Funny Side (Hopefully) Up

Harvinder Chowdury, a Sikh lawyer, has filed a Public Interest Litigation demanding that the courts ban Sardarji jokes. The courts, much more worryingly, have actually decided to take this seriously. Apparently, they're going to decide if the jokes "offend the Sardar community." Personally, I think this is a bit much. I mean, are you seriously going to go out and ban Sardarji jokes? Also, Sardarji jokes have been around for ages. How come all of a sudden, people are offended? Why is it a big deal in the first place? I mean, there are tons of communities out there who have jokes made about them. Take, for example, the rednecks. Rednecks don't shoot people for making jokes about them. Rednecks just generally shoot people. But that's neither here nor there. According to Ms. Chowdury, Sardarji jokes are a violation of the Sikh community's right to equality with other communities. I actually have a theory about equality where jokes are concerned. It is that if ...

Last week, I wrote a blog post about a project which we decided to take up called A Thousand Smiling Faces  . Between then and now, the most important thing we've managed to do is contract "A Thousand Smiling Faces" to "1K:)". We also managed to deliver 1085 burgers to kids in orphanages around the city. We began collecting money around 8 days ago. After several Facebook posts, two blog entries, God alone knows how many emails and hours spent walking from house to house asking people to donate, we managed to raise over  ₹1,00,000. The meals themselves cost us  ₹86,500 (McDonald's gave us a 20% discount on the grounds that it was charity), which leaves us with approximately  ₹10,000 behind the loose brick. I intend to use the  ₹10,000 to buy a  Jacuzzi  do another set of deliveries after the 16th of January, once my exams are finished.  The project involved over 20 of my friends (and friends' friends) and 15 orphanages. We had at least...

This week, I intend to have a stab at one of the most difficult tasks known to mankind: persuading an adult to part with a sum of money. Not a very large sum, but a sum nonetheless. This New Year's Day, I want to get 1000 kids in orphanages around the city burgers, fries and a drink from McDonald's.  And that, unfortunately, costs money. The first thing you'd wonder is probably, "Why McDonald's burgers?" Well, the thing is, I've worked at an orphanage before, and I remember that the kids at the orphanage really loved the burgers. I, like so many teenagers, have my parents to take me to McDonald's every once in a while and buy me a burger. These guys have no one. To them, a burger is something quite amazing. The look in their faces when they ate those burgers would have given those chaps whom Christ gave manna to a run for their money in terms of happiness. Another thing that quite a few of my friends have mentioned is the fact that burgers aren...

I'm terribly sorry that I'm making a second soppy post right after the last one about me leaving school, but hey, I've a really good reason this time. The reason is this: my dog died last night. Of a kidney ailment, of all things. My dog's name was Pluto. He was a white Labrador of approximately twelve years of age, with white fur. I'd tell you his height and width if I knew his height and width. He was, in my opinion, the greatest of all dogs everywhere, an exemplary example of canine-hood and man's-best-friend-hood. We've had him since he was about a month old and I was three and a bit. I'd love to say that I had him sleep next to me every night. I'd love to say that I played with him every day and fed him doggy treats at regular intervals. I'd love to say that I groomed him and gave him baths and took him to dog shows and regularly kissed him on the nose. The fact of the matter is, though, I didn't. Oh, sure, I used to play with him ne...

A lot of you mat not know this, but I'm now in 10th grade. This means, mainly, that relatives, neighbours and random people on the street tell you to study hard. Aside from that, though, it also means that I'm going to leave my current school for a different one. Before we go any further, I'd like to ask those of you who are allergic to soppy sentimentality to please leave. Those of you brave enough, please read on. I've done my fair share of bashing the education system (case in point: here ), but now that I'm actually LEAVING my school, I realize that I'm actually going to miss it. Until very recently, I never really thought about the fact that this is my last year in this school. Sure, I've been intending to leave at the end of 10th grade for a long while now. Sure, I knew that the end of 10th grade would come at some point. The thing is, it never seemed imminent. It always seemed like some event that was to occur at some point in the distant future. Wh...

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 - ...