Freedom to dissent

Legislation that would have increased the scope of Stem Cell research in Massachusetts was vetoed by the Governor, Mitt Romney because he is opposed to the idea of human embryo cloning.

Following expectations that he would again reject the Legislature’s plan to sanction embryonic stem cell research, Romney announced his veto of the bill last week. In his veto message, the governor said he could not “in good conscience” allow the bill to become law due to his objections to embryonic cloning and changing the definition of when human life begins.[Gov vetoes stem cell bill]

But then not wanting to be Kansas, the legislature overturned the veto.
Iin California, there was a voter initiative to fund stem cell research and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his support for it. Now here is the interesting thing – both Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger are Republicans.
It is a sign of maturity in politics that two diametrically opposite view points can be held by people in the same party and they can express it publicly without fear of retribution from the high-command. The freedom of expression that Americans have is not curtailed by the leadership of political parties

The High Court verdict on Coke

Recently the Kerala High Court told the Coke authorities that they can consider the plant in Kerala open even if the local panchayat does not renew the licence. Many people suggested that the courts have gone anti-people because they did not issue the order they wanted to hear. But then why did the Court issue such an order ?

The court allowed the plant to reopen after an expert committee concluded that drawing 500,000 liters of groundwater (5% of the available water in the area) a day would not cause drought as claimed by protesters. According to the company management, the plant was drawing 460,000 liters of water a day at the time of its closure and water supplies continued to decline even after the facility was shut down a year ago.It said the panchayat made its decision without the benefit of any scientific review of the plant’s actual impact on the local aquifer.
The court also said the panchayat was not authorised nor did it have the expertise to consider allegations that the wastewater sludge from the plant were contaminating the land, or that company’s products in India contained pesticide residues.The judge ruled that any private person or company has the right to extract groundwater within reasonable limits. According to the company, the maximum groundwater usage at the Kerala plant has not exceeded 460,000 liters per day.[Court allows Coke to reopen Kerala plant]

If there is proper evidence that the plant is causing harm to people, it should be shutdown legally. But here people in their zeal for fighting anything American and anything that can generate employment are using emotional arguments. These don’t fly in a court of law.
Update: Guess who is going to benefit from this judgement? – The Communists, of course. They are going to start a water theme park in Parassinikadavu in Kannur district and face the same allegation as Coke.

The CPI(M) has been leading the protests against the Coca-Cola plant in Plachimada, Paalakkad, on the grounds that the soft drink company is exploiting the area

Bag of Links

Dan Gillmor writes that copying and pasting entire articles in blogs violates copyright laws. There are many Indian blogs which just paste articles from elsewhere without any additional commentary. Be careful
Top Ten Reasons why Episode IV is better than III and the only Episode III review you will need
HOWTO apply for a Java job
The story of THX sound
Terry Gross’s interview with Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited all of Martin Scorsese’s movies

Coke plant licence renewed

When panchayats start playing political games, the High Court has to step in. Remember the Coke plant in Kerala which was sanctioned by the Communists and then later opposed by them. The panchayat then refused to renew the licence and Coke went to court. The Court then gave permission for the plant to pump a fixed amount of water, but still the panchayat would not renew the licence since panchayats in Kerala follow the Klingon legal system. But, Kerala High Court was not amused.

In a major relief to the soft drinks major Coca Cola, the Kerala high court today directed the Perumatty panchayat, where the company

The Communal Color

Aligarh Muslim University’s Executive Committee decided to grant 50 percent reservation to Muslims from all over India and many people were opposed to reservation based on religion for a university funded with the tax payers money. But Shabana Azmi, says

“It is unfortunate that it has been given a communal colour. It should not have had any political ramification,” she told reporters here on the sidelines of the launch of a book `Jama Masjid, Call of the Soul’.[Shabana Azmi backs reservation at AMU]

Yes, reserving half the seats for Muslims is not at all communal. By the same definition of communal by these secularists, Muslim League is not a communal party.

Blur everything

Since most of us are stupid and cannot decide what is good or bad for us, the all knowing benevolent Government has decided to step in

The Indian government is to outlaw all images of smoking in Bollywood films and television shows in a move praised by campaigners as a “sensible step” but attacked by film-makers as a curb on artistic freedom.
The ban, the most comprehensive of its kind in the world, will outlaw shots showing cigarette packs and advertising hoardings. Foreign movies and serials, increasingly popular especially when dubbed into local Indian languages, will have the offending images electronically blurred.[India to ban smoking in films and TV shows ]

So if James Bond is making love to a naked woman who is smoking, just the image of the cigarette will be blurred and that is the way it should be. Movies predating the ban are supposed to run a series of health warnings across the bottom of the screen. So when Shah Rukh Khan is about to beat up Amrish Puri, everything will pause and the hero, villain and sidekicks will wait till the health warnings flash below. This should heighten the tension in the scene.
Next the minister should ban guns. These can kill instantly and I don’t know why no one has campaigned against it. In predated movies, guns should be blurred. Some villains and sidekicks have bad teeth caused by paan chewing. Paan scenes should be banned. The entire song of Khaike Paan Banaraswala should be shown blurred. The word Paan should be bleeped. Did I forget to say this, a health warning should also be flashed. MNC products like Coke and Pepsi should only be shown blurred. Lassi can be shown un-blurred.
Most movies end in violence with one hero murdering lot of innocent sidekicks. This is not at all good. A sensible step would be to ban it, and predated movies will show it all blurred. With blurring you may think it is a porn movie, but hey it is a risk we have to take.
One of the essential scenes in a movie is a rain song and much water is wasted. The warning sign should be flashed before such scenes, so that residents of Chennai and Rajasthan do not attempt it at home, not to forget that the water should be blurred.
Ram Gopal Varma has been making many scary movies and it scares the bejeesus out of me. There should be a mandatory warning sign before each scare. If ghost like characters or Bobby Deol is in the movie, they should be blurred.
Finally with all this blurring, the only things that will remain unblurred are these. But they should not be banned since they cannot corrupt young minds.

