Out to Pasture: India's Milkmen Bide Their Time - WSJ.com

[article] --- Once respected civil servants, Mr. Walkar and his 300-odd fellow drivers have been left in a strange limbo. Milk sales at their dairy have plummeted as the state government lost its monopoly on milk and consumer tastes changed. But because Indian work rules strictly protect government workers from layoffs, the delivery men show up for work each morning for eight-hour shifts, as they always did, then proceed to do nothing all day. They rarely, if ever, leave the plant.

Nathuram brought up as a girl - HT

Although I feel sorry for poor a$$holes like Godse.  I somehow don't think his being treated as a girl when he was a kid has anything to do with it. This is so goddam common in India. People dress up their babies with clothes of the opposite gender if they are unable to have such a  kid.
What !! is Malgaonkar from  some alien planet.  Why is he talking as if he  has never even been to India.  Its as if we were to go to the Indus valley civilization and speculate about their social structures based on some evidence of violence. Dude, wake up and smell the coffee. And while you are at it, look out of the window and you might see your wife walking your son in his new pink frock :)

Also his childhood experience with being a God child, I think is a normal thing in India.

Somehow I think HT is screwing up reporting here :)

http://www.htnext.in/news/7097_2101937,008700010015.htm --- Mulgaonkar says that psychologists may find some explanation for Nathuram's warped mental processes in the fact that he was brought up as a girl. His left nostril was pierced to take a nose ring, he writes.

China | The new colonialists | Economist.com

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10853534 ---
THERE is no exaggerating China's hunger for commodities. The country accounts for about a fifth of the world's population, yet it gobbles up more than half of the world's pork, half of its cement, a third of its steel and over a quarter of its aluminium. It is spending 35 times as much on imports of soya beans and crude oil as it did in 1999, and 23 times as much importing copper—indeed, China has swallowed over four-fifths of the increase in the world's copper supply since 2000.


source :http://english.people.com.cn/china/images/map11.jpg

Couple of interesting things that these bunch of articles on China seem to suggest :
1. China seems to be gaining economic clout to make or break rogue states. The US influence is being countered.
2. Manufacturing and wealth could spread to Africa, Indonesia and Malaysia. This could have a positive effect on any rise in radical Islam or if its oil that they produce it could just encourage these hooligans.
3. Is a flatter world good because no one will be in position to control rogue states. Can we have multiple super powers who are on friendly terms (atleast agree on taking on rulers in Sudan and Burma) ?

Movie Review: Iron Jawed Angels

Very nice movie [synopsis]. I think women would find this movie hit them deeper than it did me. I really like Hilary Swank a lot. I was equally thrilled after watching "Freedom Writers". She's done a good job there too.
A couple of things struck me while I watched it. Alice Paul says that she cannot afford to have a romantic relationship while she is trying to achieve her goal. Her reasoning is that she will not be able to give that amount of time to her partner and might also be not giving her work the best she could. Would a man ever have to think that way. Don't most men think that having a  partner will help them achieve the goal more easily. Is it possible that women can provide men a support system that men cannot provide to their ladies. I don't know the answer to this. But I am tending to think that the average man is lacking in this department. Hopefully in the next couple of generations atleast some societies will bring up their boys with such qualities. We can already see women demanding such behavior from their partners.


Time and again sociologists and psychologists have shown that people are mostly irrational. Last week I was reading Russel and he aims his arsenal on the Christian Church to provide tons of examples how people were irrational. Actually, I think people behave this way not because of irrationality but because they want to maximize their short term gains by maintaining the power structures. Men would be so much better off in the short term if women were secondary to them. Its difficult to understand the benefits of women having equal standing in society. I have seen plenty of educated people who do not fully appreciate the benefits of diversity. I need to go back and read that Russel article again. In this movie they show the men in power illegally putting the suffragists behind bars and being violent with them. It seems so unbelievable. But societies seem to be doing this repeatedly. Looks like our history teachers are not being paid well to do their jobs :)

Emotions !! We as people get emotional. I am thinking if this is a sign of weakness. If you get emotional when you see someone finally achieve their goals after a lot of trials, are you weaker because of that. Wouldn't it be better if we were just super-cool all the time. Aha the word I could've used here could be "dispassionate". However if you are so dispassionate will you even struggle hard enough to achieve your goals. We evolved passions probably as a means of better chances to survive.

What's Racist? The Importance of a Glance - TIME

Crosby worries that this deference may mean we don't trust our own instincts when deciding what is offensive. As Monin, one of the study's co-authors, says, "That's great, of course, that downtrodden groups have a voice," but it also means that too often we may be leaving the responsibility for confronting discrimination in the hands of those discriminated against.

