Journalist P. Sainath giving a talk titled Globalizing Inequality in 2005. Hat tip to the kid bro for the link. 

Random, Rants Globalising Inequality, P Sainath

I can’t explain why I go out cycling every morning.

For the first fifteen minutes or so my knees are always sore and my hamstrings cramped up from the previous day. For the next few kilometres, after I am warmed up, I feel good but then about 10 km. or so into the ride my back starts to hurt. The grips on the handlebars rip up my palms and they are now covered with thick, ugly calluses from being rubbed raw for hours everyday. A few fingers on my left hand are often completely numb or tingly. 

If it’s sunny it’s so hot that I’m dripping wet with sweat about half an hour into the ride. If it’s raining, I am soaked to my skin within minutes of leaving the house and bitterly cold and uncomfortable for the rest of the ride. Each day I return so tired that my vision is blurry. 

Motorists think I don’t exist. Whether it’s at a crossing where I’m trying to switch down gears fast enough to keep going and a truck decides to cut across me anyway or on a wide road, a bus overtakes me only to brake hard, just a few metres ahead of me or some scrawny Goan mother-fucker on a scooter, who threatens to kick me over because I didn’t let him pass quickly enough.

Today, an auto-rickshaw side-swiped me and my pedal got stuck in the auto. I was dragged along for a few metres. He didn’t brake, he didn’t slow down. I finally got thrown to the side of the road and my foot got caught between the spokes of the front wheel of my bike and the front fork. Considering the violence of the crash I got off pretty lightly: one badly mangled foot, one destroyed shoe, one really sore ass and one scraped up elbow. The rear dérailleur on the bike is shot. Also the the front wheel is bent but I did that, while yelling in agony, trying to free my trapped foot. I got no apology and little help.   

So, I ask myself, why do I do it? Why do I go out every fucking morning, whether it’s in the pissing rain or the blazing sun to push pedals for kilometre after kilometre, torturing myself and pushing a cycle to the point that it is constantly falling apart? Why do I want to be out on the road at the mercy of the elements and of feckless motorists sending text messages from their cellphones while driving SUV’s? 

Maybe it’s because once in a while, not everyday, often when I least expect it, when I’m close to passing out, soaked with sweat, my lungs and my legs on fire after cycling up a steep hill, I go over the top of the hill and start cycling down the other side, free-wheeling down the slope, fast as the wind, with just the right song playing on my iPod and blasting into my head… and for just a few minutes I experience the closest thing to ecstasy that I can ever imagine.

Random, Rants Cycling, douchebag, Goa, militant cyclist, militantcyclist

It gives me a great thrill to see that this image that I made for a previous post (by adding the caption FAIL to a photograph of Barkha Dutt that I found on the internets) has been used as the image on most of the recordings on YouTube of the famous Indian journalist Barkha Dutt’s conversations with UK based lobbyist Nira Radia.

These recordings have been at the eye of a storm with everyone accusing Ms. Dutt of corruption on an epic scale and NDTV and the ladies involved trying to brazen it out in a typically Indian fashion.

I just realised what the furore was about because in the past month I noticed a huge surge in traffic to this site that was looking for actual Barkha Dutt news and not just the regular wierdos looking for ‘Barkha Dutt Nude, ‘Barkha Dutt Boobs’ or other Barkha Dutt related pornography (I understand fetishes you guys but please, get a life!)

So I read Open magazine’s articles and listened to the recordings and call me cynical but I wasn’t shocked in the least. This is how the media has operated forever and anyone who is surprised by the level of complicity and just pure corruption for lack of a better word is truly clueless.

Listen to the audio recordings here and try to see if you can tell at which moment exactly the line of journalistic integrity has been crossed.

Also worth watching is Karan Thapar’s interview of Arun Shourie, a grand old man of Indian news who still makes more sense and has more dignity than anyone else in the fourth estate today can ever hope to achieve. I think it is very telling when the ex-editor of two of the leading newspapers in India encourages everyone to be highly sceptical of everything they see and read on or in the news.

Also, I said the words ‘Journalistic Integrity’  and ‘Barkha Dutt’ in a single sentence. Funny! Let’s try another one. ‘NDTV gives you balanced news and unbiased editorial.’ Bwaaa Haaa Haaa! Am I a comedian or what?

Some previous commenters on this blog have asked me why I despise the fine lady and my answer is the terrorist attack in Mumbai on 26th of November in 2008.

I watched a television in horror as everyone in charge seemed to be paralysed with inaction but also as Ms Barkha Dutt interviewed the distraught families and friends of the people hiding inside the Taj Hotel in Mumbai that the terrorists had laid siege to and in which they held an unknown number of people captive.

