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.

Having a reputation a reputation helps for sure. And if the reputation is for being a nitpicker, more so! Ujjwal has sent me a couple of gems from his Shirdi’s trip which I’ll share here:

The first one is of a guy selling gay milk. As simple as that! Now I’m no Dubey that I can even try to figure out what was going through this guy’s head when he wrote that.
And forget writing it, he earns his living out of selling the homo milk, have a look:

Now this one is a little less hilarious, but definitely noteworthy. How does an merchant sell a product meant for foreigners (or pseudo foreigners) without knowing their language? At the least he’ll try to use a couple of words, which make the foreigner understand about it’s availability. Here’s what hamara hero writes:

If I were a mineral water bottle, I would do the same. i.e. Hang myself to death(see pic above, again) rather than being avelebal hear.

I don’t usually write blogs.
I certainly don’t crib or make fun of fellow human beings, publicly.
So what really grinds my gears here?

Nothing really My bored self couldn’t say ‘no’ to Anuj’s “Dude! You gotta write about this one on my blog“.

So, the motif of this post is an accidental discovery made by me sitting in the confinements of a cybercafé in downtown Kolhapur. Yeah, the birthplace of those famous-but-i-have-no-frikkin-idea-how footwear. So tacky and uncomfortable that I could never get my feet to wear a pair for one hour straight.

Anyway, let’s come back to the cybercafé where I was going to search something in Google. I clicked in the search box to start typing and popped open the dropdown menu with past searches stored in the browser cache.

My eyes and smile grew wider as I moved down the list, till I reached this absolutely breathtaking set of queries. I have seen a lot of bizarre stuff; I have seen a lot of crazy stuff; Heck, I’ve even seen MBAs actually doing some meaningful work. But I swear to the flying spaghetti monster, I had never ever seen anything as phenomenal as this:

Yes! I had to pick my jaws up from the floor too!

Mosquito Net! Really???

Our hero was probably looking for fishnet clad females.
He must have seen the photographs or videos somewhere, and must be enamored by it. No surprises there. When I saw something similar in my childhood days, I liked it too! I can distinctly remember spotting those pages, presumably torn from a magazine, thrown on that deserted road over a which my 13 odd yrs old past self was biking nonchalantly. That  sudden visual stimulus prodded my brains hard enough to make my bicycle do a  5-0 in 0 seconds. “Holy cow!”; “What is it that she’s wearing?”;  “This thing is so cool!”; “Is it really what I think it is?”; “Oh my!”; “Why oh why would anyone throw these gems on the road like this?”, were few of the many thoughts that flashed across my titillated mind.
No, I didn’t pick up and stash those pictures. That happened later. and it was a completely different set of pictures, outside the scope of this article.

Now I wonder if I would have done something similar back then if I had the luxury of having Google at my command. The imagery was fascinating, I must admit. But I’m not sure if I was driven enough.

So there are many things that go to this dude’s credit. You just have to give it to him!
A – He’s got taste. An evolved one at that!
B – He’s a fighter. A go-getter! He seeks, fails, and tries again.
C – He’s creative! I couldn’t have come up with something like this. Could you?

It was Google’s job to better its algorithms to understand the need of this youth. Our man did his best. Not his fault.

I’m not taking any credit away from Google though. It’s awesome! But like all the know-it-all smarty-pants it does have fun with you once in a while. Which brings us to my other discoveries that fateful evening. A lot of queries followed this pattern:

Aishwarya hot and necked
Rakhi Sawant hot and necked
Mallika hot and necked

This is huge! Did he really wanna see these women necking?
Why would he need to go to a cybercafé to see necking when they show it on TV all the time. This age old technique has been depicting both love and rape on Indian silverscreen forever.
Not too difficult to guess what would have happened. This one probably wanted to see Rakhi au natural or, probably in his words, ‘neced’ or ‘neked’. And Google threw a googlie: “Did you mean necked?”
In a blink this dude must have gone, “Oh! Yes, exactly… yes yes. That’s what I meant.“  Google must have sniggered while this gullible juvenile browsed through the almost similar results thrown at him anyway.

You too have done this to the naive kids, haven’t you? You insensitive scumbag.

Before I conclude this post, I can’t help but wonder how my english literature professor would have interpreted the mosquito-net phenomenon.I can almost hear his words: “The author is a clever satirist. At display is his snide acerbic wit with carnal overtones. He brings the reader’s attention to the fact that most models these days have assets which qualify as ‘mosquito bites’. Therefore he cleverly weaves his metaphorical mosquito net and tells Google exactly what he does not want to see. Hence he craftily coveys his fancy of the ample curves of the feminine form.”

Hail mosquito-nets!

- Anupam

A couple of things made me write this post:

First is this video by George Carlin, and the other is… well, cyclists. And specifically the kind of self righteous cyclists who think that cycling to work is not only cool and green, but also saves the planet. I’m not talking about those who have to cycle to work as they can’t afford any costlier vehicle, just those who can, but still cycle to work.

On Indian roads, people drive all sorts of vehicles in a single lane: cars, trucks, motorcycles, scooters, and of course cycles. Simple laws of traffic engineering (or a little common sense) tell us that in a lane, the slowest moving vehicle governs the overall speed in that lane. What do you think is the slowest moving vehicle then? Not only the cyclists decrease the overall speed in the lane, they also increase the overall chaos. Because the traffic is moving at a ridiculous speed because of the cyclists, the other vehicles are burning more fuel than they could have.

Add to this, I’ve never seen a cyclist stop at a traffic signal which doesn’t have a free left turn. The left is ALWAYS free for them. They have an awesome way of dealing with these signals. Just get off the cycle, become a pedestrian carrying a cycle, walk a few steps, get back on the devil and there you go. Because cycles are not motored vehicles, no traffic rules apply to them (I think), I’ve never seen a cyclewala getting a challan.

Talking about safety, it’s the most unsafe vehicle in my opinion. Cyclists seldom wear helmets (if they do, it’s more fancy than safe). Plus, because they consider themselves both motorcyclists and pedestrians, causes a lot of nuisance. For example, when they’re riding on their footpath (which every cyclist proudly does, and hates motorcyclists for it) causes confusion on the footpath and rage in the pedestrians. Also, when the slow moving cyclists (even when he rides the cycle like it’s stolen) rides on the main road, causes rage amongst the motorists. And a lot of road rage is not a good thing, definitely not safe.

If there’s anything worse than one cyclist on road, it’s two cyclist buddies. I can bet my life that 90% of the times these two cyclists would be traveling together, almost hand in hand. And they’ll do it till death (or their ways) do them apart. Such a scenario is almost unseen for any other kind of vehicle.

I know that in Mumbai, heaven exists at a place called Marine Drive. Not because it’s home to the rich and the influential, but that road is heavenly because cycling is BANNED there.