Turns out that the indelible ink can in fact be rubbed off if you do it immediately after it has been applied. But it still takes time to do it, and that is the time when you are supposed to be voting, so if you go into the polling booth and spend all your time rubbing your fingers, I think people will notice..

Turns out that I am the blog of the day on Blogstreet India today. Don’t use this as an excuse not to read me tomorrow. Read me every day, whether or not I have written anything new.

Also link to me, so that my rankings in Blogstreet improve. It is a crying shame that I am ranked sixth and tied with Aunty. Help me pull ahead of her!

• It is obliged, not obligated
  
• It is uninterested and not disinterested, unless you mean disinterested, in which case it is disinterested and not uninterested. If you don’t know which is the right one, then use uninterested, because if you know what disinterested means, you will know the difference.
  
• It is almost always alternatively and not alternately.

Tomorrow will be the first time I will be voting using an EVM. One way or the other I’ve been missing out on voting, mostly because I was out of Bombay during the last election cycle and I couldn’t prove that I was staying where I was staying. During the Lok sabha elections it turned out that our name wasn’t on the list because we had shifted homes across constituencies and there was no one home when people came over to do the enumeration. Now, thanks to the efforts of my brother, we are finally registered voters in Thane.

The only problem is there is nothing at all to choose between the two morons.

It is with the deepest regret that I have to announce that Aniruddha Mahajan’s post on how long his fingernails have grown is the victor in the September Blog Mela. I would like to extend my halfhearted congratulations to Mr. Mahajan for his impressive display of rigging skills.
That only ray of hope that we can discern in the dark picture is that he failed to win an absolute majority of posts; so we can take heart in the fact that only thirty percent of the readership of the Indian Blogosphere finds itself utterly fascinated by the length of Mr. Mahajan’s …fingernails.

Anya is requested to contact Shanti Aunty for his Amazon gift certificate. I also have a recommendation for him as to what he should buy with it.
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The essay I was talking of was George Orwell’s Lion and the Unicorn. The objective demonstration of socialism being better than capitalism was, according to him, provided by the fact that Nazis were doing so well in the war. (The essay was written in 1942).

Funny isn’t it?

That is half the story. In the nineteenth century, imports from Britain killed off Indian industry, especially the textile industry. But then, towards the end of the nineteenth century, something interesting started happening. Indian industrialists started setting up industries in India. An entire textile industry came into being. And, this is the most interesting part – the industrialists started off their lives as traders, more specifically as importers. See here for a detailed description of how that happened. Actually, go ahead and read the whole book. The traders found that cheap imports had created a market which made it feasible for them to set up here.
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As you know, for the first time in its history, the Cartel is faced with the disgraceful prospect of losing at the Blog Mela. As of this writing, Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan is running fourth in the polling, and I don’t think he has any chance whatsoever of pulling ahead. I think that drastic measures need to be taken for us to be able to truthfully claim that the Cartel has never lost at the Mela hustings.

I therefore propose that we expel Ravages from the membership of the Cartel. What do the others think?

That the Chairman of BHEL is Mr. A. K. Puri?

This expresses my philosophy perfectly.

#1
To all those who claim that the British “deindustrialised” India, and Nehru started us off on the right path.
Do you know when and how India’s textile industry developed?

#2
You all know that George Orwell was a dedicated opponent of communism and, especially Fascism. But he was also a dedicated socialist. He wrote a three-part essay calling for the socialist takeover of Britain. I won’t give you the name of the essay, because then you will be able to google and find it.

In that essay, what did he give as “proof” that socialism would work better than capitalism?

I had meant to link to Sandeep’s review of a book claiming that Nehru was a communist at heart. But I had to hold off because I wanted to write in some amount of detail about this. I am rather surprised that the entry did not get any comments.
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