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.

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.

Bangladeshi blogger and journalist Tasneem Khalil has been arrested by the joint forces tonight. One of his colleagues (also a renowned blogger) broke the news requesting anonymity. They are afraid to speak out. His whereabouts are currently unknown.

Tasneem Khalil (26) is an editorial assistant of the Daily Star , a popular news daily in Bangladesh. He is also the representative of CNN and Human Rights Watch in Bangladesh. His recent articles concentrated on the extra judicial killings in Bangladesh by the joint forces and other human rights issues. After the declaration of the state of emergency in January 11, it is apparent that army is behind the Care taker (interim) Government in Bangladesh. There is an emergency act in place in the country curtailing civil rights which gives power to the authority to arrest any person without conviction. He was called in for questioning by military intelligence last week.

I think to a certain extent in India, it’s so easy for us to be cynical about blogs. Be dismissive. Because there’s a relatively greater degree of freedom of the press. But if you look closely at countries where press freedom is severely curtailed, blogs offer so much freedom to journalists to express and articulate opinions, which wouldn’t otherwise be published by the press. That aside, the interim government also appears to have poor PR skills. In the last three weeks, an ex-prime minister (who has better PR skills) isn’t initially allowed back into the country and now a journalist is arrested. Not to mention, election dates that are nowhere in sight.

Update – He’s no longer in custody. Yay!

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A single e-mail between the DCP in charge of the Enforcement Branch and the California-based company will now nail such persons.

Following a meeting between representatives of the site and the Enforcement Directorate last month, the Mumbai Police and Orkut have entered into an agreement to seal such cooperation in matters of objectionable material on the web.

Trouble is, that many proxies don’t solve the problem. You cannot access gmail or orkut on many of these services. There are a few like AvoidLimit that may allow access, but the waiting time is likely to fizzle out your hatered.

There are issues that Orkut has. People get stalked. But frankly, please don’t be foolish enough to go about publishing your phone number on a public profile. You’re not asking for it, but a large number of human beings are bored and perverts. As for people creating fake profiles in other people’s names – the internet has a memory for both the fake profile, and the denial. If you ignore it long enough, people will find something else to do. I understand that cyber crimes can be very serious. But we still don’t have a concrete definition of what constitutes a cyber crime. And who exactly is to tell us what “objectionable content” is? If it’s wrong to hate Shivaji, I demand that anyone hating Kannagi be labeled a criminal too. In fact, I demand that anyone hating anything remotely Tamil be tracked down and sent a year’s supply of bad Tamil movies as punishment.

This is the first step. You may not hate anything that the government wants you to love. But tomorrow, it’ll be for some other reason. Maybe they’ll begin by saying that since sodomy is illegal, any homosexual man posting on Orkut will be tracked down. Then, they’ll tell you they’re at your doorstep because you dared to say that Pasta is better than Dal. (Actually, given our current Italian flavour in the government – that might take an election.).

Update – Google has a response. Maybe they should change their tag line to “Don’t do Evil. Just be Ambiguous.”.

Google has very high standards for user privacy and a clear privacy policy. When dealing with requests from authorities, we are very careful to balance the interests of our users while still being as cooperative in the investigation and prosecution of crimes as possible.
What is important to note is that this new reporting tool does not affect the way we treat users’ data – it only enables a faster, direct communication. Authorities will still be required to follow an appropriate legal process in order to get user-identifying information.

What exactly is “legal process” in this case? A bad case of police indigestion?

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.

The sight of so many human beings probably unsettled the leopard as it kept running helter-shelter in an effort to dodge the guards and police. The locals finally cornered the leopard and hit the animal with sticks after which the forest department tranquilised it.

But the leopard died later and the post mortem report said the animal died of fear. According to reports, three people received minor injuries.

The mob can be rather cruel. I remember when I was studying in TISS, that grand, self-virtuous institution, with a campus full of monkeys, a dog and crows, there used to be some snakes. One particular snake, unfortunately too beautiful and too big not to be noticed was spotted by a few students. Despite assurances that it wasn’t poisonous, it was brought down the tree with sticks and mauled to death. At the most the snake would gobble a few rats and cause the monkeys to chatter with fear.

What amazes me is that it took seven hours for the forest officials to even try and sedate the animal and take it to a safe place. Who trains them?

How to take part in the 24-hour online demo against censorship:

The Reporters Without Borders website will be given over to this protest from 11 a.m. on 7 November until 11 a.m. on 8 November.

Go to www.rsf.org during this 24-hour period, find the list of 13 countries that are Internet enemies and click on an inter-active map of the world to help make the Internet black holes disappear. Each click will help to change the map’s appearance. The aim is to re-establish the Internet in the countries where it is censored, to rebuild it before the 24 hours are over. Every vote will be counted. Every click will help Reporters Without Borders to speak with more force when it condemns the behaviour of those regimes that censor what should an arena for free expression.

Plus, you can give Yahoo! a piece of your mind:

By going to the special webpages, Internet users from all over the world will have the chance to record a message for Yahoo!’s founder from their personal computers. Reporters Without Borders will make sure the messages get to him. Why Yahoo? Because this was the first company to censor its own search engine to curry favour with the Chinese authorities. And because it has been collaborating for years with the Chinese police, which arrests and convicts dissident and freelance journalists. Shi Tao, for example, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on the basis of information supplied by Yahoo!, which hosted his e-mail account.