Internet.. the last gate closing

Internet… Its more vast than Earth itself.. If you spent all your life just flicking from one page to another, you’d see only a fraction of what is an ocean of data. The total time required to see all the videos on youtube 4-5 years back was more than 400 years! At that time youtube consumed more bandwidth than the whole of internet itself in year 2000.

It is the only place where free speech is litterally free. Where you choose to remain anonimous or not. The only place where we really contact and respond to, the whole world. When was the last time you wrote letters to unseen penpals? Never i hope…

Recently, Kapil Sibal and his pals, the govt, decided that internet was too offensive, no amount of money or influence worked here. So they are now trying to bring regulations and censors, to filter ‘offensive’ content on facebook, google and its branches and basically the whole of internet accessed from India. He wants ‘defamatory’ content to be taken down and companies like fb to filter everything that is uploaded for ‘offensive’ ‘inflamatory’ content.

Usually i am calm about politicians looting billions from the public but this is more serious than starvation. Much, much more serious. It’s like saying, dying of starvation is allright but saying something about it is ‘inflamatory and offensive’ to the politicians and so should be taken down. That’s no different than our lame neighbours china! These people are litterally trying to control communication itself!

The internet, all the pages, websites, social networks and video sites are unregulated. They are the only place in the whole world, where you can say what you feel, irrespective of what others (people, politicians, religious leaders etc..) think about it. Kapil Sibal is also against ‘degradatory’ comments on religious leaders. I don’t like religion. It has caused more deaths than world wars and hitler combined. Religion is an idea. And an idea changes because of other ideas,(rational or otherwise) but when you stop this flow, that’s when we are doomed. Any idea that one might feel offensive or taboo or whatever, other feels in a different way and both have the right to express what they feel. Religious leaders have a lot at stake and their best trick is to keep things the way they are. Change, for them is bad because it puts the whole idea in question over time, as better ones come. From the time scientists and their books were burnt for being anti-christian to Kapil Sibal today, these people at power know that controlling communication, effectively limit’s people’s power hugely.

The anti-corruption movement, egypt and libya’s freedom and uncountable other movements… were kickstarted on the internet. Speaking against the government was met with torture in egypt and libya, but internet, hard to control due to its vastness gave power to the people to overthrow their regimes. Overthrow an idea…

What people want to say, they have a right to say. If the government, people, religions, groups, fundamentalists etc… find it offensive, then run to your mom, don’t read it. If you want to say something against it then say it with arguement, not by blocking the means of communication just because you have the power.

A place where unquestionable, is questioned and unthinkable is thought, should be protected at all cost. The real power of people is to be able to express and respond with people. Its like banning your local cofee shop because you gather to discuss stuff…

Remember, the biggest insecurity to people, used to power is people who they think are below them, take it away. You are not their pawns, they are in that position because of you. To serve you, what you want. Over time, they have forgotten that they need us to stay up there.

Internet must be protected at all costs, it has to be uncontrolled and untamed. Else, we’ll be slaves to our own servants… not politicians anymore… rulers.. controllers..

Twilight! The bloody vampsuckerz

Ahhh Something wrong with education! :O –(couldn’t think of better title)