When the captives called their families pleading for help and told them which rooms of the hotel they were hiding in to save their lives, Barkha Dutt announced this information on live television to the world and I’m sure to the terrorists inside who were certain to have a television tuned to NDTV or at the very least have radio contact with someone who did.

The same thing happened when commandos tried to storm Nariman House during the same attacks to try and free the Jewish hostages. In her enthusiasm to get LIVE NEWS out not only did Barkha make a fool of herself by constantly contradicting the news she had just announced, she also gave the rescue team’s every move away.

Needless to say, NDTV got immense ratings for those two days and most if not all of the people hiding in those rooms at the Taj Hotel died and everyone in Nariman House save for an infant, met the same horrible fate. Wait, allow me to rephrase that.

MOST OF THE PEOPLE WHO BARKHA DUTT RATTED OUT IN THE 26/11 ATTACKS WERE SLAUGHTERED.

Since Ms. Dutt was not put on trial for treason back then these new accusations are totally pointless and shall go nowhere in a hurry. Shut up slaves and go back to your televisions.

P.S. There are absolutely NO nude pics of Barkha Dutt on this web site.

(A thousand guys just read this and went awwwwwwww! )

Be good, eat fruit.

Random, Rants 26/11, Arun Shourie on Barkha Dutt, barkha dutt, Barkha Dutt Nira Radia Tapes, douchebag, Mumbai Attacks, Nariman House, NDTV, Nira Radia, Taj Attacks, Terrorist attacks

So the other day someone’s tweet reminded me of the crazy/brilliant Prince (or the artist formerly named after a dog) soundtrack to one of the Batman films. The video above. Watching it fired some dormant synapses in my brain and unearthed a memory from my childhood that I had long suppressed.

As Mark Twain said, never trust anyone who enjoyed their childhood. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time in my happy place during the last twenty years of the twentieth century, but I digress…

So, the memory. Many, many moons ago in the late nineteen hundred and eighties there was a hindi film I was taken to watch in a cinema hall and then since it was such a great picture that all the grown ups loved so much I was taken to watch it in a cinema hall again.

The film was called HUM and it starred among others, Amitabh Bachan, Govinda and my personal gold-standard of pure, unadulterated manhood, Rajneekanth. For those of you not familiar with the pop culture of this subcontinent think about Steven Seagall and Chuck Norris meeting and making sweet, sweet man-love. Now stop screaming and  retching and think of their love child. Multiply this love child by one hundred with a level bonus for coolness and you have South Indian Demi-God, Rajneekanth.

So normally Hindi film-makers copy songs but in this case they were like “Fuck it! Why copy a popular song when we can just play it on a jukebox and have Govinda and Rajneekanth beat the fucking Bejesus outta some bad guy to the beat?” and then they all gave each other high-fives and shot this video.

What you end up with is a fucking #EPICWIN for entertainment even though it is a #FAIL for originality. Please watch the clip and try not to hurt yourself from laughing too hard. Also because I love you I have scoured the internets and found a version with English subtitles because it has been scientifically proven:

Crap Hindi Film + Ludicrous English subtitles by someone who seems to have little understanding of either language =  DOUBLE THE FUNNY!

So, watch the original video above first and then brace yourself and click play on the hindi video below. Watch for:

1> Govinda and Rajneekanth holding hands and dancing while thrusting hips homoerotically at each other.

2> Totally not fake or pasted on looking moustache on bad guy.

3> Rajneekanth giving us the first clue of the impending ass-whooping the baddie is about to receive by saying to Govinda “SHOW THEM THE PROWESS”

Enjoy! You can thank me later….

Films, Random, Rants #EPICWIN, #FAIL, Amitabh Bachan, Batman, Chuck Norris, douchebag, Govinda, HUM, Mark Twain, Prince, Rajneekanth, Steven Seagall

The first part of this post can be found here.

With the hardware part of my new/old desktop tower running I went to Ubuntu.com and downloaded the disc image for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Once the 700ish MB download was done was I proceeded to try and burn the disc image to a 1 GB USB drive I had lying around and this is where I ran into my first problem. I tried about 5 different ways to do this on a Mac without any success and finally I gave up and read the instructions on the Ubuntu site that said that this was not a ‘recommended’ method of installation. Windows apparently, was needed to create the USB installer. So a few days later I got hold of a Windows laptop and created a bootable USB drive from the image.

