Around the workplace – the internet is stretched to its limits with half the junta listening to BBC 5 live commentary or sneaking up on the live streams. Every time an Aussie wicket is taken, a mild roar of joy runs through the floor. It’s almost midnight, and am listening to a wonderful show on BBC 4 about cricket and cricket related poetry and literature.

Last night, entering “Don Bradman” as the search string on Youtube resulted in this wonderful video, where the Don demonstrates various strokes. It’s utterly perfect, somehow perfect, and yet stylish.

Rediscovering cricket in this country somehow makes me less homesick on certain days. And on other days, makes me think of the glimpses of cricket caught when traveling by train – through towns that are so small that their names barely feature anywhere. An uneven field, with a few bricks for stumps.

BBC 4 has someone reading out this wonderful poem called Brahma by Andrew Lang.

If the wild bowler thinks he bowls,
Or if the batsman thinks he’s bowled,
They know not, poor misguided souls,
They too shall perish unconsoled.
I am the batsman and the bat,
I am the bowler and the ball,
The umpire, the pavilion cat,
The roller, pitch, and stumps, and all.

Which is a wicked play on the original poem by RW Emerson.

You see, having fun is just bad, bad, bad for our Grand Indian Tradition. Hundreds of years of civilization hangs by a thread. The threads that go into the making of all our pink chaddis.

Go forth and chaddify. Send your chaddis to

BANGALORE
The Pink Chaddi Campaign,
C/O Alternate Law Forum,
122/4 Infantry Road
(opposite Infantry Wedding House)
Bangalore 560001
Karnataka

Moving essay. But more than moving, it is shockingly articulate. The idea of a “Not Rape” …

What we were not prepared for was everything else. Rape was something we could identify, an act with a strict definition and two distinct scenarios. Not rape was something else entirely.

Not rape was all those other little things that we experienced everyday and struggled to learn how to deal with those situations. In those days, my ears were filled with secrets that were not my own, the confessions of not rapes experienced by the girls I knew then and the women I know now.

The way rape is perceived – it is seen as the “worst” sort of assault. As if all kinds of sexual assault can be placed on a scale, and rape is the one that gets 10/10 for being the most vicious, or the most harmful. I don’t think it is quite like that.

The word rape itself – it makes people squirm. But words like sexual harassment or even “eve teasing” never really have the same affect. Even if in some cases, casual eve teasing is more physically harmful, more dangerous or worse for one’s self esteem. But it’s unfair to compare.

I don’t want to even think about this anymore – the whole idea screws with my mind and just makes me too anxious.

How am I celebrating my Dashmi? So far, by lighting an incense stick, and rebelling against the formal attire culture by wearing something with a little dash of orange and brown. Little block prints on a white shirt. Maybe I’ll make a little payasam today. I don’t know. If I am in the right mood, we might have a feast today for dinner. But in this (lack of) festive food induced homesickness – I came across this article in the Guardian -

As grown-up cooks and food lovers we all owe an enormous amount to the people who cooked for us as children. Sometimes it’s a dish, sometimes it’s a whole food culture. For some it’s a sworn intent never to eat that badly again but, for me it’s the inherited belief that there is something profoundly enriching in making the best food you can for the people you love – an idea that still, I hope, continues to affect everything I do.

What culinary inheritance did your mum leave you?

My mother never tastes as she is cooking. She probably doesn’t realize it. But for a lot of folks who need to do the neivedyam, to be able to cook a perfect dish without tasting it becomes a matter of habit. And it’s something I have inherited I think. I can’t taste the dish till it’s completely done. It just doesn’t feel right. Also, it makes you mess it up. For instance, if you taste sambhar half way through, when the smell of the sambhar powder hasn’t quite gone, you’ll find yourself wondering if there is too little salt. You end up adding salt. But in the end when half the liquid has evaporated, you’ll find it too salty.

My mother never taught me how to cook. When I first started cooking, it was the memory of watching her put a pinch of this, and a fistful of something else that informed my cooking style. Don’t measure, trust your judgment. And never, ever stand over something that’s cooking and sniff violently. It’s disgusting. Don’t double dip. And constantly recycle utensils. Mostly, that it’s okay to take short cuts, and how well you cook is not a measure of who you are as a person.

