The US lost the Viet Nam war, but it seems that Capitalism is winning Viet Nam. Expect to hear a continued silence from those who named the street on which the US consulate is located Ho Chi Minh Sarani, just to piss off the Americans.

Unless you are a normal person, you would know by now that I was the subject of an attempted lampooning.

I have no objection to being lampooned, but I am disappointed with the quality of lampoons that you find on the market these days. So it is an unexpected pleasure to find one that actually reminds you of the good old days when lampooning was not yet industrialised. Then lampoons were hand-crafted and each one was different. The artist actually took pride in his product. See this lampooning of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat for a good example of the dying artform. I can only dream that some day I will write as badly as Thomas Friedman so that I too can be worthy of a personalised and well-crafted lampooning rather than an off-the-shelf one.

Apparently India Today has a piece up on blogging. The article is here. But it requires a four-digit subscription number and it is not taking mine, even though I am a subscriber.

Actually, it is not taking any number I try. What are the chances of that happening? I suspect they don’t have any content online. They know that no one reads them anyway. So they’ve just put up the front page and redirected all their links to a dummy log-in page which is essentially a dead end. Anyone has a number that works? This is what the blurb says:

For long considered the Cinderellas of cyberspace, India’s army of raucous, rude and often radical bloggers is forcing the establishment to sit up and take notice, whether it is through tsunami activism or media evangelism

I am just curious to know what they mean by “Cinderellas of cyberspace”

Navin thinks that my throwaway line about it being impossible to disprove the existence of God deserves a post by itself. Not really. It is quite simple. If an omnipotent God does exist, by definition He controls everything including logic. He can create a universe where there exists irrefutable proof that there is no God. Why? God only knows, but it is certainly possible. So whatever proof you claim to have, it cannot stand up against that fundamental objection, viz “God might have created it that way”
Continue reading →

To this question
A: William Faulkner
B: Ernest Hemingway.

Good quote no?

The Economist* has come down rather hard on Bangalore’s crumbling infrastructure, but says that India’s IT and BPO boom is just beginning. Priceless line: “India’s advantages are so great that, however bad its aim, it will be hard-pressed to shoot itself in the foot.”

But the verdict on Bangalore is rather bleak. It does say that Bangalore’s problems are not really terminal, but a recovery is possible only if the Government actually builds all the roads and flyovers it had set out to. But from the horror stories I hear coming out of Bangalore, Dharam Singh is completely uninterested in the task. He and his cronies are only interested in making money by controlling the allotment of land at the outskirts of Bangalore.

*Incidentally, that link is subscription only, so don’t bother to click on it unless you are a subscriber.

Long back I realised that it is impossible to prove that God does not exist unless you make the assumption that He is a benevolent God. But today I have to ask all theists amoung you: If you think there is a benevolent God, why did He choose to inflict K S Sudarshan on us?

A said (about B) “He has never been known to use any words that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

to which B replied “Poor A. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use “.

B is the more famous one. Identify B (and A too, for bonus points) without googling.

This Guardian report says that we have reached the peak for oil production.

If this report is true.

I had found about this site called Sleeping in Airports long back from Madman’s Linksmatic (incidentally Madman, having to sleep in an airport has nothing to do with poverty) Now I learn (via The Acorn and Sepia Mutiny ) that they have classified Changi Airport in Singapore as the best airport to sleep in. One of the runners up is Schiphol, Amsterdam. Hey I’ve slept in both!

The only other airport I’ve slept in is the Mumbai one – it is rated as one of the runners up in the worst airports category.
Continue reading →

from the Economist