Anything Else

There is a controversy in the air because of Wikipedia refusing to take down pictures of historical paintings, sensitive to Muslims. Which is understandable, given the ever so brittle muslim sensitivities, but I was quite surprised to read this on their online petitions:

In Islam picture of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and other Humans are not allowed.

Emphasis mine.This is just too much, I guess Flickr should expect a fatwa anytime now for showing pictures of millions of humans. Initially I thought it was some kind of error, may be by capitalizing the Human, they mean some special humans especially revered by them, not just ordinary human beings, but then came across this post by the person behind the petition:

The first question is. Is pictures or illustrations of humans are allowed in Islam?
And the answer is NOT. And this is exactly opposite to Paul M. Cobb. This Islamic Law is derived from Quran and authentic HADITH, and both Quran and Hadith belong from the life of Muhammad to its not a 20th century Law. I know before 20th century there was no Fatwa about this but there was a common understanding between Muslims on this issue. The art of pictures and illustration of Muhammad (PBUH) was only practiced in Iran or Shia Muslims. One thing is very important in this issue, not all Shia practice this. Even then painting of face was not allowed in Shia community. That is why you will find majority of illustrations with a white blank face or a face covered with Vail. But in 20th century some illustrations showing face were discovered and then Muslim scholars decided to put a Fatwa or Islamic Law in place to block this move.

I wonder how is Internet legal in Muslim countries! Or even news papers. Or movies or arts.

I can understand the out cry against cartoons or other pictures intended as mocking or insulting Islam, but these are historical pictures done by Muslim artists under Muslim kings.

This significance of this episode in my opinion is this: a well meaning, educated and moderate Muslim will hate this, and will want the photos to be taken down, where as a well meaning, educated and moderate westerner will want the photos to stay. Unlike the cartoons, Wikipedia is not going to go away and fade into history. This could be the first time the veil of "its only the extremists who hate each other" will be lifted.

Only time will tell. 

PS: On why the pictures should be removed.

Is boiling.

PS: I know frogs are more intelligent than people.

PPS: Counterpoint.

I usually do not believe in isms like liberalism or socialism or capitalism; or rather I should say I go by "makes-sense-ism".

Since after talking about suicide in my blog post the other day, I have come to change my opinion a little bit. The liberal stand on suicide seems to be "its my body, and I should be free to do anything with it, including ending it, as long as its not affecting others" or in other words "right to live implicitly means right to not live, like right to speech implies right to stay silent".

Lets see what makes-sense-ism say about this issue. First of all, its not suicide whose legality we are really talking about, its attempted suicide, so the liberal argument is kind of null and void. If someone is dead, it really doesn't matter if he committed a crime or not. Well not really, in old England for example, one used to lose his/her nobility if they committed suicide. Similarly they would not get normal funeral, the family may not get insurance benefits or other benefits from governments [though that would be punishing the wrong person]. But so is not the case in India, and few other countries countries with suicide laws, and suicide effectively can be considered beyond legal consequences.

Now lets consider "(failed) attempt to commit suicide", liberals and conservatives differ here. Liberals seems to imply that since nobody but the person who tried to commit suicide,  is getting hurt in the process, it should really not be a crime. Right to live argument can not be really invoked here, but victimless crime can be, sort of. Conservatives, where as, seems to imply that its societies roll to protect every life, even from the person themselves, and thus society should do everything in their capacity to deter them from hurting themselves.

Liberals are wrong. This is not a victimless crime. State resources are precious, emergency medical treatment, police investigation, that can be better utilized for someone really needy(who did not bring this to themselves) and there is kins' emotional distress, and possibly financial too. This line of reasoning takes us close to conservative point of view, strong penalty seems to be warranted to deter people from committing suicide (and failing). Following this reasoning a lot of countries adopted suicide laws with penalties for attempted suicide.

But conservatives are wrong too (but not for obvious reasons) (and a most of the countries did retract this law). The first argument that comes in mind after reading the above is: deterrence does not really work in this case, as you can not deter someone by scaring them about failure of what they are doing, as they are not aiming for failure anyways. You can not scare someone about going to some room, when they are not planning to go to that room in first place. Deterrence argument should be out of window. But not really, someone might say, this still is better than nothing, they will keep this in the back of their mind, and they would still consider the chance of failure and its consequences, and will be deterred a little bit.

