“Men who want children should skip the hot tub”

So says Reuters. And what do I say?

Men who have children should boil them.

Posted by Amit Varma on 14 March, 2007 in News | Small thoughts

Courtroom on the idiot box

”High-profile court trials live on TV soon,” reports the Times of India. The report elaborates:

The government is speaking to major SMS operators to examine the feasibility of having major cases decided by public voting.

Ok, ok, I made that second bit up. The government doesn’t need to do that. It has other revenue streams.

Posted by Amit Varma on 14 March, 2007 in India

Journalists in Russia

"Fear makes such a good soil for self-censorship,” says Garry Kasparov, as quoted by Business Week in their story on how the Russian government oppresses journalists, ”Who is killing Russian journalists?” The question, of course, is merely rhetorical.

If you are an Indian journalist, do read and feel relieved. Immense boredom may sometimes come, but at least there is no greater threat to life.

(Link via email from Gautam John.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 14 March, 2007 in Journalism | Politics

Let us trade with Pakistan

My belief in how we should deal with Pakistan was outlined in an earlier post, where I wrote:

I embrace what appears to many to be two contradictory approaches: an uncompromisingly hard line when it comes to terrorism, and a deepening of trade and people-to-people contact. Both work towards the same end.

I remmbering discussing this with Nitin Pai over a series of emails, trying to bring him round to my point of view, and Nitin has now come out with an excellent Op-Ed in Mint that elaborates on my point about using trade to subvert the military’s hold on Pakistan, and explains how the peace process should be re-engineered. Do read.

Posted by Amit Varma on 14 March, 2007 in Economics | India | Politics

Orkut and censorship in India

Orkut has been at the heart of many storms in India (1, 2, 3, 4). Well, no doubt facing the threat of being blocked in India, they have agreed to cooperate with the Indian government to catch people who post “objectionable material on the web.” Indian Express reports:

Following a meeting between representatives of the site and the Enforcement Directorate last month, the Mumbai Police and Orkut have entered into an agreement to seal such cooperation in matters of objectionable material on the web.

“Early February, I met three representatives from Orkut.com, including a top official from the US. The other two were from Bangalore. We reached a working agreement whereby Orkut has agreed to provide us details of the ip address from which an objectionable message or blog has been posted on the site and the Internet service provider involved,” said DCP Enforcement, Sanjay Mohite.

The big worry here is what Mr Mohite means by “objectionable message or blog.” As I’d outlined in my WSJ Op-Ed, ”Fighting Against Censorship,” free speech is coming under sustained attack in India, and giving offence is too often treated as a crime. I hope the Indian government won’t misuse this to act as a cultural or moral police: India isn’t China, and should have nothing to fear from free speech.

There’s more on this subject on Slashdot and Boing Boing.

(Links via separate emails from Neha Viswanathan and Kunal.)

Update: Brazilian authorities also get special access to censor Orkut. Details on Boing Boing.

Update 2: Google responds. (Scroll down.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 13 March, 2007 in Freedom | India

Cricket and the West Indies

It finds them a bond where otherwise there is sea.

So writes my friend Rahul Bhattacharya, India’s best cricket writer by far, in his terrific piece, “Rally round the West Indies”.

As much as the next two months will showcase some great cricket, there will also be lots of great cricket writing on offer. Don’t look at the Indian broadsheets for that—they will make mediocrity seem like a standard to aspire to. Cricinfo, where once I worked, will have some excellent stuff amidst much ordinary writing, as will the British and Australian papers. Now is when the cricket writers will strut.

Not moi! I’m so happy to just be able to watch, without the pressure of having to write, when much of the romance is sucked out by the need to find words for it. Joy.

Also read: Sambit Bal’s piece, ”Let the games begin.”

Posted by Amit Varma on 13 March, 2007 in Sport

Indian food, Western food and fat Indians

Why do I find this conversation fascinating?

Shut up. That was a rhetorical question.

(Link via email from MadMan.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 13 March, 2007 in India

Web 2.0 comes to television

Reader Vikram Chandrashekar points me to a couple of news pieces (1, 2) about the launch in the UK of Current TV, the television channel started by Al Gore. We are informed:

The user-generated programming will feature three to eight-minute short documentaries, known as pods, and half-hourly “news” bulletins describing the UK’s most popular Google search terms.

A third of the films will be made by members of the public and the rest voted onto the channel by viewers.

I’m rather sceptical about “user-generated programming.” As I mentioned here, crowds are great at collating content (Wikipedia) and filtering content (Digg etc), but not so much at creating content. Still, the content creation of crowds can work if you have a real-time filtering mechanism that crowds themselves operate, and if you can cater to the long tail. YouTube can do both of those; Current TV can do neither. For that reason, I think Gore’s venture is likely to fail.

Of course, there’s still the presidency. (1, 2.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 13 March, 2007 in Miscellaneous

Singur: Media bias or media ignorance?

ATimes of India report begins:

Protests against Bengal’s industrial revitalisation could receive a new fillip after the suicide of a 62-year-old cultivator, an organiser of the Krishi Jami Raksha Committee (KJRC) in Singur, who lost nearly an acre of land to the Tata Motors project.

This is either dishonest reporting or shoddy journalism, and I shall give the benefit of the doubt to the reporter and assume that it is the latter. The protests at Singur are not against “Bengal’s industrial revitalisation” but against the forceful appropriation of land by the government. As I wrote in an earlier post on eminent domain and Singur, it really does not matter if the farmers got compensation: if they did not want to sell, it is theft.

Now, eminent domain might be justifiable as a last resort for matters of public use, such as building roads, but it is outrageous when it is applied to take land from poor farmers and give it to a rich industrial house. The irony here is that Tata would probably have been willing to negotiate with the farmers for the land directly, but by law, farmers aren’t allowed to sell their agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes. Yes, that’s right: even if Tata was willing to talk to the farmers and negotiate with them, and farmers were willing to sell, it would have been an illegal transaction. So Tata had no choice but to go to the government, which, of course, is not into negotiating, and simply took the land by force.

I entirely agree with Shruti Rajagopalan when she writes here that the fundamental right to property, revoked in 1978, should be reinstated in our constitution. An “industrial revitalisation” is only sustainable when property rights are sacrosanct. Otherwise it’s a mockery.

Posted by Amit Varma on 13 March, 2007 in Economics | Freedom | India | Journalism | Politics

India in the 19th century

Most of the Indian women I know who are around 30 years old are unmarried—and they’re happy that way. That is why I was somewhat bemused by this line in a Reuters report of Liz Hurley’s wedding:

Indian women are commonly married off in their teens to a man of their parents’ choosing, and are a cause of despair if they are still a spinster at 30.

Clearly the reporter in question, Jonathan Allen, had just flown down to India for the wedding, and obviously hadn’t spent any time here to get to know the place. Perhaps he even read Kipling for his research.

In tune with their coverage of India in the 19th century, another Reuters headline reads, ”Horses, elephants to star in Hurley’s Hindu wedding.” I’m relieved that there is nothing in the text about how Indians worship the cow and consider it their mother. Joy.

(Link via Divisha Gupta via email from Gautam John.)

Posted by Amit Varma on 13 March, 2007 in India | Journalism