How I ended up being disliked in the neighbourhood or How I stirred up a hornet's nest one fine Sunday.

On hindsight, I should have thought a little more before calling for a drastic change in the way we shared on the Local Area Network ( LAN ). I should have remembered Ariely's notes about shifting social norms to market norms and all its ill effects. Or maybe, for starters, I should simply have put a more popular movie for sale on LAN. Yeah, sale ! Whoever heard of that, right? Or was the price a little too steep for an introductory price? One thing I am sure about is when I put the following message to the guys on LAN, the responses were not favorable.

The message read thus :

Hello people! ( Before I go ahead, let me tell you that I am NO fan of free sharing. If  anything's worth your time, it's worth your money too.)

From today I introduce "The Honour System"  ( yeah, Freakonomics and more recently Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational ) according to which I decide a price range for each movie I have. If you want that movie, I'll give you it's minimum and maximum price ( depending upon the quality of audio / video, movie and demand ) and you decide how much you pay ( ofcourse staying within that range. )

I decided to introduce this because I spend time and money researching about every movie and I find absolutely no reason why you should get it for free and then not appreciate it.

So there, you heard it. Free sharing is evil unless absolutely necessary and so I'm charging for the movies I share. Who wants movies from me now?

My first paid movie : The Profit. ( 2001 )

Director : Peter N. Alexander

Genre : Drama.

Tagline: A dark journey into an evil mind where the only good is...The Profit.

IMDb rating : 7.2

Min price: Rs. 75 /-

Max. price: Rs. 100 /-.

And the responses ( in the typical no-holds-barred LAN lingo ) read thus :

( My responses in italics ).

>> bonzi >> SUJITH (JABBERWOCKY ) IS HOMOSEXUAL. 

HE HAS SEX WITH DOGS SADIST ARSEHOLE.

>> tarun >>If everyone goes on charging for movie why the fuck do we need LAN? We can rent it or buy it from outside.

Ok, so how about if I charged 1 Re? Does that drive my point home? My point is value the fucking movies you get. If you pay for something, you just value it more.

>> monty >>Am not talkin about money here...I just mean that you TRADE here!! You ask for something you want and then when you get it you share something of your's which isn't much important! Like movies..I know you got good collection but you don't share..you just send anything thinking we all are choos and anything you send will make us happy...but sorry am not one of them.....

Well atleast you are getting close to the point. Yea, we are trading here. But if you look at it, most people here ( except you and bonzi ) have shit for movies. Do you call that fair trade?

Now, what's so horrible in charging a small amount for the movies? For me, the mere mention of money would :

1) Introduce an element of productivity into the time you spend downloading movies from the internet.

2) Slowly, but surely, better the quality of movies watched and talked about on LAN and consequently outside of LAN too.

So, then. Were the responses a result of a sudden and unexpected shift of social norm ( free sharing ) to a market norm ( price for each movie ) ? Or were they because the first movie I put up on sale was just not very popular or was it the price? Would the responses have been more favorable if I had, say, kept a lower limit of Re. 1 and a higher limit of Rs. 5 or if the movie was, say, recently released Dostana?

What do you think?

Sad but true

You have to die to see the light?
Is the weight of the world on you?
Constantly seeking to change the world
But never to change yourself
You are a pain here but expecting pleasure hereafter?
You may be blessed but are you a blessing?

Thus begins "Sad but true", a song from "The Aryan Crusade" - Rudra's second commercial album. Rudra is a death metal band. Vedic death metal, one could classify. They pick hymns from hindu scriptures and makes songs out of them.
Rudra is a cosmic god. The lord of terror, the lord of compassion, Shivam and Shantam. According to myth, this god, Rudra, has no time to spend with the dead. He deals only with the living, the striving, the aspiring.
This is myth. This is philosophy. That which the westerner borrowed.
Ayn Rand called this living, striving, aspiring the prime mover. That small, small percentage of the population who keeps the world moving. The creators, His master copies. The dead are the parasites. The living deads. Sponges.

The desperate need for a savior
Is for the fool and the weak

The song plays on.

