Bharteeya Blog Mela – 21 April

Greetings, amigos. Please set some time aside for an eclectic selection of posts
from the Indian blogosphere. This week we have 22 posts for you to sample, and
as usual, I’ve taken some time to go beyond the nominated posts and find other
noteworthy pieces of prose. I’ve even broken them into topics. So for instance,
if you couldn’t care less about cricket (like me), you can skip the sports
section completely. Apologies for the minor delay in posting. There was a power
problem at home. You’d think a UPS mated to a spike-buster would do the trick,
but noooo…

On with the show, shall we? 

Society, politics, and culture

Satya argues for liberalisation
of tertiary education
(yet oddly enough not primary and secondary education)
and thinks the government should stop trying to regulate everything. In
another post
, he points out that the Punjab government is opting for a
school voucher system after seeing a big drop in education standards. A model
for the rest of the country to follow? This is an interesting blog that the
Cartel
will watch closely. 

Patrix, in a post that rules him out as a libertarian, opines that individual
rights can and should be subverted
in a time of national crisis.
Shocking! Somebody tell him about Indira Gandhi and her Emergency. 😉

In another post, Patrix ruminates
about making safe career choices
or leaving it all to do something one
loves. 

Harini talks about how Indians will marry anything and everything in as much
style as possible. That
includes marrying trees too
.

Nitin Pai ridicules a foreign
policy expert’s suggestion
to negotiate with terrorists in Kashmir. (Get proper
permalinks, Nitin. 🙂

On Sepia Mutiny, Anna is miffed that a list of the best 50 restaurants in the
world doesn’t
have anything Asian in it
. (I want to make that list one day with my
restaurant, but given how poorly Indians receive gourmet multi-course meals,
it may not happen if it’s in this country.) 

Saket Vaidya, in a long post, details
his concern for the poor
and how he has fed many a poor person on the
street.

Suhail Kazi has a meandering post on his journey and the trials and
tribulations on his way to getting
a Social Security Number
in USA.

Anand
reminisces
about witnessing large rallies in Kerala, God’s own country (how
I hate that term!) 

Fellow atheist Sybil, who lives in Melbourne, finds that most of her
colleagues have tried
some drug or the other
.

Akshay
goes on a train ride
in Mumbai and tries to explain some of the local
history.

Economics

Naveen, on the CCS blog, has suggestions for books that explain how markets
work around the world
.

Marketing and Management

Neelakantan takes
pleasure in trying food
from different vendors, grateful that he doesn’t
have to endure the standardised mediocrity served at McDonald’s. He also thinks
that ready-to-eat
packaged food
has more potential in India than ready-to-cook food.

Sports

Swaroop forgets to use the spell-check while writing that Saurav
Ganguly’s six-match suspension
will help him get the break that he needs. To
ignite a flame war, he even mentions the support for Saurav from some
cricket-loving Cartel members. Could he possibly be talking about posts
like this
?

And Nandan thinks Sehwag is more like
Don Bradman
than even the legendary Sachin.

Science and Technology

Selva
is upset at Microsoft
being granted a patent on a method to access emergency
data.

Rajesh Jain believes that affordable
bandwidth will lead the way
in encouraging development of ASP-modelled
software solutions for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises)

Humour

Gaurav
has an excellent plan
for eliminating all crime from Mumbai. It involves a
strategic identification of all the hotspots of criminal activity, and then
shutting them down one by one. Bravo!

Lastly, please don’t miss this
hilarious post on The Examined Life
where a couple of Cartel members take on
the mysterious Sudhakar Nair who appears unable to detect sarcasm, sardonicism,
and irony. Well, maybe he’s not so mysterious after all. His writing style and
IP address bear more than a passing resemblance to a certain left-leaning socialist writer whom we all know and love. (Seriously, "Sudhakar",
you’re dealing with a bunch of very smart people who are even smarter when
working together. Did you think we wouldn’t find out? You need to do a better
job of concealing your Clark Kent identity.)

Thank you for visiting folks, and I hope I’ve given you a decent selection to
read. Posts with just a couple of lines and a hyperlink were left out, just for
the record.

The next mela will be hosted at Selective
Amnesia
.

Blog Mela Announcement

Yes, folks, yet another Blog Mela is being hosted at MadMan’s Web. This one will be on 21 April. If you missed the last one, catch it at AnarCapLib.
I’m sure you know how it all works, but here you go again:
The Rules

  • Posts must either be made by Indians or must focus on India or Indians.
  • Please send permalinks to the blog entries only, not just the blog URL. If the permalink is not working, send me the title and date of the blog entry. Whole blogs are not accepted as nominations.
  • You can nominate your own posts or someone else’s.
  • You can submit any type of posts except personal journal entries. By “personal journal entries”, we mean the navel-gazing posts of the kind that would be of interest only to your friends and family.
  • The entries have to be dated between April 14 and 20.
  • Not all entries nominated may be accepted. Editorial discretion
    will be used.
  • New rule: If your site has those annoying pop-up, pop-under, or floating ads, forget about it!

Please post your nominations as comments to this post. Don’t post too many links at once or you’ll trigger my spam-buster.