From your birth to the time u are reading this. You have absorbed a lot of information and understanding. Even though formal education might have gone wasted on a few of us, we have never stopped learning. Like mini terminators, children march into schools, stupid, dumb and irritating and after many years, if they have managed to level up, they come out pretty much the same except that they are loaded with information and bigger processors. School and colleges are like manufacturers. They take in raw material and try to make the finished product, as efficient, polished and domestic as possible. So that we may become good citizens, so that we may trade our acquired skills and information for money. Formal education is a way living better in this society. It is what has come to be called learning. Stuffing up kids with atoms and electrons and maths at ages as early as 10 and 11. We have moved from what the kid finds interest in and wants to learn to what needs to be learnt. By natural competition for basically every resource there is, the kids that ‘learnt’ the value of ‘pi’ or whatever got employed and others did not.
So concerned moms and dads basically made it their life’s mission to tell their kids everything that can be crammed into their heads. They have also taken to lure kids with gadgets, gizmo’s, not harassing them and money… if they study. The little kid never knows that it just prostituted itself.
Its not that parents are evil pimps. Its just that you (if u are not a parent already), might or might not agree with me now. But after many years when you will be ‘bhlleesssed whith ae chiiiillllld’, you will be outraged at this very writing. You will condemn it and shield your kid’s eyes from it. You won’t want the kid to read this and suddenly have different ideas about going to school! Your instant who-cares-about-those lil-retards attitude will transform into, look!-look!-me-responsible-parent attitude. You will do everything possible to give your kid an advantage over the competition. The kid will grind endless lead and ink to be called a ‘ler-ned person’. But that’s not enough. Everyone around is ler-ned. So you will push your kid further and further into a path that you indirectly, conditionally made him choose, and they, kids cannot say anything because they were the ones who made the choice.
I did not write this to (only) rant about childbearers and slavekids. I also wrote this note to wonder weather we are ever going to be free of this. It is natural for parents to become overly concerned about their kids because they are a part of them. But because of our large numbers and growing need to acquire more and more money as prices inflate we are ever more under pressure to stay in the league. The problem is not with parents and schools and colleges. These are institutions which impart knowledge (though selectively) help us grow and civilize. The problem is with our numbers. Our growing population makes the competition so intense that people are led to believe that things like, doing crazy things, having serious interests and taking your time, are things that should be smiled upon and shook off. ‘Hobbies’ they are sometimes called. That happiness is some certified achievement and not doing things that you want. This indoctrination or brainwashing is required so that the kid/person (nt much diff) goes into a particular direction. Without this illusion the they might not survive the competition.
In the race of a billion horses, only those that were trained the most, had the genetics, that were beaten the most had the advantage. They were fitted with flaps near their eyes so that all they could see was the track. And yea they came ahead of others. They won and made the owners proud. They were never really made for the tracks and yet that was all of the life they ever saw. They thought the food was worth it…

How much do you control your life…?

This question has been asked directly or otherwise by many people throughout history. Some say we are the masters of our own destiny while others say that we are nothing but mere puppets to circumctance. Whatever it is, we are very intrested in what happens in the ‘end’. We speculate about it, we modify it as we go along, from a child who wants to be an astronaut to whatever new teenage fad that erupts, we want to become somebody, from who you are to an idea of who you want to be. We strive to do so by the choices that we make. ‘The way life goes’ depends upon essentially those choices that we make… or do we?

We are all addicts. If you are going ‘yeahh’ then thats not what i meant. If you are thinking ‘no i am not’ then let me explain how wrong you are… ‘Control’ is the drug. It was on the street before streets were invented. We are obsessed with controlling things around us from the begining of mankind. The plains and mountains were too big for us so we built homes. Restricted places where we could control things better. It makes us feel more powerful. We want to make a choice towards what we want, away from what we don’t want thus trying to control things that affect us and so controlling the path of our lives. All religions talk about life and how we should live it and what choices we should make. They are all intrested in what happens in the end. Your destiny they call it. The choices we make to reach destiny, i assume, is the ‘journey of life’. Destiny is your ultimate achievement, you were born to do it and religion is that guiding light in the dark which leads you to it. Very well, but the problem is, if destiny is something which is inevitable then religion and its morals itself have no purpose of existence. You could say their purpose is to guide you to your destiny but if that’s true, then the choices you make depends upon that guidance which will influence your choice. If choices can be influenced then destiny has to be flexible which by its meaning itself, is not possible. For destiny or fate to exist, everything in the world has to be pre-determined or fixed. Some go as far as to say that this is the proof of a fixer or god. But that cannot be possible because for destiny to exist, god himself cannot choose to make a change. Get it…

Today people laugh at this idea when you say ‘it was not my fault!’ but would explain their own versions of belief at any other time with all seriousness.