At this point I should clarify that in all fairness my inability to create a bootable disc from the image was due the fact that I use Mac OS X and there is apparently NO way to do this on a Mac except for some weird terminal commands that did not work for me. Also, I could have easily avoided the trouble I had with the disc image by just burning it to a CD but if you read the first part of this post you will have noticed I had a CD-Writer that I doubted was still working. Long story short, it wasn’t and I didn’t want to buy another drive for what I thought would be a one time use only. Read more…

Rants, Tech AMD Sempron, Kallaway Leopard, Leo4All, Nvidia, OS X, OSX86, SnowLeo, Ubuntu, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Ubuntu 10.04 review, Ubuntu Sucks, Windows XP

That’s right all you free software loving losers and nerds. Send your hate mail to the address on the right. Also, if you don’t like reading about tech you should probably skip this post coz I’m about to get my geek on here.

So recently two things happened. Ubuntu launched, to much fanfare, the latest version of their operating system 10.04 LTS (Horny Heron or whatever lame-ass name the freetards gave it though in all fairness, Apple’s Snow Leopard moniker is hardly better) and I sold the Mac Mini, for three reasons;

1> I gave up the idea of ever buying a television and using the Mac Mini as an HTPC, there is just not enough content available to warrant my ever spending money on an LCD television. TV is dead to me. (The irony? I work in the television and film industry)

2> I needed/wanted a tower again, I want to buy cheaper, faster, higher capacity desktop drives and components to use in a system, no more pricey laptop components on a desktop system just because it is the size of a frakkin’ lunch box thankyouverymuch. The Mac Mini just wasn’t cutting it anymore as a file server and a back-up computer to the MacBook Pro and the other systems in the house.

And finally 3>Due to a recent unemployment (HIRE ME!) I had some free time on my hands and wanted to build a desktop computer again, something I had not done in almost half a decade and used to enjoy very much.

So, I sold the Mac Mini to an Iphone app developer on Craig’s List (I also dealt with a scammer who wanted to send the payment to me from the United Kingdom and have me ship the computer to and-I-kid-you-not, NIGERIA. I responded with a cordial, business-like BLOW ME!)

I then gathered the bits of computer hardware scattered around the house like pieces of flotsam and jetsam, mostly hardware abandoned by my brother when he got his first Mac last year (A white Macbook) and this is what I came up with

Read more…

Rants, Tech apple, better than nothing, Gigabyte, Hitachi, i-BAll, Nvidia 7200GS, Sanjam Singh, TV is dead to me, Ubuntu, Ubuntu 10.04 review, unemployment

So summer is here again. How do I know? Because I am constantly tired and sleepy and grouchy. Why am I like this? Oh I’ll tell you why.

Because I live in the backwater of a third world country run by politicians who are corrupt sons-of-bitches who will not make any infrastructure investments unless they bear fruit within the time frame that these douchebags will stay in office i.e. a couple of years, five at best. What they will do is spend crores and crores of tax payer money on destroying forests and constructing huge, hagiolatry parks with ugly ass statues of themselves.

The huge statue of this particular stoop-shouldered ugly-ass bitch now stands covered in blue tarp because our toothless and frankly quite gutless Supreme court finally found its testicles and succeeded in putting a leash on her and making her stop the construction. So the park, the huge Dalit monument and the statues themselves just stand there, in limbo, an eyesore, a criminal waste of time, effort, money and a reminder of the pointless destruction of literally thousands of trees, a pretty jogging track, a park for kids and valuable and scarce green cover that the area could ill afford to lose.

So, coming back to the upshot of all this. Every year the onset of summer is heralded by rolling power cuts for hours and hours. Last summer just to fuck with us, the powers that be (UPSEB) thought that it would be insanely funny to regularly cut the power at 7 AM each morning!

This summer the wankers at UPSEB have gone back to their tried and tested modus operandi of cutting the power at about 1 AM each night, just the time that you have really gotten into some deep sleep. So, by about 2 or 3 AM your backup power source (the inverter) has run out of juice and died in a plaintive high pitched eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! wail that signifies ‘Low Battery’. But this wailing does not wake you up, oh no! You have already been tossing and turning for half an hour in bed covered with sweat and mosquito bites as the steadily decreasing voltage from the inverter has made your ceiling fan’s blades whirl around slower and slower and made the gaang! gaaaanng! gaaaaaaaaaaang! gaaaaaaaaaaaaanngggg! sound successively more and more irritating until the blades have just given up on trying to stir up the molasses of warm, humid air in your room and have crawled to a halt with a aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan! sound to inform you that they really are trying to move but just like Star Trek “They don’t have the powerrrrrrrr!”

So, you have gotten out of bed and turned off the fan but the inverter dies anyway and after lying in bed and listening to it for what seems like an hour you finally go “Fuck this shit!” and toss off what little of the covers you haven’t already kicked off and go and try to start the generator. So you perform the little routine that you can do in your sleep now.

Move the fuel switch from ‘off’ to ‘start’ position.

Turn the choke on.

