you? Well, don’t.

Posted at 3:06 PM by Amit Varma in India | Small thoughts

How Horny Are Indians?

A question like that makes absolutely no sense, but it must be asked—because I say so. Here’s the evidence:

Exhibit 1: According to this survey by askmen.com, India is not one of the ten horniest countries in the world. The nationalists among you should be distraught at the news—what has the country of the Kama Sutra come to (no pun intended)?

Exhibit 2: On the other hand, Google does no evil and Google Trends does not lie. Indian cities top the list when it comes to searching for ‘sex’, ‘naked’, ‘boobs’, ‘fuck’ and ‘Salma Hayek’.

My expert conclusion: We lag behind when it comes to overt horniness, but are No. 1 at repressed horniness. This calls for a freedom movement. (Jokes about a Danda March will not be tolerated. Don’t even think about it.) No?

(Askmen.com link via email from Krishna Prasad.)

Posted at 3:12 AM by Amit Varma in Freedom | India | Miscellaneous

19 June, 2008

The Google Saree

Satya Paul adds a new dimension to search:

Too bad there wasn’t a kid behind wearing Yahoo boxer shorts.

(Info via email from Chandoo.)

Posted at 7:46 AM by Amit Varma in Arts and entertainment | Science and Technology

The Unintended Consequences of Lingerie

This is one heck of a headline:

Woman Sues Victoria’s Secret, Claims Injury From Defective Thong.

And here’s the most remarkable thing about it: the injury was in the eye. I love America.

Actually, I love India as well. Just see what S Sreesanth has been up to lately.

(Links via emails from Gaurav and Srini respectively.)

Posted at 4:04 AM by Amit Varma in News | Sport | WTF

An Inconvenient Truth?

Heh.

(More here. Links via email from Lekhni.)

Posted at 3:52 AM by Amit Varma in News | Politics

Blow It Up Or Knock It Down

I love this girl’s spirit. Haven’t we all been there?

Posted at 3:31 AM by Amit Varma in Miscellaneous

What’s Consolation For An Atheist?

This piece of mine was published this Sunday (June 15) in Mail Today.

Even an atheist is tempted to believe sometimes. My mother died about three weeks ago, losing a long battle to cancer, and I found myself faced with false consolations. Ma had been a believer, and the others in my family also tend that way. They could console themselves with the thought that there might be an afterlife, that perhaps she was now in “a better place.” Friends who came to see us told us that they were praying for her soul, and that God had been merciful to her, and that it could have been worse. All this was useful for others – but not believing in God or souls, I had to deal with death as death.

I’ll come to terms with my mother’s death – with some sorrow, one moves on. But I think about my own, and that is harder. If I cast aside the existence of a higher being, I have to accept my own insignificance in the world, and that when I die, that will be that: no soul, no heaven or rebirth, no greater purpose to my mundane life. At low moments, it makes everything seem pointless. 

And yet, being an atheist is not a choice I have made, choosing one belief system over another. This is because atheism is not about belief at all: it is about the absence of belief.

Nonbelief

Some people think that atheism means believing that there is no God. This is a flawed perception. The primary meaning of atheism that most dictionaries will give you, though there are secondary meanings that have evolved from bad usage, is of “disbelief” in God or a deity. That means that atheists are not people who believe that there is no God, but people who do not believe that there is God. The difference is huge.

The conviction that there is no God is irrational because one cannot prove a negative. (How do you prove that something does not exist?) However, it is entirely rational to not believe in something whose existence has not been demonstrated. I don’t believe in dragons or fairies because no one has yet proved to me that they exist. Ditto God. I am not asserting that God does not exist, but simply saying that I don’t believe in the existence of God because I see no evidence of Him (or Her, or It). This is not a dogmatic position: if you can prove to me tomorrow that God or dragons exist, I will start to believe in them. Until then, I remain in disbelief. That’s atheism.

People often speak of atheism as if it is a movement or an organised belief system – or even a religion of sorts. That is not true. The Economist published a letter from Chad English of Ottawa a few months ago that summed it up well: “Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby. When you understand why there are no ‘aphilatelist’ conventions, you will understand why atheists don’t congregate.”

Agnosticism

It is a common mistake to view belief in God as running along a continuum in which we have theists (who believe), agnostics (who are undecided) and atheists (who don’t believe). This is based on a misunderstanding of agnosticism, which doesn’t deal with belief at all, but with knowledge. The word ‘agnostic’ is a combination of the Greek α (without) and gnōsis (knowledge), and refers to a person who believes that the truth about something, in this case the existence of God, is unknowable. It has nothing to do with believing or not believing.

Indeed, it is possible to combine agnosticism with either theism or atheism. A believer may choose to believe in God while accepting that some things are fundamentally unknowable. An atheist may agree with that view. I see myself as both an atheist and an agnostic: an atheist because I do not believe in God, as His/Her/Its existence has not been proved; an agnostic because I believe that on this matter, we may never know the truth for sure.

For that reason, I am not militant about my atheism. What other people choose to believe in is none of my business, and I respect their right to their beliefs. But the right to religion does not imply the right to force it on others. I object when people try to coerce others into conforming with their beliefs, believing that their religion gives them the license to infringe on the rights of others. Religion in the private domain and in community settings can be useful, and a force for good, but too often in recent times, it has been used to justify the worst excesses: genocides, riots, terrorism, and all kinds of coercion. We have seen deplorable instances of this from every major religion in the last 100 years (including communism, which relies as much on faith as any God-based belief system). 

Thus, it is not religion per se that is a problem, but our attitudes towards it. The right to religion is a human right that should be contingent, like all other rights, on respecting the corresponding rights of others. But many ‘religious’ people have the arrogance to believe that they, the enlightened, are due special privileges that would otherwise be unjustifiable; and many ‘secular’ people are inexplicably keen to pander to them. This endangers the basis of a free society, where artists have been terrorized into thinking twice before drawing a cartoon of another man’s god or painting another man’s goddess, not by the alleged power of those gods and goddesses, but by the primitive fury of their followers.

Consolation

I may not believe in God, but I have no doubt that belief in God serves a purpose for many people. In primitive times, before we understood what the sun was or why there were eclipses and storms, the world must have appeared a terrifying, bewildering place. Religion offered an explanation for everything, and made us believe that we weren’t as small and insignificant as, well, as we are. Besides rendering the world explicable, it made mortality bearable. When someone close to us died, we could tell ourselves that they were in a better place.

As science has gradually filled up the gaps in our knowledge, the God of the Gaps has shrunk, almost becoming redundant. And while the consolations of belief are useful, I would rather reject those false certainties and look for consolation in smaller, surer things. As Austin Cline once wrote: “A person who truly enjoys and appreciates their life will take pleasure in it and enjoy it regardless of whether any sort of afterlife exists. They might believe in an afterlife and even in some sort of wonderful heaven, but they won’t depend upon the existence of such a heaven in order for their lives to have meaning or purpose.”

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I’ve written on this subject a fair bit on my blog; a few posts: 1, 2, 3, 4. If you want to read more about atheism, I can’t think of a better site than About.com’s section on atheism, written by Austin Cline. The left sidebar there has some links to some fine pieces by Cline.

And for more essays and Op-Eds by me, click here.

Posted at 2:01 AM by Amit Varma in Essays and Op-Eds | Personal