Manipur Videos Warning: The text might be mature and will have references to violence so if there are kids or you are sensitive, please excuse. Few days back, saw the videos and I cannot share the rage, shame and many conflicting emotions that were going through me. I almost didn t want to share but couldn t stop myself. The woman in the video were being palmed, fingered, nude, later reportedly raped and murdered. And there have been more than a few cases. The next day saw another video that showed beheaded heads, and Kukis being killed just next to their houses. I couldn t imagine what those people must be feeling as the CM has been making partisan statements against them. One of the husbands of the Kuki women who had been paraded, fondled is an Army Officer in the Indian Army. The Meiteis even tried to burn his home but the Army intervened and didn t let it get burnt. The CM s own statement as shared before tells his inability to bring the situation out of crisis. In fact, his statement was dumb stating that the Internet shutdown was because there were more than 100 such cases. And it s spreading to the nearby Northeast regions. Now Mizoram, the nearest neighbor is going through similar things where the Meitis are not dominant. The Mizos have told the Meitis to get out. To date, the PM has chosen not to visit Manipur. He just made a small 1 minute statement about it saying how the women have shamed India, an approximation of what he said.While it s actually not the women but the men who have shamed India. The Wire has been talking to both the Meitis, the Kukis, the Nagas. A Kuki women sort of bared all. She is right on many counts. The GOI while wanting to paint the Kukis in a negative light have forgotten what has been happening in its own state, especially its own youth as well as in other states while also ignoring the larger geopolitics and business around it. Taliban has been cracking as even they couldn t see young boys, women becoming drug users. I had read somewhere that 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 young person in Afghanistan is now in its grip. So no wonder,the Taliban is trying to eradicate and shutdown drug use among it s own youth. Circling back to Manipur, I was under the wrong impression that the Internet shutdown is now over. After those videos became viral as well as the others I mentioned, again the orders have been given and there is shutdown. It is not fully shut but now only Govt. offices have it. so nobody can share a video that goes against any State or Central Govt. narrative A real sad state of affairs Update: There is conditional reopening whatever that means When I saw the videos, the first thing is I felt was being powerless, powerless to do anything about it. The second was if I do not write about it, amplify it and don t let others know about it then what s the use of being able to blog

Mental Health, Binging on various Webseries Both the videos shocked me and I couldn t sleep that night or the night after. it. Even after doing work and all, they would come in unobtrusively in my nightmares While I felt a bit foolish, I felt it would be nice to binge on some webseries. Little I was to know that both Northshore and Alaska Daily would have stories similar to what is happening here While the story in Alaska Daily is fictional it resembles very closely to a real newspaper called Anchorage Daily news. Even there the Intuit women , one of the marginalized communities in Alaska. The only difference I can see between GOI and the Alaskan Government is that the Alaskan Government was much subtle in doing the same things. There are some differences though. First, the State is and was responsive to the local press and apart from one close call to one of its reporters, most reporters do not have to think about their own life in peril. Here, the press cannot look after either their livelihood or their life. It was a juvenile kid who actually shot the video, uploaded and made it viral. One needs to just remember the case details of Siddique Kappan. Just for sharing the news and the video he was arrested. Bail was denied to him time and time again citing that the Police were investigating . Only after 2 years and 3 months he got bail and that too because none of the charges that the Police had they were able to show any prima facie evidence. One of the better interviews though was of Vrinda Grover. For those who don t know her, her Wikipedia page does tell a bit about her although it is woefully incomplete. For example, most recently she had relentlessly pursued the unconstitutional Internet Shutdown that happened in Kashmir for 5 months. Just like in Manipur, the shutdown was there to bury crimes either committed or being facilitated by the State. For the issues of livelihood, one can take the cases of Bipin Yadav and Rashid Hussain. Both were fired by their employer Dainik Bhaskar because they questioned the BJP MP Smriti Irani what she has done for the state. The problems for Dainik Bhaskar or for any other mainstream media is most of them rely on Government advertisements. Private investment in India has fallen to record lows mostly due to the policies made by the Centre. If any entity or sector grows a bit then either Adani or Ambani will one way or the other take it. So, for most first and second generation entrepreneurs it doesn t make sense to grow and then finally sell it to one of these corporates at a loss GOI on Adani, Ambani side of any deal. The MSME sector that is and used to be the second highest employer hasn t been able to recover from the shocks of demonetization, GST and then the pandemic. Each resulting in more and more closures and shutdowns. Most of the joblessness has gone up tremendously in North India which the Government tries to deny. The most interesting points in all those above examples is within a month or less, whatever the media reports gets scrubbed. Even the firing of the journos that was covered by some of the mainstream media isn t there anymore. I have to use secondary sources instead of primary sources. One can think of the chilling effects on reportage due to the above. The sad fact is even with all the money in the world the PM is unable to come to the Parliament to face questions.