Job Hopping

With IT and airline industry booming in India and people seem to be really misusing the freedom

Every day for the last four months I have been hiring. I come to office each day, hassle my recruitment team, agencies and consultancies for resumes, perform interviews, negotiate salaries and make offers. It’s amazing to see how people negotiate for salaries and perks, no one asks anything anymore about what the job entails, what they can contribute, or how they can grow and realize their dreams here. It’s about pay, and people are eagerly willing to display unbridled stupidity in managing their careers by focusing incessantly on money.
Heck, the time it takes to finalize an offer nowadays, I could send out an offer letter, go have several children, watch them grow, put them through school and then head back to office, the candidate is likely to have finished negotiating his pay and ready to join.
We need to wake up and smell the stink of the decay we are creating all around us in the IT job market.Year-on-year end people here expect nothing less than 30 to 45% salary increases, where as the average salary hike in the US per year is 3% and Eastern Europe is 4%. I could go on and on about the quality of the flotsam and jetsam that washes on to my desk in response to job ads, but we all know it. Sometimes it takes as many as 40+ interviews to close one position.[A very interesting note!]

That was the IT industry. Air Sahara is now offering a 40% salary hike to its employees to retain them. Lo oks like it is a great time to be an “employee” and a bad time to be running a company. For those of you in the software field, I have a question. How do you deliver a project on time?

Malayalees in power

There are many bloggers who take potshots at us Mallus. We don’t like to name names, so instead, we will provide a hyperlink. But guess what. Quietly, the Malayalee takes over

The roll call is a veritable who

Fighting Nonsense

Here is a sample of what is being taught about Hinduism in Bay Area schools

Bindis symbolize the caste system
Godess Parvati is the chief of all elves that roam the earth
During religious festivals Indians play with colors made with urine and cow dung

San Jose Mercury News has a profile of Mona Vijaykar, an Indian mom who is fighting all this

Vijaykar has tried tackling the problem in a grass-roots way: by contacting teachers and asking to speak to their classes about India and Hinduism, explaining the significance of ancient Indian languages or the origin of religious customs.
Vijaykar said many of the teachers she’s spoken with complain about the lack of resources on world religions and are hungry for information. She recalls a teacher at her son’s former school, Redwood Middle School in Saratoga, who invited Vijaykar to class several years ago to add to her lesson on India and world religions. Vijaykar remembers being outraged by a handout on various forms of the Hindu god.
The handout — produced by Teacher Created Materials, an education publishing company in Westminster — listed Parvati as a goddess who is “chief of all of the elves” that roam the Earth. Company officials didn’t return requests for interviews.
“They might as well be talking about fairies in a fairy tale,” Vijaykar said. “It makes the religion sound silly and stupid. And it’s plain wrong.”
Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard University, had a similar reaction: “Elves? That’s just false. That’s ridiculous.”[COUNTERING STEREOTYPES]

The Bay Area has a large number of Hindus and if you are one of them, it is time you looked at what your child is learning about your religion in school.

Your's are small too

The Kerala Communists have always come up with excuses to prevent companies from setting shop in Kerala. The Communists are against exploitation of all kind and this is a major problem when people want to work and earn a living. If they work, they will get exploited. So unemployment is always better. But dig this. One of the major employers in Kerala is actually the Communist Party, because, “some animals are more equal than others”. The Communists run a TV Channel and now are planning to start an amusement park.
The only person who was not amused as P. Chidambaram who found that the party has assets worth over Rs. 40 Billion. And the Communists responded immediately:

CPM State Secretary Pinnarayi Vijayan replying to the observations said in statement Sunday: “It is sad to note that Chidambaram instead of attacking the communal forces which are a threat to the country, has turned against the CPM that has done its best to keep communal forces at bay.”[Left under flak over assets]

Hey look, if you don’t let us make money, communal forces will rule the country, is the argument of the Communists. If you look at Pinnarayi’s statement, there is no denial of the facts at all. In fact, Pinnarayi does not have the sophistication of the 24 karat mallu when he denied his meeting with a terrorist wanted by Interpol.
Recently L K Advani came out against the Communists

“In national interest, I wish to caution Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh that your dependence on Communist support will prove to be a liability for anything good you many wish to do,” Advani said.
“The first thing India must do to achieve double-digit inclusive growth is to marginalise the ideological and political influence of the Communists, for their policies will neither deliver inclusive growth nor double digit growth,” he added.
Advani said the Communists have been fanatically opposed to every piece of economic reform, right from P V Narasimha Rao’s time to Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s tenure and now during Dr Singh’s time.
“I never cease to be amazed by the hypocrisy of the Indian Communists. For them, it is okay if China carries out economic reforms, but India must not. It is okay if China becomes a nuclear weapon nation, but India must not,” Advani said.[Left a liability for UPA: Advani]

The Communists did not deny of this, but said that Advani was charge sheeted in Ayodhya case and was boycotting the parliament. The Communist denial strategy these days is this – if you say our genitals are small, we will point out that yours are small too.