I transferred all my personal and business blogs from MovableType to WordPress because of the comment-spam epidemic that was engulfing big chunks of space, not to mention the bandwidth. For some time there was respite, but I again started experiencing the same shity problem.
Fortunately WordPress is written in PHP and I know how to tweak it. There is a neat way of beating the spammers. The comment spammers need to know the file that handles the comment data, and in WordPress case, it is wp-comments-post.php. So if the name of this file is changed to something totally weird, you can probably beat the spammers. There are three files that refer to wp-comments-post.php, namely:
wp-comments.php
wp-comments-popup.php
wp-comments-reply.php
In these files, find the line that begins with <form…and change the name of wp-comments-post.php to whatever new name you have opted for. Then upload all the files, including the renamed file. And don’t forget to delete wp-comments-post.php if it is still there on your server.
Most of my philosophical reflections emanate while I’m on my toilet seat. That day when I was sitting on my toilet seat patiently waiting for my recalcitrant bowel movement, a strain of thought took me back to my school days. As it happens with everybody, some of my teachers were exceptional, and some should have been prohibited from entering the premises and endangering the morale of the students. Among such teachers (the latter sorts) were my math teachers in the ninth as well as tenth standards and a teacher who taught me English in my earlier classes. First the math teacher in ninth: I could never grasp what she taught.
A long story preceded my entry into the ninth standard but there was a reason why I had difficulty studying English and math. There was a south Indian teacher who used to volunteer to teach me mathematics. I have no idea who let her volunteer for such a sensitive job because she made a total mess of it. First of all, she always called me “Amrut” and consequently, my friends started calling me Amrut whenever they felt like teasing me because they knew I hated being called like that. In south India, the sound “ri” is pronounced as “ru”, so Amrit became Amrut for her and no matter how persistently I corrected her, the anomaly lasted as long as she was in the school.
She used to let out a cry and say very often, “Amrut! You and math are just not for each other! Never ever touch a mathematics book after your board exams.”
I scored 9 out of 100 in mathematics in my finals but somehow I had scored enough total to qualify my promotion to the tenth standard. And then came another teacher.
He didn’t have a job so he started coming to our school. When he was not teaching me math, he was, to be fair to him, a good fellow. He laughed, he sang, he cracked jokes, he acted cute in front of the lady teachers.
It was only when he taught me, often he articulate in the grip of an immeasurable anguish, “It’s a shame that I have to teach you mathematics my dear friend, it is a shame, and it is an insult to the subject!”
Fortunately he got a job in the railways and left after a tumultuous stint of five months.
After leaving my special school, I joined a normal school. The principal of the school knew a relative of my father’s so I was allowed to take mathematics in the senior secondary. In the university I did my Honors in mathematics. I paid my university fees by teaching math to higher and senior secondary school students. I wonder how those teachers would feel now.
Then there was my English teacher. No matter how hard she tried, she could never make me write or speak even a single sentence in English, correctly. After math, this was the subject I feared the most.
Whenever I wrote something my teacher would make this prophetic observation, “Amrit you’ll always write English in Gurmukhi.”
My mother tongue is Punjabi and Gurmukhi is the script that is used to write Punjabi. The whole class would laugh.
These days I write content in English. I take up copywriting assignments. I write in English to earn my livelihood. When for the first time my article was published in the newspaper and I stumbled into my English teacher, she could only say, “Well, this isn’t the English we taught you.”
Those seem like days from another life.
A few days ago I had posted an incident under the title But then what do you expect where I had linked to a recording where an American radio jockey verbally abused an Indian call center worker. Although such individuals shouldn’t be given much importance but such a mentality gradually escalates into bigger issues. The incident is getting wide coverage and you can sign a petition against the incident. It’ll just take less then thirty seconds and I think wherever you are in the world, you must sign.
The Hindi film music has been a genuine confluence of different religions. In its golden years, that is, when songs were songs and not gut-wrenching item numbers, the songs were written by mostly Muslin lyricists, they were composed by mostly Hindu musicians and the instruments were played by mostly Goan Christians. Here is a collection of some profound thoughts on Hindi film music.