How do we resolve this? Or is it the valid conclusion? In the spirit of "strong opinions, weakly held", my current opinion on this seems to be something like this: what really matters is if we consider the problem as a black box, without caring about what is right and wrong, and should be-s and should not not be-s, and focus on just rational conclusions and numbers to guide us. Let see what numbers would be affected, and which way we should try to move them. Sounds cold, but here is how the numbers play: since state has to provide medical treatment and police investigation anyways, penalty or no penalty is not making any difference in the amount of money spent by state. In fact jail costs, and so does judicial proceedings leading to it, so making it a crime is bad from economy point of view.

The other number, which is probably a little more significant is number of lives lost/gained. If 500 people are dying today per unit time, and a new bill is passed, and the ultimate consequence of it is 600 people dying per unit time, everything else remaining equal, the law is bad, and if only 400 dies, then its good, this much we can say without knowing what the law states. So how will number of deaths be effected by this law? Think from the point of view of the person who just tried to kill themselves but failed. They probably cut themselves, and after hours they realize they are not going to die, and its just too painful, or may be they popped some pills and all they got is nausea and uncontrolled vomiting. Lets consider the failed attempts where the victim/culprit is suffering and need help, and they are faced with the question of calling it quits (may be just for now) and requesting help. [I am claiming that in the other case; wherein either the person is not suffering from any pain, or is still determined to die and is not planning to quit despite the pain or they have passed out or in so much pain to not be able to think; the number of deaths will depend on factors other than this law, and thus can be ignored from this discussion]. Now the suffering fellow is thinking, if suicide is a crime, and if he calls medical attention, he/she will be reported and charged, and jailed ultimately, and this will just add up to the misery that forced them to commit suicide in the first place. I guess the essence of my argument is: this law will not deter them from trying to commit suicide, this will deter them from calling for help when they fail. They will try all possible avenues, self treatment, reaching out to friends who may not be qualified enough, or contacting "legally liberal with a fee" doctors, and calling regular emergency numbers would really be the last resort that the victim/culprit would be mulling over. If nothing else this will waste precious amount of time (they would be sitting thinking/hoping/telling themselves that if they just waited a little more, the pain will go down, or may be they will pass out) that might end up being too costly given the emergency nature of the situation. If there was no fear of prosecution, the victim/culprit would just call for help as soon as they realize its even a little bit more painful than they expected.

Recapping, suicide attempt laws increase the cost to state (judicial and correction facilities), and increase the number of deaths (due to improper or delayed medical attention), without reaping any benefits, and therefore does not make sense (to me at least, if you differ, speak up!), and therefore should be abolished from India, one of the few countries that still has such laws.

PS: What about planning to commit suicide, should it be legal? To me this is too much of a thought crime situation,  where would one draw the line, when someone gets a gun? or when they confess to a friend that they are having such feelings? Shrink is what they need, not courts. 

Came across "Are We Free To Be Foolish?" By Shruti Rajagopalan (Via Me). Read that first. 

While I am still have not thought and read enough on the issues of prostitution and drugs, I feel I can talk about why suicide, in my opinion, is punishable. First of all, suicide itself is not a crime(dead people don't get sued), its attempted suicide which is, and that should be punishable, because well, state is spending resource on you. Off hand, state has no way of finding out if the fellow suffocating to death was planning to kill himself or is a poor victim who needs protection, if they did, probably the right thing for state to do is to let them die, but state has to rush them to emergency rooms and provide treatment. It costs. Then state has to investigate if its really a suicide attempt or someone tried to kill him. It costs too. And this happens to not be a victim less crime, the family of the attempter are the victims (tho they might pretend to think otherwise due to the presence of an incredibly sensitive son of a b*tch, how might try to kill himself again). 

Probably the ideal punishment for this crime should be capital, why should state spend further by housing the person in a jail, when they themselves thing they are worthless, and wanted to die, after this is ideal win win situation. But out of its immense charitable nature, state decided not to kill, and let him live. State be praised.

Actually I just got a thought about prostitution, and I do not know of its morality, and frankly morality has very little to do with state actions, rightly so, state usually picks practicality and smartness consideration over moral ones when acting. In prostitution, there are various "acts", and they cost different amounts of money. If it were to be legal, in the heat of passion, some business disputes may arise, and feminist liberation army would be on the head of the state if state considered this as a merely business/civil dispute. The only system of prostitution that can be practically be legal is "fixed price, pre-approved and prepaid prostitution". Because this system allows for extreme brutalities(who is there to say where to draw the line?) I guess its okay for state to call it illegal and save itself from human right issues. Other option is to make rape legal too, but that too seems to have some tiny human right issues somewhere that I can't think of at the moment. :-)

In short, in my opinion, in the ideal world, prostitution and suicide should be illegal, thanks to the wisdom of our government for not listing to this whiny... people. And this has nothing to do with morality bullshit that Shruti is claiming. How about drugs? Not thought enough. 