The above poster/question is by Surya Pratap Singh, a retired IAS officer. He asks why the PM is unable to answer in either of the houses. As shared before, the Govt. wants very limited discussion. Even yesterday, the Lok Sabha TV just showed the BJP MP s making statements but silent or mic was off during whatever questions or statements made by the opposition. If this isn t mockery of Indian democracy then I don t know what is Even the media landscape has been altered substantially within the last few years. Both Adani and Ambani have distributed the media pie between themselves. One of the last bastions of the free press, NDTV was bought by Adani in a hostile takeover. Both Ambani and Adani are close to this Goverment. In fact, there is no sector in which one or the other is not present. Media houses like Newsclick, The Wire etc. that are a fraction of mainstream press are where most of the youth have been going to get their news as they are not partisan. Although even there, GOI has time and again interfered. The Wire has had too many 504 Gateway timeouts in the recent months and they had been forced to move most of their journalism from online to video, rather Youtube in order to escape both the censoring and the timeouts as shared above. In such a hostile environment, how both the organizations are somehow able to survive is a miracle. Most local reportage is also going to YouTube as that s the best way for them to not get into Govt. censors. Not an ideal situation, but that s the way it is. The difference between Indian and Israeli media can be seen through this

The above is a Screenshot shared by how the Israeli media has reacted to the Israeli Government s Knesset over the judicial overhaul . Here, the press itself erodes its own by giving into the Government day and night

Binging on Webseries Saw Northshore, Three Pines, Alaska Daily and Doogie Kamealoha M.D. which is based on Doogie Howser M.D. Of the four, enjoyed Doogie Kamealoha M.D. the most but then it might be because it s a copy of Doogie Howser, just updated to the new millenia and there are some good childhood memories associated with that series. The others are also good. I tried to not see European stuff as most of them are twisted and didn t want that space.

EU Digital Operational Resilience Act and impact on FOSS Few days ago, apparently the EU shared the above Act. One can read about it more here. This would have more impact on FOSS as most development of various FOSS distributions happens in EU. Fair bit of Debian s own development happens in Germany and France. While there have been calls to make things more clearer, especially for FOSS given that most developers do foss development either on side or as a hobby while their day job is and would be different. The part about consumer electronics and FOSS is a tricky one as updates can screw up your systems. Microsoft has had a huge history of devices not working after an update or upgrade. And this is not limited to Windows as they would like to believe. Even apple seems to be having its share of issues time and time again. One would have hoped that these companies that make billions of dollars from their hardware and software sales would be doing more testing and Q&A and be more aware about security issues. FOSS, on the other hand while being more responsive doesn t make as much money vis-a-vis the competitors. Let s take the most concrete example. The most successful mobile phone having FOSS is Purism. But it s phone, it has priced itself out of the market. A huge part of that is to do with both economies of scale and trying to get an infrastructure and skills in the States where none or minimally exists. Compared that to say Pinepro that is manufactured in Hong Kong and is priced 1/3rd of the same. For most people it is simply not affordable in these times. Add to that the complexity of these modern cellphones make it harder, not easier for most people to be vigilant and update the phone at all times. Maybe we need more dumphones such as Light and Punkt but then can those be remotely hacked or not, there doesn t seem to be any answers on that one. I haven t even seen anybody even ask those questions. They may have their own chicken and egg issues. For people like me who have lost hearing, while I can navigate smartphones for now but as I become old I don t see anything that would help me. For many an elderly population, both hearing and seeing are the first to fade. There doesn t seem to be any solutions targeted for them even though they are 5-10% of any population at the very least. Probably more so in Europe and the U.S. as well as Japan and China. All of them are clearly under-served markets but dunno a solution for them. At least to me that s an open question.

