The Internet is NOT for Porn

...says the Indian Government, as they ban a popular porn website in India called Savita Bhabhi




ContentSutra has the story. I quote (with emphasis added):


N. Vijayaditya, of the CCA, confirmed the development. “There were several complaints against the site. We have taken action under the relevant sections of the IT Act and blocked the site,” he said. When asked if the agency will give a chance to the owners of the site to defend themselves, he said nobody has come forward so far with such a request. He said he could not say if the agency will pursue legal action against the operators of the website.

....

Savitabhabhi is the 82nd-most-visited Indian website, attracting more visitors than Bseindia.com, the website of the Bombay Stock Exchange.

.....

The portrayal of a married Indian woman as wildly promiscuous raised the hackles of many in a largely conservative nation. One of them, Bangalore-based N. Vijayashankar, who describes himself as a “techno-legal information security consultant”, waged a sustained campaign against Savitabhabhi, complaining to the government’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) as well as the Director General of Police in Karnataka in October last year. “Cartoons are a more participative medium. Videos don’t do as much damage. When a child is watching a cartoon, he imagines himself as the character. This has a deeply corrupting influence on our youngsters. This, apart from the fact that an Indian name was being used in such an obscene cartoon, is what led me to make the complaint,” Vijayashankar said. “A child will see a Savitabhabhi among his relatives.” When asked if there was any scientific basis to his thesis that pornographic cartoons did more damage to young people than pornographic videos, he said that was his own psychological interpretation. (Vijayashankar has no training in psychology.)

......

In an email interview with contentSutra, the main brain behind the site, who goes by the handle Deshmukh, said they were exploring legal options. “We are talking to our lawyers and trying to figure out our options. The initial reaction is since the site does not pose any threat to India’s national security and is not illegal, it must be against some international treaty to block it. However, we are still working on the legal angle.”

Currently it seems safe to say:
1. SavitaBhabhi can't do much about the power of the Indian govt over Indian ISPs. In fact, it appears that they still haven't understood the reality of regulatory control in India. The government has fairly broad rights under Section 67 of the Indian IT Act 2000.

2. The Indian govt can't do much more about SavitaBhabhi registered in the US. However, what kind of due process bans a website first and provides review upon request afterwards? The cart appears to be before the horse.

3. N. Vijayashankar really doesn't quite get the Internet. Or psychology. Or adolescent children. Poor guy.

4. There will be more back-and-forth here. For instance, check out www.savesavita.com

As a freedom-of-speech issue, it will be interesting to see if anybody in India picks up the cause. Crates of comics to Mr. N. Vijayashankar, our favorite “techno-legal information security consultant”? I doubt it.

Toon porn doesn't have the same zing as a Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women



Meanwhile, Avenue Q explains:



Lyrics | - The Internet Is For Porn lyrics

ps. Section 67 of Indian IT Act quoted below. Young Deshmukh will do well not to announce his real name in India.


67. Publishing of information which is obscene in electronic form.

Whoever publishes or transmits or causes to be published in the electronic form, any material which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or if its effect is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it, shall be punished on first conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years and with fine which may extend to one lakh rupees and in the event of a second or subsequent conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years and also with fine which may extend to two lakh rupees.

Gladwell on Anderson: The Gods Must Be Crazy (to be dissing each other like this)

In India, we have 16-330 million gods whom we pray to daily, so they can explain life to us. They don't do a good job.

In the US, since things are more rational and efficient, every generation has only 4 gods, but they explain everything.

Currently they are called Gladwell, Anderson, Surowiecki and Diamond (though Diamond's luster is fading, and is being replaced by lord Taleb on his chosen vehicle - A Black Swan)

Gaze upon their holy countenances.






Don't you feel elevated?

Recently, the New Yorker published an snappy critique by Gladwell of Anderson's book Free. Observe the thunderbolts of Great God Gladwell.

Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?

Overall, a quite cogent argument. The Great God Gladwell (3G?) is revealing an avatar I would like to see more of, the thoughtful critique.