Insecurity. Characteristic #1 of a parasite. Insecurity at work, in a relationship, etc.
Parasites could be a pain in the ass for the next parasite.
Competition. That which keeps the dead alive.
Prime movers don't dwell in competition. Not external atleast. HE designed them for struggles so that the rest could get by. And characteristically enough, they, the sponges, look down upon the people who struggle ! Hypocrisy, lies, fear. Pick the next person and you could find all these traits and a few more.
Parasites kill. They kill that which they never created ( They never create anything, without exception. ). Not even contributed anything to. But they kill. That's their right, their nature. Characteristic #3.

Victims of ruthless negation
Your ashes shall adorn our foreheads
as a sign of Victory!
You have the right to believe but I
have the power to dismiss!
Satyameva Jayate!

Another song ends.

All I am capable of while listening to a fanatic is sit frozen and wonder about the miniaturization people can bring about in a human being in the name of 'enlightenment'. Its only more chilling when the loudest arguments come from parts where men thought the most for the nation. I think of religious fanaticism and arguments or fights based on them as arguments between two men who can read and write, yes, but don't have a mind or knowledge to think. So if you give two magazines, say India Today to one and Outlook to the other and asked them to discuss the same topic for a certain prize money, ( something about which they are hitherto blank and written using different examples, references ) it would be amusing, dismaying for some, to watch the men disagreeing and arguing over issues which never existed, quoting exclusively from the few pages of text that have been fed to them, all for the prize and without reason. What difference could you possibly find between these men and those fighting over the Koran and the Gita and the Bible?

You walk the ever barren fields in a mad state of this crazy country and the shrieks - helpless, deserted - of girls, daughters of the same fate and mother enter your ear and gets trapped in that area between your eyes, where I believe the conscience is, and never escapes. Raped, breasts lightened off from the body and then, as the final honour for being women, sent to another world. Walk a little further and you see a child crawling, struggling to stand up and walk to go find his father and mother and brother and everyone he had ever seen or touched and if the people of his beloved motherland continued to get enlightened the same way, he would not have to travel too far. Such piety, such devotion for the unseen, the Harry Potterlike characters of the myth, you stand and freeze.

As you dream of of the lines of a book never written or that unique business gambit never thought of or that last bead in the string which unified all scientific theories ever known to man, the sanctity gets destroyed when you think that dreamt under the same sky with the same unsurety of the closed eyes are dreams of erasing civilizations, religions, people, ideas. A certain group of our enlightened ones do not think favorably about a religion whom they call a minority. They want the traces of this minority ( the number which funnily enough far exceeds the population of the United Kindgdom and France put together ) to be scored out of the nation. Then proceeding to a larger scale, they want a nation to be scored out from the face of the world.

It would be helpful now to bring those two men who could read and write but with hobbling minds in. They were blank about their issues and hence the argument which ensued guaranteed that nothing could come out other than the few lines of print they could read and enlighten themselves with. And if the prize money depended on a definite conclusion, they could go on and exchange a few blows if they felt the argument was going nofuckingwhere. And then supposing there were two such men in each team and one team eventually blew the other out and after all that a meagre prize was awarded? A civil situation indeed! Iran could be an example of this team and situation.

Today, the whole concept of religion and everything coming out of it, is based on a feeling of superiority. "My religion and its teachings - holy". And the feeling of superiority, of being the elder brother, the magisterial outlook, I believe, often leads to supression, disregard and violence. If instead the prime mover was a feeling of inferiority? Levels of inferiority driven by ones literacy and intellect. I am a firm believer that a self respecting human being is not motivated in an academic environment for his own good as much by a feeling of insecurity and inferiority as by anything else. And this motivation could really not lead to violence or unreasonableness and irrationality because they in turn could only lead to your downslide in such an environment. This, on an evolutionary basis would lead to a nation whose religions would be reason and intellect and knowledge rather the ones based on shaky, unseen scruples and hence to a perfectly developed democracy and nation.

200 killed in a country of a billion and a half. Big deal? I have heard people condemning the rest of the resilient us waking up the next morning, forgetting about the previous day and walking to work. What is wrong in it? I mean, isn’t it wonderful that you are alive and breathing and getting to see what unfolds? Isn’t it wonderful that you are getting to blog and comment and appear smart about the whole thing? Isn’t it wonderful to think that the air you are breathing might as well carry the scent of blood the next moment and that you are privileged to breathe now? What is wrong then in living and sleeping and waking up and going to work when you get to? Can you be sure you are not one of the 200 in the next blast? I can very well imagine 199 of those 200 thanking God and going to work the very next day after the Ghatkopar blasts, after the Gateway of India blasts, after the Mulund blasts, after the ’93 blasts, just like us.

