Been reading a lot by Devdutt Patnaik on his website that I recently discovered.

As a people we must ask ourselves one question: do we really have the appetite for unvarnished truth? Or is this a selective menu where only some things are palatable to us?

Barkha Dutt has a must read article in the Hindustan Times on how much truth we as the Indian Public want.

How much skepticism are we willing to apply when it comes to our institutions and the statements coming out from them?

Found via India Uncut

Found an interesting comment on outsourcing called Doubtsourcing. Uneven in quality but this one is pretty funny

There are no links to each individual cartoon so put one of the funny ones up here.

Found this

My Sunday morning routine includes reading some pf the opinion pieces in TOI, Indian Express and the HT. Hindustan Times is normally first, mainly due to Vir Sanghvis column. They also offer individual columnist RSS feeds, or at least a feed for Vir Sanghvi’s column. So I didn’t get a link last week or this week in my Reader, so went to the website. I opened the op-ed page, in anew window and did a search from the main page for Vir Sanghvi. I found his newest article on the op-ed page, so, was about to close the search page, when I saw it. Here is a screenshot:

The dude must have written hundreds of columns for HT, he is the Editor of HT, but the search feature doesn’t like him.

An absolutely fascinating article from Popular Mechanics, that looks at 10 Science Fiction Movies, and how well they predicted the future. Ive seen all the movies except Soylen Green and Destination Moon. It seems like  a pretty good list but there are at least 2 movies missing, both directed by Terry Gilliam.

Brazil was released in 1985. It dealt with themes of a surveillance society and how a bureaucrat goes about trying to achieve happiness. Its whimisical but there are some uncomfortable truths about our society portrayed in the film.

12 Monkeys also directed by Gilliam, has time travel as a part of its plot, which Im guessing is not something forseeable in the near future, and might be why it wasnt included in the list. Thats just one part of the plot. We see a world which has been wiped out by an weaponized virus, we see how Animals have reclaimed urban areas.

The article was written in memory of Arthur C. Clarke, who predicted a number of future technologies such as Geo Stationary Orbit.

We use msn/live messenger at work internally and with a number of clients. It was the most reliable in 1999-2001 when we started using IM in the office, and while its not the best, its normally fine. We do use skype and Gtalk quite a bit too. I like using gtalk the most because of its extremely clean interface, and lack of crap unlike yahoo and msn.

I think today might the last straw as far as msn goes. I opened the main contacts window, started talking to someone and than all of a sudden I see an ad pop up on my screen. Scared the shit out of me. For a second I thought I had some sort of adware/malware on my machine which is causing pop ups on my desktop:

I’m trying to remember if I have ever seen another application display an ad like this, where they are moving out of the window used by that application and I think adware is the only time I have. I’m not the only one pissed off by this . Funnily enough neither of these people are from the US or UK, but from The Netherlands and Hong Kong which makes me wonder if this is a problem for MSN Windows Live worldwide or just in select countries. I have got to believe that if this happened to people in the US or UK, Id find a lot more railing against Microsoft.

And FYI that close button doesn’t work, so the damn ad is there on my desktop as bloody long as it wants to be.

There are 30 more here

This is a documentary from the 30′s predicitng what Fashions would be like in 2000

Found via reddit