Unfortunately, I think that was possibly an Outlier

I now quake to imagine what might happen if there were to be a clash of the Gods, a type-face Titanomachia? Blogs would bleed the world over.


"GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL rain down upon a LONG TAIL of OUTLIERs. for FREE"

"The WISDOM OF CROWDS says if you BLINK you will COLLAPSE"


etc. etc. A truly horrible outcome.

I can't wait.

Romance in a governor's life

Reading Gov. Mark Sanford's emails to his Argentine affairee, I couldn't help but feel a sense of tragedy for the Governor. I quote the e-mails, from The State

Gov. Sanford
I also don’t want you walking20away (sic) from some guy (I take it the younger guy you mentioned a t dinner) because of me — and what we both have to see as an impossible situation. I better stop now least this really sound like the Thornbirds — wherein I was always upset with Richard Chamberlain for not dropping his ambitions and running into Maggie’s arms. The bottom line is two fold, my heart wants me to get on a plane tonight and to be in your loving arms — my head is saying how do we put the Genie back in the bottle because I sure don’t want to be encumbering you, or your options or your life. Put differently, given I love you, I don’t want to be part of the reason you are having less than an ideal week in what sounds like a cool spot.

Lastly I also suspect I feel a little vulnerable because this is ground I have never certainly never covered before — so if you have pearls of wisdom on how we figure all this out please let me know ... In the meantime please sleep soundly knowing that despite the best efforts of my head my heart cries out for you, your voice, your body, the touch of your lips, the touch of your finger tips and an even deeper connection to your soul. I love you ... sleep tight. M


Not sure what to make of it all.. but it does make one wonder about:

a. The False Romance of Infidelity: The most frightening movie I have seen in recent times in Unfaithful. The spiral of tragedy when someone crosses a line they should not have.... something is broken irreparably, and the world is a sadder place.

b. Infidelity is Rife. One commonly cited paper is Atwood & Schwarz (2002) which suggests that 50-60% of men and 45-55% of married women have an extra marital affair at some point in their life. In many of these cases, the driver is the need to feel emotionally connected to another person.

c. The Inevitability of It All. It seems a standard recipe. Person A establishes a position of moral superiority, Person A is caught in a damaging moral situation. US politics seems especially prone to this cycle. Clearly, expectations of behavior are not in sync with the reality of human weakness. What happens next? It's absurd that one appears doomed to repeat this cycle over and over again.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Gov. David Paterson, Sen. John Ensign and now this.


Let me point out that this type of expose never, never happens in India. I am under no illusions that politicians from India are cut from a cleaner cloth. It's just that either the quality of public expectations or the quality of public debate preclude this from being an item of public discussion. All you hear are dark rumours of how somebody is with young women, and now and then the ocassional mysterious reopening of a criminal case.

It's all a mystery to me.

Not all doves are created equal

Well, I do have a fondness for human absurdity illustrated via animal metaphors. So here's a lament to the unfortunate flying pigeon killed last week by an errant cricket throw.


This pigeon did not get the same honourable treatment as one of it's brethren, a sparrow killed in Lords in 1936 during an MCC-Cambridge cricket game. This one was mounted on the cricket ball that killed it!



Antony Amos , MCC’s Tours & Museum Manager commented:

“The dead sparrow is a very popular attraction in the MCC Museum. Despite its untimely death, it has certainly not gone unnoticed – being seen by over 50,000 visitors to our Museum each year.”

Clearly one can draw only one conclusion from this episode:

Better a dove gone above than a turtle gone hurtle.

Amen, again.

Not all turltes are created equal

So we have introduced you to the Turtle-Dove paradigm. Turtle's projected into space will definitely create the illusion of flight but a harsh inevitability awaits them: they will crash and burn. When a SKAR member was in Trinidad earlier this year, he met a different kind of turtle and observed the opposite phenomena. The leatherback turtle (featured above)  on first glance looks slow, lethargic, fat, indolent and stupid but is actually a king amongst Turtles. A couple of reasons why:

1. Fourth largest reptile after three crocodiles which is effectively like coming in second. Unlike their midget friends, these turtles weigh between 250 and 700 kgs!