My dad on the other hand, doesn’t quite cook as much. But he has his signature dishes. And he’s the one who gave me a weird taste for combinations. Like toasted bread (with a little nei on one side) dipped in rasam. Or a liking for raw rice, roasted coffee beans, raw vadams, raw maggi. You get the idea. And at one point, he used to make brilliant omelettes. When my mother wasn’t well, and recovering from a surgery recently, he did most of the cooking. My mother ate it up. It must have pretty good.

Cooking for others is pretty gratifying. Ask my friends, they’ll tell you how readily I cook for them. (Sri on the other hand, is currently on the receiving end of – “Can’t we just eat something raw?”. So don’t ask him.)

What’s really sad about this story is that at even age 7, the pressure to look perfect is immense. Crooked teeth? Chubby face? No. We’d like to believe that even before the kids turn 10, they’re perfectly blessed with superior bone structures and a well aligned set of milk teeth. I don’t care much for the fact some of the fireworks were fake. But telling a kid that she isn’t cute enough even if she sings so well, is just cruel.

The recording to which Lin mouthed along on Friday was by the even younger Yang Peiyi. It seems that Yang’s uneven teeth, while unremarkable in a seven-year-old, were considered potentially damaging to China’s international image.

“This is in the national interest. It is the image of our national music, national culture. Especially the entrance of our national flag; this is an extremely important, extremely serious matter,” Chen Qigang, the event’s general music designer, explained to a Beijing radio station.

I understand if the music was pre-recorded. God knows live shows are hard to manage, especially with kids involved. Lip-syncing is what most professionals do anyway. But this case just makes me want to break something.

We have an automated system to identify and remove inappropriate or offensive material in Hot Trends. In rare cases, when such material is missed, we manually remove these results from our Hot Trends list. We apologize to any users who were offended by this situation.

So let’s see what is problematic with this entire approach. This is quite another kind of censorship. You want to believe that people are not searching for certain things, that those searching for certain things are necessarily “evil” and not merely curious, and that some people have absurd interests, and that’s not normal.

Let me be honest here. I have a morbid sense of curiosity. I have spent hours on wikipedia reading up gory details about the vaguest of things. Why exactly is my curiosity offensive to anyone? Should I pretend I am this naive person who wishes to know nothing about how immensely screwed-up people can be?

I hate Nazi sympathizers and holocaust deniers, I wouldn’t want to be friendly with them. I wouldn’t want to talk to them. I would wish copious amounts of bad luck on them. I wouldn’t want to work with them. I wouldn’t want to be kind to them. But so long as they don’t engage in hate crimes or hate speech, I cannot criminalize them; unless they actually breech someone’s rights. And I wouldn’t censor their presence. Because that misrepresents. And misrepresentation is far more dangerous than someone hating someone. Because you need to know if a certain dark cloud of hatred is descending on you. If this is symbolic of a resurgence of a particular kind of hatred – then we need to know about it, and not hide behind this curtain of political correctness. Unless you know about it, you cannot nip it in its bud.

The other issue. Google appears to decide what is offensive based on a very Euro-American centric world view. While they apologize for it, I am not sure why Google actually removes inappropriate or inoffensive material. Who decides what is offensive? How is appropriateness determined? Both of them are rather cultural constructs. So whose culture are we supposed to adhere to?

I am offended that it was manually removed from the lists. I am offended that that part of my culture is designated inappropriate. How many other things don’t we see on various lists because it’s already determined that they are offensive? Is there an open list somewhere which tells us what terms are automatically excluded? So we at least know what data we cannot expect to see…

I realize how horrendous the holocaust was. How terrible the persecution of the Jews was. How a certain symbol came to be associated with terror, death, intolerance and violence. However, that symbol also has another meaning, and it’s important for that meaning to be acknowledged as well.

PS – This was a very difficult post to write. I hate Hitler and everything he stood for. I hate the fact that the world was so oblivious to the tragedy of so many people – the Jews, the Roma, the disabled, the homosexual – and literally chose to overlook the holocaust even as it was happening. But I think certain symbols were criminalized unfairly. You cannot let one madman rewrite history. You need to take the symbol back. The fear comes from the “popular” association with the symbol, so change the popular association.