Quote of the day

He can’t even eat by himself. How will he throw stones at the police?

-- Kamti Devi, the aunt of a two-year-old boy in Patna who has been ”accused of leading rioters in an attack on policemen in Bihar.” Heh.

This kid may be innocent, but we really should teach them young, I say. Like they have the Spelling Bee in the US, we should have the Rioting Bee here. Then we can truly reap the demographic dividend when these kids grow up.

(First link via email from Prabhu.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 21 June, 2007 in India | WTF

Pictures that define our times

Gautam points me, via email, to this collection: Images that changed the world. There are some stunning photographs there, many of which you would have seen earlier. They’re worth revisiting, if only to be reminded of the turmoil of the last 100 years. What event will the next such photograph capture?

My favourite among all of them is one that stands for so much more than just the time and place it was taken. Here you go:

Posted by Amit Varma on 21 June, 2007 in Freedom | Journalism | Politics

The politics of division

This is the 19th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

Politics in India sometimes seems like a card game. A few days ago, when Pratibha Patil’s candidature for president of India was announced, the newspapers were full of how the UPA was playing the “gender card.” Her record in politics was not at the heart of her nomination – Patil is a woman, and because of that alone, politicians were expected to support her.

Vir Sanghvi wrote last Sunday of how Prakash Karat vetoed every name the Congress threw at him till he was outwitted by the choice of Patil. “If Karat had objected to Mrs Patil,” wrote Sanghvi, “he would have seemed anti-woman and so, he finally gave in.” A news report told us of how the Congress “attacked the BJP for not supporting Patil for the post of the President of India and accused the saffron party of being ‘blatantly’ against the cause of women.” (It can be presumed that had the UPA’s candidate been male, the BJP would have been “against the cause of men.”)

While the BJP did not succumb to this dubious logic, they were certainly worried. Their assumed ally, the Shiv Sena, had reacted to Patil’s candidature by applauding the fact that she was from Maharashtra. The Maharashtra card! (At the time of writing, the Sena is yet to make a final choice – they haven’t yet put all their cards on the table.)

Cards, cards, cards. Ten years ago KR Narayanan won support across the political spectrum because of the “Dalit card”. Five years ago APJ Abdul Kalam benefited from the “Muslim card”. Both men have their fans, and I even know one person who likes Kalam’s poetry, but the political support they got derived from their Dalitness and Muslimness respectively. Parties that could not afford to be seen as anti-Dalit or anti-Muslim found it hard to oppose them.

The office of president is largely ceremonial in India, and it doesn’t bother me if we choose our figurehead according to caste or religion or gender. But the very fact that these factors count underlines the grip of identity politics in this country. The primary factor in Indian elections is not governance but identity, not what you do but who you are.

Read more...

Posted by Amit Varma on 21 June, 2007 in Essays and Op-Eds | India | Politics | Thinking it Through

Vibrating condoms and Indian culture

Everywhere there is joy and squealing. CNN-IBN reports:

The Madhya Pradesh government has banned the sale of Crezendo condom in the state saying it’s against Indian culture.

Public Works Minister in BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh Kailash Vijayvargiya has taken up cudgels against Hindustan Latex Ltd’s condom on behalf of the government.

Vijayvargiya says the condom is a sex toy and will not be allowed to be sold in the state.

I’d argue that the penis is a sex toy and should be banned from Madhya Pradesh as well. And I’m also most curious to know what a public works minister is doing commenting on this matter. What public works?

CNN-IBN’s TV news report on this is also hilarious—I love the back-and-forth between the anchor and the reporter, and I’d take their tone as mock seriousness if they weren’t always like this. The vox pops are immense fun too. These reporters are going to put satirists out of work. Watch:

(Links via separate emails from Anand Krishnamoorthi, Gautam John and Ashutosh Jogalekar.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 21 June, 2007 in Freedom | India | Media | News | WTF

Governments are the problem, not markets

John Stossel writes:

[Bill] Gates spoke at Harvard recently, urging graduating students to take on the “world’s deepest inequities [including] world hunger ... the scarcity of clean water ... children who die from diseases we can cure”. All of us want those problems solved, and through their charitable foundation, Gates and his wife, Melinda, have certainly put their money where their mouths are. But Gates seems unaware that these problems can’t be eliminated in the simplistic way he advocates.

He told the grads, “The market did not reward saving the lives of these children [in poor countries], and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.”

What is Gates talking about?