2. They are fast. The 1992 Guiness Book of World Recrods has the leatherback turtle listed as having achieved a speed of 9.8 meters per second in water -- making them the fastest reptiles!

3. They love deep sea diving and can dive as deep as 4200 meters below sea level.

4. They are super international and can be found all the way in Alaska and Norway to the Cape of Good Hope in Africa and dispersed as far as New Zealend.

5. In the Caribbean their eggs are considered to be aprhodisiacs!

The ones we saw in Trinidad had apparently swum all the way from Africa for a little Trini limin. So in short, they are big, fast, love adventure sports,  are well travelled and help Carribean people get turned on. Wow!

Just imagine the conversation that might transpire between a regular turtle and a leatherback turtle. Might be similar to the one that Vijay Malaya has with Dalip Singh Rana!

Japanese smuggling $134.5B from Italy to Switzerland

Last Week Bloomberg news reported that two Japanese men with $134Billion in US treasury bonds were caught sneaking across the border from Italy to Switzerland. The article is hilarious, I excerpt:

Think about it: These two guys were carrying the gross domestic product of New Zealand or enough for three Beijing Olympics. If economies were for sale, the men could buy Slovakia and Croatia and have plenty left over for Mongolia or Cambodia. Yes, they could have built vacation homes amidst Genghis Khan’s Gobi Desert or the famed Temples of Angkor. Bernard Madoff who?

These men carrying bonds concealed in the bottom of their luggage also would be the fourth-largest U.S. creditors. It makes you wonder if some of the time Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner spends keeping the Chinese and Japanese invested in dollars should be devoted to well-financed men crossing the Italian-Swiss border.

This tale has gotten little attention in markets, perhaps because of the absurdity of our times. The last year has been a decidedly disorienting one for capitalists who once knew up from down, red from black and risk from reward. It almost fits with the surreal nature of today that a couple of travelers have more U.S. debt than Brazil in a suitcase and, well, that’s life.

That's life indeed. How about I walk away with a few countries tucked into my coat pocket??

ps - thankfully, the bonds were fake. Apparently nearly all of US Treasury bonds are electronic now. Which is good for world monetary security but bad for, amongst others, SKAR, the Italian government and the two Japanese smugglers. William Pesek explains:
The bust could be a boon for Italy. If the securities are found to be genuine, the smugglers could be fined 40 percent of the total value for attempting to take them out of the country. Not a bad payday for a government grappling with a widening budget deficit and rebuilding the town of L’Aquila, which was destroyed by an earthquake in April.

pps- the blogosphere is reverberating with North Korean conspiracy theories

Please push an interphone to turn into Maiko

At SKAR, we love Japan. Japan might be a close second to India in terms of its inherent SKAR-iness. When SKAR member was innocently walking thorough Osaka, he caught a glimpse of a door and a sign that beckoned. The sign read: 

Please push an interphone to turn into Maiko!

If you pressed the button would you turn into a national park from the democratic republic of Congo? A member of the Canadian pop group Sugar Jones? Or perhaps a plain vanilla Geisha in training? 

While all three seemed like perfectly reasonable options (as far as turning into things go)

this was a button we did not want to push because...across the street from the sign, we were greeted by the stark and melodramatic image of a transvestite with bunny rabbit ears weeping while the world whizzed by silently. Hard not to see a causal connection between the button and the bunny ears!

The Tongue-Fold Path

Engulfed in the maelstrom and the throngs of people in Shibuya, Tokya, a SKAR member got a glimpse of these three characters. Who are they?Renegade Monks? Japanese take on the Three Stooges? Nothing like some good old fashioned come-hither tongue action from a female monk ; especially when her two male counterparts, baldie and fatty are looking away.

