I was watching ಈ (kannada) TV today and one of the headlines was about an effort by religious leaders to get the govt to ban cow slaughter. The video footage showed mainly Hindu and Jain leaders and someone wearing a Muslim skull cap for completeness.
I returned from a recent trip to Kerala and was surprised by how beef is readily served in many restaurants. Given the vast difference in culture between the two states which are geographically so close to each other, I researched this topic a bit.
Clearly, this has been a political issue that typically rallies the Hindus together – almost to the extent of being a defining element. I learnt that banning cow slaughter is already in the indian constution. I also learnt about a book by D.N.Jha (he seems to be a communist) – claiming that banning cow slaughter is a recent phenomenon whose primary motivation is to rally Hindus against Muslims and British.
Also interesting are articles on this topic by Praful Bidwai (seems to be a left leaning anti-BJP journalist).
Kerala agriculture minister K R Gowri, herself a
Hindu, has termed the proposed bill “detrimental to
the interests of Kerala”. In Kerala, beef accounts for
an estimated 40 percent of all meat consumed. Some 80
percent of Kerala’s people regularly eat beef. They
include 72 Hindu communities, besides Muslim,
Christian and indigenous people.
Although it sounds illogical that cows should have more rights than sheep, what seems to be very clear is that this issue has become a political one – something that has the potential to rally Hindus together, assert their identity (sort of like eating rice/noodles for the Chinese) and to some extent get Muslims and other minorities in the country to respect majority sentiment – something most Muslim countries are very successful at.
It was probably one of the worst monsoon days in Kozhikode (known as Calicut in the 20th century). We even saw one of the local TV stations shooting videos of roads overflowing with muddy waters. Since there was not much else to do, we decided to shop at Focus Mall – probably the trendiest place in the town.
The mall has 3 stories and yet it takes about 2 mins before the elevator shows up. And sure enough it has a dude in a blue uniform to push buttons. We get into one of the larger shops looking for Mens shorts. I should’ve known that the shops need to sell something fashionable in order to justify margins. Why would anyone pay Rs 500 for regular shorts?
The only type of shorts they have are something commonly called “Bermudas” here. The shorts were at least 3 inches below the knee – only a few inches shorter than regular pants. Wikipedia defines Bermuda Shorts as something worn 1 inch above the knee.
My wife picks up some womens clothes and gets in the line for checkout, while I entertain our six year old. It took unusually long given that there were two checkout counters and no one waiting. Sonia told me later that at least two men cut the line and the guys responsible for checkout were taking at least 15 mins for the two items each they had – carefully taking out the anti-theft devices and folding them nicely.
We had a similar experience at a Burger shop in Bangalore. We order pizza and the guy taking the order takes out his notepad and starts writing in cursive — literally like a kindergartner. He probably took about 2-3 mins to write down an order of two pizzas + burger + fries.
Respect for people’s time continues to be an alien concept in most places in India. So if you have a choice, its better to have someone else shop for you for simple items. Saves you a lot of time to do other things – like watching someone eat a light bulb on TV or getting an oil massage.
Hope Ankur lets us get some sleep on the flight. May be I should be more worried about his brother 
My WD passport drive boots from the USB port nearest to the SD card reader. Try booting from any of the other USB ports – things don’t work. Totally undocumented weirdness. HP folks: would you care documenting this next time please?
I heard this from at least two Indian senior families who flew this otherwise convenient, well advertized flight on an airline with high ratings. It’s a 16 hour flight and they feed you just after take off and just before landing. The other 14 hours, passengers are starving. If you’re a diabetic, may god help you.
While the other gizmos are good, the air hostesses are known to be less friendly (none of them look Arab or like being from Emirates) compared to Asian airlines such as Cathay or Singapore.
Seekingalpha is running a story today on Agriculture.
For example, in 1985 the average Chinese consumer ate 44 pounds of meat per year. Today, it’s more than doubled to 110 pounds. That in of itself is impressive, but when you consider that it takes 17 pounds of grain to generate one pound of beef, you begin to see how grain demand can rise exponentially to population growth with even modest changes to diet.
I wonder if there will be more vegetarians inhabiting the planet 100 years from now.
US news outlets – which seem to be an instrument of the government policy with almost total lack of independence do it again. Aren’t you sick of reading about Iranian opposition using facebook and twitter to organize themselves? Even if Mousavi had genuine complaints about vote rigging, only a foolish politician would be using tools of a foreign power with a history of blatant manipulation of country’s democracy. It’s almost like L.K.Advani (Indian opposition leader who recently lost) using Pakistani media to complain about vote rigging by congress. BBC and New York times are better off toning down the intensity of the coverage or risk losing serious readers looking for objective news to aljazeera or xinhua.
What was the last time you had the same kind of coverage about elections in Egypt?
Have you ever tried to lookup a train between two stations? Indian Railways website is the run away leader (not!) in terms of usability. You need to enter station codes (not city name) to use it and the interface to look it up is totally unusable.
You’re much better off searching for “indian railways station codes” in your favorite search engine.
These guys (and other Indian travel websites) seriously need some AJAX programmers.
It almost looked like my disk was going to die. My OS was giving me disk errors and the disk was making horrible clicking noises.
Turns out that I need to connect the disk to the USB ports on the left side of the HP dv5t laptop, rather than the ones on the right side. It seems to be related to some USB ports being able to provide more power to the disk than others. Whether the laptop was running on battery or AC also seems to make a difference.
All seems to be well now!
Just got it installed on my external USB disk. The installer totally rocks. Things I noticed (especially relative to Fedora 11):
- Timezone picker widget is 100 times more usable
- Does a much better job of detecting other OSes
Looks like the larger installed base of Ubuntu is clearly showing. The strength of Fedora is really that a lot of the Linux development still happens there. It’s just that Ubuntu looks a lot more polished at this point in time.