My esteemed flatmate has written a blogpost about sex education. He claims that when it comes to sex, Indians practice but don’t preach.
Please read it. As someone who preaches but doesn’t practice, his insight is invaluable.
The Criminal Underclass of the Avian World
June 19, 2007Aishwarya has discovered the video for March of the Sinister Ducks, and asks if these ducks are left-wing.
She doesn’t know the half of it. Left-wingers at least pretend to be all about the compassion. When Naxals kill people, they do it in the name of class war. But ducks are openly criminal and vile.
Check out this flickr thread, about rapist ducks:
today i witnessed a very disturbing incident at a duck pond in duke gardens. a group of male mallards, roughly about 9-11 of them were stocking/pestering this female duck. they surrounded her and began stacking themselves on top of her. she was completely underneath the water. she was drowning. they were pecking at her head. the first thing that came to my head was gang rape. they were very violent with her. her head was bleeding. this went on for over a half hour. they were just taking their turns, it looked like 2 at a time.
Gangrape is not the only crime these webfooted villains indulge in. They commit interspecies extortion also:
bread is to ducks like “crack” is to people. I’ve seen them go absolutely wild and attack kids at ponds for bread.
And interspecies gang wars:
Not only do they attack the children, they also attack each other in their fight for bread. If all that wasn’t bad enough, you reminded me of something else. Feeding wild ducks encourages them to live on the same ponds as swans, which ordinarily they would not do. This causes the swans to defend their territory, which they achieve in the breeding season by drowning ducklings.
I’m going to end this post here, before I succumb to the temptation of making a ‘foul/ fowl’ pun.
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Equality and Equalisation
May 13, 2007The FGB writes about Dalit participation in the UP elections, and makes an excellent point:
There is nothing radical being said here. I am just advocating equality. The politicians and the armchair economists and political theorists on the other hand are always lobbying for equalisation.
But the most important paragraph is this one:
Instead we do not what is right, but what is easiest. Oppress them with state machinery, and then buy them out (if we allow them to vote) in return for IIM seats.
This is a massively important insight into how the Indian government works- not just in the realm of social justice, but in many others as well. I’ll make my own post on it sometime.
Meanwhile, read the whole thing.
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Trepidation and Inspiration
April 28, 2007Despite much pleading and negotiation, Mint informed me today that no way are they going to agree to a proposal before I actually write the pieces. In other words, my plan of financing a trip to the Philippines by selling multiple travel writing pieces to them has come a cropper.
Not a complete cropper. They haven’t refused to take stories, they’ve just refused to confirm. So I’m faced with a decision: do I blow up my entire bonus (which, by the way, I don’t even get for another couple of months) on a vacation, with no guarantee that I’ll ever recover the money?
Then, I discover this post in my blog feeds, and suddenly the decision is much less difficult.
I’m going to go, have a blast, write up the vacation, and sell it. It’ll take audacity. But then audacity is a virtue worth cultivating.
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The World is a Weird Place
April 14, 2007Three links.
First, via Pharyngula, I discover the worst fantasy story in the world. As the transcriptor writes:
No mere transcription can give the true flavor of the original printing of The Eye of Argon. It was mimeographed with stencils cut on an elite manual typewriter. Many letters were so faint as to be barely readable, others were overstruck, and some that were to be removed never got painted out with correction fluid. Usually, only one space separated sentences, while paragraphs were separated by a blank line and were indented ten spaces. Many words were grotesquely hyphenated. And there were illustrations — I cannot do them justice in mere words, but they were a match for the text.
I can vouch for that. Here’s just one sample:
A gaunt skull faced priest standing at the far side of the altar clutched desperately at his throat, coughing furiously in an attempt to catch his breath. Lurching helplessly to and fro, the acolyte pitched headlong against the gleaming base of a massive jade idol. Writhing agonizedly against the hideous image, foam flecking his chalk white lips, the priest struggled helplessly – – – the victim of an epileptic siezure.
Startled by the barbarians stunning appearance, the chronic fit of their fellow, and the fear that Grignr might be the avantgarde of a conquering force dedicated to the cause of destroying their degenerated cult, the saman momentarily lost their composure. Giving vent to heedless pandemonium, the priests fell easy prey to Grignr’s sweeping arc of crimsoned death and maiming distruction.
Stunning, no?
Next, via DealBreaker, I find what is rumoured to be the HSBC Company Song (mp3, 2.77 MB). Lyrics:
Let’s live it!
