A Zero rupee note to combat corruption

 In India, petty corruption is pervasive – people often face situations where they are asked to pay bribes for public services that should be provided free. 5th Pillar distributes zero rupee notes in the hopes that ordinary Indians can use these notes as a means to protest demands for bribes by public officials. I recently spoke with Vijay Anand, 5th Pillar’s president, to learn more about this fascinating initiative.

....

One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success. Had the zero rupee note reached the old lady sooner, her granddaughter could have started college on schedule and avoided the consequence of delaying her education for two years. In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen. - 

http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/paying-zero-public-services

1. I wonder how much the zero rupee notes sell for (we're essentially paying for nothing). How does Vijay Anand break even?
2. How long before the novelty of this wears off?

The death of imagination

Goddamn Pills. Gotta take them one time or another.

Copyrights belong to respective owners, etc etc. Don't sue me.

Erm.

Resolutions are surprisingly hard to keep.

I say let them go, let us express our love for our resolutions by setting them free. If they truly love us, they will come back to us, no?

A resolution for 2010

For my 2010 resolution, I am going to take a break from TV and the internet. Here's a list of changes I have to make:
I will stop:

1. Reading blogs / RSS feeds
2. Blogging here
   
3. Playing flash games
4. Watching videos on youtube and other video sites
5. Watching movies on Television
6. Watching anything on Television that makes me forget I am watching television.

I will:

1. Check work related emails and personal emails not more than thrice a day.
   
2. Search on Google for information related to work
3. Use the internet only in 30 minute chunks at a time, whenever I have to.
4. Plan what I want to use the internet for before I use it.
   

It's time to cut back on the distractions and rediscover how simple life was before the internet and cable television came to make me an addict. It's time to live simpler.

Happy New Year!

A bus ride

This is a about an issue that bothers me. I was in India for a vacation, and caught a bus to go to my mum's place, and noticed that women don't even want to claim their rights.

I am not a women's rights person by any means, but social injustice is social injustice. Read this post - it's shameful that this kind of thing is so common in India.
July 14, 2005




I was standing in a sparsely filled bus, when someone tapped me from behind and asked me to sit down.

The seat was marked 'for ladies', but another man was already sitting in one of the two seats. I looked around, there were no standing women, so I sat down.

At a later stop, some women got in. None of them were old, and none of them were pregnant or had a child, which means they all looked fairly capable of standing in the bus without too much suffering.

As a general rule I give up a ladies seat to a woman if I find her standing, irrespective of whether she's 'able of standing' or not. It's more of a 'sticking to rules' thing than a chivalry thing, I wouldn't give up a men's seat to a woman who I judge as 'able to stand'.

But I couldn't have offered the seat to any of the ladies.

Here's why - none of them were interested in sitting down. They were all looking in another direction, and to offer to seat to any one of them I would have to attract their attention. I wasn't keen to bring attention to myself - especially in India.

And secondly, even if I had got one of those ladies interested in the seat, the chances if her taking it was next to nil, simply because the co-passenger beside me had no intention of offering his seat up, which the standard bus-traveling Indian woman, would have to be very brave to take a seat beside an unknown man.

Now here's the question.

A woman should be interested in occupying a seat reserved for her, right? Why would she ignore it? Is she so used to the sight of men occupying a woman's seat that it doesn't bother her anymore? My experience was only a 15 minute ride in the bus where I was wondering about this whole issue, but I am sure this is representative of a whole lot of other - and perhaps more serious problems.

If social change requires everyone to change, then it is going to be very very difficult to do, and will take a long time. We are a very large and a very culturally mixed people, and I suppose there is no precedent in the world for a country as diverse as ours. How do we change as a whole?

Meanwhile, if you are an Indian woman, I am genuinely interested in knowing what you would have done in a similar situation. Would you ignore that a man was sitting in a ladies seat? Would you have asked the man to stand up? What if the man refused to stand up? Would you have talked to the conductor? What if the conductor didn't help?

Oh, and I didn't get up from that seat. Guilty as charged.

Tae Kwon Do

Attempt at slapstick comedy. And for the record, I stopped going for Tae Kwon DO classes after this.

June 11, 2005

Last week found me in a tae-kwon-do class. Long period of not playing any sport after stopping squash forced me to think radically.

Like a turtle in the midst of jumping rabbits, I watched fascinated as the Koreans went "HAH" "HAH", while throwing their fists forward as if it did not belong to their body. They jumped around on one foot while introducing their other foot to their noses. They spun, pirouetted, then went flat on the ground with their legs split sideways. They then proceeded to make disembodied movements that would make P.C. Sorcar think of never coming to Korea.

They were very polite. Koreans as a race are extremely polite people, and even the guys here can kill 50 people in one stroke, they'll politely wish their victims a good day before doing the deed. So they bowed, I bowed, and for a few moments there was a general feeling of bonhomie all around. Just as I was going to say thank you, nice to meet you, and leave, one of them handed me a tae kwon do costume.

Let the Games Begin.

We started innocuously, and for a moment I even thought I was getting good at this. We did some warm-up, some stretching, some dancing around. The master put some music on and asked us to so some aerobic-like exercises.

Midway through I started listening to the song and realized that it went "If you have a big black dick throw your hands in the air!!". The girls, on cue, threw up their hands with great gusto. Either they did not know any english or... I had to let go the idea of dating any of them. And I shall make no comment on whether I threw my hands in the air or not. This blog is for Family Reading.

After some time a casual visitor to the taekwondo centre could have seen a camel with serious gastric problems trying to imitate gazelles. I lifted my feet, rotated them mid-air to the best of my ability and generally outdid the best performers of Gemini circus. To add insult to injury the taekwondo master wouldn't let me stop jumping till I had said "HAH" loudly enough while throwing my fists 50 feet in front of me.

By the time I finished the "HAH" was a plaint "AAAAAH!!".

In the end I had to pay US $30 for the costume. Someday I shall appear in a competition in it and win prizes for my performance.

A fancy dress competition, that is.

Update

The last four months have been a struggle in school; and my marks will surely reflect how much more I ground I still have to cover. The next term begins in January, but before that I am finally going to start being a husband full time starting next month, as my wife joins me after 4 months of separation. The prospect of being a husband is both intimidating and comforting - I am responsible for another person beside myself, but also someone other than me is responsible for me!

This next year will be full of coming to terms with the change I have chosen to make, and I hope my family can come out of the other end without too many scars.