The fun with having a name that spells like that of a girl is that a lot of people also assume that you’re a girl when they haven’t met you. This includes email groups, mailing lists, potential employers, pen-pals… the list goes on. Some people are heartbroken when they come to know about this: one dude from Bangalore even added me on his IM, called me via Google Talk, and then upon hearing my voice decided to commit suicide (well, almost). :D On the other hand, when girls interact with me, they assume that I’m a girl. And then they come to know the truth, they are very surprised (and I always pray to God that they should be ‘pleasantly’ surprised). But I don’t know whether that adjective applies.

[Tip: Thanks, Manasa]

how much the Laws in India:

• Assist in Data Protection; and / or
• Provide sufficient deterrents for violations; and / or
• Enforce such deterrents against such violators;

It is interesting to note how far we are in this department with respect to other countries in the world.

But here is what REALLY took the cake. The black and white striped beach dress by Chanel for… Rs 50,000.

Tell me dear writers and editors @ Mint, would YOU ever pay up this kind of money for a beach dress? And if not, why are you recommending it to your readers??

I bet every single person on the Mint team would go buy a beach dress/ sarong from a Janpath or Colaba Causeway for Rs 150.

I bet you guys use Lakme, Lotus and Garnier sunscreen (or at best Banana Boat) - not Vichy costing Rs 1090.

I bet you guys would be terribly embarassed if you were asked to wear any of the swimsuits modelled on that yacht…

I guess this isn’t going to be “Every Girl’s Beach Basics” this summer. :)

What I have explored in those two days will remain forever with me. As someone rightly said –“You can never step into the same river; for new waters are always flowing on to you”. I am so glad now because I was able to make it to that place ‘where my roots are buried’.

Let’s take this a bit far – how about a ‘Britannia single’, ‘MRF two’ and a ‘Cheetos three’. How about naming some of the bowling/batting ends as ‘Reliance end’ and ‘Birla Sun Life end’? A sample of the commentary would flow something like this –

Daredevils Sehwag has nudged Royals Warne towards the Reliance end - is it going to be a Britannia single, ohh…it is going to be a MRF two…ohh noo, the fielder has misplaced it, probably a Cheetos three…the ball has finally reached the boundary…it is a Citibank four.

It was the time of freedom, and everything seemed to be at a standstill. We caught what we thought were fishes (but were actually tadpoles) in a nearby pond, played hide and seek, buried our feet in the warm sand from a construction site next door, or searched for small conches and did craftwork. As the evening drew closer, we exchanged horror stories and waited for our dads to arrive home.

…

The day would end with a simple dinner. If we had our cousins over, it was always “Kayyi Tuthu“—an elder sitting the kids in a circle and handing morsels of food to each by turns. Curd rice with nimbekayi uppinakayi (lime pickle) on a moonlit terrace with a faint, scented breeze.

Heavenly.

If mangoes were for dessert, a tussle would ensue for the vaate (pit) while it was split up amongst the kids. Good times.

As we went to bed reminiscing the day, a cool breeze from the Gulmohars would flow in thru’ the open windows. Luckier teenage guys would take their roll-up beds to the terrace and sleep in the open beneath a star-lit sky.

As the day ended, a sense of contentment would wrap us like a blanket and a promise of another beautiful summer day tomorrow would fill our dreams.

Ranjana Rao reminisces her summer holidays in Mysore.

This promise to the people of Tamilnadu to anoint his son to the throne, the Emperor has given more responsibilites to the Prince and Hindu is all glee for the emperor has kept his promise- how noble- mere subjects we are supposed to celebrate this “Pattabhishekam”. Not satisfied with making it the front page news, it interviews Kanimozhi, another jewel in the crown of the Emperor on the performance of her brother and a great poet and a judge that she is, she rightly judged his performance to be “exceptionally well”.

And this:

While IBN reports it as clash between the Governor and the State, for the Hindu Governor just “opts” for power cut, the city has been “suffering from sporadic power cuts over the past few days that the local authorities attribute largely to cable and transformer faults”- it is not any body’s fault- what can the Government do if the cable and transformers are faulty? Government dont have any control on those inanimate objects- if they are at fault, can Government put them behind bars or drag them to court? And ofcourse, taking a leaf out of MK, WB Chief Secretary says, West Bengal is better off than other states.

Swarnasrikrishnan offers some sharp insights.

To mark the first anniversary of the arrest of Dr Sen, on 14 May 2008 and to call for his immediate release the Free Binayak Sen Film Festival is being organised by concerned citizens and groups around the country. The package of 10 documentaries, presented in this Festival, highlight the issues of human rights and public health and deal with themes ranging from nutrition, greed of drug companies, environmental pollution and state atrocities.

Some of the films that’d be screened are K.P. Sasi’s In the name of medicine, Vani Subramaniam’s It’s a Boy. it’s going to be a boy!, Michael Moore’s Sicko etc., Check the linked article for details.

The politics of claiming autonomy over bodies cannot perhaps wait, until all the fears associated with morals and culture are settled forever. It is imperative to talk about how deeply the gendered individuals in a hetero-normative society would love to assert their freedoms as others would.We seem to have reached a point that no political movement can inch ahead, unless the conspiracy of silence about sexuality is broken. Sexuality is an important arena of struggle, where everybody would perhaps need to fight at least for the legally enforceable rights against those privileges and deprivations perpetuated by the ill founded morality regime, based solely on gender.

A friend of mine has a favourite joke about Indian media. He says, the country of Japan could cease to exist but our newspapers would be far more concerned about the pretty young Bollywood starlet who stares out of the page with mascara heavy eyes, pouting next to a headline that says, “I do not expose.” Well, the country of Burma is actually ceasing to exist and yesterday, NDTV 24×7 had a program asking whether there is pressure on women today to be sexy. In this program, Shefalee Vasudev, editor of Marie Claire, urged us to consider “how the word sexy is being vocabularised.” The ticker below informed me that 25% in a NDTV survey said lap-dancing is a good profession. The word Burma didn’t crop up even once.

Space Bar thinks it’s as if it has dropped off the face of the earth:

But in general, there’s no hand-wringing, life-changing angst on behalf of Burma as there was with the tsunami, or the Bombay rains, or the bomb blasts on the trains is there? It’s as if the country had dropped off the face of the earth.

My belief in humanism, my love of my own language, a certain libertarian cast of mind – none of these could really explain why I am more comfortable in China than in India.

To me India is a land of separation, China a land of integration.

Although there is still a preference for male children in China, once a child is born, the girls and boys are near equals. This has not come about for particularly nice reasons but from the realization by the Chinese that they could not feed an ever-growing population and their implementation of their one child policy. The Chinese family invests heavily in this one child, whether male or female, urban or rural; an investment of love but also of money particularly for education. So the Chinese are, overall, far better educated than the Indians and the sexes are far less separate. In China, women are mostly strong individuals; in India, they are second class citizens.

Academics next…… Oh! Par excellence!
No,no,not his degree,but perseverance!
Nineteen attempts at a stretch……..
Matriculation degree is yet to fetch!

Yep… Sukumar Roy is the father of Satyajit Roy. For those who want to see the actual Bengali version, she has quoted that below the translation as well

the day before yesterday I saw a young mother slap her 9-10 year old daughter who was afraid to venture into the pool. It was something that made me very sad. Beating your kid in front of others is something a parent should never do. It is the worst sort of humiliation one can mete out to your kid. It filled me with horror, shame and embarrassment, watching the poor kid plead with her mother not to force her to enter the pool.