Not many know this, but day before yesterday, i.e. 14th August was my second blog anniversary. I couldn’t post anything to commemorate as my net connection went down and then my operating system shed its mortal coil.

(Hey weren’t you supposed to be roaming the mountains and forests and deserts in search of something?

Yup, but I got caught in a traffic jam wherever I went, so I thought that it better to continue one’s spiritual quest in the quiet of one’s home)

the comments to this entry for an example of how one may win one over to one’s side through peace, love and understanding.

this new blog Spontaneous Order for more dreary discussions on Liberal Philosophy, Capitalism, Globalisation, Governance, Free Markets, Economics, Law, Livelihood, Education, Environment, Technology, commentary on current affairs in India.

I would like to clarify that there is no truth in the rumour that I have kicked the bucket, much less in the rumour that the demise of “Jivha” has struck me with a depressive illness from which it is feared that I may never recover.

There is, however, truth in the rumour that I have lost my interest in the material world. I now seek knowledge that would free me from this endless cycle of birth and death. The temporal issues of politics, economics and technology now entice me not. What are these but bonds that hold you back, smoke that blinds you from seeing the ultimate reality? I have therefore decided to rise above petty debates, quarrels over trivia and arguments over meanings of words. I now seek to view the truth from a higher plane, a plane where wisdom and understanding do not flow from mere words.

With that end in view, I now roam the mountains, forests and deserts as a mendicant, dressed in bark and eating what the earth offers me. I know not what day it is. I have lost the ability to distinguish day from night. What is the diurnal cycle to one who thirsts to unravel the mysteries of the karmic cycle?

I know not how long the quest will last or what this will result in. I only know that I cannot resist the call of the siren and I must go on. I can promise you, my readers, that If ever I reach the end that I seek those among you who share my thirst will be among the first to be made privy to the secret. Till then, my former friends, (for I have now shed all attachments; I have neither friend nor foe) I bid you adieu.

Though I shall be gone from your midst, the site shall remain, and whenever I find the time and respite from my unceasing quest for the truth, I shall repost entries from my past, a past when those entries seemed infused with a profundity that I now see they do not possess. I urge you in all humility to read them if only to see them for the trivialities they are, mere diversionary tactics that Nature puts in your path to lead you astray.

I love it when my readers do my hard work for me. I am talking, of course, of Mayank’s comment to my Genghis Khan post. I am reproducing the comment here, with only cosmetic changes. He has done half my work for me.

I did a brief mathematical analysis of this claim. There were around 40 crore people in 1250(source ), after Genghis Khan’s tenure compared to 600 crore people now. So, a simple back-mapping tells us that 1.6 crore men now, will have approximately 10 lakh ancestor males in that population, the assumption being here that the children Genghis khan spawned were not in general more promiscuous than the other contemporary adults. So, this brings us down to account for 10 lakh people with the same Y chromosomes as an immediate result of the sexual excesses of Genghis Khan, his four sons and two grandsons as mentioned in the article. The fact that only Genghis khan is remembered for those brutalities means we can safely assign half of that figure directly to him.
This means one king in 40 years actually spreads his Y chromosome in 5 lakh males. With 40 years meaning arnd 15k days, he actually succeeded in impregnating 33 women per night( or day too, if he had no other job ).
The fallacies in the above simplistic assumptions are not hard to find. We can easily say that the tribes originating from him gave birth to more children etc. But that doesnt make the scenario look any more feasible. Well if he did…. HATS OFF TO HIS STAMINA AND LUCK.

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It all started when it was decided that Sikhs had to take off their turbans and cut off their hair, because their religion forbade them from cutting their hair.

Then the Surds complained that they were being discriminated against. For example, Islam required Muslim women to be dressed modestly. There were so many Muslim women on the streets, all dressed modestly, and no one was doing anything about it. So the police had to go around forcing all Muslim women to take off their salwar kameezes and wear minis.

Then the VHP moved the Supreme Court to strike down section 302 of the Indian Penal Code, which outlaws murder. The VHP argued that making killing an offence could be seen as an endorsement of the sixth of the Ten Commandments and so such a law had no place in secular society.

Then Pakistan attacked us. The Prime Minister was reluctant to defend us, because the Bhagwad Geetha exhorts all humans to fight for what is right. As the Pakistanis’ actions were clearly wrong, it would be right to deploy troops to defend Indian soil, so it could not be done. (As it is, the strength of the army was severely depleted, because all the Kshatriyas were discharged from duty following a ruling from the Supreme Court which claimed that letting Kshatriyas in the army could be seen as an endorsement of Hindu religious texts which mandated that fighting and ruling were the right professions for Kshatriyas.)

Then it was pointed out to the Prime Minister that not fighting could be seen as an endorsement of Non-Violence, which was a Jain concept. Unable to decide, the Prime Minister quit, whereupon he was arrested, because his action smacked of renunciation, which was a Hindu concept.

