What does “sic” mean?
No googling.

The Economist reports on China revaluing its currency and says that this has made a soft-landing more likely. However, I stick by my prediction.

The Indian Blogosphere has gotten into one of its periodic fits of wondering about what to do about nasty comments. I have stayed out of previous discussions on the subject, but I fear that I cannot resist any more.

As you can see, I do enable comments. I have been fortunate in that most of the comments – in fact, the overwhelming majority of them, have been civil and intelligent ones. I’ve hardly had to do any policing, and the little I do has to do with deleting spam that spam karma catches for me. It’s not as if I steer clear of controversial topics. So I suppose that the quality of my comments section entitles me to some bragging rights which I shall herewith proceed to expend.
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Update: Cancelled because of rains.
As I was saying, the Bombay Bloggers Meet for July will actually take place. It will take place on the 31st of July, which is a Sunday. I was saying that we have chosen a venue for the Meet. It will be held at Prithvi Theatre.

Wait a minute! I hear you ask. Isn’t that a somewhat unusual place for a Bloggers Meet? Apparently, no. I am told that there is a restaurant at the premises, where food and coffee can be had. If the location proves unsuitable, there are many other places nearby where more coffee can be had. Therefore, it has been decided (after extensive and wide-ranging discussions) that that is where we shall all meet. The only downside to the venue is that newcomers can no longer adopt the usual heuristic to find the table where the Bloggers are sitting, viz. check for the table where the people look the weirdest. Hence we shall find some other way of identifying ourselves.

What else? Yes, the address. This is what I have been able to find:

Prithvi Theatre
Janki Kutir
Juhu Church Road,
Mumbai
and the time of the meet is 3 PM as usual. Unfortunately, apart from this, I have no idea how to get there. But I am sure I can find a way, and so can you. Thank you.

Remember, long long back I had asked Was the British Raj good for India?

That post got me an astonishing 64 comments. That makes me feel guilty about leaving that tantalising “January 14th, 1761” remark open ended. Now that the Prime Minister has caught the Advani disease, I suppose this is as good a time as any to examine what happened on January 14, 1761.

Yes, that date refers to the third battle of Panipat, one which the Marathas lost rather ignominously, and some would say, unnecessarily. There are two ways to look at the defeat. One way is the Narlikar way.
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Indira Gandhi declared the emergency after losing an election related court-case right?
Who was her lawyer? Very easy. No googling.

The onerous task of conducting the next Bombay Bloggers Meet has fallen on my shoulders. I realise that this is not a task that can be undertaken lightly. Therefore, after extensive and wide-ranging discussions, I have taken the first (and only) decision that is involved in being a Conductor of the Bombay Bloggers’ Meet.

I have chosen a venue.

The importance of this decision cannot be misunderestimated. The two most important decisions involved in setting up a meeting are choosing a venue and deciding a time. Opinions are divided on which of the two is more important.

Some say that deciding on a time is the most important thing. If a venue is chosen, but not the time, people will probably land up at the venue at different times. They will not find other participants and naturally, they will get confused. If the venue chosen is a public place like a restaurant, they might go around asking random people if they have come to attend the meeting. Finding that no one there has come to attend the meeting, they might give up and join some other meeting.

“Precisely” says the opposing school of thought. If a venue is chosen, but not the time, people can still have the meeting. It will just not be with the same set of people they were supposed to meet in the first place. On the other hand, if a time is chosen but not the venue, people will start off without knowing where to go. Now, while time is a single dimension, space is two-dimensional.(Some people say that given that highrises are a fact of life in a city like Bombay, it is more accurate to call space 3-dimensional.) Therefore, the probability that two people who set out for a meeting without knowing a venue will meet accidentally is much lower than the probability that two people who attend a meeting at a venue without knowing the time of the meeting will meet.

This discussion of course, does not take into account the impact that technology has had on the conduct of modern meetings. In many respects, it has made it possible to conduct a meeting without choosing a venue, though purists might object that such meetings would amount to stretching the definition of “meet” too far.

The foregoing discussion, while interesting in its own right, is reduced to being of only academic interest in the present context. That is because I have, after due deliberation, chosen both a time and a venue for the Bombay Bloggers Meet for July ’05.

Aren’t you very worried by the RSS takeover of your party? It seems to me that nothing good can come out of it. What are you folks thinking? (You may respond even if you aren’t exactly a BJP supporter. )

Just thought I’d remind people that Salman Khan is a bad man, not because he was mean to a nice girl like Aishwarya Rai, but because he has done other bad things like get drunk and mow down people sleeping on the pavement, and wilfully shoot blackbucks in places that he wasn’t supposed to. If the media had followed up the mowing down story with as much diligence as it is following this story (or, for a better example of what the media can do – the Marine Drive rape case ) perhaps we’d have seen him in jail by now.

Or, if you are a human female, consider the question amended to “Would you find a male gorilla attractive?” (“Of course! Why else would I get married?” will not be considered an answer.)

Yes, by “attractive” I mean attractive in that way. If your answer to this question is a shocked or a somewhat bemused “No”, let me remind you that I am not asking you “Do you find her attractive” My question is would you find her attractive if you were brought up in a different culture. Suppose that you were a feral child brought up by gorillas, or if you were brought up by some sort of cult which considered gorillas distant cousins of humans, and hence accepted sexual relations with them as normal. Would you ever be attracted to a gorilla?
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Bomb Blasts in London

Well, not really, but that is what his article bemoaning the growth of cars amounts to.
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