The Original Gold Digger

If Kanye West was chillin in China around 1893, he would have met the original gold digger -- Empress Dowager Cixi (check out her nails designed for gold digging) who married the emperor, embezzled state funds set aside for expanding the navy, teamed up with a bunch of conniving eunuchs and used the money to build....a marble ship!

Get down girl, go 'head get down
Get down Dowager, go 'head get down
Get down Cixi, go 'head get down

The (carrot) revolution will not be televised

If your grandfather was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary who was also a politician, author, physician, military theorist and guerrilla leader whose face is universally recognizable in every part of the globe, what would you do with yourself? Would you become a tax accountant? An insect taxonomist? Would you learn how to play the ukulele?

No... if your name was Lydia Guevara you could become an animal rights activist and pose semi-nude for PETA with carrots strung defiantly across your breasts. Yeah baby! Grandpa Che would be proud of you... or silently turning in his grave.

Tiger Uncle and Chindogu

Absurdity abounds in Japan. When a SKAR member was is Tokyo last year, he noticed a diminutive looking old Japanese man standing on the street corner by himself looking pensive. What a sweet old man thought SKAR member. And then all of a sudden sweet old Japanese man opens a plastic bag with practiced ease and... in a manner both routine and nonchalant, begins to don a hat. No ordinary hat my friends. It was a Tiger hat! The mind boggles:

Where did he get this hat from? Why is he wearing it? Is he making a fashion statement? Does he do it to ward off evil? Perhaps to intimidate? Maybe to pick up chicks?


No surprise that the Japanese are the same group of people that developed Chindogu:

Chindōgu is the Japanese art of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that, on the face of it, seem like an ideal solution to a particular problem. However, Chindōgu has a distinctive feature: anyone actually attempting to use one of these inventions would find that it causes so many new problems, or such significant social embarrassment that effectively it has no utility whatsoever.
Featured below is an example of Chindogu.


Tiger Uncle might get upset if we put him in this category because his hat probably does serve some subliminal purpose that is not apparent to unsuspecting SKAR members.

Notable Turtle #1: Vijay Mallya

Nobody epitomises the Turtle-Dove paradigm as the King of Good Times Mr. Vijay Mallya.



Observe his flying-turtle antecedents. Born into a wealthy distilling family, Vijay apprenticed under his most un-turtle-like father Vittal Mallya until taking control of the United Breweries group at age 29.

Since then he has led a lavish lifestyle featuring:
a. loss-making yachts

b. loss-making F1 teams
c. loss-making cricket teams
d. loss-making airlines

The last is so notable that the NYTimes thought it fit to write an article about it. I excerpt:

Kingfisher Airlines of India promised passengers the royal treatment — flight attendants so comely they were called “flying models,” full meals even on short flights and curbside valets to carry their bags.

But how the mighty have fallen.

Short of cash and unable to pay its bills, the company has had to take on debt from India’s government-owned banks, pledge assets in exchange for loan guarantees, postpone delivery of new planes and search for a foreign investor.

Most symbolic, perhaps, instead of starting nonstop flights from India to California — as envisioned by the company’s flamboyant founder, Vijay Mallya — the airline last added a route from Calcutta to Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh.


He also has a bottled water business, which if he manages to lose money on, would be a minor act of genius.

The most creditable thing young Vijay did (which middle-aged Vijay is doing his best to destroy) is to unite all the various brands he inherited under one uber-title: Kingfisher. A move apparently modelled after another global mega-brand: Virgin.

Vijay himself appears to be mirroring his look upon Sir Richard Branson, down to the stringy salt-and-pepper look.



But he's missing a few parallels in the analogy
a. Branson was born poor, Vijay was not
b. Branson flies hot-air balloons, Vijay is a hot-air balloon
c. Branson is reportedly dyslexic, whie Vijay can read

The last fast is supposed to cause youngmiddle-aged Vijay bouts of gnashing fury. Which explains that stringy hair, all over again.

Vijay, wake up. Sell the sports teams and focus on your businesses. Turtles will hurtle!

