Expressions – Bhagwad Jal Park

I learnt a couple of days back that the Mumbai High Court has asked the Womanist Organization of India (WOI) to prove that men and women are equal. Apparently according to Maharashtra law, women cannot work in shops and bars after 9:30 pm and the WOI says that this is discriminatory and prevents women from obtaining employment on the same footing as men.

The Senior inspector of Police has told the court that waitresses and singers “can never be equated with women in other fields.” He’s also said that these women can be exploited and this goes against public interest and society (he forgot to mention the women in question though.) Now here’s the interesting bit: The court has asked WOI to “provide documentary evidence” that men and women are equal.

This is very unusual. The organization will of course have to decide which aspect of “equality” it wants to prove. Women and men are of course not equal in everything. Physically for example. Even in non discriminatory physical sports, men and women tournaments have different rules. Like tennis for example. But in my view, the particular sort of “equality” in this case is the right to opportunity. The law effectively says that women cannot be offered the same opportunities that men are offered and are thus placed at a disadvantage.

Also, the inspector’s comment is outrageous. What the hell does he mean by saying that waitresses and singers “can never be equated with women in other fields?” Are they some inferior sort of women? In what way? Do they deserve less dignity? And who is he to decide? In my opinion, he has to provide documentary evidence that they are not the same. The burden of proof is his.

It’s also an insult to women in that it implies that they can’t take care of themselves. We’re talking about adults here and no one is forcing a woman to work after 9:30 pm if she doesn’t want to. If it’s risky, then as an adult she has to make the decision as to whether or not she wants to go ahead. This is like the health department making a law saying “you cannot touch fire. It’s risky.” We already know that and can take care of ourselves thank you very much. And of course, we’re back to the old inanity of “public morality” which was touted during the hearings for the reading down of Article 377.

As usual, I had a devil of a time trying to find the case on the Mumbai High Court’s website – mainly because you have to search with exactly the right parameters and they’re so many of them. But I managed to at last. Here’s the screenshot of the case (Click to Enlarge):

Men and Women Equality before the Bombay High Court

The case will next be taken up on the 16th of October 2009. At least I think it is. The official listing says 16/10/2008 which I presume is some sort of typo. Here it is:

Next Hearing Date

Am I happy that the court has asked the WOI to prove that men and women are equal (In whatever sense of the word)? Yes and no. Yes because once the concept is proved in court, it’s set down in black and white for all time and can be quoted in every case from this case forth without further argument. It will help expedite the removal of many more discriminatory laws. No because it seems that the right to equal opportunity is obvious and the court needn’t ask for it to be proved.

Unfortunately, “equality” isn’t something that is taken for granted in Indian society. Look how much Naz had to fight for the decriminalization of homosexuality when it should have been obvious. It’s possible that the court is trying to cover it’s tracks by being impartial and taking up the case from first principles to create an unassailable position. If so, then it’s the right thing to do. I hope it’s not because the Judges are prejudiced and have decided to try and make a fool of WOI and brand them a nuisance. But given the high credentials of our High Courts in general and looking at historical evidence, I’m inclined to think the best of them.

I’ll keep you guys updated on this case as and when court proceedings take place – and if they get delayed to a future date, I’ll post a brief note for that as well so you won’t be left hanging.

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Apparently the Indian Supreme Court will hear the challenge to the reading down Article 377 tomorrow on the 30th of Sept. It seems to have clubbed several petitions together and hearing them at the same time. According to the Daily Cause list, it will be held in the court of the Chief Justice himself. The name of the main petitioner is a chappy called Bhim Singh who is the head of (wait for it) – The Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party (JKNPT)!

Good ol Bhim seems to be upset since he feels that “just two judges” cannot change “his law.” But wait! He’s not gay is he? Apparently not. So it’s not “his law”. Neither does he seem to give any value to “his” constitution which promises equality of all including homosexuals. He rattles off the bromides with considerable expertise. “Cultural invasion”, “Against Indian Culture”, “Not be tolerated” etc. ad nauseam.

I really hope the SC puts paid to this issue once and for all – but it feels good doesn’t it? I can almost feel myself drooling as the SC dismisses the challenge. I just wish I could be there to see the unfortunate Bhim’s face.

To keep upto date, subscribe to further updates on the hearing of Article 377. Or you can receive an email about further updates to this case.

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In this post, I’m going to lay bare my finances to the wide world. Most Indians I know are hesitant to discuss this aspect of their affairs (perhaps even more than their sexual ones!), and here I disclose full details with screenshots of my finances with nothing hidden. Call me an exhibitionist, but it’s fun to do what I haven’t seen anyone do before!

