In short, the daughter of an immigrant turns into a rabid anti-immigration politician. And then gets tired of the country she lives in and moves to another, because she’s looking for peace and contentment. (Of all the countries you can find peace and contentment in – if it is at all possible – she chooses the UK).

Australian former anti-immigration politician Pauline Hanson is selling up and heading to Britain, according to an interview with an Australian magazine.

She told Women’s Day that Australia was no longer a land of opportunity and she had “had enough” of living there.

Ms Hanson built a career on claims that Australia was being “swamped by Asians”

Oh oh. Does she know how many ‘Asians’ live in Britain?

Walking through Hyde Park during the pseudo-spring this country witnesses – I came across a strange prophet. It was a funny experience, as always the Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park has its share of loons and political rhetoric.

This particular chap (calling himself the Pizza Prophet) insisted it was time for a new religion, and one of the fundamental beliefs had to be at least one “food item” being banned. It led to much hilarity as he decided that pork and beef couldn’t be that one food item, as they were already taken, and so people came up with fish and apples. Others suggested that food of a certain kind – like Pizza or Sausages be taboo.

Perhaps it’s the recession, or the financial crisis. Or it’s ennui affecting the entire country – but the BNP and its many cousins like the EDL are having a field day. A cab driver the other day said he was a member of the BNP, and he wanted people like me to go back where I come from. He muttered something about St George. I asked him if he knew that St George wasn’t English or even British. In fact he was born in Turkey and died in Palestine.

I gave the cabbie a tip anyway. He said “I don’t mind people like you here. It’s the others I want out”. I asked him if he meant he didn’t mind people who gave him tips. He had no response. Thanks to the traffic jam I grilled him for a full five minutes about why he was a BNP supporter. The scary bit was that he didn’t know. Had no idea. There was rhetoric and more rhetoric. He might as well have believed the Pizza Prophet. But he wouldn’t want to give up on his pizza or sausages I guess.

He then told me liked Indian curry. There’s a joke in there somewhere, I am yet to figure it out though.

If you have friends, you would by now have received some ten thousand forwards on this elusive little section in the People’s Representation Act – a fabled 49-O. Here’s what it says.

49-O. Elector deciding not to vote.-If an elector, after his electoral roll number has been duly entered in the register of voters in Form-17A and has put his signature or thumb impression thereon as required under sub-rule (1) of rule 49L, decided not to record his vote, a remark to this effect shall be made against the said entry in Form 17A by the presiding officer and the signature or thumb impression of the elector shall be obtained against such remark.

Various people have been going ga-ga over this. Apparently it lets them express some sort of political statement about how they find all the politicians completely undeserving of their vote. Well, fair enough.

In the few times that I have voted in any election, I’ve always felt I was voting for the lesser evil. It wasn’t because the candidate has me in raptures with their promises, or because I was dazzled by my admiration for them. You can hate politicians all you like, but they are necessary. If you want to go about exercising this 49-O business, you might as well say, “Sure, give me the President’s rule”. Which is a bigger mockery of democracy than than having goons in the parliament. You really want a politician who understands you? Go stand for an election.

As far as I know, even if the majority opts for 49-O, votes that are tendered are counted, and winners are announced accordingly. So in effect, you are giving up your right to vote for the lesser evil. (Yes, the counter argument is that there could be equal evils – but that sort of symmetry is rare.)

So that money – that river of money that was spent on an election, could instead be used for something else, or at the very least, to minimize public debt. Before we get all orgasmic about 49-O, we need to consider what happens when we don’t positively assert our votes. Sure, the semantics of it suggest that opting for 49-O means you are making a choice, but what it actually means is that you are giving up your right and abstaining. You are fence-sitting. And your fence-sitting, which otherwise is nobody else’s business, costs the country a lot of money.

You are better off trying to pressurizing an existing government into action, rather than prevent government formation in the first place. You can’t choose? Very well, screw democracy. We’ll just get a dictator. Saves us money spent on elections.

Rape is simply sex (I am talking about ‘husband-rape’ here)… Women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal…To suggest that rape, when conducted without violence, is a serious crime is like suggesting force-feeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence.

On an average, comments like this put me off for a couple of hours at the very least. But then I decided to jump through the cache of the blog and I spotted this gem.

Yes indeed kind readers, we now officially know that “white, middle class, male drivers” are the most oppressed social group evah! Now that the BNP has sacked him, maybe he’ll turn to stand up comedy. For more on the xenophobic, insecure nonsense that the BNP peddles, do read Ian Cobain’s articles in The Guardian on his experience as an undercover journalist working his way through the BNP.

There, that’s ruined chocolate cake for me – forever. Ugh!

A group of 20 All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) workers, led by MLAs Afsar Khan, Ahmed Pasha and Mozum Khan, stormed the Press Club premises and raised slogans against the author.

They attacked her with bouquets, flower pots and virtually anything they could lay their hands on at the concluding session of the book release. The police later took the legislators and their supporters into custody.

you don’t really think “violence”. You think maybe they threw these objects in the general direction of the author, Taslima Nasrin. But watching the video footage makes me livid with rage. Three MLAs? Even as there was someone capturing all of this on camera !?!

