The latest buzz?

Don't ask me how I found out about this. Suffice to say that it's the latest buzz.

Election fever!

The new election is well underway with all sides campaigning ahead of a final deciding conclave. There have been fears expressed in some quarters of voter apathy, given a stark choice between unelectable liberal candidates and conservatives who have been unable to shake off an image tarnished as uncaring and out of touch. The newly elected PM (pontifex maximus) will need to tackle 21st century issues, in particular the dilemma surrounding future participation in Europe.
Bookies suggest the eventual winner will retain conservative views masquerading as social conscience, though the secretive ballot process has itself been called into question with the extended use of postal voting.
The election result will be heralded in the traditional manner by changing a swingometer from undecided blue to red.

Confused? Why wait?

I realise that who we vote for will make very little difference unless you live in a marginal constituency, but as is the custom every General Election post Netscape, you can work out who you should vote for online.

What a beetle in the bush is worth

An entomologist at the Natural History Museum has named three new species of slime-mold beetle after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, as a special honour.

Maps R U.S.

Now here's something that I admire, being well into the multi-platform delivery thing; check out the calculators on a channel I developed, which you can subscribe to on AvantGo.
Google -- who else? -- has developed an easy to use map tool for those on the move in the U.S. and Canada: http://mobile.google.com/local. It's pretty well designed for the smaller interface in the bigger Apple, going to a really granular level and based on Google maps.

Lady Diana bench

By popular demand, obligatory Taj Mahal snap:

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?