Posts from — December 2006

Mamata Banerjee ended her 25 day long fast at the stroke of midnight on Thursday. After that, she was promptly admitted into the ICU of a private hospital in Kolkata, where she is on respiratory support and is being administered intravenous fluids to treat her dehydration, hypoglycaeamia and other nutritional disorders.

Now I do not mean to imply, like CPI-M leader Nilotpal Basu did, that Mamata Banerjee’s fast was just an “outlandish drama” or that Mamata had no ideological basis in going on a fast. These issues are up for debate.

But I wonder if a person on a prolonged fast, who is all but unconscious and on life support systems, takes a decision to end the fast based on his/her political or moral ideals or is it just the primal instinct to survive that prompts him/her to end the fast!!

Any ideas?

Sacha Baron Cohen (now famous as Borat), in an earlier avatar as the irrepressible Brit gangsta, Ali G, appeared in a movie called “Ali G indaHouse“. In this crude, rude and crazily satirical slapstick movie, Ali G got a chance to play the MP from Staines. As an MP, one of the outrageous suggestions that Ali G gave in the parliament was to rework UK’s immigration policy to grant citizenship only to “fit” women.

In a case that sounds right out of Ali G’s backyard… a couple of Swedish immigration officers have been maintaining a photo collection of “exceptionally beautiful” women who have passed through the immigration checkpoint that they were manning!

The officers, who were working at a ferry terminal near Stockholm, made photocopies of the women’s passport photos and placed them in a binder. They also noted the date of birth next to each entry, the Stockholm police department said. [Source: MSNBC via an almost month-old entry on Metafilter]

While I am amazed at the diligence shown by these officers in keeping a meticulous record of the influx of beauty, I wonder what good is a photo, with a date of birth recorded alongside, going to do?!

Any ideas?!

The colorfully lit Clarke Quay in Singapore. It’s one of the most favored watering holes in Singapore as far as the nightlife is concerned. The assortment of restaurants from fine dining and world cuisine to the racy “Hooters” presents the onlooker with a difficult decision to make!

And of course, a clutch of nightclubs, led by the humongous Ministry of Sound, contribute a lot to the draw of this place.

If you’re going to be in Singapore, make sure you give this place a go… after the sun sets, of course! :-D

The new Blogger is out of Beta. Defying “conventional” Web 2.0 “wisdom” of a perpetual Beta, the new version of Blogger has been formally launched.
When I read this news, I decided to migrate my Blogger account over to the new version. So I logged in to Blogger with my old username and password, expecting to see a link on my Dashboard giving me the option to migrate. If Blogger was out of Beta, it obviously meant that they had worked out all the kinks around migration of old Blogger accounts over to the new version. And since they could not force-migrate blogs automatically without the bloggers’ knowledge, they would provide means to migrate optionally.

But I was surprised to find no such link/button on the Dashboard. Hmmm… that’s strange, I thought. So I logged off and went to Blogger homepage. There was a button on the generic Blogger homepage that gave the option to switch. So I clicked it and initiated the migration process.

After a minute or two of “in progress” status, it flashed a very generic message stating that an error had occurred that prevented the migration from completing successfully. And that their engineers would look into the problem. There was absolutely no inkling about what the error might’ve been. Just a generic message asking me to look out for a link to migrate that would appear on my Dashboard sometime in the future. In short, the message did not tell me what the problem was and neither did it give me any idea about when the issue might be resolved. That’s a poor poor user experience!

And not just poor user experience. It also shows that issues relating to migration of old blogs have not been addressed fully. And yet, Blogger chose to come out of Beta and launch formally.

All this sounds frighteningly similar to the Microsoft approach of releasing half-baked software full of un-helpful and thoroughly confusing error messages! Personally… I am not concerned that I was not able to migrate over to the new version of Blogger… because my primary blog is right here and it uses WordPress (God bless WordPress!). But looks like in its efforts to compete with Microsoft for the web OS space, Google is hurtling towards becoming a Microsoft clone in all the wrong ways!

Santhi Soundarajan failed a “gender” test and had to forfeit the silver medal she won in the 800 m race at the Doha Asian games.

Apparently this is not the first time she has failed this kind of a test. An athletics selector has said that “officials knew before the competition that Santhi had been denied a job in the Railways on similar grounds.”

There are two things worthy of note here. Firstly, this issue of a failed “gender” test should’ve been handled far more sensitively by the media and sports officials. But knowing them for the thick-skinned species that they are, I am not surprised that the issue has been played out in a tasteless manner. When a respected national daily prints a headline that goes “Santhi not a woman…” one cannot expect anything better!

The second and the more important point here is about Railways refusing a job to Santhi due to a failed gender test. This implies that a government entity (Indian Railways is a state-owned company) has denied employment to an Indian citizen on a gender/sex based criterion. Surely, this is unconstitutional!!

Shouldn’t the media report and question this rather than subjecting Santhi to humiliation by tasteless reporting?!

Update: Well some people say that Indian Penal Code’s Section 377 denies the basic constitutional rights to people who are of “unnatural sex”. But I wonder how that is possible! Section 377 of the IPC talks about “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal…”. I fail to understand how it applies in the case of a transgendered person! Please enlighten me if you can. But until that happens, the point I raised in my post still stands. Indian Government, through it’s agency Indian Railways, acted unconstitutionally in denying employment to Santhi based on the results of a gender test! It was sexual discrimination. Period!