The injustice inherent in the whole operation will radicalise the entire Muslim world to a point where unorganised, knee-jerk terrorism will become unstoppable.

…But how will Germany cope with seven million Turks, France and UK with as many Algerians, Moroccans and Pakistanis.

In all there are about 20 million Muslims in Europe. They will be seething with rage. And Americans are letting it be a problem that Europe must manage, just as the radicalisation of 500 million Muslims on the Indian subcontinent could well plague our region. (Saeed Naqvi – Indian Express)

Okay you oppose the war. That is a valid point of view. But given that the Armageddon you are predicting now has been predicted in 1991 and 2001 before, doesn’t it behoove you to explain why it didn’t occur then and why it will occur now?
Otherwise, simply repeating the prediction just evokes pathos. It looks like you are helplessly watching the buildup, you know you can’t do a thing, so you are making empty threats.

It thinks that it is better to be a private company in the current environment than to be a public limited one.

The taste for names or sounds may change, but those changes reflect underlying preferences for novelty, conformity and divergence.

Name choices, like clothing choices, reflect the desire to be different, but not too different. The ideal balance varies, and new fashions begin with innovators who want to stand out. If the innovations have the right aesthetic appeal, they spread to people who aren’t as nonconformist.(How can the Marketplace guage fashions? – NY Times (Free Registration Required))

This bit also applies to India:
Whether names or clothes, fashion reflects the primacy of individual taste over inherited custom. The freer people feel to choose names they like, rather than names of relatives or saints, the faster names go through cycles. Boys’ names, which tend to be more influenced by custom, change slower.

I think in India it is the Bengalis who have the most variety in names and Tamils the least. Bengalis have done a good job of drawing from medieval Sanskrit drama where some of the most interesting names are found (Agnimitra, Malavika,Vasavadatta Udayan) while Tamils still have to function within constraints.

Gults tend to have the most unfortunate names – I once had a prof whose first name was Subhash Chandra Bose! – this in addition to the various initials representing his caste name, father’s and grandfather’s names and the name of his ancestral village.

Thankfully, Ravikiran is still an uncommon name, so I think I’ll just name my son Ravikiran II.

Montefiore declared that without God all human life would be meaningless. Ayer countered that humans alone imbue their lives with meaning. “But then life would have no ultimate meaning,” objected the bishop. “I don’t know what ultimate meaning means!” cried Ayer. His objection, of course, is that such concepts as meaning, purpose and having a point are human categories that make good sense in the context of human society, but are, at best, metaphors when applied to non-living systems.(Is the Universe Doomed? – Guardian)

An interesting discussion on whether the Universe is actually chaotic or whether it has a purpose behind it, and whether the question of complexity makes sense.

The Economist is calling for a fourteen year copyright term.
Currently, the minimum copyright protection period by International treaty is the lifetime of the author plus 50 years, or 75 years in case of hired work. This is the minimum. Countries can extend the copyright protection, but not reduce it.
It sounds a bit strange that an invention that may take years to research is protected for only 17 years, while this blog entry which will take me five minutes to write is protected for my lifetime and my children’s.

(Incidentally, the 17 year protection period for patents came from an old tradition wherein an apprentice was bound to his master for 7 years. Initially, patent protect?on lasted for only 7 years. Then it was doubled, and the term was increased again by half the period, i.e 3 1/2 years. The last half a year was then taken off. Not sure of this.)

Now that’s a novel idea!

Hey this tradition started in our time!

Arundhati Roy has won some kind of award for “Cultural Freedom”, whatever that is. To her credit she has shared the award with 50 NGOs in India, but she would have liked to globalise her dissent* a bit. ( Link in PDF, via Ashwini)

I would have liked to share at least part of the money with independent and alternative media groups in the United States ? Democracy Now!, Indymedia, and Alternative Radio ? all of whom are staging a courageous and formidable battle against their own government’s propaganda. Unfortunately, Indian law does not permit me to do this.

The citation for the award calls her writing “precise and powerful”
Excuse me, Precise?

This is from one of her essays. The topic, please note, is the standoff with Pakistan that we had last year:
A dear friend, who is an activist in the anti-dam movement in the Narmanda Valley, is on indefinite hunger strike. Today is the twelfth day of her fast. She and the others fasting with her are weakening quickly. They are protesting because the government is bulldozing schools, felling forests, uprooting handpumps, forcing people from their villages. What an act of faith and hope. But to a government comfortable with the notion of a wasted world, what’s a wasted value?

Terrorists have the power to trigger a nuclear war. Non-violence is treated with contempt. Displacement, dispossession, starvation, poverty, disease, these are all just funny comic strip items now. Meanwhile, emissaries of the coalition against terror come and go preaching restraint. Tony Blair arrives to preach peace – and on the side, to sell weapons to both India and Pakistan. The last question every visiting journalist always asks me: ‘Are you writing another book?’ ( “Under the nuclear shadow” – Guardian )

Precise?

And this is from one of her interminable essays on the war against the Taliban:
And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this onslaught of what we know to be preposterous propaganda? The daily consumers of the lies and brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam being air-dropped into our minds just like those yellow food packets. Shall we look away and eat because we’re hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at the grim theatre unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and say, in one voice, that we have had enough?

As the first year of the new millennium rushes to a close, one wonders – have we forfeited our right to dream? Will we ever be able to re-imagine beauty?

Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a newborn gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in your ear – without thinking of the World Trade Centre and Afghanistan?( “Brutality Smeared in Peanut Butter” -Guardian)

Arundhati Roy is guilty of stunningly garish imagery, but no one can accuse her of precision.

*One of her famous quotes is “The only thing worth globalising is dissent”.

There are 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who understand binary and those who don’t. If you don’t understand this joke, you are in the latter group.

If you are in the former group, can you prove that 32! (32 factorial) written in binary will have 32?31 zeros? You cannot write a program to do this.

Two reasons why we should be friends with Iran: We get oil, and we screw Pakistan’s happiness.
The friendship axis

How he changed the Tata group – by Swaminathan Aiyar.

My two readers must have realised by now that I am a genius. The layout of this weblog is quite innovative – all pages have some static content (the menu bar on the left and the links on the right) and some dynamic content – the posts. Unfortunately someone has already patented this novel idea, as these guys found out:

Our website, www.museumtour.com has recently received an patent infringement notice from SBC Intellectual Property.
The letter suggests that any website which has static, linked information (top banners, menus, bottom banners) which are displayed while other sections of the page are displayed as non-static (the area where products appear on most websites) infringes upon the patents they hold.

What next? A patent on the novel idea of hyperlinking? That too has been tried.