People have the right to protest. You don’t like the book, don’t buy it. Encourage others not to buy it. But interfering in someone else’s right to read, write or speak just doesn’t cut it for me. That’s not protest. That’s plain old intimidation.

What’s also scary is that this is in a city that I don’t associate with hardliners of any kind. I’ve lived there for a brief while, and loved the city for its liberal values. It’s not a city that cries itself hoarse saying it has liberal values like Bombay, but has them nevertheless. Well, at least the Police took the three morons (MLAs) into custody I guess. Though they’ve been granted bail.

On a related note, for a change, Times Of India has an interesting article on how the Media runs to the “extreme” camps for soundbytes.

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I found only one part of three on YouTube, but here’s another snippet of the same documentary at Wholphin DVD. A group of young boys and men shoot verbal missiles. Some of their statements include –

“(if she were my sister) I’d shake her hard and hang her up there by an electric cord.”
” If you were my sister, I’d hang you by the feet with your head swinging in the air.”
” Before God and the Law, women are deficient in religion, deficient in inheritance and deficient in intelligence.”
” Women are a disgrace.”
” Women in general are flawed from start to finish.”
” She has to be accompanied by a man whenever she goes out.”

Interestingly, I just finished this wonderful book “Reading Lolita in Tehran” by Azar Nafisi. It maybe a memoir in books. But this interaction with books is an intensely personal journey. It makes them question everything – the wearing of veils, to the standards used to judge women and university politics. Set in that turbulent time in Iran during the Islamic Revolution in the late 1970s, when the monarchy was overthrown and Iran became the Islamic Republic of Iran. The freedom that women had under the reign of the Shah of Iran was quickly snatched by the antics of Ayotollah Khomeini. Women, as always became the lambs of the revolution. While for many, the veil was a political symbol before the actual fall of the Shah, the government diktats that women MUST wear the veil took the choice out of their hands.

The other amazing read is Marjane Satrapi‘s autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis : The Story of a Childhood. Persepolis is a reflection on changing times through the eyes of a young girl. While it is autobiographical in nature, it is such an incredible insight into the minds of those whose childhoods were grabbed during those years. I just found eight pages of the cartoons online at the Iranian.com which has this curious tagline “Nothing is Sacred” – Pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

As Azar Nafisi in the course of the book Reading Lolita In Tehran mentions time and again – the adults who lived through the revolution could be nostalgic and remember better times. They knew what they had lost. But the children, those who grew up without the memory of the days of freedom, had no idea what they had lost to the revolution. They didn’t know freedom. They could only idealize it and think of it as a romantic figment of imagination. There’s such deep and dark sarcasm in Persepolis that it just yanks your gut out in the open. Sample this cartoon for instance. That keeping a few strands of hair would stand for defying an entire regime seems so out of place. But women’s bodies, when they begin to belong to “the other” instead of “the self”, the loudest statements appear to made in these seemingly quiet and trivial ways.

Perhaps the oldest civilizations in the world suffer from too much memory. So everything is neatly divided into piles of new and old. The newer ones, they are free to construct what they want. There is nothing to demolish.

Yemen (149th) slipped four places, mainly because of the arrest of several journalists and closure of newspapers that reprinted the cartoons. Journalists were harassed for the same reason in Algeria (126th), Jordan (109th), Indonesia (103rd) and India (105th).

Some trouble spots identified here. Needless to say the levels of conflict in a country have a negative influence on the rank, it means the government gets more tight fisted about what gets printed.

Things are much the same in Sri Lanka, which ranked 51st in 2002, when there was peace, but has now sunk to 141st because fighting between government and rebel forces has resumed in earnest. Dozens of Tamil journalists have been physically attacked after being accused by one side or the other of being biased against them.

As far as Nepal goes, the political turmoil which resulted in clamping down on the press, and then consequent freedom of expression means the country is at 159. Pakistan is at 157. Bangladesh is at 137. It’s pretty interesting that South Asia (excluding India) is pretty much in the same range (137 to 159).

RSF has an article on how the index was compiled, along with the questionnaire used to compile the data.

It is based solely on events between 1 September 2005 and 1 September 2006. It does not look at human rights violations in general, just press freedom violations.

Reporters Without Borders compiled a questionnaire with 50 criteria for assessing the state of press freedom in each country. It includes every kind of violation directly affecting journalists (such as murders, imprisonment, physical attacks and threats) and news media (censorship, confiscation of issues, searches and harassment).

While it is nice to note that India’s rank has improved over the last three to four years, it might have something to do with the situation worsening in some countries, as opposed to the situation improving within a country. Further, the absolute rank for countries may be higher as some countries appear to share the score.

I wonder if there is a similar index for comparing Press Freedom in different states and regions. It would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between degree of economic freedom, level of conflict and freedom of press. Further, one wonders how many instances of violation actually get reported in many parts of India. Plus, can one actually measure arm-twisting of the Media? What about instances of corruption within Media at the level of institutions, where decisions are taken about not reporting events, manipulating reports etc. and this knowledge may never reach the public domain anyway.