Retirement Goals

But to start off, this is my retirement goal: I need to have a monthly income of Rs. 3L (3,00,000) when I retire. I figure I’ll need this much when I retire since inflation will be 7.8% and Rs. 3L will be equal to around Rs. 30,000 in today’s value after 28 years (time till I retire). My wife and I feel that if we were old right now, we can easily get by on Rs. 30,000 a month.

So to get a monthly income of Rs. 30,000, I need to accumulate Rs 3.11Cr (3,00,00,000) by 2037. I want to retire when I’m 55.

So final goal = Rs. 3 Cr by 2037.

Current Status

I’ve been investing since I started earning (haven’t missed a month in 6 years) and over that period, have managed to accumulate 8L till date. The recent crash and subsequent rise of the Indian Stock Markets has more than tripled my assets. So here are my assets as of the 27th of September 2009 (Click to Enlarge):

(The red smudged “Other Liabilities” is a person for whom I’m temporarily holding some cash – so it counts as a liability). And to ease the fears of “other” security conscious people in my life, I have graciously consented to blur some account numbers….Ok ok, I guess it makes sense – As the Chief Whip said in Yes Minister – “Open, but not gaping!” In case you’re wondering what cool tool I use to generate my financial reports, it’s called Yodlee – a free online financial aggregator whose clients include Bank of America and other large corporations, so I trust them.

What I need to do to reach 3.11 Cr by 2037

I invest only in the Stock Market and as such, I expect excellent returns over the next 28 years. I never take cash out and keep investing per week. Based on historical records, I should get well over 15% per annum, but to be on the safe side, I’ll forecast for only 12%. Plugging the figures into a simple retirement calculator, this is what I get:

So the good news is that I now only need to invest a minimum of Rs. 5000 a month to reach my targets by 2037! I currently invest a minimum of Rs. 7,000 per week – half in a Tax saving ELSS scheme and the other half in Mid Cap companies (I can afford to take on risk since I have a large time span). Here are my investments for the past one month (Click to Enlarge).

So I find that I’m currently investing around five times more than what I need to invest. Ooh la la! It makes me imagine how much bare minimum I need to earn to live comfortably and keep investing at the same time. When I calculate it, I need to earn just Rs. 15,000 a month (instead of the 35 – 40 thousand I earn right now). Given that I charge $20 an hour, I need to work less than an hour a day – on weekdays only of course – for the next 28 years to achieve my retirement goals!

Makes me think I have quite a good life. No babies, no house rent etc. The only thing maybe I’ll need to worry about is medical expenses. Thinking of taking out some insurance when I get back to India – I’m still not convinced either way. Ideas anyone?

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I had started reading “His Dark Materials” a few years ago in Jabalpur, and then abandoned it into the second book (there are three) for reasons not clear to me now. After finishing “Hard Times”, I decided to take it up again and finish the series. I’m glad I did. The names of the three books are:

1. Northern Lights (Called “The Golden Compass” in the US)
2. The Subtle Knife
3. The Amber Spyglass

The books are fascinating and make us think of several new concepts that we would never have thought of before. Take the concept of “daemons” (pronounced dee-mons) for example. In the series, the souls of people are outside their bodies in the form of “daemons.” They look like animals, but never leave the human to whom they’re attached. They can speak and are intelligent according to the level of their owner. The daemons of children can change shape at will, but finally settle down into a form determined by the nature of the young adult.

Image Credit: betizuka

His Dark Materials

It’s a touching concept and one that makes you wish we had daemons of our own in the real world. Imagine having a friend near you all the time who is you and yet not you. An entity that knows what your real nature is and is bound to you heart and soul forever. Someone to whom you can talk freely and who almost knows what you’re going to say and not be surprised. Someone who accepts you as you are because your nature is their nature too. An intriguing twist is that everyone’s daemon is of the opposite sex. It’s as if your soul takes on your personality as it would be if you were male or female instead.

Another prominent feature of the book is the enigmatic stuff called “Dust” (That’s a capital D). It turns out that it’s what we call Dark Matter and is conscious and responds to higher levels of thought, art and intelligence. Finally, there is the nature of the Church which is highly prominent. In fact, the book is about the rebellion against the Church which is portrayed as a despotic omnipresent government which wants to stifle and kill anything that they view as “threatening” to the “Authority”.

Don’t want to spoil the plot for a reader, so I’ll just say that the book invokes very fundamental questions about god and how he is and what he wants.

The book ends in a bittersweet manner, and is quite sad at the end (but not in an evil way). You just wish that things could have turned out differently. It’s not a “happy happy” sort of book and while it’s fantasy, there are some parts that will be better understood by adults.

