No can do

Suraiya writing in the TOI- A can’t-do attitude is much easier to enforce than a can-do one. It is much easier to shut a school – temporarily or otherwise – than to ensure that there are basic amenities like electricity, to keep it open. It is much easier to make smoking in public places a [...]

Beautiful

Via Churumuri, Pullman responding to a question on his book- Q: Mr. Pullman, the title of the novel, seems to an ordinary Christian, to be offensive. And to call the son of the God a scoundrel is an awful thing to say. A: Yes. It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it [...]

Infatuation

Salil Tripathi (via Sans Serif) responds to Roy’s pro-Naxal PR campaign- In a rambling 19,500-word essay published a week ago in Outlook magazine in India and the Guardian newspaper, Ms. Roy writes of recent experiences following the Maoists in the Dandakaranya forest, near where the security forces were ambushed this week. The piece was headlined [...]

Dictatorship and Democracy

A strange post at Churumuri- [M]uch to the disappointment of anybody who upholds democracy and federalism, all the discussions about the [right to education] bill have missed the single most important facet of this whole thing: the complete usurping of power by the central government and the complete neglect of state governments in the matter [...]

Wipeout

Regarding hdd wiping, Gutmann writes- In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques. As a result, they advocate applying the voodoo to [...]