Related articles:
After scaling the heights Richard Branson plans to plumb the depths (telegraph.co.uk)
Vijay Mallya Buys Gandhi Items in Auction (kisaso.com)

The Difference between Turtles and Doves

Warren Buffett said "It's only when the tide goes out can you see who's swimming naked" At SKAR, we have a version of this fine saying. It's called the turtle-dove paradigm.

Turtle-Dove Thought Experiment

1. Essentially, divide the world into two groups:
a. Dove : animal of the skies, capable of self-sustaining flight
b. Turtle : animal not of the skies, not capable of self-sustaining flight

2. Launch both into the air as follows:
a. Dove : from a cage, on the ground
b. Turtle : At velocity, into the air, from a high perch in life

3. Observe who flies, and who falls. In a twist on gravity, this step is called a "comeuppance"


SKAR uses the turtle-dove paradigm to differentiate between people who have achieved what they have at a young age due to privilege, or due to talent. Ultimately, SKAR believes, the dove will win. It's a matter of persistence, since there's no saying exactly how high and how fast the turtle is projected into the sky.

Naturally, turtles can often waste positions of great initial strength, simply because they do not recognize that they are not a dove.

Corollary I
"A turtle, when projected from great altitude, can momentarily provide the illusion of flight. Everybody is fooled, including most of all the poor turtle."

Corollary II
"Turtles will hurtle."

Observe the anthem of the flying turtle



Now, are you a turtle or a dove?

Odd bird of the week...

National Pigeon Association of USA (NPAUSA)

From their Champion's Gallery: a Bokhara Trumpeter


Where's the bird's head, man?

'Nuf said.

No you will not get laid if you co-invented the USB drive

SKAR members have recently been bombarded by this Intel ad which features Ajay Bhatt, the supposed co-inventor of the USB drive. Their rock stars are apparently not like ours.

A couple of problems with this ad.

Problem 1: The Ajay Bhatt in the ad is actually not the co-inventor of the USB drive. The person in the ad is an actor.

Featured below is the real Ajay Bhatt. Come on Intel? Was this "rockstar" not cool enough to play himself? 

Was it this impossibly smooth "talk to the hand" move that he could not get right and so you decided to go with his hipper Indian doppelganger?

Problem 2: This is the other alternative. Dalip Singh Rana a.k.a "The great Khali." Now this guy is a rockstar...

... but was it really necessary for him to assault the Undertaker on Debut?


Dilip Singh - The Great Khali on Debut

If I had to chose, I think I'd rather be The Great Khali vs. giving the world a nice way to carry their PowerPoint files in their pocket.

Hobson's choice.

ObAMMA Grrl: The Market for Premium Hugs

At SKAR, we believe that premium markets reveal a lot about human nature. The market for hugs however, has never gone premium until recently.

Got us thinking about the original inventor of the Free Hug movement. Referred to many as AMMA, she has given over 26 million free hugs over the course of her lifetime. 

In an article with Salon, Amma says:

"What's happening here cannot be described. It is true communion, pure love that flows, flows like a river. It is pure subjective experience. It's like somebody trying to explain about drumming. You cannot explain with words. In order to really understand, you have to play a drum or listen to it. It's a direct experience, a real meeting between hearts. It's like looking in a mirror and cleaning your face."

Wow. She continues:

"I'm trying to awaken true motherhood in people, in men and women, because that is lacking in today's world. Today there are two types of poverty. The first is a lack of basic necessities. The second is a lack of love and compassion. As far as I am concerned, the second is more important because if there is love and compassion then the first kind can be taken care of."

We're sold. With such a huge need for free hugs in India SKAR wants to start offering luxury hugs.But how could we compete with AMMA? She's got a lock on the market for true motherhood.

Well, we could follow the idea of the IPL and bring in some differentiated talent, like.... ummm... ObAMMA Grrl here.

If ObAMMA Grrl dressed up in a sari and offered you a hug, how much would you be willing to pay?



ps- She can lip-sync too. Quite well.

