I’m trying to write more regularly, so expect some rambling.

We used to watch a lot of Star Trek: TNG back in the day and there was this one episode I’m sure my parents were a little uncomfortable with - ‘Justice’. After around 10 minutes of watching the half-naked inhabitants of Rubicon III indulge in guilt-free sex and other pleasures (and my mother’s glares), we were asked to leave the room  (damn you, understandable but misplaced fears).

I finally watched the episode last night, 16 years later. It was pretty silly but thematically more substantial than I recall. The USS Enterprise makes contact with a planet whose peaceful inhabitants live in fear of their god, an advanced alien being kicking it out in the planet’s orbit. When Wesley Crusher breaks a trivial rule, the Enterprise has to prevent his execution and this isn’t easy considering they’re sworn to the Prime Directive. The reason I prefer TNG over the original series is because of the former’s obvious moral core.

Anyway, Captain Picard saves the day with a speech.

I don’t know how to communicate this, or even if it is possible. But the question of justice has concerned me greatly of late. And I say to any creature who may be listening, there can be no justice so long as laws are absolute. Even life itself is an exercise in exceptions.

Let me digress, but only slightly. The IT law overhaul in India is clearly a bad idea but shouldn’t we be worried that there are people out there making arguments like this?

I really don’t want to contribute to the hyperbole that this debate has already created but I can safely say that this is the finest one hour of debate, one-sided as it is, I’ve seen in a very long time. Two amazingly articulate intellectuals take on Catholicism and religious hypocrisy. To be fair, I do wish that the two proponents of the Catholic church would have been a little more, I don’t know, Christlike instead of pretending that (institutional) child abuse and homophobia are urban myths.

Stephen Fry makes an especially brilliant case against the so called ‘force for good’. Nod along or throw stuff at your computer but this is what good television is all about.

Go watch. Now.

This is me, expressing sadness over an acquaintance’s decision to not vaccinate his child because of what he’s rightfully referred to as, media-fuelled skepticism.

Scratch sadness. Incredulity.

I’ve always been for representing both sides of an argument except when the arguments are, like Leonard Susskind would say, bogus. Case in point, intelligent design (an oxymoron if ever there was one). And now, you have a bunch of fringe lunatics promoting vaccine skepticism. Skepticism has never been a bad thing but misinterpreting reports and arriving at fallacious and often self-serving conclusions alway is.

To make matters worse, you have people like Oprah and Bill Maher giving a platform to anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists. Again, wouldn’t have been such a bad thing if the aforementioned celebrities did not wield such enormous power over the choices of a demography that include housewives and impressionable twenty somethings.

Thankfully, it’s not that hard to find scientific information, empirical data and responsible reporting when it comes to vaccines.

• How Safe Are Vaccines? – Time Magazine
• Michael Shermer’s Open Letter to Bill Maher
• How to Win Arguments About Vaccines – WIRED (Also, this)
• Drinking the Anti-Vaccine Kool-Aid – Neurologica Blog

I do get that the flames are mostly fanned by parents who’re genuinely scared for their children. But to quote Steven Novella, ”It’s not enough to mean well. You have to get the science right.”

There’s a series of brilliant articles on CNN IBN about being gay in India.

• Coming out, not a gay and glad experience
• Gay and Indian
• Law and Behold
• Six part video

Just so you know, the Indian equivalent of Proposition 8 in America is Section 377.

This Valentine’s Day, the Law Commission of India is thinking of all you hormonal, barely out of school, socially challenged 18 year old boys. As if board exams and sparse facial hair weren’t problems enough, the government of India may very well grant you the right to finally propose to that girl you’ve had your eyes on.

http://www.ibnlive.com/news/law-panels-knotty-idea-let-boys-marry-at-18/58277-3.html

”There is no rational, scientific basis to why boys who may vote or take other decisions after 18 must wait to be 21 to marry,” commission member Kirti Singh told UNI.

So rejoice all ye who have been waiting to turn 21. Women however have it tougher; the age of consent is now 16 instead of 15.

How does the Law Commission decide on what laws to change? Aren’t there more important amendments to be made like, say, I don’t know…banning urban ‘gunda’-ism?

Seen near Southbank, Melbourne.

The Vatican has outdone itself this time. After the Ten Commandments of Motoring and declaring itself as the one true church, the dark empire has denounced The Golden Compass. For the uninitiated, The Golden Compass is the (children’s) film based on Philip Pullman‘s His Dark Materials books and from the looks of it, the film will lose millions of dollars in revenue thanks to obedient sheep all over the world.

The Vatican on Wednesday condemned the film “The Golden Compass,” which some have called anti-Christian, saying it promotes a cold and hopeless world without God. -Reuters

I keep forgetting that in spite of wars, famines, disasters and Uwe Boll, the world is still a warm and fuzzy place. And, out of the thousands of films churned out over the years, it had to be The Golden Compass that promoted such blatant blasphemy.

“In Pullman’s world, hope simply does not exist, because there is no salvation but only personal, individualistic capacity to control the situation and dominate events,” the editorial said. -Reuters

Am I the only one who finds irony in the above statement? I’d really like to know what the church has to say about the last time God controlled situations and dominated events. Even the most pessimistic of speculative fiction writers would not have imagined that even in the year 2007, religion would enjoy the freedom to air such tripe and worse still, that there would be enough people to actually enforce it.