Grab the pull cord and heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeavvve!

Nothing.

Repeat about 15 times until you have got your heart rate up and have a good, steady stream of curse words going under you breath.

Catch your breath. Stop wheezing.

Repeat about 10 more times.

Slap your forehead and check the kerosene tank. Full.

Check the Petrol tank. Empty.

(Let me clarify here that the world renowned engine boffins from Honda Motor Company in their infinite wisdom designed this petrol tank to hold at least a few litres of fuel. Good for a month of starts at least. But they also designed it in a way that let all petrol in it evaporate within a few hours of the tank being filled.)

The result is that I now have to go get a torch, find the Coke bottle full of petrol we keep somewhere, fill the tank just enough to get the generator started this time while taking care not to drop too much of it on myself so that if the shit does hit the fan I don’t scream and burn for too long.

Done.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeavve another few times.

Result!

The generator coughs and splutters to life and covers me with sooty black smoke full of unburnt hydrocarbons.

Turn the choke off.

Switch the fuel tap from ‘Petrol’ to ‘Kerosene’ while trying to inhale as few carcinogens as possible.

(This generator starts on petrol but runs on kerosene for reasons that I am too stupid or lazy to comprehend, especially at 4 AM)

We have power.

I walk back to my room closing all the doors between me and the generator to muffle the godawful racket.

Switch the fan back on.

Peel the moist sheets off the bed. Mosquitos on the wall. Swat the blood-fattened little bastards, fall into bed and try to relax and get some sleep.

Almost as soon as I finally fall asleep the alarm rings to signify the all-too-soon arrival of a new day.

Mother.                                  Fucker.

Random, Rants BSP, douchebag, Electricity, Honda, Star Trek, Statues, Supreme Court

So. While the whole tech/blog world is caught up in Apple’s brilliantly orchestrated storm of leaks, guessing games, waaaay-too-elaborate renders/mock-ups and general breathlessness about the heavily rumoured but never officially acknowledged Tablet/Slate computer I’m sitting here cursing this piece-of-crap operating system they pooped out last year. Yeah, I’m talking about Snow Leopard (hereon called Slow Leopard)

Wasn’t this supposed to be The world’s best operating system, finely tuned?

Why has boot time gone from a snappy 25 odd seconds to a minute or more? Why does Slow Leopard need to restart every couple of days when Leopard could easily go for weeks without a reboot?

Why do both my screens get a grey tint and my keyboard and mouse stop working when I try and logout instead of restarting to save time? Which then necessitates a hold-down-the-power-button-and-hear-the-sickening-clunk-of-the-hard-drive as the system shuts off while you get Windows ME flashbacks.

And all this grief for what? No new features besides the ability to play movie clips in the icon itself! Thanks Cupertino. Thats real useful. Slow claps for you. Windows users… eat your heart out.

Is anyone else hating Snow Leopard as much as I am? Is there anyone else who just wants the 10.6.3 update to fix the myriad bugs that make Slow Leopard painful to use? Are there other users who don’t give a flying fuck about a freakin’ tablet computer and just want their expensive aluminium (yes thats the way the English speaking world spells that word) bodied computers to just work, as advertised?

Also, Superdrives. Fuck Superdrives. Mine seem to die on me every couple of months at the exact time I need to burn a few copies of my showreel to send out. This has happened so often that staff at my Apple reseller avert their faces and try not to make eye contact with me every time I walk in with a broken Mac. I feel like it’s my fault sometimes.

Anyhoo…. Rant over. Happy thoughts now.

There is nothing that can cheer you up after spending hours stuck in traffic like looking over into the next car and seeing that a girl you used to date looks like she has spent her life, post-you, stuffing fatty foods into her face with both hands.

Fucking.           Priceless.

Rants, Tech apple, exes, iPad, Leopard, Mac, Slow Leopard, Snow Leopard, Superdrive, Windows ME

That and the beeping and booping. Can you imagine using a computer that constantly made some sort of sound for every UI interaction?

Geeeez…

(via unplggd.com)

Random, Rants, Tech

This video assaulted my mind waaay too early in the morning today. No, I did not see this at Onion.com and this is NOT satire. This is an actual Christian Rap Group (And if you have never heard Christian Rap or Christian Rock you haven’t lived) singing about the dangers of hugging people head-on where your crotches are actually (GASP!) touching. They call it (andIkidyounot) “Satan’s lustful arm wrap”

Play the video, listen carefully to the lyrics and hurt your brain at your own risk.

Once again. THIS IS NOT SATIRE. These fuckers are dead serious.

Music, Random, Rants Christian Rap, Christian Rock, Christian Side Hug, Jesus, Religious Fundamentalism, Satan’s lustful arm wrap