John was never a fan of PJs…actually, he was a tubelight — he never could under­stand them.

What does the world have against Poor Jokes? Over the years, I have come to develop a sympathy for this much-maligned creature called the PJ. Indeed, what has it done to deserve the kind of treat­ment meted out to it by modern society?

Many people make jokes that fall in the category of PJs. There’s a double standard applied, however, because most people will laugh at their own PJs, but groan at somebody else’s.

Maybe that’s where the distinc­tion between the PJ and the non-PJ lies. A non-PJ is a carefully devel­oped situa­tion that has humor associ­ated with it, whereas a PJ is one with a story that is somehow ‘discon­nected’ from the punch-line. Conse­quently, the PJ gives personal satis­fac­tion — it seems funny to the person who knew what was coming.

I propose a Forum for Restora­tion of Poor Joke Rights (FRPJR) whose first demand will be a thirty-percent reser­va­tion for PJs in every comedy show.

Life is way too short to solve six equations with eight unknown variables.

Caring For Your Intro­vert is an article by Jonathan Rauch. Finally, someone seems to be making a lot of sense.

Richard linked to this article in his blog, and I whole-heartedly agree with his observation.

The role of the Opposi­tion in the Parlia­ment is to oppose the ruling party in all matters. Most polit­ical parties have trained their members to adhere strictly to this principle. When an issue is raised, the Opposition’s duty is to denounce the whole thing as a corrupt and anti-national move that would desta­bi­lize the economy, degrade our rich culture and heritage, and make our poor farmers suffer.

Wait — this is actually a good thing. Or at the very least, it is better than all polit­ical parties conspiring to quietly pass bills and Consti­tu­tional Amend­ments that cement their own positions or serve common crooked purposes. This is the alarming new (?) trend in polit­ical circles nowadays.

A respon­sible Govern­ment and a respon­sible Opposi­tion would be welcome, but until then, let’s maintain status quo.

Most human beings realized from the very begin­ning that the use of nuclear energy to attack other human beings was likely to result in huge losses, both in terms of life and property. Of course, some said that this was accept­able as long as the damage done was to the enemy, and when all parties had this opinion, Doomsday seemed inevitable.

Some nations felt that they should work together to prevent this kind of madness, by coming to an agree­ment on how nuclear technology should be controlled. The outcome of such an agree­ment was a ‘Treaty’ that was signed by a number of nations. Of course, some nations had to be ‘persuaded’ to become a signa­tory to the ‘Treaty’ but that was not worri­some, because these nations were not econom­i­cally or militarily powerful, and their opinions could be suppressed.

Unfor­tu­nately things did not work out too well. The ever-changing polit­ical scenario made the ‘Treaty’ irrel­e­vant in the modern context, and soon new ones had to be formu­lated. The ‘Treaty’ became one of many treaties. Each one was flawed in its own special way, and faded away with time.

And so the stale­mate continues. Maybe we’ll have to wait for the forma­tion of a World Govern­ment for the issue to be resolved. A World Govern­ment would have to be more powerful than any single nation in order to be successful. Moreover, it would have to be free from polit­ical influ­ence by individual nations, so the United Nations is ruled out of the contenders’ list. The other names in the list are…well, there aren’t any.

The problem is essen­tially one of trust. It’s diffi­cult to get two people to agree to something when they’re not sure of the other’s inten­tions; how do we get things to work out between countries and cultures?

Many people in my campus use cell-phones to commu­ni­cate, not only with relatives and friends at home, but also with others within the campus. When a call is made to another cell, it has to go to through a service provider even if the callee is close-by, and there­fore the caller is charged.

If calls could be made to other cell-phones directly whenever the call-recipient is within a critical radius, it would save a good of resources, and also reduce the load on the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion infrastructure.

However, I think a cell-phone powerful enough for this purpose would probably violate Govern­ment norms.

It’s the festival of colour — Holi. Shantanu’s blog has an infor­ma­tive article about the festival.

Flowery words have been spoken about the virtues of democ­racy. It has been touted as the best form of govern­ment society could possibly have, and its sanctity has remained unques­tioned for many generations.

There have been rebels. Socialism and its offshoots have stood defiantly in different corners of the world, but with the demise of the power of the former USSR, socialism as an ideology has become a chapter of the past. Never­the­less, the failure of socialism is not to be mistaken for the success of democ­racy. To go beyond and improve on what we already have, we must recog­nize short­com­ings of the existing machinery, and aim for better.