Sai Baba: He looks like Jimmy Hendrix but he makes real magic, man

Who is this man?



Is he related to this man?



Sadly, no. Top pic is the Sai Baba, new age/ascetic who's bigger than Jimmy (lower pic) ever was, and he can make magic, man. He can produce things out of thin hair air!

Which is just wicked cool, and beats smoking up ANY day.

Read about the guys who believe in the Power of Sai miracles; the crazy people who mistook the Baba for MJ (how could they miss the HAIR?); and the people who SKAR thinks spend too much time analyzing dead news clippings to make boring videos like this.



Pssh. who cares where the gold necklace came from? Didn't you see how the other guy was beaming?

Honestly.

Dismal Economy thankfully looks like Pacman

if the biggest recession of our lifetime is not a bizarre moment, then I don't know what is. Let's take a minute to savor the damage.

However, amidst this global malaise, it is reassuring to know that the percentage of this chart which resembles Pac-man, has, in fact stayed the same since we last checked.

Uncyclopedia: a really, really skary Wikipedia.........

If you ever accidentally google "Death of Noddy?", you will discover halfway down the page a Wikipedia-like link that says this about him.



Cletus Noddington, commonly known as "Noddy" is a Celtic deity dated from the early Bronze Age to the period of Roman expansion into Britain, though the combustion engine-god has had a large impact on modern day society; the mythos of "Noddy and Friends" ("Friends" being cult members) was recreated in children's television and the image of the little man with a bell on his drooping hat has entered popular culture as a symbol of Satan and the Devil.


Click on any of those links and you'll go down a rabbit-hole into the Wikipedia of the Twilight Zone. And that's when you really know you've found the Uncyclopedia

The Uncyclopedia is the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and it's great (if somewhat profane). There are more than 24,800 articles of pure nonsense on it; all dedicated to taking the central tenet of Wikipedia (i.e. anybody can edit) and carrying it to a logical extreme.

Here's its entry about itself, for instance:

The poor meme-ridden "comedy" website Uncyclopedia is the stuff of Internet legend and infamy. The site which originated in 1860 is now a multi-national effort and is viewed as the best of its kind by some.^[1] Uncyclopedia currently specializes in tedious mockery of perceived competitors and petty in-fighting, with much of the content viewed as mass-produced junk. However there remains a peculiar fondness for some of the articles by fanatics. The site has however been viewed as a waste of server space by its host, the evil Wikia Empire.


And here's the official symbol, the Potatopedia:

The potato is the symbol of Uncyclopedia and Sophia. It signifies mental softness and dead Irishman.

The Uncyclopedia is now hosted on Wikia servers, but still remains somewhat unknown. Looking through its history I came across a warning from the Malaysian Internal Security Ministry; warning about "untruths, insults and ridicule" about the country on the site. I can appreciate the outrage, but I'm not sure what was expected instead. The Internet is an unedited place; and Uncyclopedia is like its do-it-yourself Onion.

So if all you Wikipedophiles are looking for something to well and truly SKAR yourselves, this is your chance... go for it!

Search Uncyclopedia

 

Esperanto & Blade: Trinity

As a result of the Union Square Virgin Megastore's Closing Sale ("Lights and Light Fixtures also for sale") this week, I was able to obtain a copy of the New Line Platinum Series Edition 2-Disc Unrated Version of Blade: Trinity for all of $4. As the third film in the franchise and the fourth in my bag (alongside Blade 2 and Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder) expectations were not particularly high. Iom did mi koni kio trezoro estis interna.

Among the special features (collected under the title 'Nightstalkers, Daywalkers and Familiars: The World of Blade: Trinity' - which to my mind has more colons than are necessary for any self respecting moniker) is a piece in which director David S Goyer talks about how cities are often bilingual or multilingual. Road signs and public warnings are therefore often in English and another language - in LA it might be Spanish, in Swansea perhaps Welsh, in New York almost always Hobo Scrawl.