I meant to post this long back, but for some reason I held back.

Does this article pass the smell test?

The Mongol emperor [Genghis Khan] inseminated so many women in his 40-year career raping and pillaging across Asia that he created a pool of at least 16m male descendants who today carry his Y, or male, chromosome.

Yes, it is a Times of India link and so it goes without saying that you should be suspicious of what you read there. But my question relates to the figure of 16 million. Does it make sense?

The rest of the science looks sound. Y-chromosome is passed unchanged from father to son, so if indeed it turns out that 16 million men (1.6 crore) have the same Y-chromosome, then it must mean that they had the same male ancestor sometime in the past. The article gives geographical and historical reason why it could be Genghis Khan.

I’ve done my own calculations and the results look… interesting to me. But tell me what you think.

I had grave misgivings about handing out gmail invites to Mallus. I was afraid that they’d use the id to write fanmail to the verbal terrorist or swap the id for copies of the verbal terrorist’s One Book That Cannot be Named on gmailswap. But JK came up with persuasive arguments why I should give him a gmail account (to wit, “ha ha ha… I defeated you in the blog mela rigging competition. Now I want a gmail account as tribute”), so I gave an account to him. Now he’s turned around and stabbed me in the back! He’s compared my really selfless action of giving him a gmail account with – you won’t believe this – Sonia Gandhi’s renunciation of the Prime Minister’s post!

O perfidy! How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless Mallu!

And then Shanti goes and proves that you can’t trust Gults either. I give a gmail account to both her and to my grand nephew(well she called me uncle, so my niece’s daughter is what?) and what does she write?

I had no idea the deal was to write nice stuff about Ravi in return for the GMail invites. Ravi, I promise to not start the Blog Mela again until you have a winner-worthy post ready for it – thanks for the invites 😉

So what does this mean? That none of my well-thought out, erudite posts are worthy of winning the Blog Mela?

See, she could have praised me in other ways. She could have rigged the Blog Mela in my favour(wink wink). She could have simply announced me as the honorary winner of the blog mela that was not held this month. But no! She uses the opportunity to pass on the blame for not holding the Blog Mela to me!

Such is the way of the world my friends. You can’t trust anyone these days.

Update: I’ve run out of invites. If you haven’t received one, it means that you are out of luck. Sorry. You can still send me requests and they’ll get queued for when I next get invites. (I’ve got some more now) But I am warning you that I’ll play favourites and let some people jump the queue. So you had better try your luck elsewhere too.

Gaurav is hawking Gmail invites… for free. It reminds me of the time when I went for a movie and there a black marketeer was selling tickets for “Titanic” … same price.
By the way, I too have some gmail invites to give out. For free. Send me mail using this form

Economist.com | Face value

Bikram’s licensing of his sequence, says Jim Harrison, a lawyer for OSYU, is thus less like selling the rights to a song and more like lecturing about the “Kama Sutra” and then trying to charge couples a fee every time they have sex in one of the positions. Or, returning to that fast-food metaphor, like Bikram writing a new recipe for hamburgers and then showing up at barbecues to charge the people flipping the burgers
Intellectual-property law is crucial to economic success. But extending it to yoga will, ”The Economist’s spiritually enlightened, physically limber journalists hope, prove too much of a stretch

Rediff.com offers one GB e-mail space

Rediff.com India Ltd has increased the e-mail space provided on its portal for free users to one GB from five MB and that of its premium users to two GB from 10 MB, even as the company hiked the single outgoing and incoming e-mail message size to 10 MB.

This was predicted (by Kings for example).

And why am I groaning? Because now Indiatimes will also do it and when Indiatimes does things, it doesn’t just do them. It talks about them. Everywhere. In the papers. On radio. On webistes.

Everywhere.

And it is occurring to me more and more that Yahoo raising it to 100 MB is a bad idea. Say 1 GB and it sounds like “infinite” 100 MB sounds just like 100 MB.

Google Search: blog cartel

Ok, I am happy that Yahoo has upgraded to 100 MB and all, but why did they have to make the interface so ugly? And how is the layout better?
And I am noticing that the 100 MB is actually turning out to be counterproductive. This is how:
Colleague: (Who has never heard of gmail and has been content with Yahoo so far) “Wow! Yahoo has upgraded me to 100 MB!”
Me: (With a smug look on my face) 100 MB! Bah! That’s nothing. I have 1 GB! For I have Gmail!
Colleague: Where?
Me: Want an invite?
Colleague: Gimme Gimme Gimme!

I am liberal with invites these days because there really seems to be a glut. Handing out invites like this instead of going live seems like a good marketing tactic. I wouldn’t have talked much about my gmail account if not for the invites.