Archive for the 'Censorship' Category

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Bad Bad Orkut. No Donut For You

Published on October 10, 2006 in Censorship and Technology. 89 Comments

In a landmark legal strike, the Aurangabad bench of the Mumbai High Court has “directed the Maharashtra government to issue notice to Google for the alleged spread of hatred about India by its social network service ‘Orkut’. [Times of India]

Laying aside useless litigation on issues like murders, rapes, property disputes (which some say take decades to resolve due to court backlog), the wise men in black coats seem to have at last gotten their priorities right by spending their time taking action on an issue of the greatest national importance: the “Down with India” communities that flourish on Orkut like flies on cowdung.

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Censorship Done Wrong

Published on July 20, 2006 in Censorship, India and Media. 72 Comments

If there is anything worse than censorship, it is censorship done incompetently.

Like those DD2 movies they showed late at night where a random mammary would occasionally pop out of the scratched-out (yes sometimes not even pixellated) areas sending frustrated teenagers like me into paroxysms of forbidden joy, in the process rupturing my moral fabric forever.

The government’s list of hate-sites is another such example.

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Lessons Learnt From the Ban on Blogger

Published on July 17, 2006 in Blogs, Censorship, Comedy and India. 139 Comments

A few things I did not know before Government Of India ‘s blanket-ban on Blogger/Typepad. — a ban whose supposed purpose we learn is to keep SIMI terrorists from passing love-notes between themselves.

1. SIMI-ians exclusively use Blogger and Typepad to communicate. Which is why these are the only blogging platforms that are blocked. SIMI stays clear of WordPress (too dynamic for static fundamentalists), Rediff blogs (because they don’t like the template), O3 Indiatimes (because even they disapprove of a paper that sells editorial space), and Yahoo 360 (yes even SIMI activists have some sense). And like everyone else, they have never heard of MSN Spaces.

2. SIMI activists may handle RDX and gelatin with dexterity but have trouble understanding the concept of proxies by which website-blocking can easily be circumvented. As a result, a ban on blogger totally brings them down to their knees—especially when they don’t get their daily fix of desihotties.blogspot.com

3. SIMI terrorists do not know the use of bulletin boards —the gazillions of them that are on the Net. Hence cutting off blogger/typepad will reduce them to headless chickendom.

4. Enforcing a ban on Blogger/Typepad/Geocities will fool the SIMI people into thinking that India has officially become Pakistan (where access to many blogs are blocked) and now that their mission has been accomplished, they may let their guard down.

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Nanhe Munne

Published on June 22, 2005 in Censorship, India and Society. 6 Comments

Amit Varma blogs about an article from Mumbai Mirror.

Skimpily clad students can provoke incidents like the Marine Drive rape, the Mumbai University feels (never mind if the victim in this case was actually not wearing a skimpy outfit, only a black tee-shirt and blue jeans), so Vice-Chancellor Vijay Khole has called a meeting of all city college principals in the first week of July to discuss “campus attire” for students. Students are crossing the limits of decency, Khole told Mumbai Mirror. “After the Marine Drive rape case, we think scantily clothed students could be one of the reasons that such incidents happen.”

Amit is shocked at the regressiveness of Vijay Khole in wanting to impose a dress code of decency. He understands that political parties, especially rambling rightos like VHP-Shiv Sena, can make such demands. But a VC ? Surely he should be able to see through this oft-repeated simplistic, patently wrong association between revealing clothes and rape.

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