Destiny is not just a thing of religion though There is a theory with pretty convincing argument.

Determinism is the best alibi after ‘destiny’ to blame upon for things that you did wrong or were careless with. I left my bike out in the night, it got stolen yesterday, determinism! 😦  Determinism is the same as destiny with a slight difference. It is not based on flying chariots…

Rather it is based upon the nature of particles. The atoms and electrons etc. It says that everything is predetermined because at the deepest level, everything reacts accordingly to the changes in its environment. Our every action, every move, every thought is a result of complex series of events which happened because of the condition or environment we were in. They would not have reacted in any other way. That, cause and effect, work from the deepest core of our being to the person we propose and love, and that choices that we make are inevitable. It means that if we could measure all things about a person, and all includes the position of atoms etc at the given moment, we can accurately predict what you are going to eat for your lunch and where, 10 years later from today, you could be dead too. Cool right, so people playing cricket are just fooling themselves, the outcome is fixed!

This means that we have no ‘free will’, no real choice of what we are doing because it is dependant upon other chain of events that led you to that choice.

A deterministic world is not a desirable world. It makes us feel too mechanical. We like to believe that we are in control of things, maybe not everything but at least things around us. But if logic is to be followed irrespective of what we feel, then determinism makes more sense than free will. I think free will is an illusion that we live in because the world is too complex for us to predict the end result. Our ‘choices’ have so many unintended consequences, which affect not only the decisions of other people, but the very choices that exist for them to make a decision for or not. We cannot measure that and thankfully so! It feels rather powerless to imagine that we have no free will. Like a withdrawal syndrome of sorts which makes us want to feel powerful again. There is a compulsive need, which makes us want to control things in our sphere of influence, maybe that’s why we are addicts of control. From the games (cityville!) that we play to the real cities we build, we love to create and control and yet fail to realize all the things that led to it. We are not as smart as we think we are, only smarter than the monkeys. x)

Talking about monkeys, that brings us to the main question, How much do you really control the way your life goes. The answer could be anything. Bananas for instance but how much ever we hate to believe it, it seems we have no real control over our life at all! That the emotion of a certain want and its fulfillment or not, had a previous series of events which led you to believe that you wanted something after which you moved predictably towards what you believed you wanted and so forth… A rather sad answer to a question, who’s answer is expected to be a triumph of humanity itself.

But there could be another way to live happily again. I think that our inability to calculate the end result, even if it is going to happen precisely in a certain way, keeps us happy and powerful. We are more happy not knowing how things will turn out to be than knowing how they will. I don’t want to know if me being born on a certain date led a friend of mine 19 years later, to host a surprise for me. I want to be surprised. My inability to calculate, lets just say a lot of things that led him to do that for me, made me more happy.

Just as the the heinsberg’s cat in a poisoned box cannot be said to be dead until we open the box, even if we can be fairly certain that she is dead without doing so, you cannot know how ur life will turn out without living it.

Anyways to prove to xyz, that ‘whatever’ was not ur fault, you will require a box, a poisonous gas depending upon your cruelty, a live cute cat. After that i hope u knw how it works… Life is so complex that we can never know what is going to happen.

Do tell me what you think about all this and weather you think you control your life or not, your own answer or something completly different! I’d love to read your comments..

All hail the lords, or be gagged and killed!

