(and by extension, I too)
Not for the first time, I have to turn around and criticise someone I praised a day before. Gaurav is now claiming that people who have lots of children do so for economic reasons, i.e. so that they can send them to work and supplement the family income.

Come on! Now this is confusing effect with cause. He is actually saying that though they have access to contraception, people choose not to use it because they want the extra income from their future children.
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Sathish has been claiming in Anarcaplib that the unions in Kerala are learning from their earlier mistakes and are willing to correct them. I am sceptical if they will ever do it, and to tell you why, I will have to tell you people a story about Trade Unionism. It is a long story with many morals at the end of it. But before that, here is a little-known titbit. The earlier British version of the term was Trades Union (in singular). Can anyone tell me why? It has to do with the history of how the unions were formed. And oh. The correct answer will get you a gmail invite!

If you want one, that is.

Hint to the leftists and the rightists.
You think that

• It is slavery to sell your services to foreigners
  
• It is slavery to buy foreign stuff. It indicates a lack of confidence in our own manufacturers.
  
• It is slavery to work for foreigners
  
• It is slavery to employ foreigners, such as for example McKinsey consultants to advise us on economic policy.
  

Has it occurred to you that if you think “slavery” every time you see a white face, the fault lies not in our trade with them, but within yourself?

That’s what Gaurav says, and I agree.

When I was a child, it occurred to me that population was the wrong measure; we should be looking at population density. So I read up a bit about population density and in some book was written words to the effect that “though there are more prosperous countries which have a higher population density than India, India’s population is still considered high when compared against her available resources”

I don’t remember the exact words, but they were more highfalutin than that, so naturally I didn’t understand what it was saying. A couple of years later, when I reread the book (an atlas actually) I realised that they were saying that India was considered to be overpopulated because she was poor. So the reasoning was circular. India was poor because we were overpopulated. The population density was not actually high, but when compared with what resources we had, we were overpopulated.

That formative experience made me distrustful of experts and their big words.

I had some trouble with my blacklist. I was not able to add new URLs to the blacklist. Some error with max_data_packet thrown by MySql. Strangely, I seem to be the only one who has ever got it in the history of MT Blacklist. Has any of your blacklists never gone above 3700 entries?

I wasn’t able to fix it. So I worked around it by deleting a whole bunch of blacklist entries and putting catchall strings in their place. So for example if you have legitimate URLs with the string “porn” somewhere in it, you won’t be able to put it in my comments anywhere. I hope those false positives will be so rare as to be non-existent. If are a nice Bengali girl with the unfortunate name of Aporna, tell me

Then there is Swami who has fired another shot in the long battle between us on the subject of Gandhiji. I will respond some time. And by the way, I too don’t know how to manually trackback to a site. Is it even possible? I think it uses HTTP POST to do it and you need to write some kind of script to do it.

Our politicians have been attacking each other viciously over the past few months. Most people think that this isn’t a very good thing, and perhaps they are right. Calling someone like Manmohan Singh a “Shikhandi” even disgusts someone like me and I am a person who a) does not get easily disgusted and b) actually enjoyed it when it was Sonia Gandhi under attack.

I was about to write a post wondering what on earth had gotten into the BJP to do such self-defeating things, when it occurred to me that there was a positive side to all this muslinging and all this arresting each other on corruption charges.

You see, most of our politicians deserve to be in jail for one reason or the other, be it for corruption, rioting, rape or murder. Our leaders accuse each other of all these crimes during election time, but after they get elected, they usually say things like “We will not be vindictive”. That’s because they know quite well that if they seriously pursue cases against each other, they will also be targetted by their opponents when they come to power.

So the positive side of all this vicious attacks on one another will hopefully be that the gentleman’s rogue’s agreement among our politicians may finally break down. If they put one another in jail with the same enthusiasm they have displayed in snarling at one another, it will be a blow for the rule of law.

There is something strange about articles that start like this:

There was a time when India looked at the poor as the yardstick for policy making. Today she looks at the middle class and the rich, the poor having disappeared from the map of progress and development.
(The two faces of India)

Go on and read the article if you want. It is 9 months old (and I got it from a 9 month old post on Charukesi’s blog. Don’t ask how I got there. It was a mix-up), but the lamentation is standard and could have been written any time in the past 13 years. It is about how the neo-liberal economic policies and the forces have globalisation are unfortunately leaving the poor behind, unlike before, when India used to “look at the poor as the yardstick for policy making”

I find those arguments really, really, weird coming from hardcore leftists. Because during the supposed Golden Age of Nehruvian Socialism, they used to say the same things about Nehru’s policies.
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Apparently some idiot in the US forged a document claiming to be a 30 year-old memo using MS Word. That story is all over the American blogosphere and it isn’t a very interesting one for someone in India.

But then, I have some gmail invites to give away and… I haven’t asked my readers a question to show off my knowledge for quite some time, so I might as well ask a question and set a prize… a Gmail Invite! (is there anyone who still wants it?)

There was a forgery scandal in India that was, in a sense, a mirror image of the one that is happening in the US. Someone had used a manual typewriter to forge a document said to have originated in a foreign country, and someone immediately pointed out that the manual typewriter was a museum piece in the rest of the civilized world.

Which scandal am I talking of?
(Hint: Try to narrow down the period during which it might have occurred.)

While I am on the question of human psychology, I am reminded of Nilu speculating that perhaps the logical faculties of human beings must have evolved because being logical gave early humans an advantage over others who weren’t capable of logical thinking.
Yes, but… things are unfortunately more complicated than that. Please take this test and you will find out what I meant when I said that humans are wired to be combative and not logical.

Ramnath notices that men and women are jealous for different reasons. Men (in general) are worried that their wives will have sex with others, while women (again in general) are worried that their husbands will love someone else. He also notices that this fact is explained by evolutionary psychology. If women sleep around, men are faced with the prospect of having to raise the children of the gair, while for a woman if her husband sleeps around, it does not make as much of a difference as it would if he deserted her.

Having identified the reason, he goes on to speculate that with society changing, i.e with women becoming financially independent, this behaviour will probably change.
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Amol Hatwar responds to my earlier posting about Indian college education. Just to repeat, my point was about college education in general, not about Indian college education. Indian education has many problems, most of them having to do with the centralised university system. But the problems I talked of will occur even in a perfect world.

The guy with the moon in his matted hair responds to my question about the Indian Airlines ad. The discussion started with my question about the Indian Airlines ad that has been airing on TV and it has done a to and fro round over email.

I still disagree with the guy with the moon.. etc.
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