I greatly recommend it to readers who want a bit of fantasy reading, but one which isn’t cheap. This is far from cheap and doesn’t center around thrills with no meaning. Not “junk food” by any means.

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It makes sense. The database with half a billion genuine subscribers to mobile phones in India can be used as a starting point for allocating the Unique Identity numbers for a billion Indians. We already know that Nandan Nilekani doesn’t currently plan to include personal details in the National Database. But it looks like your cellphone number is going to be part of it.

While it seems like a good start, one wonders if the Unique ID is properly targeted here. According to all sources, it’s the poor and underprivileged who need it most. Maybe such people will not have cell phones (700 million of them). In which case, we’re starting out by giving UIDs to those whom it’s not meant to benefit. But it’s still a start and we have to start somewhere. Since each person’s biometrics will be associated, this should remove the problems with duplicate IDs. But it’s going to mean a huge task of gathering data.

Image Credit: Vinay Joshi/Reuters

Indian National ID set to use Mobile Subscriber Base

Of course since the government isn’t going to blindly copy the telephone subscriber data, how many people are going to willingly verify their numbers for the UID scheme and hand over their fingerprints? Will there be any incentive for them? In the long run, I’m sure that this project can cover almost all the country. What we’re still waiting to see is whether or not the UID will be used for other sinister purposes – even though Nilekani says that there’s no “card” as such and that it’ll be voluntary (initially at least).

India’s large and undisciplined population might be a strength here. After all, for people to keep, maintain and carry a UID requires discipline. You can’t force people to remember to carry it with them. And it’s not like a driving license where if you don’t have it, you’re putting people in danger cause you may not be qualified to drive. After all, there’s nothing wrong in going for an impromptu stroll is there?

I’m watching the situation with – as Blackadder put it in Season 4 – “with a due sense of dread.” To keep upto date with the Unique Identity Card issue in India, subscribe to its RSS feed.

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When discussing climate change and the environment in general, a common type of argument I hear is “it won’t really affect humans so much.” Whether we’re talking about the effects on rainfall, sea levels, seasonal disturbance, or running out of oil, there are always those who claim that by virtue of their geographical position, economic status, or lifestyle, they personally will escape the brunt of the devastation that climate change can cause.

Some proclaim that they don’t care since they will be long dead by the time any such effects are in a position to harm them, and you know what – they’re right. There is an excellent chance of most people currently living not being affected by climate change. As Bjorn Lomborg so eloquently puts it, Bangladesh would probably have become rich enough after a hundred years to escape the problems caused by rising sea levels. This he argues, is enough reason not to sink money into environmental protection efforts.

Discussions on the environment at a global level almost exclusively deal with the effects on humans. Whether such and such country’s economic progress will be affected. Whether or not the threat to this particular coastal city is real. Whether or not we will have enough oil. Overuse of natural resources is an issue only so far as it affects human lifestyle.

However, I feel that most of these people are missing a crucial fact. Even assuming that you don’t feel regret for ruining the planet per se, aren’t we ignoring the large number of non-human living creatures on the planet? How many multicellular living creatures are there on earth anyway? With how many conscious creatures do we share the earth? To put things in perspective, let’s just take insects. There are a hundred million insects for each human on earth! Assuming there are no other species, what percentage of the conscious life do we make up? Answer: 0.000001%

Not that the insects really have much to worry about. They’ll survive long after humans have gone even in the event of a nuclear holocaust (kind of relieving isn’t it?) But what about all the other species whose lives are affected by our activities? The amount of suffering we cause them is incalculable. Yet we never think of them because they don’t suffer in front of us. Well, I want to bring some of it forward. Into our faces. This is what we do:

Image Credit: Save_The_ Planet

Bird Trapped in an Oil Spill

Fish dead due to pollution

Polar Bear trapped on thinning ice

These are just isolated examples. There are so many more. Ask yourself. Even if our policies were to have no impact on humans whatsoever, do we still have the right to cause so much suffering by our actions? I’m not exactly a bleeding heart animal lover – it’s just a question of what is fair and what’s not. If these animals had votes, we wouldn’t be so casual about them would we? What exactly gives us the right to mess up resources that we share with an overwhelmingly large majority of other conscious creatures?

Having met some of the people that I have, I know that they will continue to not give a shit about anything that doesn’t bite them on the nose. But hopefully there are others out there to whom this has given some food for thought.

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I’ve had occasion to mention on this blog before how American opinion sometimes seem out of sync with what the rest of the world takes for granted. Earlier, we had taken a look at the disbelief in climate change. Now I discover that evolution is a hot potato as well…

Jeremy Thomas’s new film “Creation” is a celebration of the life of Charles Darwin, whose struggles the movie depicts. It revolves around him questioning his faith after the demise of his daughter. The movie was showcased at the opening of the Toronto Film Festival and has spread throughout the world in every country except one – The United States. Apparently US distributors feel that the movie is too controversial.