H! S! B! C! Live it!We have the HSBC vision
putting what we’ve learned into actionWith focus and commitment
for our customers through passion
Let’s stay number one
With a vision we will run
With a strategy and energy
Together we will be
HSBC you and me
I’m sorry, I can’t go on further. But I’m overjoyed. Go HSBC! What is an extra billion and a half dollars in bad debt provisioning compared to the might of your company song?
Last up, the Simon World blogpost on Nail Houses. Some developer tried to acquire houses, but one guy refused to sell. Check out the picture, you’ll understand.
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Pissing Off Everybody
March 18, 2007Human Rights Watch has a report out which says that discrimination against Dalits is equivalent to apartheid. This is patently stupid, since apartheid was institutionalised by the South African state, whereas at least legally, the Indian state is constitutionally bound to discriminate for Dalits. (The fact that is fucks the implementation up is a separate matter altogether.) Anyway, I foresee a lot of people getting offended by this, especially the Hindutva types. But check out what HRW wrote in the press release:
“International scrutiny is growing and with it the condemnation of abuses resulting from the caste system and the government’s failure to protect Dalits,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “India needs to mobilize the entire government and make good on its paper commitments to end caste abuses. Otherwise, it risks pariah status for its homegrown brand of apartheid.” (emphasis mine)
This is fucking hilarious, in the context of this:
Though our Acts prohibits the derogatory usage of the words such as `pariah’, the people in media still continues to use it in a casual manner. They must learn some lessons from countries like America where the Blacks were called once as `nigger’. Now they use `African Americans’ to identify Black people. This kind of insensitivity should not be tolerated. I request everybody to share my pain and come forward to feel like a `pariah’.
This rocks. HRW will piss off both the Hindutva loonies and the Dalit loonies. If the Dalit Panthers attack HRW for being politically incorrect and insulting Dalit sentiments I will weep tears of delight.
HRW is not the only organisation which manages to piss off two usually antagonistic sets of people. Camlin does it too. Charu Kesi is outraged that their permanent marker ad glorifies regressive behaviour:
Yes, really permanent. Widowhood, breaking of bangles, erasing of sindoor… the works. In the last scene, the poor man comes back to life, else what would have been the next shot in the ad, I wonder – sati? Even “worse”, what if the poor man does not come back to life, and the bindi does not got erased? What a blow to Indian culture that would have been…
but the Rational Fool thinks that it mocks orthodox Hindus:
I wonder if the lawyer from Indore, who recently sued the former Indian cricketer Ravi Sastri for hurting the sentiments of the Hindu faithfuls by extolling the virtues of eating biltong, had noticed the Camlin ad!
This rocks too. I have visions of angry feminists attacking the Camlin HQ from the front side and RSS workers attacking from the back side, charging their way through cubicle space until they eventually read the CEO’s cabin and pulverize him between the two of them. It will be like Unhygenix and Fulliautomatix setting aside their differences when it comes to the big punch-up in the last few pages of an Asterix book.
Of course, when it comes to pissing off people who are usually at odds, the Chinese were way ahead in the game.
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And You Thought He Made This Stuff Up
March 16, 2007Some people say that writing dwarf songs is not hard to do, as long as you can remember how to spell “Gold,” but this is a little bit cynical. Many dwarf songs* are on the lines of “Gold, gold, gold” but it’s all in the inflection–dwarfs have thousands of words for gold, but will use any of them in an emergency, such as when they see some gold that doesn’t belong to them.
*All right–all dwarf songs. Except for the one about Hiho.
What I really want to know: why is it that every single Chinese New Year song is about money? I just heard one that went “qian ah qian ah qian ah qian ah qian ah qian ah qian” (translated: “money, money, money, money, money, money, money ah..”, set to a tune)… for thirty minutes.
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My New NGO
March 16, 2007I am starting an NGO called the Kansa Society. Its aim is to promote the slaughter of irritating kids. I will be the Chairman Emeritus and Kodhi will be the President. But Jabberwock and Nilu are welcome to join.
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Visual Puns Are Good Too
February 7, 2007Chilli in Mint:
Also, Chillie in Mint:
The real blame lies with every socialist government that amended the Constitution, infringing on property rights. And the answer lies in reinstating an individual’s fundamental right to private property—which was abolished in 1978—and restraining the government’s power of eminent domain.
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theothernilu is a Goddess
January 20, 2007
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