Cauvery Water Riots

February 5, 2007

This is where I point out how the problem could be solved if we simply had sane pricing for water.


Lobby The Jurors Now

February 3, 2007

I’ve nominated Popagandhi for Indiblog of the Year.

Yes, Indiblog of the Year is hardly a huge honour for someone who’s nominated for Best Asian Blog at the Bloggies. Yes, she is Chinese by ethnicity and Singaporean by nationality. And she does not live in India. On the other hand, she’s more Indian than most Indians, and writes better about traveling in India than most Indians I’ve seen.

If she is not nominated to the final list, I will take it as proof of the disgusting racist and homophobic mentality of the jurors. And their hypocrisy too. After all they are the ones who complain on their blogs about Indians being racist and hostile to representation.

It is in your power to prevent this happening. Lobby the jurors and demand that they vote for Popagandhi. Mail Confused and Shivam and ask them if they are ready to put their ballot where their blogposts are. Threaten to burn Patrix’s effigy if he does not push Popagandhi up the lists. Or if you want to go Gandhigiri style and send Neha roses, you can do that too. The important point is that Popagandhi wins.

For great justice!


Merit Is A Dirty Word

February 3, 2007

My employer has a ‘Diversity and Inclusion Programme’ underway right now in all the countries it operates in. So now there are new D&I newsletters hitting our inboxen and springing up on the intranet.

The interesting thing is that in other countries, affirmative action is demanded in the name of merit. In the Gulf countries, for example, female employees demand merit-based selection because they’re as good as the men, and it’s social discrimination which prevents their selection to higher posts, or indeed at all.

India seems to be the only place where merit-based selection is seen as anatagonistic to diversity.

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Chicken and Egg

February 3, 2007

Why Indians shop daily instead of going to a supermarket or hypermarket every weekend and stocking up American style:

  1. They’re used to it
  2. Not enough people have cars with which to lug back one week’s worth of provisions
  3. Everyone has domestic servants who they can send shopping at a minutes notice

What this leads to:

  1. Small pack sizes. The biggest pack of milk and juice is a litre.
  2. Arising out of point 1, there’s not much demand for really big refrigerators. If you’re only storing a day’s worth of milk, you don’t need a 500 litre monster.

This is annoying for me, because shopping on weekdays cuts into time which I’d rather spend at the gym or blogging or studying Chinese or whatnot. But because of the consumer behaviour of the rest of the Indian middle class, I can’t buy a five litre milk carton or juice carton which would last me the week. Bah.

Actually, even if they were available, I couldn’t fit them in my refrigerator. That, however, is because me and my flatmate were too cheap to spring for a decent refrigerator, not because of the middle class at large.

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We Need More Jokes About Bodily Fluids

February 2, 2007

Q) What did the sperm bank buy when they wanted more stylish equipment?

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