Funny Side (Hopefully) Up

Have you ever noticed how the newspapers these days are just full of bad news? It's like there's no longer anything good going on in the world any more. I remember back when newspapers had good news in them, and - wait, I'm fifteen. I've no recollection of such a time. But seriously, I'm sure there was one. There must have been a time when the newspapers were full of little bits of good news. Now you actually have to search through all the bad news for a shred of good news. If you saw the world only as it is portrayed by newspapers, you'd probably be afraid to step out of your own front door without a shotgun and a bulletproof vest. You'd think the world was full of thieves, murderers, cheats and corrupt politicians - the dregs of society. You would be, in short, paranoid, depressing and no fun at all to hang out with. Our public media channels are really of two types. The type that tells you about said murders and robberies and other depressing stuff an...

First off, I want to apologize to Impana Halgeri. She's my most reliable commenter/blog-reader and I promised I'd write her a post for her birthday a couple of days ago (unless she follows the Hindu calendar - then I've no clue when it is), something which I quite forgot to do (I wasn't being lazy, I swear!). Now then, on to the post. On the subject of birthdays, I decided to make a blog post a couple of days ago about the Gregorian calendar (the one that we use as of right now) and how it's evolved since Greg came up with it. Greg, incidentally, was really Pope Gregory XIII (I know, lucky number thirteen, huh?). So anyway, up until Greg the (Possibly) Unlucky came up with his brilliant new calendar, all the Christian folks were using something called the Julian Calendar, which was invented by - you guessed it - Jules! Jules being Julius Caesar, that chap that Asterix and Obelix keep beating up. So anyway, Jules' calendar made the year 0.002% too long, and for...

At least, that's what Chatur Ramalingam seems to think. However, many of our fellow Indians seem to disagree with him. According to them, there are nothing BUT places to do mutra visarjan (for all you poor, masochistic folks - ah, I mean, non-movie-going folks - out there, mutra visarjan means urine expulsion). In case you haven't guessed already, we're going to be talking about one of India's most widely criticized and even more widely practiced issues - public urination. I'm not exactly saying that it's our people's fault - I mean, come on, we have so much urine-related cultural history! Just in the past 50 years, we've had people who've used their urine for everything from watering plants to drinking it (I believe that some people also flush it down their toilets. How wasteful of them). Besides all the historical precedents, however, we also have some more practical reasons for peeing wherever and whenever we feel like. If you've ever seen...