Lets talk about the third set of laws, that she claims are made because state thinks the citizens are stupid. 

Helmet law: State has to bear the cost of treatment, traffic police, ambulance, emergency rooms, then all kinds of CAT scans are heavily subsidized at every level from government hospitals to exemption of service and sales tax on part to levies on import and so on. This and all kind of person safety laws should be removed the day it became okay for the government to let people die on streets. If you expect quick treatment, be prepared to wear the helmet. And don't tell me you can always pay for your treatment later on, as when you are fu*king lying in the pool of your blood, state has to decide to take you in or not, state has to take the risk of taking in even those who can not pay. They have to hedge the bets. It has to be either no one or everyone whom the state will have to invest in, and thus its logical that state demands everyone to wear the helmet. BTW if you are so proud of paying it up, and liberty, no one is asking you to wear the helmet, it just costs Rs 200/- for every ride you take without helmet. State will love you, trust me. 

Street food: State is subsidizing health care at every level, medicine, paying doctors, hospitals, tax exemptions etc. Anything that increase this cost, state has the right to make a law against. Sure the rich can pay for their health, but the only way state can make sure that only rich can shop on street food shops is by putting a constable on each of those shops kicking out poor bastards away. It would have been good to live in that "ideal" world, but we don't, and state is completely right in doing what they are doing here. 

Hand-pulled rickshaw: She claims the reason is dignity, but let me tell you a few facts about economics. Rich pay the taxes. They get to use roads more than the poor. Rickshaws are cheap. They take up space. They do not help the rich. They congest the roads. Throw them out. We did. This was definetely not a moral or paternal decision :-). 

Labor laws vs individual contracts: We have huge backlog of court cases in India. Contract is bullshit unless it is upheld and enforced by a court when in dispute. Labor laws reduce the number of cases, and forms a system in which the average case is kind of ok for the poors. Moral and Paternalistic? Please! Practical? May be.

Dance Bars: Desperate filthy people. Girls out of money, doing things to earn it. Alcohol. Late night. Ripe for prostitution? Hell yes. See, making prostitution illegal is bullshit unless state enforces it. State does not have resources to sit 2 constables in each such bar (even then who is there to watch that they would not get bribed) and make sure that prostitution is not happening. Its not even a question of dance bars, if for example there is a street where late in the night girls come and stand, and its known that few of them get taken home for a charge, its entirely practical thing for state to send police petrol to kick any woman standing on that road late in the night. It has nothing to do with dignity. State has finite resources. Terrorists are not sleeping. We can not observe every single interaction to decide if its prostitution going on or not. You just look for patterns, and remove them all together. Smart utilization of resources it is called. Politicians sell this in the name of "protecting the dignity" but only the naivest of us are supposed to buy such arguments.

Bhopal case:

The victims and citizens of Bhopal were not allowed to sue the company who took away the lives and health of their families and the prosperity of their city because the state felt that “ambulance chasers” would take away most of their compensation in legal fees.

Bullshit. For your kind information the case involved was in 100s of millions of dollars. UC India, if entirely liquidated, would not yield even 10 million dollars. Its pointless to sue them. You had to sue Uniion Carbide in US. And victims and citizens simply can not do that. Where is the question of allowing or not allowing anyone? State did not deny any right, victims could have, and did sue UC India. As part of settlement with Union Carbide (US), India waived all cases against UC-India, and this is obvious double jeopardy understanding (you don't sue twice for the same crime). Did India manage the best settlement? Probably no, probably yes, people like her (lawyers) are supposed to give their opinion about how much settlement would have been right, but the thing is, it was way beyond what the victims would have got on their own (by suing UC-India). State did a favor. Talk about thankless jobs!

In conclusion:

Do we have the right to take risks that only affect us? Do we have the freedom to live our lives as we choose after weighing the risks, even if we are being foolish according to the government? And if part of freedom is the freedom to be a fool, are we free?

We sure do. You can do many adventure sport. You can perform any risky medical procedure. But as long as you say "oh we will take risk as much as we want, but if something goes wrong, please come up and save us", as long as we put an obligation on the state to protect us from the consequences arising from those risks, the state has the right to demand some lack of foolishnes on your part.

