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Society

Plural of criminal = Guardian of culture

People who beat up other people without provocation react to some other people sending them underwear with “This is not the way. They could have discussed this with us peacefully across a table”.

People who beat up people based on their state of origin, their religion and caste, file a defamation case against someone who expressed their opinion on this. And the judiciary does not help our young victim.

If Veerappan was alive today, maybe he would’ve sued the Tamil Nadu and Karnataka police for chasing him around and causing him mental trouble – the police should’ve done a round-table meeting with him trying to “sort out” the differences they had with him.

Maybe Charles Shobhraj can sue the Interpol for being insensitive to his freedom needs, and demand that they discuss things out with him in an amicable setting.

But do you know why that will not work? Because in Amit Varma’s words “Mobs are above the law”. Groups involved in criminal activities today are not criminal in themselves – they are guardians of culture and representatives of aam junta.

Maybe Gabbar Singh would have stood a chance of going free, joining politics and putting Thakur behind bars (for having caused him irreconcilable trauma) if his gang would have protested for his release in front of our Supreme Court, stating that the gang was a social activity group which was protecting the Ramgadhwasis from a big calamity: Gabbar Singh’s rage.

That could be the plot for a new Sholay.

All views expressed in this blogpost are not related to anyone, and no person living or dead is implied. Please let me blog in peace, don’t sue/arrest/beat me up.

Categories
Internet Product What's wrong? WTF

Smart Web – How Smart?

While reading this Rediff.com story about Maruti Madhavrao Phad, a Maharashtra government employee who got injured during the recent terrorist attack on Bombay, I noticed something.

It is not related to the story as such. If you scroll down to the end of the story you’ll see the credits for is particular story. It reads “Image: Maruti [Get Quote] Madhavrao Phad at his home. Text: A Ganesh [Images] Nadar. Photograph: Uttam Ghosh


See the screenshot of the line. Notice the yellow areas? These are smart tags which apparently the engine parsing the code of the pages inserts to “enrich” the user’s browsing experience, by providing additional information related to the content the user is browsing through at the moment.

Note the word “related”? Now see what the yellow highlights in the image show. “Get Quote” for Maruti. Here Maruti is the first name of the hero of the story, not the name of a car-making company. Yet, the Rediff engine treats it as the company’s name, and is offering you stock quotes for it. And for Ganesh, the link is a Rediff search link with the string “Ganesh” – marked “Images”. Which means that it would return images of the Lord Ganesha, and other celebrities called “Ganesh”. Not images of the author of the article in this case, A Ganesh Nadar.

And both these tags are intrusive, they not only break the text they are placed in, they break proper names of people. Intrusive and irreverent. Considering the tone of the article, even more so.

Were they really necessary?