Funny Side (Hopefully) Up

Have you seen this ad on YouTube featuring a seriously overweight guy who professes to love traffic? If you haven't, you're not missing an awful lot. If you have, well, good on you! Either way, what I mean to say is that in a strange way, pretty much all of us Indians are like the overweight guy, we just love traffic for rather different reasons than the chap in the ad. If you've spent any length of time in the company of Indian males, you will probably have discussed <insert your locality here>'s traffic problems. Everyone, no doubt, would have spoken of the traffic with contempt. There were probably a few mentions in the conversation of how the traffic is bad because there was no planning to how your city/town/subdivision of Atlantis was constructed. Someone will also probably refer to a few bottlenecks. At some point, everyone would have begun to blame it on the government and the conversation would have turned into a denouncement of all things bureaucratic....

A few days ago, Moody's, an American rating agency-type thing, did an analysis on India. The essence of the analysis - or at least, the part which everyone is all up in arms about - is that communal violence in India has to be curbed. As communal violence goes, India is in pretty bad shape. Between the years of 2004 and 2009, approximately 130 people died every year, with thousands of people being injured. While 130 people may not seem like that many, I invite you to think about how exactly you would feel if one of the 130 was a friend  of yours. What I don't understand is what all this is in aid of. Now, I personally am not exactly a good, God-fearing Hindu, so no doubt my word will carry little weight where the religious-violence-propagators of this world are concerned, but here's my two cents anyway. While I have nothing against religion in itself, I do have something against the killing in the name of one religion or another. Actually, let me amend that statement - ...

"Space, the fina-" oops, sorry, wrong frontier! The frontier in question here is the internet. As you probably know if you have been following this blog fairly regularly (and if you haven't, why haven't you?), I'm a big fan of free speech and all that good stuff. I'm also a big fan of being able to use the internet freely. Don't get me wrong - I hate DDoSers as much as the next guy - but I think I ought to be able to access all the sites on the web. All of a sudden, though, the geniuses over at the Department of Telecom have gone and implemented censorship! The DoT has been implementing some serious censorship lately, but I probably don't need to tell you that. Of course, many of the blocked sites host copyrighted material, so I don't particularly mind them censoring that (actually, I do, but let's pretend I'm not so Modi doesn't send his hitmen after me). However, blocking Adf.ly , a URL shortening service, of all things, seems a bi...

The American Presidential Elections (yes, you do need to type that with the capitals) are right round the corner, so what better subject to blog about than Obie's (Obama's) successor? As of right now, the chap getting the most attention in the election is everyone's favourite idiot(-savant), Donald Trump. Donald Trump, for those of you who don't know, is a Republican who makes Alia Bhatt seem a likely candidate for a Nobel prize in History. He has, in short, the mental acuity of a stick insect. IMHO, the only reason Trump joined the elections was to become a meme (choice samples shown below). Be careful, things might get hairy with these memes... Eat your heart out, Chuck Norris! Donald Trump does, however, have his good ideas (no, I swear, it's true!). For instance, he feels that the best way to stop oil prices rising is to have someone sitting in Washington saying, you will not raise that <unprintable word> price. Absolute genius, right? Our f...

Have you ever wondered about geeky kids? Geeky kids, here, need not be nerdy kids. Geeks, specifically, at least the way I define them, are basically just people who are good with computers. They're the sort of people who get the pun, "If you pile up Coke bottles, are you stacking the pop ?" Basically, they're the guys who make computers  do the things that computers do (which is a lot of things, by the way, including letting you read this blog post.) So all you kids out there who think you can join geek club out there because you know a lot of Klingon, shoo. Personally, I've always been kind of proud to be a geek, perhaps largely because my classmates are OK with my being a geek. It's also a lot of fun. Being able to program (a near-necessity to be considered a geek) is actually pretty cool. You have the ability to solve so many problems, not just for other geeks, but also for other people as well. It isn't even that hard to do (whatever the non-geek b...

For those of you who've been checking back to this blog on a regular basis to see if there's any new content (and if you haven't, why haven't you?), I think I owe an explanation as to why you haven't seen any. You see, two weeks ago, I hurt my right wrist in a car accident. Don't worry, I'm OK and also probably alive (I see a white light!), back at the old stand and churning out blog posts at the fantastically lazy rate of once a week. Luckily for us, no one got hurt, and we're all safely at home. Our car after the accident. Once upon a younger year, it looked a lot more like an SUV. I didn't write this article to tell you about my near escape, though. I wrote this article to talk about local languages and just why it's important to speak them. In the case of our car crash, for instance. A couple of minutes after the car had landed (on its roof, no less!), a bunch of onlookers had gathered. One of them took a large stone and smashed our win...

Every day, when I sit down to study, I close my door. Not because I don't want anyone to see me studying, but because I wouldn't be able to study if it were open. Mainly, this is because my grandmother is having a shouting match with one or all of the servants. Now, I don't know how it is in other houses, but in our house, we have three people who come in to work - one person who cooks, one person who cleans and a third who deals with the garden and walks the dog and does all the other little odd jobs around the house. It sounds like a perfect solution, right? We don't have any work to do! The problem is, though, every person we find for any of the above posts turns out to be argumentative and noisy. Until last year, our house functioned quite smoothly. We had a cook, a driver, a gardener and a cleaner, all of whom had been working in the house for at least three years. However, over the course of a few months that year, all of them left or were fired for varying reas...