This is precisely called slow poisoning. You kill 200 in a country of a billion and a half and it hardly matters. The agendas are met and not a feather is moved. You see every man worth a dime commenting and appearing smart, every channel theorizing brand new theories till they get enough air-time to fill their pockets and every politician condemning the acts and seizing the opportunity to gain precious political points. This goes on for a week or two and then suddenly everything takes a backseat and everything is forgotten because its elections at so-and-so. So what is wrong if I wake up the very next morning and go on with my life than be a mere hypocrite?

The whole attitude, though, is like thanking heavens for letting you live for just one more day or a minute. Being a reasonable being, one would rather value his life and take control of it than live at the mercy of heavens. But how and when does one begin to value his life if even such incidents don't move as much as a whisker? What is required here is a shock so huge, everyone becomes a victim. So that there's no space left for resilience, no place to go and nothing to do but revolt. Revolt for our own lives and for a change. A 200 people here and a 50 people there, dead or alive, don’t bring about a revolution or even a minor change, quite evidently.

Instead of doing your fireworks here and there, why don’t you nuke us, fellas? Why don’t you, for our sake? Some place where it hurts a little less but which would shock us out of our pants and make us get to the road than to work. All of us.

Honour in the light

Came across demi ray's post about honour killing of 4 young girls in Pakistan. With the new year beckoning and with hindsight to our advantage, it won't be a bad idea to look at where we are headed. This sure might be an isolated incident, but an uncivilized one all the same.

These young girls were not simply daughters conceived by men. They were borne and nurtured into existence by a mother. She -- the mother -- could do nothing more than stand by her man as he slit their little throats.

To say there is an unhealthy, unrealistic perception of sex – as ‘sex’ is loosely defined as ‘women’ – is to put it mildly. For centuries, this patriarchal perversion has been festering in the dark like an ignored cancer, adapting to its debilitating pain and unsightly lumps, growing stronger in endurance, but weaker in health, isolated from examination for fear of the major surgery it will require to remedy it and ultimately, justified by the societal function this disease serves – the family unit, with a mother that will never run away from household duties.

That’s not exactly how women are inspired to unconditional love. It’s so easy to activate a woman’s loyalty and devotion, I marvel at the cavemen who think they need to cripple a woman in order to keep her around. And undoubtedly, that works, too. Women are abused to greater and lesser degrees all over the country and all over the world.

The criminal in this case, however, now has two sons to carry on his name with ‘honor’ in tact – and a criminal justice system that defends him. Matters like this are perceived as 'family disputes' and men are inherently the household disciplinarians. What have the sons just learned? The mother, has a private, silent psychological and emotional torment to contend with. Mothers don’t ‘recover’ and bounce-back from things like that. What has been reinforced for her?

We all find ways to justify our behavior – even cold-blooded ‘pre-emptive’ murder can and is justified in the mind of the criminal. He killed young girls who don’t even know what menstruation is in anticipation of the day they ‘will’ have dishonorable sex. For centuries, this deviation has grown and festered in the dark.

When the Qur’an was being revealed to the 7th century Arab pagans, one of their ‘directives’ was to stop burying their live newborn baby girls. That was a common practice back in those days. I don’t know how long it took to stop these live burials, but we don’t hear about this practice in Arab countries, any longer. However, if the root of what motivated this live burial of females is not eradicated, it could simply ‘evolve’ as another gender-based crime, such as burying ‘adulterous’ women in sand up to their necks so that stones could be thrown at the only exposed part of her body. This was a Middle-Eastern practice, described in the Bible as well, that Jews – and their counterpart Christians – have moved past.


Hang your head down in shame. We belong to the same race.
We can only hope such news does'nt make the headlines in 2006.

p.s: Police in Multan said they would complete their investigation into Ahmed's (the girls' father) case in the next two weeks and that he faces the death sentence if he is convicted for the killings and terrorizing his neighborhood.

Would be interesting to see how things turn out, the country taken into consideration