Recently there has been some discussion and controversy about a 15yo boy being allowed to perform a Caesarian operation on a woman (without her consent). Don Marti seems to think it’s OK and gives some examples of what 15 year old people used to do in past times. However he misses a couple of significant points, one is that the knowledge of surgery was much lower a few hundred years ago and the expectations of the patient were a lot lower, the other is that the patient in this case did not consent to being operated on by a 15yo. If the boy’s mother thought that he was capable of doing the job correctly then she could have allowed him to deliver a younger sibling… Given a choice I would rather have someone like Doogie Howser operate on me than a random surgeon - but I would be extremely unhappy to discover after an operation that it had been performed by a different surgeon than planned who didn’t have a medical license and who’s motivation was to invade my privacy by making a movie of the event! Don cites the interesting essay Against School by John Taylor Gatto which makes some really good points about the state of the education system in most first-world countries. An interesting point that John Gatto doesn’t mention is that in Japan school-boys wear uniforms that are based on Prussian military uniforms. From all the evidence that I have seen the Japanese school system is more Prussian (IE worse by many objective measures) than most countries. The Sydney Morning Herald has an interesting article comparing education systems which claims that a major cause in lack of academic performance is unjustified praise. I first became aware of the extent of this problem when discussing education with a misguided university lecturer. He told me that he felt that his purpose was to make the students believe that they had achieved something and that this was much more important than actually teaching them. My response was to point out that heroin and cocaine are both good options for people who would rather feel successful than succeed and to enquire as to whether he thought that they should be advocated for children. The conversation ended soon after that and he requested that I not name him or his university when blogging about it. I take this as an admission of guilt, if you act decently in public then you should not be afraid of appearing on a blog - decent actions will either be too boring for a blog entry or things that you are proud of.

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Amaya's recent loss reminds me of all the little friends I had when growing up. Mr. Nitty, Roo, Minette, Scuffy, Scit-Scit, Noisette and Mr. Bean. Mr. Nitty, Roo and Minette died of old age. Scuffy, Scit-Scit and Noisette were all Burmese and all had congenital heart defects. We suspect some inbreeding there, but they were all amazing cats. Mr. Bean got hit by a car. That was rough. He was a real sweetheart, and I was playing with him maybe 10 minutes before he was killed. Luckily my parents current cats, Fuji, Moxie and Mr. Bigglesworth are doing well. I also miss Doogie and Scuba, the cats I had with my ex-girlfriend. Scuba especially was just so full of life and affection. Losing little friends is always awful.

Artist: Mr. Garrison Lyrics
Song: Merry Fucking Christmas Lyrics
Mr. Garrison: I heard there is no Christmas
In the silly Middle East
No trees, no snow, no Santa Claus
They have different religious beliefs They believe in Muhammad
And not in our holiday
And so every December
I go to the Middle East and say… “Hey there Mr. Muslim
Merry fucking Christmas
Put down that book the Koran
And hear some holiday wishes. In case you haven’t noticed
It’s Jesus’s birthday.
So get off your heathen Muslim ass
and fucking celebrate. There is no holiday season in India I’ve heard
They don’t hang up their stockings
And that is just absurd! They’ve never read a Christmas story.
They don’t know what Rudolph is about
And that is why in December
I’ll go to India and shout… Hey there Mr. Hinduist
Merry fucking Christmas
Drink eggnog and eat some beef
And pass it to the missus. In case you haven’t noticed
It’s Jesus’s birthday
So get off your heathen Hindu ass
and fucking celebrate! Now I heard that in Japan
Everyone just lives in sin
They pray to several gods
And put needles in their skin. On December 25th
All they do is eat a cake
And that is why I go to Japan
And walk around and say… Hey there Mr. Shintoist
Merry fucking Christmas
God is going to kick your ass
You infidelic pagan scum. In case you haven’t noticed
There’s festive things to do
So lets all rejoice for Jesus
And Merry fucking Christmas to you. On Christmas day I travel round the world and say,
Taoists, Krishnas, Buddhists, and all you atheists too,
Merry Fucking Christmas, To You! (Clapping) Thank you Mr. hat

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