A few days back, one of my friends sent me a link to check out. The gist of the link was to convince people to not drive their vehicle for 30th Jan 2011. And why?

Because “One day’s restraint cannot count all that much, you may say. In that case, you are wrong. Each minute step matters. And here, we are talking about a collective minute step. Let us breathe free on January 30. Let us help our earth breathe. Let us! “

Now while I couldn’t even begin ridiculing the intentions of the “No driving day” guy for almost three weeks, I have come out of shock and began thinking about it. I really tried hard to understand what good can be achieved by a group of people, 1000 or lesser, led by a random person on the internet to give up driving for a day (which, conveniently is a Sunday as well ). Why do people celebrate “earth hour” one hour once a year by switching off their lights? Why do people try to save tigers on the internet by blogging? Why do models go nude for PETA rather than wearing fur? (okay, that I understand)

We all know that the world today is suffering from a lot of problems, all this pollution in the air, the scarcity of energy, the sparsity of tigers and a thousand other things. Some people take these problems more seriously than others, and they know that if they propose any solution to the mass in which each individual will have to get out of their comfort zone, it is doomed to fail. So what do they do?

They just propose something which will make the followers feel that they are contributing to the cause, whereas they are just trivializing it and deluding themselves by going for a self righteous trip. They are just getting rid of their guilt of polluting the environment and congesting our roads very cheaply. Not driving on 30th Jan will not cause even 0.0001% change in overall traffic or pollution this month, this year, or ever. It won’t even make a statement. But participants will think that they have made an impact, while they’d have just made a fool of themselves. And they will gloat and laugh when they see you driving on 30th, and maybe even compel you to join them in this stupid crusade.

Proposal for my followers:
For not letting these people good about themselves, I propose my followers should drive twice on 30th Jan, simple. This way you can reverse the guilt and let them know that they have not done anything good for the environment. All their gloats are belong to us.

Proposal for “No driving day” followers:
Save some water as well guys, If you really want to feel good about yourself and help the environment, stop bathing 7 days a week and do it once a week. That way you will really have saved some water everyday. Too inconvenient?

In the words of George Carlin, “We’re so self-important. So self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. ‘Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.’ And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven’t learned how to care for one another, we’re gonna save the fucking planet?”

I’ve always been a big fan of Firefox, at least for the adblock plus extension which doesn’t let me see insane banner ads all day long. If not for speed, I’d have never moved to Chrome at all. It turns out, I was losing out on a lot of fun all the while just by not looking at these orkut ads!  There have been instances of orkut ads going wrong for me, but this one is a HUGE fail. Visualize this:

Orkut wtf

So orkut tried to “Find a match in my community and profession“. These are three epic stupidities in just one sentence! The girl they choose to titillate me with is Ms. Shah, a Gujarati (while I’m a marwadi), who is an MBA (while I’m an Engineer). And of course I’m MARRIED! The probability of me being interested in marrying Ms. Shah would be lesser than me surviving two thunder strikes and dying off a coconut falling on my head. So much for the targeted ads.

Oh, by the way: Facebook isn’t doing too good in terms of targeting either. The post on pluggd.in which talks about Indian matrimonial websites stooping too low also notices this.

After writing a previous blog post on naming asklaila.com, I was thinking more and more about how do companies name their products. And does this name have anything to do with the success of the product? If the answer is ‘yes’, I fail to understand how in the world has Hero Honda succeeded in becoming the numero uno in motorbikes five years in a row!

According to me, Hero Honda has come up with the stupidest names ever for bikes. Now, what kind of a loser names his bike Achiever? No seriously! Why would anyone in the world want to buy a bike which is named Achiever? Ditto for Glamour, unless you are a yellow-pants-orange-shirts wearing Govinda yourself. With Hunk, they reached a new low, which I didn’t even think was possible. Well, maybe they thought of building an hunky Indian version of the Harley Davidson, but named it so that everyone understands what the name stands for.
Ambition, in my guess would be for the 50 year old virgin who still thinks he could marry a princess, but manages only to buy an Ambition in the end. And don’t even get me started on Splendor(and the thousand versions of it: Splendor plus, super Splendor, Splendor NXG)!

Glamour might be for Hunks who have the Ambition of being Achievers of Priyanka Chopra. Speaking of bollywood and HH’s naming of bikes, I think there is a definite correlation. In my opinion, Hero Honda names most of its bikes keeping one bollywood star in mind. If Glamour=Priyanka Chopra, Hunk=Hrithik Roshan, Joy=Joy Mukherjee, Ambition=Imran Hashmi, no points for guessing what’s Karizma for. I can actually read through the mind of the person responsible for Karizma. “Hmm.. I need to name this bike in English… I think Charisma is a good word, which although I don’t understand, would look nice. Moreover it sounds like Karishma Kapoor (big grin). But people would think it’s a lengthy version of “chashma”, so let me make it more like Karishma.” Hence the name Karizma.

With Passion, they forgot that they are selling a bike and not viagra on wheels. And I can only assume that Passion Plus would be an ideal name for a stronger medication.

Maybe I was a little harsh on Hero Honda, because other companies like Bajaj, TVS, even Yamaha sometimes name their bikes idiotically. Like Dawn or Boxer etc, but come on. You have to give it to Hero Honda for the maximum number of ridiculous names.

When Hero met Honda, a cycle company met a motorbikes company, and you can only be sure that cyclists are nothing more than stupid people, hence the awesome bike names. I could go on and an, and take a dig at pleasure, sleek, street, and the endless other ludicrous names, but I should just stop and let you know that such names not only grind my gears, but make my blood boil.

p.s.: I ride an Avenger, and if you think the name is awful, you are wrong.

I always find pretty amazing how the indian press empowers women, statistically. Allow me to explain that in a little detail: Today’s headline in the TOI read: Girls outshine boys in CBSE 12th result here, and here. Ditto with Hindustan times
What a sexist way to announced that the CBSE 12th class results have been announced!
This also makes me wonder who are TOI and HT (and all other newspapers) really trying to impress? The girls who passed CBSE class 12th exams? The girls in 11th grade who want to insult their male counterparts by claiming percentage victory of their seniors? The village idiot who doesn’t send his daughter to a CBSE school (Forget the fact that he can’t/won’t read english dailies)? Okay lots of questions, which you can answer in the comments.

If you want the same fact statistically analyzed even more, I am willing to oblige. This year, 637,578 students – 264,248 female and 373,330 male – took the Class 12 board exams in the country and abroad. If I ran a daily: the headlines would be:
1) 288957 boys and 243282 girls pass this years CBSE. Boys outshine girls, yet again
2) 19% more boys pass CBSE than girls, buck up females!
3) Mass hysteria in women as CBSE 12th girls fail to pass (as much as boys)

For one more example of selective statistics for empowering women, now bring your attention to something we’re so used to seeing that we hardly notice the prejudice. Do an exercise: Grab today’s newspaper and search for any news which mentions an accident (where > 10 people died). I bet you’ll be able to find the pattern, “52 people died in a bus accident near blahblahland. 19 women, 3 children and 4 senior citizens were identified dead in this horrible accident”. Yeah right, what happened to the men, Sherlock?
The newspaper almost wants to say: “Some men also died, we’re too lazy to count. If you’ve attended kindergarten, do the math yourself. Anyway, they deserved to die. They were not cute little children or helpless women or old dying senior citizens. We won’t evoke any sympathy from the reader if I mention such trivial details.”

And this really grinds my gears.