Kind Readers, please note that I will be in Mumbai from Saturday to Monday. My schedule will be a little tight as I have to attend a wedding, catch up with my dad, and meet my boss. But there should still be time to squeeze in a blogger meet.
If you want to meet up, then, in the immortal words of the King, hit me on!
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Posted by Aadisht
I hope cricket doesn’t follow the same path. Already the game of cricket is more about money than the actual game itself. If this initiative succeeds, it will be only money where the slaves (cricketers playing for the team owners) will fight out for the kings (team owners).
Three posts later, the Jagathguru also says:
The board should make the players pay for their failures. They cannot take their places for granted.
You might conclude that he is advocating that the players be slaves to the board instead of slaves of club or league owners. But that is only because you are free market fundamentalists. You cannot Think Deeply.
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South India: Brahmins with hairy paunches who go swimming with their poonals on.
North India: Fat Jatnis with moustaches and protruding teeth who stuff their coin purses down their bras.
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Ezekiel on Gog:
In the latter days I will bring you against my land, that the nations may know me, when through you, O Gog, I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. Thus says the Lord GOD: Are you he of whom I spoke in former days by my servants the prophets of Israel, who in those days prophesied for years that I would bring you against them? But on that day, when Gog shall come against the land of Israel, says the Lord GOD, my wrath will be roused.
For in my jealousy and in my blazing wrath I declare, On that day there shall be a great shaking in the land of Israel;the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air, and the beasts of the field, and all creeping things that creep on the ground, and all the men that are upon the face of the earth, shall quake at my presence, and the mountains shall be thrown down, and the cliffs shall fall, and every wall shall tumble to the ground.
I will summon every kind of terror against Gog, says the Lord GOD; every man’s sword will be against his brother. With pestilence and bloodshed I will enter into judgment with him; and I will rain upon him and his hordes and the many peoples that are with him, torrential rains and hailstones, fire and brimstone.
So I will show my greatness and my holiness and make myself known in the eyes of many nations. Then they will know that I am the LORD.
Revelation on Gog:
And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.
And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.
The Koran on Gog:
But when Gog and Magog are let loose and they rush headlong down every height (or advantage). Then will the True Promise draw near.
So it goes. The Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran all agree that the coming of Gog will herald the apocalypse and the destruction of all evil by God. They aren’t quite clear on who or what Gog is, but they’re emphatic that Gog is evil and a precursor to God destroying the world and revealing his glory. And they are the word of God so they can’t be wrong.
Which is why we should be very very worried now that Sunsilk Gang of Girls has launched GOG TV. Yes, the prophesy about Gog has traditionally been associated with the Middle Eastern nations ganging up on Israel and triggering nuclear war, but it could as well be about girls colour-shining their hair. The end is definitely nigh when curly hair can be created artificially.
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No, not the horrible track record on censorship and freedom of speech. That’s unfortunate, but can be forgiven considering they make up for it with mee goreng and bottled calamansi juice.
But creating an organisation called the ‘Action Centre for Entrepreneurship – Finance Action Crucible‘ and doing so straight faced and without any sense of irony – that’s truly appalling. How do they manage to do it? Have they no shame at all?
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Posted by Aadisht
You know, given that there is a conspiracy, it makes sense that Madhav is in charge of it.
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Right. These days the BMP is klling stray dogs. This has a lot of animal lovers unhappy, leading to many anguished blogposts (two examples here and here). And inevitably these posts attract commentors who shrilly and hysterically go ‘But don’t you know that stray dogs are killing children? Are you more worried about dogs or children?’ Practically the only thing missing is the actual statement ‘Will someone please think of the children?‘
So I have the solution. After all I’m naturally brilliant. Rather than culling dogs, let the BMP cull kids who stray into public spaces instead.
This solution pleases everyone. Animal lovers will get to see Bangalore’s stray dogs gamboling wild and free. And with no kids on the streets, there will be no attacks on them by dogs either. And the BMP will surely kill the kids more humanely than it is killing the dogs.
Fewer children will also have beneficial downstream effects. To start with, it will reduce pressure on the strained and overburdened education system. Systematic culling will eventually attenuate the supply of students so much that there will no longer be a constraint in the number of university seats. Nobody will be tense about their board exams any more. With seats going free, reservations will also cease to be contentious. In fact, with no new generations to perpetuate it, the caste system itself will cease to exist.
And you thought that the Kansa Society was only about ensuring peace and quiet in restaurants and public transport. Piffle. Our agenda will transform the whole world into a paradise.