I have grown up listening to Hindi film songs. One of my aunts (my father’s youngest sister) used to play the radio so much that once my grandfather, in shear boredom and annoyance, was about to smash the set. Those days I used to stay with my grandparents. I think that was the time when I began to assimilate those songs. I could hum them without understanding what they meant. People in the neighbourhood specially used to ask me to sing certain songs and I used to sing them readily.
Good songs were still being composed in the mid-seventies. It’s appalling to see the prevalent mediocrity one sees these days. I’ve begun to appreciate the old songs even more after having started taking classical music lessons. My guruji sometimes very diligently explains individual compositions. I can now see how much work, how much dedication went into them. It was a wild passion, not pursuit of money that produced those songs. These days, most of the songs are written and composed by forty-year-old teenagers (no, I don’t mean to say teenagers are stupid) who are too dumb to be creative. They are given a template by the music companies and they compose within those peripheries. Even reputed writers like Jave Akhtar these days write churlish songs because may be there are no takers for good, literate lyrics.
This needs to be changed. There is still a huge market for good, classy music. There are still people who understand and appreciate musical poetry. This segment needs to be found and re-established. But who can take the initiative? I think the producers, the directors, the film-financers, the people who matter in the film industry, and of course, the audience.
What a stupid thing! According to this Guardian article there is a machine that can sign books without the author having to do it. In order to promote their books, authors visit various places around the world, participate in “meet the author” events, and personally sign the books that people purchase from that place.
In the first place, why do we get a book signed, or for that matter, get someone’s autographs? Is it for the sake of hieroglyphic appreciation? A signature means we have been in the proximity of the person who has blessed us with his or her signature. It’s kind of an evidence. It says, “Look, I was with that person.” That is why we get autographs.
I would never get my book autographed like this, not even from Garcia.
According to this new finding the Godhra train burning incident that lead to one of the most (the others, like the Congress sponsored 1984 anti-Sikh riots in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her own Sikh body guards) heinous state supported riots was an “accident” and no mob set the fire from the outside of the Sabarmati Express.
This can mean anything. We know the present government/s, and we know the previous government. Both are/were least interested in truth, and they are/were least interested in finding and catching the culprits. The BJP wanted to appease the majority and the Congress and its confused allies want to appease the minorities. Reports and findings have perpetually been twisted and they will be twisted to suit political motives — even a child knows this.
This is a good news for the pseudo-secularists (Alka calls me a pseudo-secularist). I’m gradually realizing how hypocritical these secularists can be. They blatantly lie and ignore facts just to appease certain communities and political mommies and daddies.
Yes, we should all be in favor of the witch-hunt that this “finding” can trigger. Fire or no fire, the riots did happen and the state government did play its part in inciting them and protecting the guilty. The real culprits, whether they are Hindus or Muslims, should be brought to book.
Ironically, some of the accused of 1984 riots are back in power and enjoying political portfolios. This is a shame and throws light on how sincere our secular government is. Ironically, again, we have a Sikh PM in India.
I wonder what’s that song: We didn’t set the fire…
Quite often I see advertisements in the glossies and get into bouts of despair. There are so many things I would like to own. I want to buy high-resolution camera-phones, the latest PDAs, the gaming consoles, at least one high-definition TV. And of course the automobiles — I want to own at least four automobiles. The recent addition is a house that gets lots of sunshine, with its own roof, surrounded with a garden that has many trees, and has at least three bedrooms with attached bathrooms and individual terraces.
I know I’m talking like a true “materialist”. There are many things above that I don’t need but I want. I don’t need a camera-phone. Heck, I don’t even need a mobile phone because I don’t move out of my house much. And PDAs — most current PDAs are nothing more than glamorized toys. To organize myself well I need a laptop and I have a laptop and it is hundred times better for me than a PDA. Yes, I need at least one automobile. I don’t consider automobiles a luxury. Instead of a jazzy car I need an automatic four-wheel-drive that is comfortable, sturdy, and of course, safe. House too, I need one and the sort of house that I want is exactly the type I mentioned above. Currently we live in a house that doesn’t even get a single ribbon of sunshine.