Crosby recalls an example of this from her undergraduate career at Stanford. The school's sports teams were called the Indians from 1930 to 1972, when the name was dropped because of protest from Native American students. Still, from time to time the former mascot would appear on t-shirts and paraphernalia — and each time it fell to Native American students to bring up their objections to the administration, Crosby says. "Why is it always their job?" she asks.
[Article]

The Muslim Demography Of India: Sachar Committee Report « The State Of the Oldest Nation

Interesting report. And thanks to blog author for summarizing it.

http://hawkeyeindia.wordpress.com/2006/12/06/the-muslim-demography-of-india-sachar-committee-report/ ---

The report confirms that Muslims have higher population growth rates and higher fertility rates than the rest of the population even when adjusted to regional variations such as the North(with a higher population growth rates) or south(with near replacement level growth rates). In both instances the Muslim Population growth rate is slightly higher than that of the other Socio-religious communities in the said region.

The report also says that Muslims have the most favourable child sex ratio among all Socio-religious communities in the country. An average of 986 females to every 1000 males compared to 927/1000 for the general population.

They have a lower rate of Infant mortality compared to the rest of the population but paradoxically have a higher incidence of child under-nourishment cases.

Muslims have a younger age profile compared to the general population.

The Muslim Population has for historical reasons a more urban profile than the rest of the population. According to the 2001 census 35.7% of the Muslim population was urban compared to 27.8% for the overall population.

Movie review: Jodhaa Akbar

I was impressed by Gowarikar's rendering of the movie. Maybe I never paid close attention, but I never spotted the continual link of national awareness elements in "all" his movies from lagaan, swades to Jodhaa. In Jodhaa he has repeatedly tried to show that muslims considered themselves part of "hindustan".  Shows the Sufi side of Islam and has Akbar raving about the importance of keeping the "state and church" separate. I am sure by this time Western philosophers were coming to similar understandings. (John Calvin was playing with these ideas probably at around the same time. I was thinking Akbar probably heard of such notions from traveling scholars. Happy to be wrong here.).



While watching this I began to think that a more serious movie maker could've thought of exploring Akbar's thought process on good governance. The whole aspect of challenging the religious elders in the court on religious tolerance could be made in a 20 episode TV series, easily. Then I thought, something like this might not even be watched by 1% of the public that queued up for this movie. Unfortunately we need simplistic messages to get across to larger masses of people. The interesting thing is that I just began to assume that this will have a positive effect on people who just brand all muslims as bad. Then I thought of this conversation with a friend. He was referring to an email thread about "Akbar being a bad ruler". This counter meme is likely to catch on more with the guys who are already wanting to think on those lines. I hope the movie leaves a more lasting impression on their conscious brains than the email threads.

Other than the subliminal message of national integration the tangent to the character of possessive "Maham Anga" (played very well by ila arun) was nice too. She gets jealous of her daughter-in-law like most mom-in-laws, but the movie takes this opportunity to show that even a great king like Akbar learnt able governance from small fights like these with his wife. Jodhaa teaches him to "trust but verify".

Oh and I liked the way Ash looks. They've done a decent job in enacting their characters I think. Of course one could argue that maybe Jodhaa could be portrayed as a bit more stronger woman. A new face would've worked better. Hrithik is good too. Some scenes with the side characters could've been dont better. But I will always have this crib with the Indian film industry. For some reason the 2nd rung character artistes (I count Kulbushan kharbanda and his likes as first rung character artists) seem to think that over dramatization is the key to acting well. Why the hell did they want to show Akbar taming a wild elephant is beyond me. That whole scene was sooo crappy. The good thing is the movie spares us the trouble of hating ourselves for buying the $10 ticket by not inserting untimely and long song and dance sequences.

All in all paisa-vasool. But I guess I was in need for very little mental stimulation at the end of a busy Friday too :)

On a side-note: Remember when they had Tipu Sultan on TV. We used to collect chocolate wrappers with Tipu sultan pictures on it and then exchange the wrappers for some useless gift. I wonder if they would still do that with something like Akbar :)

Consciousness is only a word

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-02-27.html --- "Consciousness" is only a word we use to refer to sometimes quite different behavioral phenomena. In this article I have suggested that most of the time what people mean by the word is our ongoing, though mostly covert, self-talk about our own public and private stimulation and behaviors. This account may or may not be correct, but it is parsimonious because it makes very few assumptions and appeals to observable or potentially observable relationships that are consistent with experimentally established scientific principles. We skeptics find it all too easy to fault obvious pseudosciences, but when it comes to our own messy, unscientific thinking about ourselves, we're a lot less critical. Thus, it will probably take a lot longer to realize that the conscious inner life that so fascinates us may be nothing more than a learned repertoire of verbal (and/or imaginal) behavior than it did to realize that the earth is not flat, that it is not the center of the universe, and that life on earth was not designed by a Creator.