Damn global warming and nuclear arms, religion may very well end up being humanity’s undoing.

PS: Piss off the Spaghediety and you’ll be hearing from me.

Every time an Indian with a Y chromosome delivers a tirade fueled by patriotism, he is bound to tell you that the Indian culture stands tall amongst all else because of it’s unrivaled respect for women, for the female form, for the working woman, the daughter, the sister, the mother. He will tell you how fortunate a woman in India is for she is not subjected to the evils of an amoral western society. He is the epitome of hypocrisy.

• Guwahati men strip, beat up women protesters: Local men strip and molest protesting tribal women in broad daylight while the police watch. What is most bothersome is that journalists managed to click photos whilst the atrocity was in progress. Are we so passive? The government feels that a 1 Lakh compensation will make up for the emotional and physical torture these women were put through.
• An Infosys employee in the US pushes his 23 year old wife out of a moving car for being unable to come up with enough dowry. Apparently, you don’t have to be uneducated to be an imbecile. The news came to light thanks to a Pakistani doctor.
• 26 year old Ashwini Mohite from Pune gets raped and murdered on her way back from work.

Add to that, a 300% increase in violence against women in Kerala, Taslima Nasreen being harassed for her views and reports that suggest violence against women is at an all time high in Asia.

The blame for these lie not with the victims, like most claim but with a judicial system that unabashedly sides the insecure ego maniacs who perpetrate such acts and let them go away with punishments hardly befitting the crimes. Isn’t it sickening when the moral brigade sticks it’s head out to uphold the culture and tradition of the country while doing nothing to check violence against the fairer sex? Isn’t it high time to stop making lame excuses by blaming films and the media? Is not every woman someone else’s daughter, wife or mother?

(Picture sourced from The Hindu: Online Edition)

Yale: I mean we’re just people. We’re just human beings, you know? You think you’re God.
Isaac Davis: I… I gotta model myself after someone.
-Manhattan ( 1979,Woody Allen)

Ever since I can remember, I’ve never been satisfied with who I was. I’ve always pretended to be somebody with quirky tastes and admirable eccentricities. But then, that is how we all start out; we start pretending to be what we want to end up as. Along the years, there have been a number of people I’ve tried to model myself after and these weren’t your garden variety famous folks. These were people I knew (directly or otherwise); people who were older than me; people who possessed a vastly superior intellect when compared to my math hating frontal lobe.

So as I grew up, I read the books they raved about, listened to their favorite bands and watched the films they swore by. These were the people who unbeknown to them, I truly looked up to and to a very great extent, tried to ape. I always knew what I wanted to be; the pseudo intellectual. Like them.

Now, many years later, as I look around, I see them languishing with petty and materialistic pursuits. Somewhere along the line, they sold out. They found bliss in mediocrity and comfort in normalcy. I constantly find myself asking, did I aim too low?

Honestly, as much as I’d loved all his previous books, I was a bit disappointed by Richard Dawkins‘ The God Delusion; not because the arguments weren’t sound but mostly because the entire book oozed with an air of arrogance. Of course, when you’re one of the smartest people on the planet, arrogance goes with the territory, but still. He came across as a fundamentalist at times, albeit an atheist fundamentalist. Wasn’t that the very thing he spoke against- fundamentalism?

So reluctantly, I sat down to watch the 2 part British TV series, The Root of All Evil, Dawkins’s attempt at provoking a religious self analysis of the average couch potato. As much as I want to limit the use of superlatives, I can’t help but marvel at what he’s tried to accomplish. The TV series is brilliant, thought provoking and thoroughly convincing and it’s sure to enrage some people, hopefully for the better.

He journeys from the Lourde to Jerusalem and meets people ranging from devout believers to fundamentalists. His conversations range from the humorous to thought provoking to the genuinely scary. The second part dwellled on a more pressing problem, indoctrination of religion; bringing up children to believe in superstitions.

What really had me all worked up was a conversation Dawkins has with a psychotic evangelist, Ted Haggard. His ignorance of the concept of evolution and science in general is amazing-it’s amazing that millions of people actually listen to people as retentive as him. Evangelists sicken me, and I like to think I know a thing or two about them. But a little reading into the life and times of Ted Haggard left me…well…satisfied.

In November 2006, former prostitute and masseur Mike Jones alleged that Haggard had paid to engage in sex with him for three years and had also purchased and used crystal methamphetamine. Jones said he had only recently learned of Haggard’s true identity and explained his reasons for coming forward by saying, “It made me angry that here’s someone preaching about gay marriage and going behind the scenes having gay sex.”

But on Haggard acknowledged some, but not all, of the allegations, and was removed from all of his leadership positions in religious organizations, including the church he founded. At first, however, he claimed he had never met his accuser and in a television interview said “I am steady with my wife. I’m faithful to my wife.”November 5, in a statement Haggard said, “I am a deceiver and a liar. The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality…There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I’ve been warring against it all of my adult life. … Please forgive my accuser … actually thank God for him. He didn’t violate you; I did.”

-From Wikipedia

And he almost had dibs on the best seats in heaven!

I loved the way Dawkins ended the series. Being non religious/atheist/agnostic doesn’t really make life all that bleak, it just leaves endless possibilities at our disposal.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they are never going to be born. The number of people who could be here in my place outnumbers the sand grains of Sahara. If you think about all the different ways our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here: the number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist. We are privileged to be alive and we should make the most of our time on this world.