Happy Easter Yoko

And so this is Easter and what have you done? The CEO's been sacked, a new one's just begun.
And so this is Easter and to add to the fun, the COO's changed roles, which is the most he has done.
And so this is Easter and in the long run, the sales director's still there though he's the crappiest one.

Management's over if you want it...

In-Delhi-ble inklings

The motorized rickshaws that scuttle about Delhi's arteries like yellow parasites reflect their host's most neophile aspirations. Since the turn of the millenium, all have been converted to run on compressed natural gas in a ressucitative attempt to relive the city's lungs of stifling pollution. And now that the number of mobile phones in Delhi's neural network is approaching its tuk-tuk tally, disenchanted passengers may SMS complaints direct to the city police. Just text a three-letter code relevant to the misdemeanour (say over-charging) followed by the rickshaw number and Delhi constabulatry will dispatch an Ambassador to apprehend the crime-wallah.

Indian mysticism

For all India's purported mystical and spiritual qualities, read ignorance and poverty and see how closely these are bound. In South African townships there's poverty too: people in tiny corrugated shacks in the middle of a dust bowl who walk shoeless miles to fetch food. Yet (I'm wary of rose-coloured spectacles) there is less intellectual poverty in these townships than in what I've seen of India. Education is compulsory in South Africa and even where children have to sustain themselves because of family disease or unemployment, all are acutely aware of forsaken schooling. Contrast this with India where education is optional, even state schools are fee-paying but remain incredibly under-equipped (no desks or chairs), children working in shops, factories, train stations and streets... or is this famous Indian entrepreneurship? Moreover, in South Afrrica the population is politically mature, while in the world's largest democracy, prejudice reigns.
I wonder if the hegemony of the caste system, the unthinking acquiescence to a feudal order that condemns so many to every form of poverty, is what apartheid would have become given another century or so to fester. A sense of community as we might understand it seems to have been blighted by three thousand years of knowing your place. Not even Mahatma Gandhi -- himself a catalyst for the anti-apartheid struggle -- could foster this social conscience. Vishnu, preserver of the Hindu world, ensures that barely half the population is literate; and that's by the Indian government's measure which judges literacy as being able to read and write your own name...
So for all the saddha bathing in mother Ganges, muezzin at dusk, Buddhist pilgrims and Jain monks, India convinces me that atheistic scepticism offers the straightest path to social conscience.

Agra-vation beggars belief

Here's a resolutely urban myth: if you give to one person begging, twenty others will congregate around you until they too are sated by pittance. If this doesn't happen in Agra where poverty runs through the gutters of the tourist trail, where does it happen? I spent the last fortnight giving, mostly soap, pencils and bananas to children and this mendiant manifestation is yet to materialize. If you flaunt your wealth in front of your peers, why not in front of the poor?

Not just Howard's End

As we consider the Tories' policy to exempt certain people from certain parts of the human rights act as they see fit, let us look briefly at the Labour party's record on human rights. This includes:
* removal of trial by jury in certain cases;
* allowing the Home Secretary to decide who can be under indefinite arrest without charge;
* since that particular law didn't get through, they can only be held under house arrest, tagged and banned from using the telephone;
* imminent plans to ban protesting on Parliament Square without a permit;
* instigation of a politically elected supreme court;
* did I mention ignoring legal advice on sending thousands of troops into war?
These people have no shame: they want to disenfranchise us.

Ain't nobody here but us chickens

All right, so it's not going to make force feeding geese and ducks any easier (that still needs to be done by hand), but the Bright Coop E-Z Catch Harvester certainly appears to make chicken retrieval easier. Take a look at it in action.

I want one of these

This is über-geek kind of stuff: a wrist-watch PDA. All right, so it's not in colour and there's no wi-fi, but you can run all sorts of applications on its 8MB memory: an AvantGo web browser, Vindigo movie guides, possibly Documents to Go (for reading Excel, Word and PowerPoint) as well as the usual diary and address book and memo stuff. Plus games, and tube-maps and all the rest. Take a look.

Lost in translation

Luis Aragones, manager of the Spanish national football team, has been taken out of context and mistranslated. "I used the expression 'black shit' when I was talking to Reyes, as a way of saying you are better. It is like a form of motivation. [...] If it had been translated correctly it would have said that Henry was a phenomenon, but it wasn't," he added.

Generosity

This is the story of generosity for today. Beslan, whose school was besieged last year, has donated thousands of dollars to the relief effort for the south-east Asian tsunami. A widow's mite if ever there were.

So 2004

Since everyone else seems to have had a retrospective moment, allow me to indulge. While 2004 was undoubtedly the year of Dubya and the chav -- could they by any chance be related? -- it was also the year of the blog; and not just this one. Thousands of blogs were created and consumed through RSS feeds and aggregators and other nonsense.
Since I am always at the forefront of fashion -- particularly technological -- this leaves me in something of a quandary. Blogging, with all its linking to singular sites, uninformed political comment and Phil Space anecdote is like so last year. What should 2005 hold for an erstwhile martial arts doppelganger?