Compensation?

More than 2,000 Indian farmers commit suicide every year because they can´t sustain their farms and pay their debts. Of course globalisation has been blamed for this, just like it´s been blamed for everything else going wrong in the world. But others have pointed out that the real villain is agricultural subsidies - US taxpayers are forced to pay for the dumping of cotton in India, which destroys their market. And without a sophisticated financial system or micro credits, the Indian farmers can´t deal with even a temporary loss of income. 

But I just talked to a person with some insights into Indian agriculture who mentioned another, terrifying reason. The Indian government pay Indian families who have lost their father after a suicide about $3,000. It´s a way of helping of course. And it´s a fortune. About ten times the annual wage. Unfortunately it´s also a powerful incentive for someone who can´t provide for his family.

Sad but plausible.  

In his futile attempt to fight terrorism, Mr Mukhi asks us a question:

“The question we need to ask ourselves is whether a breach of privacy is more important or the security of the nation. I do not think the above question needs an answer,” said Mukhi.

Not only Mr Mukhi is completely clueless about cyber security, he has no idea why the notion of privacy is so important. So what is wrong if our password are stored and is available to police. Why is someone potentially reading our mails such a big problem?

Privacy relates to access of private information about individuals. Human beings associate trust with this information. Imagine someone coming to you and accusing your wife of adultery, in one case he just proclaims, your wife sleeps with other people. This is meant as an insult and you will take it as such, and will just ignore it. But imagine if he has access to your wife's calendar, and says dude yesterday you thought your wife went to laundry in the evening, well she went some other place, and that movie thing she did with her friends last Friday, well, she dint go to the movie either :-), and few other such tidbits. Ignoring the allegation has become so much difficult now. Imagine if he has access to your wife's email account and told you that she still is in touch with her collage ex boyfriend, your wife will not be able to deny this, but she never saw him, and knew how you hated him. The marriage is in deep trouble don't you think? He might not approach you and might blackmail your wife and make some money out of it.

Everybody has stuff about them that if taken out of context can be a cause of great deal of embarrassment or in many cases much worse. Privacy is our weapon against people finding out things about us and misusing them.

Now imagine, 30-40 percent of Bombay accesses internet through cybercafes. If all passwords are being recorded, sure someday someone will discover where they are and steal them. May be the security would be tight, but may be not.

More about trust aspect of privacy. If I call a girl and ask her to come to some place, she will most likely not, but if I have access to her email password, I can find out about her trusted friends from it, and can pretend to be a friend of them calling her to tell her that the good friend of hers is in accident, and caller found her number from the cellphone in his pocket. The chances that the girl comes to the desired place become so high now, don't you think.

There was a case about a guy being lured to a place and kidnapped and I guess murdered using orkut. The guy made a mistake of trusting an unknown person, but imagine if passwords are stored for lackhs of people in some police computer and its gets stolen, how many potential blackmail and murder crimes might get facilitated.

The passwords would be stored in the cybercafe, one point of attack, anyone sitting on this computer can potentially get the passwords. Next passwords will be collected by cybercafe operator, he might steal them himself, or someone might steal them from him. The passwords would be stored in CDs and collected by someone, or electronically uploaded to some site. Sites get hacked all the time, millions of passwords will just give extra incentive to the hackers. Then there are numerous personnel involved in maintaining the remote database that stores all keypresses, any of them could make a copy for himself.

I know of kids of millionaires and billionaires on Orkut, and if I can kidnap them, I can demand hefty ransom. I might be willing to sell this idea to some underworld don to just kidnap kin of system administrators responsible for the database.

Do you really think Mr Mukhi that such risks are worth the near zero benefit that we are going to get out from the privacy invasive plan that you are rolling out? What have you done to protect such privacy invasion? And if you did do anything, you would be a misreable sob if you did not, then why did you decide to redicule privacy concern instead of convincing us that suitable measures are being taken to protect our privacy?

Any data that is collected can be retained and stolen. A lot of privacy information can be gleaned from those datum and trust system inherent with privacy can be exploited to harass people or engage in criminal activities against them. Privacy is thus important. Especially against such un-thought-out measures by government officials, who usually do it under the guise of fighting terrorism.