What happens when mistakes of the government’s are out in the open? Does the government try to improve itself? Does it even try to apologize after looting one sixth of the country’s  GDP? Does it quiver in its boots and feel the wrath of the people? No! It feels all this is ridiculous and goes on to do sensible things… like turn into a dictatorship. Yes we are officially under dictatorship so if you don’t want to waste time reading any further; you may run for your lives…

The government recently, in a move to gag the news channels brought the information and broadcasting board under its ambit. This means that if the ministry feels that something shown on tv is ‘inappropriate’, ‘anti-national’ or violates its ‘norms’ , it will take away the license for that channel to broadcast! As we may safely assume that the government feels that ‘it’ is the whole country and we are only their money minting slaves, it will just restrict channels who criticize their party, whichever comes to power. This move came right when the tide is well against the government. The politicians know what news channels can do once they have got whiff of something amiss. News channels played a huge role in exposing the politicians and were catalysts in mass movements against corruption. They also asked uncomfortable questions to politicians, “How do you own a private jet with models as your hostess, when everyone here in the studio supposedly earns more than you?” or “Why did you buy things for the common wealth games at 15 times the prices (:O) when the world tells me bulk buying should be cheaper?”

I believe that the media companies have no interest what so ever in showing people what they don’t want to watch, so by natural selection, the only programs that will survive are the ones people will watch, so why, in the so called largest democracy in the world (by population, dnt be so happy :P), is the government trying to control what people see. If anything needs to be controlled, it is the recent bollywood movies, to save people from becoming retarded, not the news channels and half naked celebs making love.

The politicians were astounded! “HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT? YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE STUPID!” They soon found out that the Right to Information Act actually works and all their happy looting was being exposed. They worked out that people were happily starving before the RTI came into being, when all they could do was die. They were still starving, but now had the proof and the politicians were going to jail! For a moment they thought of, being careful. They didn’t like the experience very much. They were the rulers elected and re-elected on the basis of ignorance.

All this civil power was highly unacceptable… So the politicians have started to question the RTI itself. Recently many politicians in what we are supposed to believe by coincidence have started attacking the RTI by saying it leads to inefficiency. Of course it does, a lot of the scams were exposed because of this act. Without RTI people might have never known the mind boggling figures upwards of thousands of crores which were taken out of their hard earned income, I think even the mogul emperor Aurangzeb took less money than that from his subjects and it was all white! The politicians want to efficiently loot people… They implement the ignorance is bliss thing, literally.

Now they seem to have suddenly realized that they are indeed the light for all darkness, the owners of all souls and so, people who file RTI application are being attacked and killed. Since last year at least 12 RTI activists have been murdered for seeking information on various government activities. They have been shot, slashed by knives and swords and severely beaten up.

So there is this act, implemented by the government to bring in transparency in its functioning, but if you use it, you will be killed… Neat.

There are only two places left which are yet to be touched by the infected hands of politics… They are maybe the most important tools that we have. One is the Supreme Court. The only body in the whole country which can dare to put sitting ministers in jail. And the other is the Internet, the only place where I can write and publish THIS without (probably) being tortured and killed. It is the only place where freedom of unendingly varied ideas can exist. Not selective, but free in a true sense. It is responsible for the rise and fall of many movements that will shape the history of man… I fear though, that after trying to gag the broadcasting channels and killing RTI activists, the Internet will be next… If it is, then we will be truly enslaved…

On, religious sentiment of anger towards hardline terrorism.

When religious people abuse the terrorists, i wonder weather they think for a moment that, the terrorists think that they themselves are doing the right thing (for their own religion), we perceive them as downright evil but they actually believe that someone up there wants them to do what they do, just as u think someone up there wants u to do things (on a much smaller scale like rituals and beliefs), but don’t u see the wrongness in this whole movement of thought!? An institution of faith, wants you to wage wars for self preservation. It requires you to actually believe tht there is an ultimate force, which by the way seems to have a wicked sense of humor, and you are to constantly please and bow down to it. The terrorist is highly indoctrinated. Brainwashed, he is forever trapped in his own fairytale concept of things. So its is almost amusing to watch a religious person abuse other religious people because their idea of religion is different. Both are unaware, tht at different levels, both are brainwashed!
In urban India, a shift from hardline devoteesm, to (today, or atleast ppl around me) a much diluted sense of belief, has occurred because people started to realize that no1 was judged for what they did or did not do. Yet due to prior conditioning over years and years, accepting that there is no judge at all, is very difficult.. How does a mind develop when it is locked in this system? Religion is very attractive comfort because people think they already know the answers to everything! But when two answers don’t match, then there are blasts, deaths and more wars, all to protect their own version of stories which have outlived their purpose to civilize.
Its hard to believe tht at this stage of development, so many people here are yet so hopelessly trapped..