I fail to understand how a developed country can have such an attitude in the 21st century. Apparently being developed has nothing to do with it. Evolution is accepted in every other part of the world including the poorer countries. In India (apart from hardcore Christians and Muslims,) evolution is accepted by all educated people. Yet in the US, only 39% of people believe in it! If I didn’t have the facts in front of me so starkly, I would have flat out not believed them. But it’s true!

Image Credit: PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

Some of the attitudes towards evolution are that it’s a “half-baked theory” , “It’s never been proved” and “It’s a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying.” People in the US largely believe that the earth was created in 6 days. I’m forced to wonder whether there’s any use to being educated if one still holds such medieval ideas. It seems that people feel that evolution is a “hoax” that is perpetrated on the world and they are the only ones who haven’t been taken in (just like climate change.)

Obviously there’s a pattern at work here. Most Americans disbelieve climate change. They disbelieve evolution too. My conclusion is that large sections of the American people are either brainwashed, or lack critical thinking. Since I’m sure Americans in general are as intelligent people elsewhere, I’m forced to the conclusion that they’re brainwashed. As far as climate change goes, I’m sure they’re brainwashed by the corporate campaigns against it, but who could possible want Americans not to believe in Evolution?

The answer of course is simple – the churches and evangelical movements in the US are just like big businesses with media campaigns, immense budgets, and large gatherings broadcast all over the country They employ professional marketers and employ their own “scientists” to create doubt about evolution in the minds of those who listen – and since they’ve been doing it for so long, they’ve managed to grab the mind of almost everyone.

I think it’s a clear warning that all large organizations can be dangerous. Whether they are political parties, the church, or corporations. We must look at how things have turned out elsewhere and not repeat the mistakes others have made. The only thing we can do is to be on our guard. It may be too late to do anything about the US, but we can surely protect ourselves from such manipulation in other parts of the world.

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Coming to the US has introduced me full force to the Patent system prevalent in the country. “Intellectual Property” as it is called rules large aspects of America’s legal system. Almost anything can be patented – right from software, to hairstyles (as my wife told me), to business practices. Coming from a country where such things don’t enter most people’s minds, I’ve been able to observe it from outside, and have realized that it’s contrary to the very thing that makes humans special.

It’s a travesty and an insult to the natural behavior of humans and goes against the very impulse that has propelled humanity to the top of the food chain. Don’t believe me? Read on!

Read more…

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It took me a little while to figure out how to convert tags into categories in my Wordpress blog, and here’s hoping that someone else doesn’t need to search as much.

Wordpress Tags to Categories

Basically I found that too many of my tags were long term “slots” and I wished that some were categories instead (poor planning I know). With so many posts, I wasn’t relishing the idea of changing each (even with the “Quick Edit” functionality.) After some searching, I finally found that it could be done using in-built Wordpress functionality! So here’s how to go about it:

1. In the Administration section, click “Posts”
2. Under Posts, click “Categories”
3. At the bottom of the page, click the “category to tag converter” – bear with me, I haven’t gotten mixed up
4. In the new screen, you should finally see a “Tag to Categories” button!
5. Here simply select which tags to convert into categories, and Wordpress will obligingly do it’s duty.

That’s it. No plug ins, no coding and no SQL. Simple, clean, and effective. Hope you found this useful!

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The prologue for “The Gathering Storm” – the twelfth book in the “Wheel of Time” series – has just been released and I’ve just finished reading it. Just one word for it – fantastic. Brandon Sanderson filling in for Robert Jordan does a great job in presenting lots of major characters including some juicy Forsaken for our reading pleasure. It may be my imagination or my wishful thinking, but maybe – just maybe – a bit of the clutter that’s been plaguing the series has been cut out.

The Gathering Storm - Wheel of Time Series

Viewpoints include the captured suldam and damane who were with Semirhage, a Borderlander who receives a call to arms (Lan would have been cool though), the Forsaken (Graendal, Demandred etc.), the Prophet, and a brief glimpse of Ituralde. I’m pleased to mention that it’s interesting and doesn’t ramble on about fashion too much like the last few books have. Looks like Sanderson has taken note of the deficiencies of the previous books.

This, combined with Chapter One which can be downloaded for free from tor.com leave us salivating for more – true to the spirit of Jordan’s work. You can buy the Prologue for $2.99 if you want – or just wait for the full ebook to come out on the 27th of October 2009. I’ll be first in line to read it!

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