The funda­mental flaw of the democ­ratic process is its failure to under­stand that society is an evolving organism. If citizens of a country were to sit together at a confer­ence and democ­ra­t­i­cally decide to limit their own freedoms, is this decision binding on those that follow, the ones who could not partic­i­pate in the confer­ence? Ideally, a new vote should be taken with their partic­i­pa­tion, and the decision should be re-evaluated. If a nation voted to follow the princi­ples of commu­nism, would it remain a democ­ratic nation, given that this was the choice of the people? Indeed, what is the differ­ence between a so-called democ­ratic nation and a so-called commu­nist one? If we leave aside the economic struc­ture and functioning of the state, we are left with a set of beliefs that essen­tially points to the power of the people. The question, really, is about how this power is exercised.

In India, elections are held every five years. In this period, the elected govern­ment has the power to enact any law within the limits of the Consti­tu­tion of India. Moreover, it is not too diffi­cult to alter the Consti­tu­tion itself, given that a finite subset of the citizenry can always conspire to achieve their ends. There are certain measures meant to prevent blatantly corrupt practices, but a deter­mined Parlia­ment is guaran­teed to succeed in its schemes, whether good or evil. In fact, the elected members are kept on a leash of fear – the fear of losing the next elections. What this implies is that, there will occasion­ally rise to power a few who show little concern about how the electorate might judge them at the next test, and conse­quently, their indif­fer­ence will crystal­lize into arrogance and misuse of power. This has happened before, and it will happen again.

The power of the media in this context is grossly overes­ti­mated. A dog that barks can be silenced with a knock on its head. If the media were to be gagged, expres­sions of outrage may become louder in the global commu­nity, but it is economics and self-interest that ultimately decide what punitive measures are taken by neigh­boring states, and carefully calcu­lated moves can leave the country invul­ner­able to economic attack.

Some people might be under the impres­sion that the law-makers are the ones entrusted with improving the existing system by enacting new laws, but they are mistaken. Laws, even Consti­tu­tional amend­ments, are made within the frame­work of the existing system. Moreover, elected repre­sen­ta­tives have not studied polit­ical systems; they are not experts who can confi­dently suggest better solutions to problems posed by the current form of democracy.

At the end of the day, if citizens can be made aware that the system they abide by is imper­fect by choice, then they can try again and do better.

I’ve been tagged by Varun.

So what do you do when you’re tagged?

1. You have to come up with eight different quali­ties of your perfect lover.
2. You have to mention the sex of the target.
3. You need to tag eight victims to join this game and leave a comment on their blog saying they’ve been tagged.
4. If tagged more than once, you don’t need to post again.

Before I get started, let’s just remember that it’s too much to expect other people to be perfect when we ourselves are hardly models of perfec­tion. Having said that, these are quali­ties I would like to find in my perfect mate -

• She should be able to commu­ni­cate with me on different levels
  She should know what I think and feel, and vice versa, without either of us saying a word. Call it telepathy, if you will.
• She should share my sense of morals and ethics
  I would find it diffi­cult to respect someone who had views about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ different from mine.
• She should give me my space when I need it
  Maybe the lunar cycles have something to do with it. Sometimes I like to socialize, and sometimes I wish to be left alone.
• She should talk about inter­esting things
  This is actually two different quali­ties combined into one point. First, I prefer to listen (which means I don’t talk too much), so she should be willing to talk. Second, she should talk about things that interest either of us. She should have opinions about every­thing; I don’t mind if she disagrees with me, but she should be able to defend her views.
• She should be open to new ideas
  Some people do things because they must be done; they don’t question anything, nor do they like change. She shouldn’t be one of these people; she should be willing to try out new things, and listen to and analyse alter­nate points of view, although she needn’t neces­sarily accept them.
• She must be loyal, trust­worthy and respon­sible
  She should display a sense of loyalty towards her friends and close relations, not just me. I should also be able to trust her with impor­tant things, without having to worry too much.
• She should be attrac­tive
  I won’t say anything about her being pretty. Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. As long as she seems attrac­tive to me, and I, to her, I’m satisfied.
• She should be willing to travel by my Time Machine
  Yes, I’m going to develop a Time Machine and travel across space-time, and I wouldn’t want to be alone. She should be ready to share my adventures.

These are the people I have tagged -

Simit
Ujjwal
Avi
Sujit
Chaitanya
Satish
Kanishk
Anti

This is not something I gener­ally do — talk about cricket, that is. I watch cricket, and only when one of the teams playing is India. But this match was way too good to be forgotten.

Not that I’m going to say much about the match. I’ll just drop a link to the stats, which are self-explanatory.

The match between Australia and South Africa. The Australian team creates a world-record by putting up a total of 434, and relaxes with obvious smugness. Enter Gibbs and co. who refuse to let go even when things start looking bleak, and eventu­ally succeed in creating history by winning the match with just one ball and one wicket to spare.

Wow!