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I started the dowry series with two personal anecdotes. now here’s another one.
Years before Gurubhai was marrying for money, my grandfather’s sister-in-law was mortgaging her jewllery to finance his apprenticeship in a shop. Without the apprenticeship, my grandfather would have been a tailor. With it, he eventually got his own shop, became an Exide sitributor, and broke into the middle class- which allowed him and his family to escape from Partition alive. If it hadn’t been for my great-aunt’s dowry, I probably wouldn’t be writing this today.
This is the good side of dowry: it transfers wealth from people who have it to people who don’t. This wealth is especially useful to people who need to break from lower class to middle class and won’t get any help from banks to do so. It also gives parents an option to give their daughters an inheritance without having to use a will- which is of no small importance in a country where legal documents can be disputed to such brutal effect.
So here’s a reality check. Dowry has negative connotations. It is associated with forced marriage and a lack of modernity. It has been attacked by everyone from Munshi Premchand to 1980s Doordarshan propaganda filmmakers. It still serves a useful purpose.
But what about the bad stuff I’ve already talked about? The dowry deaths? The unreasonable demands to in-laws? A dowry death is a murder, and needs to be treated as one. The crime is murder, not taking dowry. Similarly, if you have a problem with in-laws being harassed for bigger dowries, treat it as criminal extortion and don’t criminalise dowry. Dowry is value-neutral. As Skimpy points out here, it’s no business of the state – or anybody else- what two families do by way of voluntary wealth transfers. It become’s the state’s business only when physical coercion or intimidation are involved.
Another point. Even assuming dowry bans are successfully enforced, it could end up being a net loss. It would end the high profile, heartstring-tugging, heart-bleeding stories of dowry deaths and destitute girls’ parents, but it would also end up preventing parents from giving their daughters an inheritance without having to die first, and from entrepreneurial sons-in-law getting cheap venture capital. Compare Bastiat’s essay on the Seen and the Unseen.
Dowry isn’t perfect, but it isn’t evil either, any more than high school exams are evil because they lead some students to commit suicide. It could work better, sure, and I’ll discuss how in the next (and final) post of this series. But it’s still a useful tool, and needs to be appreciated as that- a tool, nothing more and nothing less.
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Posted by Aadisht
At Shiok, where else?
Present: Anand, Suman, Prabhu, Zero, Chenthil, Arun, and Aditya. Drunkenness led to discussing how to rid the world of free market fundamentalism, how the true test of being an Old Skool blogger is remembering when Nidhi Taparia was the prettiest girl blogger, why we were the Real BarCampers, and our next project: www.extrashot.in.
My humble contribution to the noble endeavour: a Californian Iced Tea and a Green Apple Martini.
Update: Poto!
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Posted by Aadisht
This is an example of why libertarians get thulped for being impractical:
If betting was legal, and as a punter you could choose from a) an HDFC subsidiary offering betting facilities, b) a Taj Group company and c) some shady outlet like the ones you can choose from now, you’d obviously choose one of the more legit ones. Being public companies, and part of bigger brands, they would be far less prone to fix matches. That would reduce bookie-led match-fixing.
It will work, in theory. Also, in theory, banks and NBFCs will drive loansharks out of business. The problem is that theory requires that there are no barriers to customers. Real life will have barriers in plenty.
Let’s look at the real real world first. Suppose we do get an enlightened government which legalises betting. Even so, the Income Tax Department and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act are going to play spoilsport. The IT Department is going to monitor all transactions made with legitimate bookies. Punters will be required to submit their PAN details with every bet they make.
This is not an issue for a software sarariman who is going to put a thousand rupees down. But if you’re a big-time punter betting ten megarupees of black money then a legitimate bookie is out of bounds for you. The big money will continue to be placed with underworld bookies, and because it’s big money, the underworld will continue to fix matches.
This is where my own inner libertarian pops up and says, bah, get rid of the regulation and the problem is solved. Money being laundered is actually a good thing as it will then find its way into legitimate uses.
Unfortunately, even in an idealised real world with no regulation or monitoring, there will still be barriers to customers, especially if the bookmaker is an HDFC subsidiary that is accountable to shareholders and can’t take too many chances. Just as HDFC won’t give anybody a loan beyond a certain limit, HDFC’s bookmaking subsidiary won’t allow anybody to place a bet beyond a certain limit. The bigtime punters will still be excluded, not by regulation but by the bookmakers’ own risk appetite. And so the biggest bets will still remain underground, and the incentive for the mafia to fix matches will still remain.
Two points before I end this post:
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Posted by Aadisht