Since the city in which the Blade films take place is never actually named, Goyer decided that the city's denizens would be fluent in Esperanto - that wonderful "international auxiliary language" that never really caught on. So all signage and advertisements in the film include Esperanto elements, and there are even segments of dialogue in Esperanto - such as an exchange between Kris Kristofferson's character Whistler and a newsvendor in which they discuss the growing public perception that Blade is a menace to society. An Esperanto flag is also visible in one scene, during a fight between Blade and a recently awoken Dracula (yes, really - only he's called Drake here - perhaps because of his leather pants.)

There is even a scene that has a character watching Incubus - a 1965 black and white horror classic starring William Shatner (yes, that William Shatner) which has the distinction of being the only feature film completely in Esperanto.

Wonderful stuff for $4. And if all that wasn't enough, there's an alternate ending that has the Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel characters fighting a werewolf-vampire hybrid in a Shanghai casino run by Russian mobsters in stetsons and inhabited by girls in assless chaps. So that's nice.

Jugaad is the asli spirit of Innovation

Now that GM looks likely to be owned by the American taxpayer, and that all the fuss around the $2000 Tata Nano is dying down, I was gratified to read that the Economist has not forgotten about Jugaad - the original low-cost auto design from Asia

A year or so ago, when somebody asked me to describe the soul of India, I gave them the phrase "jugaad". Jugaad means nothing works like it should, there is no infrastructure, there is no blueprint for success. But you have a pressing NEED: to get from point A to point B. So you just make it happen, however you can.

Like this taxi...


Or this tractor...


And here are some more 'jugaadu' shots from the Indian highways, courtesy of the Flickr Jugaad group

(thank you also to the Power of Ideas blog)

It's just a reminder that as long as anything costs Rs 1 in India, somebody will be ready to improvise a solution that works half as well, for a quarter of the cost.

No matter how ridiculous it looks.

Creative Protest 3: Get your panties in a bunch

So we have written about women coercing complacent government officials to wear bangles and about Gandhigiri. The SKAR creative protest award definitely goes to the

Consortium of Pub-Going Loose and Forward Women -- a group of women who decided to mobilize online and send unwashed pink panties to a Hindu activist group that was responsible for abusing  women in a bar.

This story has been widely written about and makes for an easy SKAR piece. However, what we found most absurd was Mr. KG Paul's take on this matter. This cherubic looking self-proclaimed citizen journalist who reports from his home (please notice the silk curtains in the background) discusses this incident and decides that it is a great opportunity to 

wax eloquent on the clash of civilizations, Justus Moser and Matthew Arnold!

Patel vs. Patel vs. Patel vs. Patel vs. Patel vs. Patel

If you thought only the Indians in India were nuts, you need to read this post.

On July 19, 2001 Cricket umpire Roy Higgins turned up to umpire a game between Yorkshire LPS & Amarmilan club from Bradford. To his surprise, all 22 of the players on the pitch were named... Patel

BBC Sport has the story, but I'd like to quote from LPS club secretary Ishy Patel
"We didn't realise we all had the same name until the match was under way, but even then we didn't think it was anything special.

"We certainly didn't think it would become such a big story.

"Twice before we've played and there were 21 Patels lining up against each other, but on this occasion our regular wicketkeeper, who is not called Patel, had to go to London for work."

Spare a thought for the one non-Patel. No wonder he took off to London for work. The scorecard from that momentous game is here below:



But thats not the only Patel story in town:

BBC News last week has an article about a marriage mart in Wembley, where groups of British Patels can meet & date another...er.. Patel. There are 250,000 Patels in the UK, divided across half a dozen castes.

As the guests arrive they are handed lists relating first names (surnames are obviously a given at this do), ages, qualifications and occupations of their opposite numbers, together with the names of the villages their forefathers came from. One girl explained:

"You look for the village where your own folks come from. But you can't link up with someone who's from your own village because they'll be too close, like your cousin or your brother."

The mind boggles. It's approximately 6800km between Wembley and any village in Gujarat.