Vijay Mukhi, President of the Foundation for Information Security and Technology, is introducing a plan for Mumbai police to install a keylogger and screen grabber on all cybercafe machines in Mumbai. Why only cybercafes? Mr Mukhi explians:

"The terrorists know that if they use machines at home, they can be caught. Cybercafes therefore give them anonymity."

To me this is on the verge of bullshit. Has the president of foundation of information security and technology, heard of Tor?

Tor (The Onion Router) is a free software implementation of second-generation onion routing — a system enabling its users to communicate anonymously on the Internet.

It is a US Navy funded project, I guess Mr Mukhi knows something that US Navy and EFF security experts do not that gives him the confidence that anonymity offered by Tor is not enough!

Tor is just one example, there is SSH dynamic port forwarding that acts as a proxy, and if you have access to a server outside India, it provides complete privacy against Indian surveillance. Getting access to a server outside India costs as low as a dollar per month.

These two solutions give access to privacy that even a complete novice can use [once you realize you have something to hide from government, and have spent a few minutes on Google for basic instructions on how to set things up]. There are more advanced techniques, I can hide encrypted information in unrelated files, like images, upload it to flickr for instance, and my friends can access it, and government can not do anything about it, unless they are sitting right next to me while I am doing all that.

It is an impossibility to even conceive that such communications can be tapped, unless the sender has made some obvious mistakes. Terrorists aren't making many otherwise police must have stopped them in action!

Lets talk about keylogging and screen grabbing for a minute. What if someone is using codes to transmit messages? This is how the world war I and II were fought, encryption. The encrypted text could be written on a piece of paper, typed and Mumbai police will keep staring at the screen wondering what the hell to do with those garbage looking text?

Further, keyboard is just one of the input mechanisms available to enter some information on a computer. First thing that comes to mind if Keyboard is not safe is mouse. There are on screen keyboard that one can use. Screen grabber might help a little bit, if mouse movement is tracked, and screen shots are taken at enough frequency as to not miss any mouse clicks, it might be of some help. But only if no code has been employed. Then many cybercafe allow USB thumb drives, these may contain mails that I want to send my fellow terrorists, how would keylogging and screen grabbing help? Many offer microphones, I can imagine few offering bluetooth. Terrorists are smart, much smarter then the police at least, and they have proved it on numerous occasions, thinking otherwise would be foolish.

This entire exercise is futile against anyone with very basic knowledge about the subject.

Mr Mukhi asks an interesting question:

“The question we need to ask ourselves is whether a breach of privacy is more important or the security of the nation. I do not think the above question needs an answer,” said Mukhi.

Terrorists are using cybercafes for planning terrorism related activities. I would be really surprised if they are not using their home computers for doing the same. If my assertions are correct, and the measures taken by Indian police is completely futile in stopping any of them, the question is, did the police know how futile these are, or they are really ignorant enough that all this is coming as news to them? Is this move an honest attempt by police to stop terrorists, or an attempt to save their face for not doing anything. This is not just a casual question, if Mr Mukhi knows that these measures are futile, and yet pretends it will work, I will consider him a part of terror network, who is helping the terrorists.

The blood will be on the hands of Vijay Mukhi for either being actively part of terror network by misusing his position as president of foundation of information security to use inappropriate measures to stop terrorists, or for being an incompetent officer who does not know the basics of information security and yet is egoistical/selfish enough to continue to be as president, and not let other more competent people take over.

Here is what I would have done if I was the president. First of all, I would impress upon everybody that all such mass surveillance is a seductive but bad idea to capture determined individuals. They never work. What works against terrorist is the same that works against any crime and specially the ones involving international parties, and that is solid ground investigation. The old fashioned investigation based on clues obtained in questioning and crime scene, pursuing it with diligence, tracing all the leads, and so on. As a president I would build information infrastructure to help in such investigation, finger print database, car license information database, analysis of bank accounts. I would try to introduce the 100 year old information technology that is radio to more police officers. I would try to build systems in which various police forces in India can share investigation progress and findings. I will help build data-mining systems to mince all information conceivable from data collected all over the country by ground agents.

I would at least realize that my actions, as president of that institution, must be helping terrorists unless they are deterring them.

Indian police is helping terrorists by not getting rid of people like Mr Mukhi, who is either incompetent or terrorist's accomplice.