Can he name one poor country that permits the free market to operate? The problem is not that the market doesn’t make it profitable to save lives—it most certainly does. The problem is that Third World countries have overbearing, corrupt governments that are obstacles to private property and freedom. That’s why the children’s parents have no voice or power.

Read the full piece—I think the last three paras are a superb summation of the problem. India, alas, is an excellent illustration of how government smothers free enterprise.

PS: And while on spontaneous order, one of my favourite posts on the subject, one that I’d linked to here and Rahul reminded me of recently, is “A Simple Rule For a Complex World” by Don Boudreaux. An excerpt:

While declaring “Let the government handle it” comes across as a solution, it’s no such thing. Instead, it is merely a sign of a simple and baseless faith—a simple and baseless faith that people invested with power will not abuse it; that political appointees possess or will find better answers than will millions of people pursuing solutions in their own ways, and staking their own resources and reputations on their efforts; that only those ‘solutions’ that are spelled out in statutes and regulations and that have officials paid to implement them are true solutions.

So yes, show me a problem and I’ll likely respond “Let the market handle it.” I’ll respond this way because I know that not only is my own meager knowledge and effort never up to the task of solving big problems but that not even the Einsteins or Krugmans or Bushes amongst us can know the best solution to any social problem.

Solutions to complex social problems require as many creative minds as possible—and this is precisely what the market delivers.

Posted by Amit Varma on 20 June, 2007 in Economics

Britney Spears does peepee from the sky

So this headline would have us believe: “Britney Pissed Over Crazy Billboards.”

Oh, wait, they’re not using ‘pissed’ as a verb…

(Link via email from Prabhu.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 20 June, 2007 in Arts and entertainment

Rani Mukherjee, Aditya Chopra and crows

Headline of the day: ‘Rani Mukherjee is not engaged to Aditya Chopra’.

And in other news:

Crows flying above mayor’s bungalow has Dr Shubha Raul worried because she considers them an omen

Now, had it been cows…

Posted by Amit Varma on 20 June, 2007 in WTF

The Eye of a Cow

I hereby nominate Bob Hicok as the Poet Cowreate of the World. Check out his poem, “My new neighbour”:

Looking at a cow one morning last month,
I wondered if the congregation of flies
on the eye of the cow
stared at the eye of the cow
with their compound eyes
and if I had ever seen this many eyes
in this small a space or had a thought
in which the word eye occurred so obsessively.

Read the full poem—I especially like the way it ends, though not the fact that it ends. A poem about cows should go on forever, like the Milky Way.

(Link via email from Falstaff. Previous posts on cows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 , 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 20 June, 2007 in Arts and entertainment | Old memes | Cows

No jhappis!

Report 1:

Two high schools in Mumbai have banned pupils from holding hands, kissing or touching on campus, warning that they will face disciplinary action if caught, officials said Monday.

The schools justified the move by saying that these acts, which are increasingly being shown by the local entertainment industry and emulated by the students, were contrary to traditional Indian values.

Report 2:

Fairfax County middle school student Hal Beaulieu hopped up from his lunch table one day a few months ago, sat next to his girlfriend and slipped his arm around her shoulder. That landed him a trip to the school office.

Among his crimes: hugging.

All touching—not only fighting or inappropriate touching—is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: “NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!

Hmm. Actually, I would have welcomed such a move when I was in school. You see, I was in a boy’s school, and was deeply envious of all the fun boys in co-ed schools must have been having. “They must be touching girls,” I’d think—and then I’d start bawling. “Ban touching,” I must have demanded of any higher power that had the power.

Hey, but at least I changed! 

(Second link via email from MadMan.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 19 June, 2007 in Miscellaneous | Personal

Got wheelchair? Can’t fly

A headline today in the Times of India: ”Private airline offloads wheelchair-bound man.”

Maybe they figured he had his own transport. No, quips aside, this is quite stupid, and I hope the airlines in question figure that they can get a slight competitive advantage, at least in terms of image, by taking special care of the disabled. (I also hope they don’t do cheesy ad campaigns about it, with lines like “So what if you have wheels—we’ll help you fly!")

And the rhetoric of that disability rights group is quite over the top.

Anyway, the last four paras of that story seem to be transplanted from somewhere else: what could the cost of living index have to do with airlines and wheelchairs? WTF?

(Link via email from Ojas Sabnis, who got it from Shailesh Tavate.)

Update: Those extra paras are gone!

Posted by Amit Varma on 19 June, 2007 in India | WTF