MojoJojo’s cousin, the new Super Villain!

Recently, 9 people were found off the coast of Japan in a small wooden boat. These people had run away from their home country. They were wearing hoods, masks and glasses to conceal their identity, hoping that their relatives in homeland won’t be identified and sent to DEATH CAMPS…! and no Hitler is not back.

We have all watched cartoons as kids and its taken for granted that the ‘good’ will win over the ‘evil’, no matter how powerful, ruthless and ambitious the villan is, the hero wins every single time. (He may have the script on his side…) But what about the real world? Our constant attempts to script it don’t work very well.

In the real world, Mojo-jojo was busy fighting the powerpuff girls so his cousin (who looks just as short and has a similar name) got jelous and decided to take over a whole country…

And he has indeed… The country in question is Pyongyang, 조선민주주의인민공화국, or North Korea. And the villan is Kim Jong-il, the dictator, ruler and (i’m not kidding) god, of the whole country. Yup, if u thought you had it bad from our hideious corrupt politicians and unjust nagging parents, then you need to change the whole dimension of thought here. Its like the whole country is grounded forever… Here’s what is going on in North Korea… Things even Mojo-jojo wouldn’t do..

The dictator, Kim Jong-il controls ALL media including the radio, news etc… U need a licence to buy a TV, which has 3 channels in the capital, and 1 (ONE!) channel in the rest of the country, all owned and controlled by the ‘government’ to propogate the ‘glory’ of Kim Jong-il and his family. The whole country is brainwashed to believe the ‘sacred birth’ of their leader (They teach that from school). So all you can watch on the TV, is the pathetic face of a mass murderer smiling at you as u die in your home, because hospitals are worse.

Any critisim of the ‘government’ is punishable by death. ‘Political prisoners’ are sent to labour camps with their families including children and grandparents for the rest of their lives. Most die from starvation or torture.

As kids, we loved to boast about our ‘general knowledge’ (catterpiller has 16 legs yay!), bah, the entire population there is yet to know that man has been to the moon! Internet is banned.  More than 900,000 people have died of starvation in that country but according to the country’s controlled media, North Korea has NEVER suffered famine or poverty. (U may die of starvation while watching how well the country is prospering  :P) If you are caught stealing food or attempting to escape the country you are PUBLICALY executed. A North Korean man was brutally tortured and publically executed by firing squad for calling a friend in South Korea on his mobile phone. (International calls are punishable by death).

Vehicles and fuel are reserved only for the political elite (leave vehicles, people don’t own themselves). People there are led to believe that their leader is loved the world over and is the ‘greatest’ and ‘kindest’ person in the entire world and has rendered immortal services to era and humankind.. (yup he has, by reinstating our faith in democracy!) It is hard to register in our mind that all this is actually happening to a whole country! Mojo’s cousin is bad!

It is intresting to see that if a whole country can be conditioned to believe and behave in a certain way, the whole of humanity is also another version of (intentional or unintentional) conditioning? We have slowly evolved from the indivisual power (imperialism, rulers etc) to power of the people (democracy). Power of a system will always outweigh the power of an indivisual. Dictators, communists and control freaks cannot keep their control for long because people will always gravitate towards a better alternative, it is our nature to do so.

In real life the hero or (wht we percieve as) ‘good’ eventually wins, not because of the script, but because people move towards what benifits them. I believe that freedom of North Korea is inevitable. Freedom in the sense of freedom from basic insecurities, because after all we too are slaves to the systems that we create…