There should always be a balance between needs and wants. Trouble sets in when we begin to go beyond the needs. When I rethink about my desires, I think more than the things that I desire, I want the ability to have them, without necessarily having them. For instance, I don’t need a PDA, but I should be able to purchase one. I don’t need those extra three automobiles, but I should be able to buy them. Buying doesn’t make me happy, but the ability to buy them does.
Having enough money is not a panacea for all the problems, but it surely makes things easier. There are many things you can do if you know that you can spend. So again, when I rethink, it’s not the fact that I don’t have those things that makes me unhappy, but the inability to buy them. The more I think about this, the more I feel motivated. I don’t want to reach a point where I can buy these things. I want to reach a point where I am able to buy these things.
There is no need for Prince Harry to apologize for appearing a Nazi-type garb. It is being made into a big deal for nothing and Prince Charles is rightly backing his son.
But why am I writing about this Prince Harry affair? May be it’s the effect of that Page 3 program I was boringly watching on the ZOOM channel. Those guys are really cheaters I must say. In the promo of the program they flashed the images of swim-suit calendar models and they said they’d show the coverage in the program. So like an innocent, trusting individual I watched the entire program hoping to see some bikini-sporting models. All they showed was a couple of stupid parties where they interviewed people who had an impression that partying is the only thing to do in life and if they didn’t party Kofi Annan may have to resign from his UN post. I wonder why/how these guys spend such boring lives.
So this is the reason I’m writing about Prince Harry. But don’t worry; this blog hasn’t stooped down to covering the shady travails of famous but insignificant celebrities. Oh! I shouldn’t say such nasty things because every person is important in his/her own sphere of universe. Ok, I take my words back.
Nausea was the feeling that greeted me in the morning when I awoke. The world was spinning and whatever was inside vied to come out. Still, I ate two sunny-side-up eggs with a slice of bread and then practiced vocal music. Then my guruji came and I realized all my scales were topsy-turvy. In the midst of my spins it was a totally different experience to sing classical. My guruji was about to blow his top off when I re-gathered my senses and somehow managed to sing some correct notes and extenuate the circumstance. As soon as he left, I fell asleep on the very seat I was singing five minutes ago. And I think I’m still sleeping…
The Nobel Prize winning Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi has been summoned to appear before a revolutionary court in Tehran or face arrest. This summon doesn’t suggest why she has been summoned. This tells how arrogant these courts can be. Ebadi, 57, the first Muslim woman and first Iranian to win the Nobel Peace Prize, said she still had not decided when she would attend the court but she may attend the court at the last moment just to avoid unnecessary trouble.
When she got the Nobel Prize for Peace she said in a TV interview that she didn’t believe in confrontations as they harm the actual cause. She can easily go to some other country, live in exile and work for reforms, but she wants to improve the society from within, very gradually.
The revolutionary court was setup just after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and it primarily deals with national security offences. It has jailed many political dissidents in the past.
I think the international community should closely and carefully monitor the situation and shouldn’t let anything unpleasant happen to Ms. Ebadi. The courts in such countries are very unpredictable.
This is a recording of a conversation that I just received through a discussion group. This totally freaked out radio guy from America called up some company who had outsourced its call center service to India. Personally, I didn’t find the way that person talked shocking because the sort of impression that we get by watching American movies is that this is the normal language used there. I’m also not bothered about his reaction on the outsourcing issue. Lots of American companies sell their goods to other countries and in the times of globalization (by the way America is the greatest proponent of globalization) such things are ineluctable.
A bit funny was the way he got applauded for using foul language; and that too with a female who was talking to him so politely. I think this guy should be sued for racial slander just to harass him, and may be to teach him a lesson that is taught in the elementary school that one shouldn’t use filthy language. And for some extra effect he should also be spanked.
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