Am I overstating? Do you think president of such information technology security thing will know something about blogs? Could he have posted his plan on some place and invited discussion from security experts? Did he get his plan reviewed from anybody in any computer science professor specializing in Comptuer security? There are many in IIT Bombay. Or did he just say to himself: oh I am the president, whatever plan I come up with must be right, and other people would not know better, because it is my job to research validity of such plans ha ha ha. Terrorists are using internet to plan bombings, no doubt about it, did he really feel he has outsmarted all of them? This arrogance is costing us lives, and I do not feel right to mince words and call him anything less than a terrorist himself. They kill for religion and misplaced ideologies, he lets them kill for money, I guess he can be counted as worse than them.

Doctors get sued all over the place for malpractices. This is malpractice to me.

This is not just a minor mistake: there is a scarcity of police resources that we have for fighting against terrorists. Instead of trying to coordinate with ground investigators to narrow down to individuals that might give some real progress, this fellow is starting a program that will tie our scarce police resource to excessive cybercafe monitoring, and prosecuting, in the name of fighting terrorism, when its nearly theoretically impossible for the program to make smallest dent in the terrorists networks ability to utilize internet to plan next terror attacks.

Was reading a rebuffal of global warning on by this fellow, here is something I found really interesting:

I confess: I understand that global warming may have negative consequences. Heat waves, droughts and coastal flooding may become more intense. Temperature-sensitive viruses such as malaria could become more widespread. Lakes may be depleted by evaporation. Animal life will suffer.

But as Bjorn Lomborg points out in his sharp, persuasive and aptly titled book "Cool It," a warming climate has advantages, too, and not just trivial ones. Though global warming will cause more heat deaths, it will also mean many fewer cold deaths. Drought may increase in some areas, but warming also means both more rain and longer growing seasons. Temperature changes will harm some wildlife in some places. But many species will benefit from a bit more warmth. Does anyone know for certain that the net human and environmental losses from global warming will exceed overall gains? 

This is the crux of matter, isn't it. Global warning is bad is a naive statement. Global warming is bad for warmer(=under developed) countries, and is good for colder(=developed) countries. Nobody mentions this fact in global warming debates, as if assuming Bush and party are equally concerned of death of Americans and death of Middle Easterns. The whole global warming debates makes so much sense now. 

Came across this insightful comment on Peter Foster's blog:

In India, development is INSPITE of the government while in China, development is DUE to the government.

Of course, a large part of India has been very unfortunate in having despotic, cruel, oppressive regimes ('governments') for the last 700+ years or so. Indians thus have become used to the fact that they should not depend on the government and that they have to do most of it themselves, including building private roads (the rich) where necessary, arranging potable water supply (the private tankers) etc.

So true! We never had a phase of well meaning kings or rulers in our history. 

Note: I wrote this article few weeks back, and refrained from posting it till I was done with creating somepickle. 

The quality of comments on Rediff articles is usually pathetic, but there are exceptions:

by John W Davis on Jul 30, 2007 04:42 PM | Hide replies

Pakistan has given the trainings to people in the name of Islam who carried out the bomb-blasts in Bombay which left more than 400 innocent people dead.

If pakistani government is so much devoted for Islamic cause then why they raided the Red Mosque in Pakistan and killed the Maulvi and all his supporters.
- What ISI, pakistan based Jihadi group who fight for the so called cause of Islam, what they were doing at the time of raid on the masjid.

Had this act been done in India of raiding a Masjid, Pakistan must have made a lot of hue and cry so also media. They would have declared India anti-islamic, would have prepared so many provocative videos and would have spreaded them in the name of Islam and prepare the people to carrying out anti-India, terrorist activities and kill innocent people.

Pakistan always try to pose itself "Massiha" of musalmaans and in the name of helping the cause of Islam, pakistan use India Musalmaans for carrying out anti-India and terrorist activites.

Pakistan's president openly and happily mentioned that they attacked the mosque since China asked to do so (some chinese citizens were made hostage by Red Mosque and later freed).
So, if Pakistan is really devoted for Islamic cause, they would not have carried out the attack on the mosque and killing so many people just because China asked them to do so.

No idea how long would the comment stay on that page, Rediff does not have peramalink for individual comments. They also routinely censor comments, not that that sounds as bad given the quality of comments, but a very bad lesson nevertheless. These people should be fighting government censorship, how can they do it now, now that they themselves do it.

They say media is the eye of a nation, I guess we are pretty much a blind country.

Just gave me the idea, a slashcode based website for India. We are utterly full of contempt against our media, the user comment may prove more informative than the stories themselves. We need a forum for people to speak/argue, and slashcode's moderation system/user kerma ratings is the best out there. 

News for Indians, stuff that matters.

Why not!